These conferences tend to have themes, back in my university days I went to a video forum with Paddy two years in a row. The first year was on online and DVD and the year after was dominated by HD kit. Internet World is no different. Last year’s show seemed dominated by Mobile marketing, the iphone was beginning its major ascendency and it dominated the booths. This year the theme was social media. As this is a part of my companies current IT plan it especially interested me. The problem this year was that the seminars were attended seemingly by a lot more people than last year. This year there were queues the whole way round some of the theatres and I had to give up on some of the seminars I intended to go to. This lead to a nice time sat outside in the sun that was not overly productive. That said I still managed to get into 5 seminars and learned a good amount in all of them.

This year though there were some other features that caught my eye. First of all I found a couple of versions of the Microsoft Surface technology. It was not the best technology but the company demoing it said they’d had to turn down the sensitivity for the show (lighting issues). Apparently they have rolled out a couple in airports. Because of the lack of sensitivity I was not overly impressed but I can see potential. That said I don’t really want to look down and interact with a table.

Next I played with a touchscreen technology that everyone has heard of but few in this country have played with… I refer of course to the Apple Ipad. After a couple of minutes playing with one I thought that having touched one I could see the potential in tablets but I don’t think Apple are on to the best idea. I like the idea of it not running a full desktop style operating system but I think the Iphone interface is a little stretched. I await tablets using Android as this can more easily be tweaked. The other downers for the ipad are that it is really heavy. For something you are meant to use on the sofa it is surprisingly uncomfortable after a couple of minutes. The other downer is that the brightness and contrast do not encourage its ebook reader functionality. I am now willing to give a tablet the benefit of the doubt but do not think it will be the ipad that wins people over even if it is the thing that grabs all the headlines.

Finally I got around to trying an F1 simulator for the first time. Previously I have wimped out when I have seen these fake F1 chassis sporting RFactor and ‘realistic’ handling. I took my shoes off and got into the car, my word is an F1 car not properly configured to its driver uncomfortable. It is a seating position you will not find anywhere else and in the simulator the seat was digging into my back… which I am sure would not be the case in reality. Anyway onto the driving. The track was Silverstone so I knew where I was going (that said the guy felt the need to tell me every turn). I managed to spin on lap 1 by touching the kerb a little hard at one point but from then on I was fine. I managed to set the second fastest lap at that point of a 1:33.200 but by the end of the day I was 6th out of however many people had a go over the day (I would imagine at least 25) so am relatively pleased.

So overall a good day, I learnt a good deal about how we should deal with our social media strategy at work and I got to play with some good toys as well. I look forward to going back next year.

In terms of the drivers there are some great names in the sport including Fabrizio Giovanardi who is something of a touring car expert having picked up 9 titles over 18 years. Jason Plato will be known to many as a hard racer who takes few prisoners and the whole field is full of drivers who don’t mind swapping a little paint. This season is going to be great and the only real downside is the loss of last years champion. Yes, rather sadly the champion can’t find the funds to go racing this season. Colin Turkington has long been a driver to admire being I suppose best described as a gentleman driver staying out of trouble and yet still able to pick up large numbers of wins. He will be greatly missed this season.

As usual my mother and I will be venturing to Brands Hatch in May and October with Paddy and Beth joining us as well it’ll be a fun little trip. If you have any interest in close racing and lots of overtaking then you should really consider coming with us sometime… Just don’t be like Craig and spend the whole time taking photos instead of paying attention. To get in the mood and find out just how good the BTCC is tune into ITV4 this Sunday sometime between 11 and 6.

The problem is that I am seeing Photoshop as something of a necessity but no necessity is worth £600. On the plus side the seller is willing to give a refund so no real loss just a waste of time. Sometimes trying to stay legal is a right pain in the backside…

On the up side for ebay I have bought four playstation one Formula One games for a total of £9 the two that have arrived so far have both been of working and good quality. So it seems ebay is great if you don’t intend to spend a lot of money, if you do then it and the people on it will screw you over.

On the other side of the system, I have been after a version of adobe photoshop for the last couple of months but I am not interested in paying the near £600 that adobe expect me to pay for the software. I am also disinclined to take the student approach of torrenting the software because I now have the money to buy things legally. Therefore I have been scouring ebay and amazon marketplace looking for good deals on older versions of photoshop. After a couple of weeks I found a good deal, a seller with good feedback (would never spend over £50 on ebay with a seller with under 100 feedback and at least 99% positive), a good price and an unused copy of Photoshop CS2. I won the item for £87 and thought I was on the way to legal photoshop jolliness (assuming the seller hadn’t lied to me). Having paid though I have now received an email from ebay saying that the item has been removed, what is the point in removing an item from the system after the item has been completed and payment made? Worse still due to ‘privacy’ ebay refuse to let you know why the item was removed from the system. You are just told to contact the seller who may or may not talk to you/give you a refund. If he doesn’t then I have to go and bitch to paypal about getting my money back.

Seriously I understand that it might make sense to remove items from the system if the item is illegal etc but this was software that was unused from a seller with a good reputation. If there was a valid reason then that is another problem that plagues ebay entirely and one that I have faced two of the last times I bought items on the site. The first was a copy of the epic Orange Box by Valve which must be registered to a steam account for the pc version to function. It can only be registered to one steam account and it already had been so therefore I could not play the game and had to send the game back. The last item (pre-photoshop) that I bought on ebay was sent back as well, this time because the seller had sent me a rather obvious fake copy of GTA Chinatown wars on DS. I had heard that DS piracy was rife on the website but figured I’d try my luck and I failed. The cartridge was thicker than usual, the box images were lowish res and the manual contained text from a review website (I typed in a passage to google when I opened the manual knowing it was fake).

So piracy, high fees and unknown calculations have majorly knocked my confidence in the nets biggest auction company. At the moment I don’t really see a lot of reason to return for anything over about £20 any time soon. Meanwhile on the photoshop front, the guy has sent it to me anyway and we are both a little perplexed as to why ebay cancelled his listing after it had been completed… Now I just have to hope that the item was as he described it to me in the first place. As far as I am aware though ebay is still the best site on the net for purchasing things you can’t find anywhere else. For example I have bought four PS1 Formula One games a total of around £10 for me to review on http://www.f1gaming.com in the coming months. I would not have been able to find those items anywhere else and would probably have been charged more for them if I had, in the case of small little rare trinkets ebay is still king but for larger/more modern items I am finding it a bit of a pain in the backside.

Tapovan

My aunt wanted a website for her Gite in the south of France. It launched last week and is already near the top of google in searches for the region. Currently I am finalised a gallery and ideas for an online booking system but for now if you are interested in a holiday in a beautiful area in the south of France then take a look and contact them.

The other thing I have been working on is a pet project, being a Formula One fan for the last 12 years and not missing a single race in that time while also playing every F1 game that has come out in that time. I have been a member of a forum for the last 5 years that was a great community but its somewhat fallen into disrepair as the owner lost interest. I therefore wanted to take the theme and improve upon it. I have therefore launched the first version of f1gaming.com.

f1gaming.com

The idea behind the site is to place the latest f1 and f1 game news onto the website on a daily basis with several writers keeping out community updated. In the next couple of months we will be launching a forum on the site and a full database of race results and racing games with reviews and user reviews. For now though the site only has the ability to allow users to sign up and post comments on most news stories with a lot of other parts coming soon.

Other sites I am working on:
A church website
A telecoms and courses website
This Blog
My film news website
Our hosting site

So if you want a website or you have comments about my work let me know… but be prepared to wait for a little while due to my current workload… and the fact I occaisionally don’t want to work in the evenings.