blogitech from Chris Maddern

It seems with the loss of Veronica Belmont that Mahalo Daily is in search of a new presenter to run it’s daily ‘interest’ show. Although in true ‘Calacanis’ style, they’re not just interviewing; they’re creating a full-blown web2.0 event out of it – aptly named ‘Mahalo Idol’.

Auditionees are invited to come to the Mahalo HQ to complete their audition, however for people outside of LA, there is the option to make a 1 minute mini-clip of a Mahalo-style episode. This should create a barrage of interesting (and amusing) content for us viewers and apparently even the auditions themselves will be streamed live.

So, if you’re female and think you’re up to the challenge of becoming a Veronica replacement, pop over to Mahalo Idol and try your hand at filling her formidable boots!

Chris

DELL have a sale on monitors here in the UK and so I’m very tempted to go ahead and take advantage of this :).

Here’s the problem… I’m not sure whether to go for dual monitors, or one big one. I have a 22″ DELL at the moment, so it’s either get another 22″ and have duals, or get the 27″ and sell the 22″ (at least partially because different sized screens can look a little stupid beside one-another, but mainly because being a student…).

So.. anybody have any opinions? I suppose it’s mostly coding / writing that I’ll be doing…

Let me know!

Chris

Just a little humorous message that made me laugh today. I was updating my picture on Twitter (as some of you may have already noticed :)), and got the following error message:

As it turns out; it was too large. It just made me laugh that they didn’t put the few lines of code in to check if the file was too big (the file finished uploading from what I could tell) before proceeding and replying with an ambiguous message.

I love twitter too much to have any complaints though.

Long live Twitter and all Twitterites,

Chris

What a great time to be getting on board… my new iPhone is ordered and will arrive on Monday. I can’t wait… and now I can’t wait *even* more. My one hold-back was no native solution for MSN chatting and VoIP was something that seemed as obvious a service to feature on a 600MHz processor-wielding phone as there is!

Now, on the very day that I ordered; this appears to solve all our VoIP and IM woes. I’ll be sure to post a review of that and other things iPhone some time after Tuesday when the initial excitement decays.

Photo courtesy of Engadget, Video after the break!

Chris

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Two words: Editorial & Accountability.

There are hundreds of ‘blogs’ out there, 99% of which report the exact same stories, sometimes with a slightly different twist, or humour added, but rarely is there any editorial added; a dialogue that transcends the facts and places the pieces together to make sense of the story in context.

I feel the urge too; to copy and paste an Engadget story, add that joke that you think makes it funnier, wittier, better, and then post it up. It’s easy & it’s fun, but it adds nothing (well little) to the sum total of information out there.

When I started to create this blog I thought that I would try to use the fact that I’ve spent a good deal of the past few years of my life both involved and deep in reading of the technology industry to create this editorial that I feel that technology so needs. I don’t know how well I’m doing; scanning the main page there’s a mixture of editorial pieces and ‘replogs’ (replicated blog posts).

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I posted earlier on poorly designed error messages and the very next message I opened rewarded me with this error message.

A brilliant error message I’m sure you’ll agree; telling you nothing of the problem nor giving you any suggested course of action to solve it!

I think that’s been in Outlook Express for 7 or more years now and has managed to migrate on to Windows Live Mail. Congrats MS!

Chris

*Edit: didn’t it have the title ‘Error’ too in Outlook Express?

I turned my computer on yesterday to find a barrage of updates from MS Update… you can see this both ways.

a. It’s great they maintain their products
b. How do they find so many updates each week; and also why do we wait (at worst) a week for an update that’s done?

To be fair, in a world of broadband, 10 updates totalling 36MB took no more than ~1 minute, although anyone on a dial-up must have real problems keeping a Windows Vista / Office 2007 combo up to date!

Chris