I am danielbowen. danielbowen I am.
Every so often, some new online service will present itself. Some turn out to be duds, but some turn out to be pretty compelling. As most of them are free, it’s often handy to grab your name early on while it’s available, in case it becomes useful later.
In the prehistoric days of the net, I used a nickname. But I went off that, and switched to the same alias that usually matched my corporate email name: dbowen. So back when Excite was a portal and email service that people actually used (as opposed to a the ghost town it is now), I managed to nab the dbowen user on there, as well as a bunch of other, more obscure services.
At some stage it got too hard, and I switched first to dfbowen, then to danielbowen. Certainly longer, but this is an easier one, and is also more readily identifiable with me.
There are obviously other Daniel Bowens around online, but I seem to have usually managed to beat them to the punch on this stuff. I’m obviously more of a geek than they are. The most recent was Facebook, but here’s a list of the main places I’ve grabbed my name:
- danielbowen.com — blog… and really, the only one of these that I truly own
- danielbowen at gmail.com — now my main personal email — I periodically get emails for one of my namesakes here. The same logon is used for a multitude of other Google services
- danielbowen at yahoo.com — an email address I no longer use, but it’s the same profile used for YahooGroups, and also for…
- flickr.com/photos/danielbowen — my Flickr photo feed
- danielbowen at hotmail.com — I don’t use this for email, but it is my Passport logon, for various (mostly Microsoft) services. Someone’s got this one mixed up too, as I’ve noticed an influx of Match.com dating service emails, apparently directed at a namesake in Western Australia.
- twitter.com/danielbowen — the Twitter feed, providing useless snippets of information, 140 characters at a time
- friendfeed.com/danielbowen — I don’t really use this very much, but it combines the blog, Twitter, Flickr, geekrant.org posts, and my Google News EgoSearch into one handy stalking package
- User:Danielbowen — my Wikipedia user page. I dabble in Wikipedia, undoing obvious vandalism when I see it, and occasionally adding things to articles
- facebook.com/danielbowen — but note, I don’t really use it that much at the moment. Mostly Scrabble, and keeping up with friends that I actually know in real life, and a handful I know well online. Stick to the blog/Twitter/Friendfeed if you want to stalk me.
What’s your handle? Do you have a single one you use online? Have you missed out on your preferred logon on some services, and had to compromise, or have you got something reasonably unique?
Life is high resolution
You know you’ve been watching too many online videos when you look at something in real life and think “Wow that’s high resolution… and the motion is so smooth…”
The General
A few weeks ago we watched Buster Keaton’s The General the other day. It’s public domain, a free download from the Internet Archive.
Very funny stuff, and some quite remarkable stunts considering they had so few safety precautions compared to nowadays.
I had been pondering if it was rude to talk during a silent movie.
The conclusion was: yes. It may not stop you hearing the dialogue, but it does interrupt your concentration.
Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr is also on my list.
Oh, great
Oh great, I just got my first international phone SMS scam spam. I’ve had the odd domestic SMS spam before, but this is the first like this. I hope it’s not the start of a flood.
It has a couple of hints that it’s probably a variation on the old Advance-fee/419/Nigerian scam — the claim that the sender is a Doctor; the USD dollars amount.
I know some will take the time to play along and bait these scammers. I don’t have that kind of time or inclination. If anybody else wants to, then great — just don’t use my name — I’m sure they’d be happy to hear from Mr Harry Potter or Mr Richard Cheney or Doctor Who or William Prince or Mr Dave Lister or whatever other name someone might make up.
Anybody else get one of these this morning?
This blog is sponsored by…
If you’re wondering, yes, the Lasoo.com.au banner advert is due to a sponsorship deal.
I was quite pleased to see they produced a graphic that fits in well with the blog — in a similar vein to my post last week on contextual advertising.
Lasoo is a web site that compiles and indexes retail catalogues — particularly handy for someone like me who has opted not to get them in my mailbox. Personally, I’ve used it in the past to find a good price on an iron, and when hunting for a specific birthday present.
I’m not going to go overboard in singing its praises just so you click through the banner, but it does seem to work well, and if you’re in Australia and ever, well, spend money, it’s worth a look.
On the public record
I think I might have out-done myself this time.
Last month I represented the PTUA at a senate hearing into Commonwealth investment in public transport.
During questions, the topic of public transport for special events came up, and as I had the night before been to such an event, I drew on that personal experience in one of my answers, all of which naturally has gone into the hearing record*.
CHAIR [Senator Glenn Sterle] — I find it absolutely amazing — in fact, I find it gobsmacking — that you can exit the MCG with 100,000 people and within an hour it is a ghost town.
…Mr Bowen — That is right. The money has been put into public transport to make it work extremely well for special events — big sporting events, concerts and all those sorts of things that Melbourne does really well. To give an example, I went to a concert after the grand prix last night at Albert Park. That was a huge crowd.
CHAIR — How were The Who?
Mr Bowen — I do like The Who. I am not so keen on the racing cars but I like the music, so I went for that. The crowd all, after the concert, swarmed out of Albert Park. They were cleared very quickly out from the tram stops surrounding Albert Park. A tram, again, can carry up to 200 people. That moves crowds not quite as well as heavy rail but certainly very quickly. You can just imagine the nightmare if they allowed parking there — the space it would take up and the time it would take to get those people out. Those special tram services moved people away from Albert Park very quickly, but they quickly broke down, so to speak, a few kilometres out. The special services provided were really good, but for people going a bit beyond where the special services go — out to the suburbs, and in my own case I was heading back out to Malvern to catch a train home — there were no special services at all. The big crowds were certainly taken away from Albert Park but they did not get all the way home, and they had long waits ahead of them, in some cases, to get all the way home. Melbourne public transport does clear crowds very well but, again, the lack of a complete cohesive network running at all times of day means that it does fail in some cases.
It’s like blogging… via Hansard.
- *The transcript, just released, is still in draft form, and contains some minor errors.
- Channel 7 story from the day of the hearing.
Nicknames
Flashback to a post I wrote about personal branding, in particular your name.
I suspect it’s something that happens as you get older, but sometimes I roll my eyes at people who persist in using nicknames on the Interwebs.
If it’s a nickname you’ve had In Real Life, then fair enough. But otherwise?
Why use it online if you’d never call yourself that elsewhere?
It’s true, for a few years around my early-20s, I used one: Raymond Luxury-Yacht, after the character in Monty Python who declares his name is actually pronounced “throat-wobbler mangrove”.
(That sketch is one of a handful that had me literally rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter the first time I saw it.)
These days assuming someone isn’t trying to deliberately hide their identity for some reason, nicknames just seem a bit… well… silly.
I’m not talking about the name of a blog/web site, or contractions of a Real Name, but a completely made-up nickname for no reason other than it sounds good.
Does anybody go the whole hog and use deed poll to change their Real Name to their Net name?
It’s another of these things which is down to personal choice, I suppose. And maybe of course I’m turning into an old man.
Expecting some interesting comments from those who use nicknames here!
Some unsung blogs I read
Thanks in part to Google Reader and the miracle of RSS feeds, I read way more blogs than I post comments on. I do leave some comments, but I just don’t have the time to properly have a blog.conversation on all the posts I read.
I try to bear in mind the XKCD cartoon: “Someone is wrong on the Internet” — sure, if you want to discuss and debate anything, there’s no shortage of places to do so. But if you contribute to them all you’d be at the computer all day and all night doing it.
So you (and indeed the writers) of some blogs might never know that I enjoy them. This post is to make amends for that. Here are ten of my favourite blogs that I rarely or never comment on:
- Highriser — some great perspectives on Melbourne life
- Jayne’s Our Great Southern Land, highlighting Australian history
- I Started Something — the influential Long Zheng, from somewhere down near Hastings on the Mornington peninsula, stirring up the Windows world with observations, particularly on forthcoming releases
- Overheard in Melbourne quotes many of my fellow Melburnians and the amusing things they say. I particularly liked the one today: Like…my brother has this livejournal thing, and there’s a group he’s a part of, all about embarassing things people say, and how other people overhear them and post them on the internet. He reads them to me sometimes - some of them are really bad! And, like, I’m always afraid someone is going to hear me saying something dumb, and put it up there and he’ll realise it was me. Oh my god. What if I’m already on there??!!
- Ed Bott has his own blog and one on ZD Net has a constant stream of opinion and advice on PCs
- James’ Chaucery blog highlights little factoids, and is what inspired me to do those little graphs that pop up occasionally
- Kensington Victoria is random topics, often funny, from some bloke in Kensington
- Coding Horror is a well-known programmer’s blog from Jeff Atwood, who has some incredible insights into the lives of professional geeks like me
- Transport Textbook has a lot of interesting (at least to me) articles on transport (specifically public transport) theory.
- For some reason I find the Washington Post’s Get There blog equally interesting. I’ve never been to DC, I don’t even know that much about the geography or politics involved, but it seems they have some similar problems in transport to Melbourne, with congested roads, crowded trains and buses, and disruptions from time to time causing havoc. I wonder if one of the daily papers here would take up something similar — I might suggest it. They do seem to be able to illicit a more forthright response than is often seen here, though the Leader blogs with people like John Rees from Connex and Darren Peters from the South Morang Rail Alliance may be showing the way.
I wouldn’t expect everybody to read what I read, given some of them are specific to my interests.
I read (and like) a lot of other blogs, and specifically excluded those written by my friends and acquaintances (hello to Tony, Trish, Ren, Kathy and all the rest of you), as I’m sure they know I’m reading, even if I don’t comment often.
At some stage I should go through the links on my own blog’s margin and update them to something closer to this list.
What other unsung blogs are there out there?
