If you get a lot of email (and who doesn’t?) may I suggest my book, Dealing with Email? It was recently re-released in epub ebook form and for the Kindle via Amazon US (you can preview pages from it from Amazon’s page.

For the academics among you, how about a copy of Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media (also previewable on Amazon) featuring a chapter by yours truly about MySpace users? The paperbook is $30 – cheap for an academic work…

Due to recent breakages and having an income after years of studenthood I find myself looking for a bunch of consumer electronics goods at once and I’m coming to realise that:

1) Even in this most-covered commercial area, there are annoying information gaps (products that are UK/European models are much less often-reviewed than US ones).
2) Being able to find reviews of any individual product is no substitute for buyer’s guides that would help you sift through dozens of similar products by your own criteria.

So can you help me find the following?

• A cheap (sub-£150) digital camera that is good in low-light conditions (ie shoots well indoors without a flash)
• An inexpensive 22″ TV with reasonable speakers and (if possible) support for high resolution connection to a PC for use as a monitor (am currently considering the John Lewis 22″ or the LG22H2000)
• A cheap mobile phone with decent calendar/organizer function (ie an up-to-date version of what Palm used to sell as an organizer alone) – preferably with keyboard – am currently considering the INQ Chat or the LG GW520 – should be on three because of their Skype support and cheap internet.

Other suggestions?

I looked back and found that my earliest blog post was ten years ago today. Readers will note that it has been used steadily less and less over the years because it falls between two stools – most of my recent blogging has been academic and hosted on the Media@LSE group weblog which I set up. Since I am no longer there I plan to phase that out. This blog is therefore primarily for more personal blog entries, but I find that for the most part things that are personal I only wish to share with my friends and acquaintances and I am therefore using Facebook more – particularly now that the latest update allows item by item privacy controls. This blog may therefore end up being my ‘public-facing’ blog again, mainly about academic-related things. Stay tuned for further announcements…

Since I go 2-3 times weekly London to Leicester these days I have to book lots of tickets in advance but all registering with the East Midlands trains site lets me do is auto-fill “london” and “leicester” in the search box and fills in address and credit card details at the end. It doesn’t remember favourite train times or seat locations. Nor does it send booked train time information back in email in a form that can be easily imported into Outlook or iCal. It takes 13 clicks to add each single journey to my basket! Alas Trainline and Raileasy both cost £1 more per ticket and £1 per transaction to book (more if using credit cards). Megatrain‘s tickets are cheaper but trains arriving at 11:00 and leaving at 15:00 wouldn’t give me much time to work.

Any other ideas?

I’m just back from holiday in Brittany where I learned to windsurf – something I didn’t expect to be able to do and indeed something it’s rather un-like me to even want to learn but it makes a contrast to my sedentary recreations during the rest of the year. No pictures, alas – you’ll just have to take my word for it that not only did I figure out how to get up and stay up on the thing but I even figured out how to turn it around which was all the harder for me because I had to un-learn how I expected it to work from when I used to sail in boats.

Current tasks (in no particular order)

• Figure out what order I should be doing these tasks in 😉
• Finish tinkering with my book proposal from my thesis and send it to publishers
• Finish thesis revisions and return to examiners so I can call myself Dr Brake without embarrassment
• Prepare for hopefully minor struggle to enable me to release my thesis under Creative Commons instead of copyright (if I manage this I hope it might help push others to do the same)
• Finish the latest three job applications (getting repetitive strain injury from copying and pasting details from my CV onto application forms has been absorbing much of the last few months)
• Put together postdoc applications
• Figure out ways to make Google Apps work in some way approximating an integrated system instead of a grab-bag of miscellaneous services to help the administration of the EU Kids Online project.

Notwithstanding the mini-mountain of tasks described there things are good. I’m rested from the holidays, really enjoying being back on the conference circuit again (Transforming Audiences 2), about to have a job interview, unexpectedly may get funding to go to ICA 2010 in Singapore (I love travel, climate crisis notwithstanding)…

Love to talk more but I’m off to dinner at Les Trois Garcons (paid for by someone else!)

I was thirsty on a long-distance train recently. I wasn’t planning to have a coke when I got to the buffet car but to my surprise it was the cheapest drink – 2/3 the cost of the smoothie ‘healthy option’ – cheaper even than tea. I looked at the health notes – 29% of a whole day’s sugar per serving! Then I looked at the fine print – this single 500ml bottle contained two “servings” thus it was nearly 2/3 of a day’s sugar ration all by itself!!

I’ve been doubly digitally deprived of late – I have lost internet access for three days – that was bad enough. But this coincided with the loss of my new iPod Touch. I hadn’t really realised how much I have come to rely on it as a filler of spare moments with (mostly) speech podcasts, snippets of web pages and the odd game. Also as a note taker and organizer that was – crucially – at hand wherever I was.

I would like to say that now that I have been forced to live without continuous distractions I have discovered the pleasures of living in the moment and being fully aware of my surroundings. But in fact I just find the situation frustrating. Perhaps I need a longer period in a media isolation tank – but as a media studies academic it may be that my media addiction just comes with the territory.

My favorite meta-gaming webzine, The Escapist discusses the brief life and the Death of a Manifesto – Manifesto Games, which created by Greg Costikyan to get independent games into the market. The long and short of it is that several mainstream digital download game distributors have also taken to stocking indie games but Manifesto despite its visionary zeal has been unable to make a go of it.

An accompanying article asks “what does indie gaming mean anyway?” echoing arguments about mainstream vs indie art and music that have been discussed for centuries).

For those of you not following me on Facebook or on twitter (drbrake) I submitted my doctoral thesis back in April and today it was formally examined. I was asked to provide some minor revisions and once I have done so (within the next three months) I will officially become Dr Brake (or Dr D.R. Brake if you like as my forenames are David and Russell). For more on my thesis (which I will also make available online once I have done the revisions) visit my academic publications page.

I replaced my five year old PowerPC-based iBook G4 with a practically identical MacBook last week and I know at least one other reader is contemplating the same thing so here are some impressions and a few problems/requests for help.

Good:

• As you might expect, I got more storage – 500Gb instead of 80 – which means I can now have all my music and all my pictures and all my movies on one machine instead of having them distributed on different ones.
• My battery life has gone back up from c. 1hr to supposedly nearly five (as yet untested).
• Having a built in webcam is pretty entertaining.
• Making the transition was very easy even though it involved a change of processor architecture as well as a change of machine. Only a few applications broke and almost all the application settings remained intact. I was working on the new machine within a half day of connecting it to the old one.
• Thanks to a “back to school” offer the new macbook came with a (nearly) free iPod Touch which was significantly better than the first generation one I had in that it includes a volume control and can accept a microphone.

Bad:

• The down arrow already seems to be coming loose though the machine has not been subjected to any physical stress I can think of.
• Even with nearly double the RAM (2Gb) and I would have thought several times the raw processing power, the new machine feels very little faster. Moore’s law suggests I should see a 4x speed increase – where is it? One can’t blame The Great Moore’s Law Compensator – the tendency for software to get more and more bloated as processors improve – because I am running the same software I was last week. Are there a lot of non-native applications still on my machine running in emulation? Will I see a dramatic boost if I “top up” to 4Gb of RAM?
• It’s not noticeably lighter either though I believe it is supposed to be slightly lighter and it is just different enough in shape that I had to buy a new case for it.

Help, please?

• Adobe AIR seems not to work despite uninstalling and reinstalling it twice so BBC iPlayer and Tweetdeck don’t work either. Any ideas?
• I installed Windows 7 RC via Bootcamp but none of the games I have installed to date via Steam run – in the case of TF2 I get the “splash screen” and the icon briefly appears in the dock but then it disappears without even an error message. Should I try installing parallels, fusion or one of the other multiple-OS enabling apps and try that? Any other ideas?
• Any ideas about how I can get my Macbook to recognise the existence of an external monitor when it is running Windows 7? If I do get it to play games I would prefer to play them on my 19″ monitor.