Pete's Eats

I have a feeling that 2006 is going to be a challenging year in the best possible way. Challenging perceptions, methods and beliefs will be the hallmark of my year I suspect. Why do I think this? No idea, but intuition isn’t normally too far from the resulting reality – for me anyway.

In the past year I have made some tough decisions about my professional life. For instance, amongst other things, I made some conscious decisions to not speak at certain events or make my voice heard at others (there *is* a difference). I turned down three book offers. I blogged less and I openly criticised a certain company that makes web development tools about their abominable track record developing a mobile platform and watched the doors close on me with startling speed. I refused to take part in the 15 or so magazine articles that I was asked to write for and I spent far too much time playing World of Warcraft! I don’t know, yet, whether these were the right decisions to make but I have never been one to stay in a rut for too long and I’m very good at forcing change on myself. 2005 has been a good year for that.

I want 2006 to take the best bits of 2000-2005 and develop them further. I have, for the first time in my life, some very definite plans for what I want to be doing in 2006 and that feels very good.

On my radar for the next 6 months:

• I have had a book idea for some time, now is the time to get it drafted
• I’m Tokyo-bound
• I’m LA/SFO-bound
• Working on a fairly major social networking project
• Developing Musicblog even further
• Get to the mountains more!

There’s more obviously, but it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m fairly sure you’ve all got much better things to be doing than reading this! All that’s left to say is:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Technorati Tags: Japan, New Year, To-Do

Pip got the Appleseed UMD for PSP as an xmas present. It was one of those presents that Dad’s buy for their kids because they want to play/watch/mess with I’m ashamed to say.

I’ve blogged about Appleseed before and when I was last in Japan I bought a special preview DVD pack with character figurine etc. From the very first time I saw the trailer I was desperate to see the movie but until now there hadn’t, to my knowledge, been an English version available so you can imagine my excitement when I saw the UMD version.

I wasn’t disappointed – at all. The movie is astounding, simply beautiful to watch with it’s brilliant mixture of photo-realistic and cell shaded cgi. With a little more publicity it’s this kind of thing that would see Japanese Anime become mainstream in Europe. It has a typically apocalyptic story line for a Japanese animation but with some level of subtlety which isn’t so typical. I can’t recommend it enough.

I’ve always been a fan of portable media consumption. I’m a mobile phone freak, have read entire novels on Pocket PC’s and Palms, watched full length movies on my iPod and have my gym workout schedule on one too. There is something so right about watching Bladerunner on a PSP it hurts. Appleseed slots into that bracket without doubt. PSP is the platform to watch this on and it’s inspired me to rip a lot of other sci-fi dvd’s like Casshern and The Matrix onto memory sticks too. I can’t wait to see Final Fantasy Advent Children either – with the largest sales of any UMD title in Japan yet I think we’re in for a treat.

Oh, and the soundtrack is pretty nifty too.

Technorati Tags: appleseed, psp, Anime, UMD

An experiment in UI design.

It’s an interesting experiment although I came away from there with a real sense of something being ‘missing’ from the whole experience. Ya, I know, the missing thing is clicking.

There is something so satisfying about a successful mouse click and now I can appreciate every one of them whereas before I took them for granted.

Technorati Tags: UI Design

Not work-safe. But, omfg this is so funny…

The Internet is for Porn – streaming video (flash player)

Technorati Tags: gaming, funny, World of Warcraft, WoW

Do you play World of Warcraft? On the EU servers? In the Stormrage realm?

Then there’s a new guild, Think Different, that needs you!

We’re going to focus on being friendly, helpful and not all about high level instances! In fact, we’re actively trying to recruit mid-level players (30 to 50) so that we can form some well balanced groups to take on the relevant instances (such as Scarlet Monastry) so that everyone will get something from it (loot, knowledge, experience etc).

Because we’re so new, anyone who wants to join and take an active part will be able to have quite an influence on how the guild evolves… If you just want to be part of a friendly, helpful guild without any responsibility then that’s totally cool too.

We’ll have a website, forums and a teamspeak server available to whoever wants to use it…

More details about us here. Hope you can join us

Technorati Tags: gaming, WoW, World of Warcraft

With this week’s release of Firefox 1.5 I decided to take Cory’s advice and make the switch at last. It’s been bugging me recently, that my bookmarks in Safari were fairly numerous and that a large proportion were significantly out of date. I’ve been using Safari since it’s inception and there has never been an easy way to manage them without devoting loads of time to it. Anyway, the upshot is that I was considering deleting all of my Safari bookmarks and starting from afresh – but then the new edition of Firefox came along and so I’ve gone that way instead.

So far, two days in, everything is turning out to be as hoped for. I’ve skinned it up with a nice theme called GrApple Graphite Pro and downloaded various search engine plugins like Wikipedia and Del.icio.us (both from here) and finally (so far anyway) a handy Web Developer plugin that allows me to do all sorts of things with code/css etc.

More importantly, my bookmarks are relevant once more and somewhat easier to manage imo.

I’ve also spent rather a lot of time recently (see my previous post about bird flu) adding tags to every photo in my iPhoto library. Well, actually, about 1/3rd of them so far… Searching for a particular photo should be a little easier next time…

Heroes: Boris was shouting about tags long before anyone else I know – he obviously has mysterious powers of prediction about these things.

Villains: PriceRitePhoto for ripping people off with such barefaced audacity. Check out this account of doing ‘business’ with them.

Technorati Tags: Firefox