First social media style update for a while, and this one is a little let obviously social media related. However, the email improving add-on for outlook “Xobni” has just gone from invite only beta to open beta.

Have been using this for around a month now, after being invited by a certain Mr Brewski. It’s a really nifty little bit of kit, aslong as its not crashing outlook. Which does seem to happen, hopefully future updates etc will make it a lot more stable. It gives you a sidebar list of everything you need relating to the person who sent you the email you are viewing, the most useful personally is the list of shared files.

Information stolen from Mashable, read it here.

Yes its time for more road/plane tripping. Today I flew to Los Angeles California. More specifically to LAX airport. Early start for this one, had to leave home at 6 to go pick Horsy up from the stables, to get to Terminal 5 in time. Yes Terminal 5!!! Its actually really quite nice in there. So much more organised than the others, the check-in system works and security took literally 2 minutes to get through. We cant blame T5 for Robbie being late can we…

So we got through all the boring stuff at the airport, grabbed a bite of breakfast before boarding. The plane was quite surprisingly quiet, we managed to grab some spare seats around us and just kinda “spread” out a bit. So instead of us three having 3 seats in a line we had me and Robbie in either end of the 3 and Horsy had the seat the other side of the aisle. Bonus! I had the aisle too, poor ickle Robbie wanted the window. Generally the flight was pretty standard, a lot smoother than the NY ones previously, except from a little incident just after take off where it felt like the plane hit a wall, literally dropped in the air. Ah well. Nothing else of interest, and lots more to say about the rest of the day.

After landing we jumped into a taxi across to the hotel. First thing to mention is the weather, what a fantastic day! Fantastic whilst in the air conditioned taxi anyway. The roads seemed very much like what you expect/see from/in films, big wide (10 lane) open freeways, everything looking scorched by the sun. Sand coloured buildings, Goodyear Blimp, Ikea (?). The roads were strangely quiet for lunch time on a week day though, no explanation for this, maybe everyone was busy at work.

The hotel was fabulous, check out the pictures on their website here from the room there was a kickass view of the bay and the sea! There are pictures of all this stuff around the place, here in a post and here on Flickr. After fondling around in the hotel briefly we headed out to see the venue we had lined up for the Get Together tomorrow night. google had told us that it was 58 seconds away from the hotel, you could see the sign from the hotel, all signs positive, still took us 30 minutes to find it, my fault, wrong turn. The buggers there wouldn’t let us go up and see the room BOOO. Sod it then, lets go to the beach! We found that fine surprise surprise. This was the Long Beach of Long Beach, if that makes sense. I’m sure it’s where Baywatch has been filmed in parts, again pictures around the place. Lasted all the way until the walk back to the hotel to start to fear being burnt.

Quick shower, then off to dinner with Jen and Amir. Jen picked us up from the hotel and we drove over to the restaurant. I’ve never had Japanese, and I can’t remember the name of the place. The food was really good, but the portions were rather large, means we got to take a take away box with any left overs.

Back to the hotel, little bit of work and pretty much passed straight out. It was 5am body clock time, so I think we had a valid excuse.

Anyway, more tomorrow.

I’ve no idea what this is going to look like, this is my first attempt at using the Flock Browser to post a blog post. It seems kinda strange because there is no sign of any form of formatting for my specific blog. Lets see what happens when I click publish.

And I promise I will admit to any changes I have to go into the normal back end to make… go publish!

Just signed up for a Flickr account, I have had a couple in past but never used them. Didn’t realise the free account restrictions were quite so intense, 100mb up limit a month aint alot at all. New York alone has covered 3/4 of that. Check it out in the link on the right.

Noticed this a couple of days ago but not had time to blog about it. As I’m getting more and more addicted to Twitter I have been paying more attention to Twitter news… and this is the latest and greatest! New Twitter search engine called Summize, see here. Summize is an existing search engine to find user opinion on products/people/anything.

Something I hadn’t noticed in my first look around was the ability to search by polarity of sentiment, according to Laughing Squid this is done by the emoticons in tweets. Very clever! So thanks to Laughing Squid, more accurately Scott Beale for this insight!

Those who know me will know I, from time to time, have some problems with sleeping. Those that know me a little better will know that I’m always whinging about not sleeping… which has over the last week or so got a little out of hand and led me to be pretty sick the last few days. Boo!

Whilst bored at around 5am I started fiddling with my phone and thought that maybe Google could help me with my insomnia problem, the first thing I found was this on Helpguide.org. The article goes into a lot of detail about the symptoms, causes and cures for insomnia and from my experience it is all very accurate. A lot of the information I could personally relate to and plan on taking some of the advice in the cures section. Admittedly, I wont be trying the meditation/drug based cures.

The quality of this link is the sole reason for this post, I wanted to give some credit/kudos to the people who wrote it. I know it’s unlikely they will read this but who cares, I can sleep at night in the knowledge I credited them (great pun hey?). So thank you Gina Kemp, M.A., Tina de Benedictis, Ph.D, Robert Segal, M.A., and Suzanne Barston!

Absolutely bloody genius!

You’ve heard of Flashmobs I hope? Basically where lots of people show up in a random predetermined place and perform a random predetermined act. There have been Flashmobs where people all bow and start praying in the direction of a leader before etc.

This one was different and more genius than before. The recent popularity growth of the “Rick Roll” has lead to this… A huge group of people showed up at Liverpool Street Station today at 6pm to sing the Rick Roll song, “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley.

What coverage of the event was there… well you can watch Whatleydude’s Qik video here! On the BBC here or the office site here.

It’s these things that make me wish I lived in London!

Doesn’t happen very often, but we have some new coins coming out! See the story here on The Royal Mint, Kudos to Capn Designs who have also posted about this.These were designed by 26 year old Matthew Dent, young much?

Signed up for Qik.com earlier, you can see the link in the blogroll on the right or you can follow this link here.

My first video, just happens to be a stalker vid of Horsy, she didnt realise she was being filmed, 8 minutes of film later, she still hadn’t realised. Not till just after I stopped the stream did she realise.

For those who don’t know what Qik.com is, it basiaclly allows you to stream video live from your mobile phone to the internet! COOOOLLL!

Ok I know I’m cheating a little bit by combiningthe two days, but day 5 really does only include landing, getting off plane and driving back to the office. Nothing really of interest! So back to day 4… Day 4 and the final day in NYC. Got up, went for breakfast with Horsy and bossman. Swiftly back upstairs to get on with more work. Rushed around NYC trying to find the Fedex depot, finally found it and made friends with the girl who worked in there! You have to try extra hard to be nice to people when you need perfect strangers to do weird things for you! When reading the last sentence, please remove any sexual innuendos you are thinking of!

Once all this was sorted, it was time to go look at some pubs! My how tough hey? Well yes actually, ended up walking about 6 miles. One place was right by Grand Central Terminal, one the far side of Times Square, and a fair few between. One of which I was more than slightly suspicious of being a strip club. Whilst walking through Times Square, I noticed a gathering in the middle of the road so thought I best find out what was going on. It was live Guitar Hero (computer game) going on. People were putting their name down and going up to play on the massive screen. A funny combination of absolutely useless people and some really good people. After all this excitement I ended up back at the hotel to collect the bags and get a taxi to the airport. Where the carnage basically began…

So what happened at the airport I hear you asking… to be honest, at the airport not a lot. Got checked straight in, got boarding passes, got through security with no problems. Went to duty free, bought some Whiskey and pressies. Boarding was delayed by 10 mins because the plane came in slightly late, but no real problem there. Got on the plane, settled down, it was really quiet on there so Horsy went to sit on the other side of the gangway so we could both spreadout. How conciderate.

Next we hear the Pilot come over the PA system, telling us the bad news that there is a delay in getting a spot on the runway, there would be approximately an hours delay before we could take off. This was of course disappointing, not as disappointing as when the Pilot came on again about 20 mins later to say that one (of two) runways had been closed. Meaning there were 80 planes queued waiting to take off, and the same amount in the air waiting to land, approximately 2 hour wait. I guess it goes without saying that the ones waiting to land get a slight priority over us. I kinda feel that this was my fault, there was a point whislt waiting at the airport where I thought to myself: “I don’t know why people always complain about punctuality of flights, I’ve never had any problems”. The cabin crew put the inflight entertainment on early an fed us drinks earlier than normal so wasn’t too bad. I did notice a couple of things though which got me thinking. First off I thought it was weird that the runway ran over the top of a road with public cars on. A tunnel underneath a runway with aeroplanes on? I’ll go around thanks! We also had to taxi past the Americans Airlines terminal, I wonder if they were delayed as well, conspiracy theory states that they will have been flying all their flights out on time to make other airlines look inferior!

We finally got our spot to take off, we taxi’ed to the end of the runway where it was possible to look back along where we’d come from. Strange to see a line of 15 planes (majority of them big transatlantic planes like ours) lined up. Like you would expect to see in car form queuing for a car park or something similar. Taking the Britains love of queuing to another level! Other than few problems with the inflight entertainment there is little else exciting which happened. Had a little kip on the plane, but no where near long enough to not be totally jet lagged today 🙁

More pictures to come asap!