Monthly Archives: December 2008

Folie à Deux

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I heard a couple of tracks from Fall Out Boy’s new album on Kerrang! Radio last night and was amazed. First I was amazed because… well, I never realised that FM radio was transmitted in stereo. Radio stations should do this more often. It was refreshing to hear a song like that. The quality was surprisingly good too, for a radio station. Talk shows would be twice as awesome (well, some of them) if they were in stereo too. It just seems like a logical thing to take advantage of.

I was mostly amazed because the tracks they played were awesome. Usually with Fall Out Boy stuff I have to spend a while getting used to it, but this immediately grew on me. I’m totally happy I decided to get that subscription for last.fm.

Self motivation is hard

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I think I’ll be a really good manager when I’m older when it comes to motivation. I do see myself as a motivator when I need to be to make people feel better about their situation and so work better, but I guess a weakness of mine is that I find it hard to motivate myself.

That’s not surprising though. I’ve always thought that Herzberg’s two factor theory for motivation is the one that makes the most sense. Since I work alone for my own projects most of the time, there’s no one really to congratulate or tell me that I’m doing good to make me feel good about my work. I don’t really have any responsibility; I just program my stuff when I want to. I’m not required to keep to a schedule or anything, I don’t have any responsibilities really. I wish I did.

At the moment, if I want to code something I’m usually in my living room, with my laptop on my lap. That’s clearly not a working environment, so the really nothing to feel motivated about. Obviously, no pay or anything so that can’t be something to motivate me either…

It’s a shame because I have so many projects that are currently unfinished and I’m sure would be awesome if I did. For instance, I have a shell of the new WordPress I want to use and release, but it’s not finished yet because I just can’t find the motivation for it…

So, yeah, meh.

Freemium services and the downfall of ad-based stuff

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Not that my opinion matters much, but it’s my blog and I’ll voice my thoughts if I want.

When people as big as digg.com, who have huge contracts with Microsoft for their advertising, aren’t making money then you kinda have to realise that advertising can no longer fund services any more. I’m not an economist so I’ve no idea why people aren’t advertising as much,  but they aren’t.

cnet says that more services next year are going to be freemium, so some parts of the website will be free just like normal, but there’ll be options for premium stuff too. I’ve no idea what services someone like digg could offer as a paid feature though. In fact, a lot of websites I’ve no idea how they’ll monetise themselves without advertising being the focus.

Since the content is all user generated they couldn’t have any content that’s only for paying customers. digg already found out with revision3 that letting people pay to see the programs early never works – they just get leaked and then their viewing figures suffer. Doing that would be ridiculous anyway on digg.

Maybe it could remain exactly the same, but digg promote their API stuff more, and put a lot more work into it (I’ve no idea what type of stuff it can do at the moment, since I’ve never looked into it), and then charge developers for using it. Or allow 100,000 calls to the API per month for free, but if you use more than that you pay a monthly fee. After all, people using the API are benefiting largely from the traffic that they’re getting from digg. Matt Cutts gets a huge number of people to his website from digg, and if he were charging for advertising on his blog (he doesn’t) then the traffic from just digg would be worth a few hundred pounds per month at least. He’s not using the API to be fair (I’m just using him as an example of how much traffic from digg can increase your advertising possibilities), but I’m sure he could increase his page views even more if he were.

So, making data portable (with APIs) and then charging for extensive users, or access to more features within it is a way people could make money I suppose, but I can’t see Facebook or MySpace so willingly giving away their data on their users. Especially with the privacy factor too. Though, they both do have APIs for their applications and stuff, maybe paying developers could have access to more functions.

So far my only idea is that websites that have an API can charge for usage within it. But how will those developers make money? Obviously, they can’t release an API from the data they’re getting an API from, even if they could that’d end in a vicious cycle looking for more and more developers to use the API.

An obvious way for non-content based websites to make money is charging for their services. That’s what zamzar seems to be doing. Considering half the advertisements have dropped off their front page (it used to be flooded with flash ads) they must be making some money from that.

Gaming websites like Kongregate make money from game sponsors at the moment, which I don’t think is the same as advertising, and will probably still stay strong. But, like Neopets and Second Life, with their selling virtual items, I think Kongregate is starting to do the same, and pretty successfully.

Last.fm have already gone freemium I guess, you can listen to most tracks three times before it tells you you’ve reached your limit, but you can pay £1.50 and listen to them all you want [update 2008-12-30: apparently, you don't get onto the *public* beta just for paying :(, you still get some cool features for subscribing though]. That’s not a lot to be honest, and I’m happy paying that for unlimited, legal streaming. That’ll probably increase if they get another label to join, or even when it comes out of beta. So, they’re not going to have much trouble.

The only people I can see actually having trouble in that case is content people like news providers (who don’t really want to make their content portable) and bloggers. They could write books though! News providers like Wired could always bring out a news paper, or a monthly magazine. Bloggers could bring out books, like Darren Rowse did. They could even have premium online content for subscribers, but Britannica Encyclopedias have that model, and it looks like their finding that that’s not how the internet works.

Last night’s happiness involved a gun, and some mutant rats

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Just off the bat, I’m getting really annoyed my my mysqld dieing all the time. I’ve no idea what’s causing it, except that maybe WordPress (which seems to be the only affected thing at the moment) is a little too intensive for my 64Mb server.

Database dieing was the reason I didn’t do last night’s happiness update, but I’ll do it now.

Yesterday’s most happiest thing for me was probably getting Fallout 3 for my xbox. That game is freaking awesome. It seems huge and expansive, however I’m worried that – because things don’t respawn (at least, I don’t think they do. There’re still dead bodies lying around that I killed in-game days ago) – I’ll kill everything and then won’t be able to level up any more. Last night, the stupid Brotherhood of Steel guys killed half of the Raiders before I had a chance.

I only found out you can queue up attacks in the VAT thing a few hours into playing…

I bought Ghost Recon too, but I don’t really like it, so I’m putting it on ebay. I only need one bid to get my money back, to be fair, and I think people will be looking to collect as many game as they can during the holidays. Especially with people getting new xboxes and stuff for Christmas.

Fifth day of happiness

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Still another hour left, but I guess not much else will happen.

I guess my happiest thing today was McDonalds with Samantha (my youngest sister). We went to Asda, because I need to buy the stuff I mentioned yesterday. I saved thirty-something pence thanks to the VAT cut on a pair of jeans. I realised that that’s totally almost a chocolate bar and was kinda happy. Thanks, government.

On the other hand, Woolworths is closing down, leaving 27,000 people without a job… That upsets me.

I think I might work on KoA some more.

Oh, I think I might have fixed this blog’s database problem. Was stupidly easy. All I had to do was repair them, which was made easier when I realised that I could do that with PMA.

Forth day of happiness

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To be honest, not much to be happy about today.

I’m kinda ill; I woke up at about nine o’clock this morning, only be to really sick. There was nothing in my stomach except bile apparently, so that’s all I threw up. Most disgusting taste ever. Even burns a little too. That happened every hour or so until five o’clock when I finally thought I could brave going downstairs.

I had planned on going to Asda today, to get meat-alternatives and other stuff I need, but obviously that didn’t happen. I’ll get them tomorrow I hope.

I suppose one good thing I’m happy about is finishing Blood Beast (Darren Shan). Though, it ended in a cliff hanger, so it’s also kinda a downer that the book finished.

Two And Three Of Eight Days Of Happiness

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I suck at keeping to memes, apparently. In my defense I wasn’t really around last night to update.

So, on the 19th the best thing about that day was seeing people from high school. The best part wasn’t even seeing my proper friends for the first time in months. Random people – like Luke Taylor and stuff – just chatting about random stuff. People apologising for being dicks during high school. Awesome. That made me happy.

I’m not sure what my favorite part of today has been… Probably getting my xbox to connect with my laptop and watching random things. I still have a couple of House MD to catch up with, and it’s cool that I can watch them on an actual TV rather than my laptop. Even though it streams them from my laptop, I didn’t notice a proformance hit at all locally.

Eight days of happiness meme

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Maxi tagged me. I think he’s expecting me to do this on LJ, but no.

Today’s happiness is probably waking up in my bed again. <3 I’m back home for christmas now (rather than in Leicester for university), so I got my own bed, and I got to have actual cereal! Rather than toast. And now I’m going to get something else that doesn’t involve cheese. Being back home rocks.

Unfortunately, I may have overstepped my budget by buying a TV and an xbox, so I’ve no idea how much I can actually spend at the moment. I’m pretty sure I have enough money for all the stuff I’ve current bought though, so nothing should be bouncing.

When I get back to university (some time in January) I should have my bursary, which is £400 though and I’ll be back on track. My original budget played on the hope that I’d already have that £400, so I’m not really off budget, it’s just a little out of sync at the moment.

Oh, and be spontaneous

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I’m going to bed now, but before I do I want to write up what I should be doing tomorrow:

  • More work on KoA, specifically…
    • User profiles page
    • High score table for the one and only game that’s currently on there
    • Switch the Inventory page to use Prototype (at least)
  • Find out how to fix the MySQL/VB problem
  • Find out have to fix “5 clients are using or haven’t closed the table properly” problem that MySQL has on Trinity, and exactly what causes it. (Start here.)
  • Write chapter six of my database design portfolio out
  • Wash up, and wash clothes
  • Write out a better plan for my VB tutorials

Big Coins and an N64

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After finally getting to sleep last night, I had a weird dream.

It was in my house, and we were in my bedroom except none of my stuff was there. In place of it were a lot of school desks, with random people sitting around being taught by Vince Vaughn. No idea what he was teaching though, I got bored and went down stairs.

In the kitchen we have a pantry which is usually just full of junk. This time it had a man sitting in it with a money box. He asked me for £1.70, which I found in my pocket and gave him. But he was like “Actually, we don’t accept those kinds of pounds, do you have a thicker one, like this?” I just looked at him weird and walked past, down the stairs (which don’t exist), and he shouted “I’ll let you off this time!”

Down stairs was a basement, with a few people sitting on the floor all holding different types of controls; joysticks, PlayStation controls, N64 controls, Atari-pong controls. They were all playing Super Mario Kart 64. There was about seven or so people, all different ages and stuff, just playing. There was another woman (Mary, I think, from Web Design) walking around saying “if you’ve had your two rounds, you have to leave!”