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On getting a bus today I’m pretty sure I said “I can has Daysaver please?”

Ye Gods, what have I become…

For various reason I’m looking into getting a video camera. Okay, basically I want to interview people on video and upload it to YouTube as I suspect it’ll be more effective in getting messages and personalities across than transcribing audio. Given than YouTube (or possibly Vimeo as I like the aesthetics and aesthetics go a long way in this game) I don’t need anything fancy and will probably be recording on the lowest setting anyway.

The last time I checked Camcorders were very expensive and used this strange vintage medium called “tape”. And a cursory glance in Jessops on Friday showed this mostly to still be the case but there was a single little camera about the size of my fist at around £100. This intrigued me. Price and size wise this was perfect but it surely couldn’t be any good, right? Fearing that it might be good and I might buy it there and then I left, but the notion didn’t leave my mind.

While talking with Antonio later that day he said he’d also been looking into such things as budget ways of getting community groups to record videos that could be instantly uploaded the web with minimal editing. Apparently these cheapo camcorders used flash drives like you get in normal cameras and generally float around the £100 mark. And they’re not that bad if you’re not after anything special.

So I check the online shops. Fuckall on Dabs and Jessops but Amazon has the goods, at least from the Other Sellers. This little beauty is £80, fits 6 hours per gig (according to the reviewers so pinch of salt there), and is 9cm long, smaller than an iPod. That’s stupid small. And there are many others.

My question, then, is does anyone out there have any experience with such things? Is there a particular model that’s considered the best?

There is a tradition of marking the first sightings of migratory birds each year. Now, I don’t know my ornithology and don’t really keep my eyes open for them but I do know my rodents and canids so I can join in this game.

On Friday night circa 11pm I spotted a fox.

And today at about 5pm I saw a rat.

I have mapped these observations.

I hope this is of use to a national rodent and/or canidae survey.

The big news of the moment is that our landlord has gone into liquidation which means as of Friday we’re renting from a receivership company based in Bradford. Which is nice.

A bit of background. This flat is great for many reasons but the primary one is it’s very cheap. I’m currently paying £235 a month for the smallest room and that includes all bills except electricity. Council Tax, water rates, gas central heating, they’re all covered by that £235. On top of this I stick between £15 and £20 in the electric meter each month depending on how much computer work I’ve been doing.

The reason the flat is so cheap is partly because the landlord wasn’t interested in many money from it (they were subletting and I think we had it at cost) and partly because it hadn’t been modernised or even decorated since the 70s, give or take. This didn’t bother us at all. Personally speaking the cheapness has enabled me to live my pseudo-slacker lifestyle these last couple of years for which I’m grateful. And the flat has character, such as the somewhat freaky furry wall in the living room.

So while there’s a possibility whoever takes over the building in the future will keep the status quo it’s much more likely they’ll look at the flat and realise in seconds that with a little investment it’ll be a goldmine. Once our current tenancy contract is up (September) the rent will soar and we’ll be out.

What makes this is big deal beyond the usual pain of moving is this flat is something special, as anyone who’s visited will attest. It’s also been in the “family” for over eight years having been pretty much exclusively occupied by alumni of Dillons / Waterstone’s on New St. Us leaving is annoying but the fact that none of “us” will replace us is terrible.

I could go on, and no doubt will over the months to come, but to get to the point I’m once again looking for somewhere to live. There’s no real urgency and I’m not desperate (yet) but should something interesting and cheap come up please do let me know.

I’ve been using the Joomla content management system for the last couple of months on Digital Central and have come a conclusion about it.

At first I thought my unease with the system was that it was new and using a different paradigm. I would, I felt, get used to it.

Later I told myself there’s law whereby the more powerful something is the more complex it has to be. Joomla is certainly powerful and it’s certainly complex.

Now, having had to use it on a daily-ish basis for a while I can honest say, hand on heart, that it’s a piece of shit and a hinderance to my work. At least the interface is. It’s the most unintuitive, frustrating thing I’ve had to click my mouse on since I can’t remember when. This is not helped by the project I’m using Joomla for not needing a fraction of its power.

So, my advice if you’re setting up a site and want a content management system? Think very hard about what you need, strip away what you don’t need and use either Wordpress or Movable Type. They might be sold as blogging CMSs but they can do much more and they won’t make you want to eat your fist.

Joomla seems worryingly popular in the West Midlands web design world and it’s so often badly implemented. (See the permalink-free Birmingham Words with it’s relative URL feed. Why would you put relative URLs in a feed? How can you be allowed to do so?) A content management system should, I feel, guide you to best practice. Web standards should be at least given a cursory nod. And crufty URLs should be the first thing you try and sort out (can you not run .htaccess from the system?).

I could go on. But I won’t. I’ll save it for my report.

In the meanwhile, please stop using it.

(Google search for Joomla! sucks brings up 219,000 results.)

Very busy week last week due to the mother visit and the Fierce Festival and my not being that practiced at being very busy, and some news of import to impart too, but I’m off to photograph Pride in the rain so it’ll have to wait. Much to report though.

This piece from I, Cringely says, in essence, that the very nature of how Google runs will be its downfall. Because it has created the perfect working enviroment and filled it with the best minds it will ultimately fail as those minds use the Google enviroment to create the Next Google. For some reason this is often seen as a problem. I think it’s a good thing, and if Google are prepared to let this process happen then it’ll be an even better thing.

People ask me what the reasoning is behind Created in Birmingham and there are many answers, but the main one is to encourage others in the arts communities and creative industries of Birmingham to start blogging (in the widest sense of the term “blogging”). CiB, I say, will be declared a success when it is no longer needed. I am working towards making it a useless weblog.

If I was setting CiB up as a business with a revenue plan or whathaveyou then this would be a bad thing. But from the PoV of building a distributed online community (or whathaveyou) it makes perfect sense.