Dom Davis (The Blog)

There was a blog post yesterday, despite evidence to the contrary, and a controversial one at that. It simply didn’t survive long enough to actually get posted. My iPad, which is now the principle method of blogging, only has wifi and I can’t post on the move. What i do instead is compose the entry, then publish it when I get in the office. While this is great in theory there is one element of it that fails to work in practice: should the blogging application crash, or be told to shut down by iOS then the post appears to be lost. What I shall try today is hitting e publish button, watching it fail miserably and hoping that it will still be on the failed publish queue when I get in to the office so I can republish for your edification and delight. As a precaution I shall also be cutting and pasting the post into my trusty notebook app for recovery should my plan fail.

The good news is that is would appear that the new tariffs for the iPhone 4S, which I will hopefully be getting soon, are both cheaper than my current iPhone tariff and include tethering so I can hok my iPad to my iPhone and publish in the move. That’s the theory at least.

While we’re on the subject of fondleslabs its the release of iOS 5 today which is very exciting. I’m not sure if I’ll have to wait until tonight before it’s available but rest assured I shall be upgrading all my iDevices pretty sharpish. iCloud is also arriving soon (new iTunes to support that) and there’s lots of excitement in the land of Apple. That said it may be time for me to bite the bullet and upgrade my main computer from Snow Leopard to Lion. I’m still not convinced with Lion whereas I am still very happy with Snow Leopard (there’s a certain irony that Snow leopards are my favourite cat while lions are my least favourite) but time, tide and Apple wait for no man and to not upgrade is to fall behind.

If you remember, the blogging software I use while on the go had a major update that caused it to be very flakey when it had limited access to the Internet. To get round this I started writing blog posts in another app, cutting and pasting them to the blogging app when i was ready to post (and had a good, strong 3G signal) and posting them on the walk into work. Is method has served me well and, despite numerous updates to the blogging software it’s a pattern I’ve stuck with.

This week I’ve returned to using the blogging app for everything. I’ve also changed the platform I use to write the blog posts. This is because I am now the owner of a shiny new iPad. It has the advantage of being sightly easier to type on the the phone (although this not as easy as a real, full sized keyboard) but the disadvantage of no mobile connection. On the plus side it means the blogging app shouldn’t keep falling over when it gets a slow connection for 3 seconds that then drops out as there will simply be no connection at all on the train. On the downside this means I will have to wait until I have wifi to post (which to be fair won’t be long as I’ll be in the office soon enough). Still, on balance I now have an iPad

Incidentally, the past few weeks have seen me using my laptop to put together a presentation for a jolly I had last week with work hence the lack of daily posts. Normal service should now resume.

So now the summer holidays are in full swing I might go back to noodling about on my laptop on the way into work and writing blog posts on my way to (and, if they’re long, possibly from) work. We’ll see. This, of course, does beg the question: where the bloody hell is summer? We went through one of the warmest springs ever and then, with the exception of the odd day here and there, it’s just stayed like that. Recently it’s felt more like autumn than summer and I’ve even toyed with the idea of lighting a fire last weekend. This country seriously needs to sort it’s climate out.

I’ve never been a stat whore when it comes to my blogs but I do enjoy having a peruse of the Google Analytics logs from time to time. Todays discover is that a staggering 31% of visits to this site in the past month are people searching for the lyrics of the ‘We buy any car [dot com]‘ lyrics. Since July 11th 2010 that search term has generated roughly 4 hits a day to this site. Currently if you do the search you get my blog as the third result. I’m guessing the recent ramping up in traffic for the term over the past two months is people using the little magnifying glass thingy on Google and generating a false hit but it still doesn’t explain the interest in the lyrics. They are, after all, not exactly the hardest in the world to learn.

The rather specific term “my foot” “x-ray” “nail polish” “blog” has generated 66 hits since it first showed up on June 27th, 2010. That’s roughly 2 hits a week. What are you looking for when you search for that?

I shouldn’t complain though. People coming from google.co.uk stay the longest (3.5 minutes) and read the most pages per visit (nearly 4 whole pages). And at least the searches are for ‘Butt Plug’ (don’t ask).

I had cause yesterday to go hunting through the posts of one of my old (and currently dormant) blog sites in order to find a link for a friend. They had postulated on Facebook that those bringing bicycles onto mass transit¹ should face swift, disproportionate and, above all, deadly retribution. While I believe he has a valid point I still maintain the position I held last decade which goes a tad further and it was that link I wanted to share.

I tracked the post down via a quick search for ‘gun’, then ‘kill’, ‘postal’ and finally ‘arm’². Not remembering the title of the post I found myself reading a selection of the posts. OK, so I rambled, my punctuation is off and there are some class typos in there but I still, to this day, find many of them fun.

I keep toying with the idea of starting it up again but the fundamental problem is my current commute consists of using a half empty, reliable service where ‘busy’ is not having the pick of table seats and ‘packed’ is having to sit next to someone. Not conducive to The Rage.

The other idea I’ve had is writing a book based on it. The problem there is time³. In the meantime I may just have a ‘rural timetable’ for posting there, after all, most people use RSS for blogs these days⁴ so irregular posting shouldn’t be an issue. Plus I can include driving on there now which is an endless source of tales of utter fucking morons. Ah, there’s The Rage

¹He’s been living in New York for a few weeks and has already gone native.

²It was an angry blog.

³I’m supposed to be editing a book for a friend first which I’m woefully behind on.
⁴Or at least they should.

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I have tomorrow off. And Friday. Then on Monday I go into hospital for a quick dynorodding (don’t ask). The rest of the week will be spent recovering. Then it’s Christmas, then two days off in lieu of Christmas. All of which means that today is my last day at work until the three between Christmas and New Year. And let’s face it, those aren’t exactly the most taxing of days in many offices.

This, does of course, have a possible impact on blog entries. The next few days The Zozo and I are treating as a holiday so I wouldn’t expect much in the way of output from me. Monday starts very early and ends up with me being in a fair amount of discomfort which, again, may have a negative impact on blog writing. Tuesday onwards is where it starts to get fun. While there will be ample time to construct entries I will probably be quite heavily medicated which is going to greatly reduce coherence. Expect weirdness (more so than usual).

Normal service will probably resume on the 4th, although you pays your money (metaphorically speaking) and you takes your chances.

As part of the inexorable descent into winter it’s beginning to get a bit chilly on my walk to and from work. To date I’ve survived with tshirt and hoody but I think it’s time to fish out the proper jumpers, dust off the coat and put the hat, scarf and gloves where I can easily grab them should they be needed.

Gloves do, of course, make iPhone operation hard so I may have to weigh up desire to blog versus desire to keep hands warm in the coming months

So we’ve had another post disappear yesterday it would seem and the app threw a fit today when it couldn’t get any signal, crashed and wiped out the post I was working on this morning. Couple that with the fact I’m on holiday from Saturday and I think updates for the next few weeks are going to be thin on the ground. Hopefully when I come back there will be an update to the blogging program (or I find a way to revert to the old version, or find some alternative method). In the interim I shall try and sneak quick updates in either at work (naughty! ) or at home in the evenings.

P.S. I forgot my keys again yesterday (that was yesterdays post). It turned out ok in the end though, the Zozo rescued me

The new version of wordpress for my phone is doing my head in. Before I could bounce in and out of the app happily gathering links, lyrics, and other useless shit to scatter among my posts, but not any more. The new ‘autosave’ feature means that rather than coming back to my post in the exact state I left it I now come back to it in the state it was in the last autosave. Or blank, as was my experience just now. It’s buggy, crashes, doesn’t do what it used to do and is generally making blogging on the move a pain rather than just a bit fiddly. You lot are now 3 posts down. Sorry.