Something for *me* :)

I've been meaning to underpin my ICT knowledge for a while now. Got buckets of experience and knowledge, but never really got round to getting the bits of paper to back it all up.

I've toyed with various ideas in the past, but kept gravitating back towards the Open University.

Well, to cut a long story short, I've just registered for my first OU course. But I haven't gone for an ICT course!

Just recently, I've been feeling that I'm in a bit of a rut again, so I wanted to do something that would just be a bit different. Stimulating, even. So, I've just registered for this.

Really looking forward to it. I'll probably do some ICT stuff in there at some point, but what I really like about the OU is I've got plenty of choice along the way.

thesixtyone - a music adventure

thesixtyone - a music adventure

This site has become one of my daily visits. It's another social networking music site. I adore last.fm, but this site is a bit different.

thesixtyone (t61) lets new artists upload 3 of their songs. Users of t61 have points to bump songs that they like. The more bumps a song gets, the greater the chance of it reaching the home page (where it will be seen by more people and bumped further). As a song is bumped, users who have already bumped the song get points (to bump more songs). The earlier they bumped, the more points they get.

As artists songs are bumped, they get points. More points mean they go up levels, and the higher the level, the more songs they can upload...

It may sound complicated - but it's not. And it's a great way of listening to new music. There's a few big names on there, but the vast majority are not major label artists - and I suspect there's a lot of amateurs as well.

As an experiment I put some stuff up of my own and from the band I was in in the early 90s. So if you do pop over and join, then feel free to bump songs by version and The Guild of Thieves.

Renewable electricity now affordable

I was pootling around the web this morning, and I stumbled across an old bookmark to ecotricity - www.ecotricity.co.uk

Ecotricity have a couple of green tariffs. Their main one is a supply where they supply as much ebergy as they can from their wind farms, and top the rest up with conventional sources. Thing is they take the money their customers spend on electricity and invest it in clean forms of power like wind energy. Apparantly, they are the only green electricity company actually building these new renewable energy sources. And if you look at the stats, they certainly back these claims up...

A while back I looked at ecotricity (amongst others), and there was still a definite premium to pay for this sort of tariff and investment. Well, npower have seen fit to increase our monthly payment yet again, and with their 17% increase in prices, I thought I'd revisit green energy. And the difference is not down to a few pounds a month. Certainly small enough for me to seriously consider switching.

I also looked into sourcing gas from a different supplier on a green tariff. As there's no such thing as green gas, best you can go for is a carbon offsetting tariff. Anyway I've found one that is cheaper than npowers gas.

So all in all it looks like a switch to a greener energy supply with a company that is actually investing in renewable sources, rather than paying lip service to the Governments (tiny) requirements need not cost a great deal more than traditional tariffs...

I'll check my figures again - I may even have switched before the end of the evening...

When the machines rock...

That's it - ticket's booked for the Replica's Tour at Rock City.

If it's half as good as the telekon show last year, it'll be ace. Can't wait :)

My digital life - redux

Well, I've had a bit of a play - and it's looking good for Google :)

I put together a list of what I wanted to pull together over the next few weeks (or months, knowing me...). Basics first - email, calendar, blog, online photo album. I want them all to talk to each other as easily as possible.

A few years ago, I'd've rolled up my sleeves, broke out Dreamweaver and hit Sourceforge and spent some nights topping up my monitor tan by grabbing some of the best Open Source stuff and knitting them together as best I could. Now, I just don't have time. And, to be honest, why reinvent the wheel when this stuff is already being done so well for free (or very little cost)?

So - email. I've been using Google Mail for years. I redirect a couple of 'normal' email addressed through my gmail account. Two things sold gmail to me early days, and they're the main reasons I still like it now. Spam Filtering and labels. The spam filtering has always worked really well for me. And allocating labels to emails is much easier than filtering into folders. Of course, the idea of labelling items is commonplace now with any web site worth it's salt using tags...

As for a Calendar, I use Outlook/Exchange for work. So whatever I choose has to sync with that. I'd also like to be able to set up and share calendars. Not looked into it too deeply yet, but Google's calendar will let me do both od these. Moe on this when I do a bit more digging.

Blogging is something I've always mwant to get into more, but never really got round to it. I used LiveJournal ages ago, but didn't really like it. Used Blogger before Google bought it out and quite liked it. Used it for a bit after Google bought it up (I've just deleted some rubbish posts from 2002 from here!). Then much later I set up Wordpress on my own webspace. Main reason for that was integration. Wordpress let me drop things onto the page like my last.fm widgets. But, surprise, surprise - on revisiting Blogger good old Google have upgraded blogger and you now have lot's of control over the layout - including dropping in add-ins. Lot's of flexibility to link in the other apps I'm looking at. So, as I've already gone with Google it makes sense to give blogger another go.

That just leaves and online photo album. I have a Flickr pro account, but I've never really got on with it. It seems to have all the stuff you'd need, but you know when you just don't click with something? Anyway (and I guess you can tell what's coming), I thought I'd check out Picasa - Google's photo app. Again, I played with it early days, but it didn't seem up to much. Just had another play now and it's much improved. And it obviously links in to all the other Google services.

The icing on the cake is that the Google toolbar pulls all this stuff together in a nice convenient place.

So there's my starting point. It'll be interesting to see how well all these apps sit together as I use them going forward - and how well I can link in the other sites I use regularly like facebook and last.fm...