a blog by howard jameson @ gatheringgrace.org

Stupid small print

Stupid, stupid small print.

I saw this in iTunes...

... and thought of somebody who would like it, so I clicked it, then "buy series pass" here...

...then this...

(Its all going very well at the moment isn't it?)

But it wouldn't "gift all episodes" because the small print says...

...which I don't think is the impression given by my previous three clicks.

The trail we leave behind

I guess we are all aware of the power of the marketing which examines our purchasing in the supermarket or monitors our online buys. I got this email from Amazon today...

Dear Customer,

As someone who has recently browsed our selection of digital cameras, we thought you might be interested in seeing some of the new ranges and great offers going on in store right now:

...so all I had done is looked at some cameras and bang they are on to me.

I can imagine that I may soon stop using these sites - its like those shops where the assistants stalk you around trying to pressure you into buying the most expensive model.

My new computer

I love my iMac desktop. It does everything I need more or less, but I much prefer the user experience to anything I had in my PC days.

There is one situation where my iMac isn't giving me what I need. I want to be able to record information on the hoof - in meetings, during conversations/phone calls etc, so I need something immediately accessible.

I also struggle when my means of note taking is limited to a single method. Sometimes I need text entry and at other times I need something that will record mind maps or other more graphic means.

But there's no use making notes if you don't have an intuitive means of retrieving information. I try to use systematic file names and, obviously, on my iMac can pull off most things with Quiksilver and Spotlight plus the occasional bit of file tagging, but that can be time consuming to set up and if you are not pretty rigourous I find tags get out of control.

I need rugged, transportable and really good battery life.

So I welcome my new computer to my working life which seems to give me exactly what I need. Its an A4 book and a Lamy pen. The iPhone takes care of everything else I need when out and about.

Safari 4...

...is beautiful. Top Sites!

Do not disturb

I have been using a Mac application called Mailplane for handling my work email and my old personal email address which attracts a lot of junk, but the occasional bit of usefulness.

This morning I discovered the "Do not disturb" feature. Mail is received, but I don't get a "ping" or an unread count shown. Brilliant!

Steve Jobs: the Messiah?

Definitely not! But I couldn't help having a bit of fun seeing some similar strands in the stories.

Apple (yes, even the name suggests something going way back) is the minority player, but with a devoted following. Even Apple's survival as a minority player (albeit with some energy behind it) is remarkable, looking back over its history of division and internal strife. But then Steve returned and everything changed...

...which gets people anxious about what will happen when Steve inevitably (because he is not the Messiah) clears the scene. Would they miss him? Well they can't say that they won't, but they have to play down the problem of what happens next if he does...I liked this quote...

"But I see Apple after Jobs as Ford after Henry Ford," Gottheil said. "The acolytes have incorporated the main teachings of Jobs. He's created a process and a culture that will continue."

All very familiar?

Good news for the trees!

My long term justification for the iPhone was that when I go up to Board of Education trustees meetings I don;t need to print of reams of documents which are emailed to me.

So I can now download the documents onto my phone and read them "live", even without wifi access - even the dinky cashflow graphs

Just under 500K of data NOT printed out.

Mobile blogging

So I am using the new typepad app for blogging direct from my phone. If you can read this then it obviously works...

Church and the future of technology

I regularly keep an eye on the readers stats for my blog. Over time, though, the average number of page downloads per day goes down by a fraction of a decimal point. I don't sense much of the energy within the blogosphere that was there three years ago. There are now some big name established writers (I don't know whether they "syphon off" all the readership or whether there are so many blogs now that it is impossible to engage in conversations as used to be the case).

I loved communicating with old friends from college, but a couple of them (and good ones too) have dropped out of blogging to some degree. The time pressure of full time Ministry means little time to think, which is needed before a post can be actually interesting, the demands of a specific location also make it difficult to write about certain issues because of confidentiality. I love it when locals read what I write, although this has led to misunderstandings in the past as the language of one sort of discussion is read differently by those outside it. I still get a huge kick out of putting liturgies up and finding other people use them and adapt them, although I don't post much on that side of things simply because I don't do enough creative things.

There are similar trends, I would suggest, in other areas. Social Networking seems to flip flop from one trendy platform to another, whatever happened to MySpace? I am allergic to naff design and music that blasts out before I want it. Facebook is also irritating due to users being overloaded with stupid "news" telling them that Simon has dunked Johnny on the Gungy Sandal Application. No, I don't need that either. I think most of the groups of users I overlap with slightly were friends anyway, and merely use Facebook (or similar) as a means of staying in touch at a rather inane level.

My gut feeling, going back to my first point, is that there has been a degree of maturing in the "post-Modernity" inspired blogging of a couple of years ago. Points have been made and people have moved on, and in a lot of cases those people are anchored in the Church of England (referring here to the people I most naturally connect with). They are now Incumbents or Pioneer Ministers in different places.

I think this is great and bodes well for the next few years.

Apple fan boy goes wild...

...about his iPhone.

Yup, bought one. Yup, love it.

Finally I can carry my diary around with me and sync it with my computer so it can be edited in either location (office or travelling), and I can pick up emails if I want to when mobile as well. Sorry Nokia, but I could never do these things with a little plastic buttony mousey thing and keys designed for predictive texting.

Something stirs here with thinking about tomorrow's PCC Away Day. On an iPhone a new hardware, thinking of the touch pad etc, (the "structure") has come into place which allows something to work the way it should have done all along, so the software (the "values") works really nicely. My frustration with my old Nokia was that I was wanting to do lots of new things on something that was still basically just a phone.

I hope we think about how our values of Church can dictate the structure, and not simply stick with what we have adopted from the way Church may or may not have worked in the past...

...and I'll have my iPhone with me to help me take notes as well.