Tag: sci-fi

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Strong headline maybe, but if you’re not on Google+ then you might consider your stance after reading this.

Jeri Ryan, best known as borg escapee “Seven of Nine” in Star Trek:Voyager, hosted a Hangout today on Google+, in celebration of having over 1 million fans subscribing to her feed.

Someone lucky enough to participate
in Jeri Ryan’s hangout!

There was a lot of buzz around it, with hundreds of comments flying around under the Hangout post, updating in real time.  It was pretty hard to get a video stream from Google, such were the number of simultaneous subscriptions.

In many ways, this reminded me of the excitement of the early internet, where we learned about things such as bandwidth… The kids today, they have everything!

Still, the excitement wasn’t only in the new broadcast/interaction (intercast?!) method through G+ hangouts, it was the realisation that, should they choose, celebs can now use a nice, safe way of engaging with their fan base.  Directly.  Over time, this may disarm broadcast controllers and empower people, be they celebrities or fans, into collaboration through constructive, enriching dialogue.

Wil Wheaton, self-confessed geek and well-known actor likewise, was notably impressed with hangouts.  It was refreshing to see people observing great netiquette while chatting with Jeri.  How much more enjoyable, this, than suffering typically mundane updates as you might in another social networking system.

As Google measures and expands upon functionality in G+, I hope they’ll see fit to bring more interactive tools to the table.  I get the feeling that hangouts are just the start of the next revolution.  As Android gathers increasing momentum and Google+ apps appear on both major mobile platforms, we could see real-time social networking emerge as the number one communication method.

People, known and unknown to each other, will communicate, partly in mimicry, utilising all tools at their disposal.  And, with open source platforms gathering adoption, they will inevitably add both their biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. 

Resistance, my friends, is futile.

UPDATE – here’s the recording:

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Last week was fantastic. Lots of stuff achieved, plus a few blockers along the way which have spilled over into this week and new challenges. To top off last week, a close friend of mine had a great birthday BBQ on Saturday and then became a father on Sunday. Congrats to them!

Last week:

Work

  • [X] Development work on 2 customer projects
  • [X] Stay in touch prospective clients/leads
  • [ ] Get list together of targets for Project “L” and plan launch
  • [X] Review charity project costings: is there a more cost-effective approach?
  • [ ] [Arrange to] visit datacenter for scheduled maintenance – the machines, not me 🙂
  • [ ] Create additional web forms to service other business areas
  • [ ] Minor company homepage change
  • [ ] Review structure of site and content; trim.
  • [ ] Complete SVN/Bugzilla integration project.
  • [X] Complete new cashflow tool.

** DONE Investigate why CentOS box is looking for dpkg (Debian packager) in cron job
** DONE Revise Project “W” PDF
** WAITING Put project “W” site online?

Life

  • [ ] Tax return
  • [-] Practice Siu Lim Tao and stretching
  • [X] Clean house
  • [X] Try to get a bit of Family Guy in

** DONE Clean car

Misc

  • [X] Decide on Slovakia trip
  • [X] Learn GnuCash
  • [X] A few more CDs to add to the collection

This Week

Work

  • [ ] SEO customer project
  • [ ] Database update customer project. Test out Kexi
  • [ ] PHP calendar development for customer
  • [ ] Visual design/template revision work for customer
  • [ ] Get list together of targets for Project “L” and plan launch
  • [ ] [Arrange to] visit datacenter for scheduled maintenance – the machines, not me 🙂
  • [ ] Create additional web forms to service other business areas
  • [ ] Minor company homepage change
  • [ ] Review structure of site and content; trim.
  • [ ] Complete SVN/Bugzilla integration project.

An unscheduled but important piece of work is also project “W”. I have made significant progress on this over the weekend and need to keep the pace up!

Life

  • [ ] Tax return
  • [ ] Siu Lim Tao / stretching
  • [ ] Properly start my involvement in an open source project
  • [ ] 2 swims, 1 mile each
  • [ ] One more form/session of exercise (run? weights?)
  • [ ] Grocery shop
  • [ ] Social life 🙂

Misc

Would like to see more: