I have finally found a place for the wonderful “Posterous” service that I wrote about several days ago.

For those who have no idea, Posterous is a blogging platform that works via email - you just send an email to post@posterous.com and it creates you a blog, makes a post out of the email, and arranges attachments nicely (so, for example, if you attached a photo it will appear nicely sized in the post and open a lightbox style view when you click on it).

Here’s my Posterous page…

If you have a mobile phone with a camera, and the facility to email the photos you take, you have an instant mobile blogging platform - or “moblog”, as the blogging masses like to term it. I know you can do the same trick in Vox, Wordpress et al, but they are all far more fiddly to set up than just sending an email.

I guess this means that “The Enormous Waste of Webspace” will remain as the main repository of my thoughts and opinions, but my corner of Posterous (jonbeckett73.posterous.com) will house the numerous photos I take as I wander the earth - purely because it takes very little effort to do so.

Who would have dreamed that the words “Sarah Palin” would do better than “Britney Spears” to garner hits on the internet? Obviously Britney thinks so, because she’s just announced she’ll be opening the MTV awards again (car crash television strikes again).

In the meantime Sarah Palin’s team of speech writers did something rather clever - they got her to say “Hockey Mom” in front of the media. She may as well have said “Soccer Mom” or “MILF”… perhaps politicians in the US aren’t as stupid as we all thought… or rather, they realise exactly how stupid the populance is.

It’s time for a coffee break from the endless streams of source code I am spewing out at the moment, so I decided to invent a meme. It has no real title yet - feel free to suggest one, and copy/modify for yourself.

1 decade ago
In 1998 I was still living with my parents, working as IT manager for a construction company, and actually pretty happy with my life. I was single, had no responsibilities, and pretty much did what I wanted most of the time.

1 year ago
In September 2007, my better half and I were approaching the final hurdles in our two year journey towards adopting children. We did not yet know that three little girls desperately needed a new Mum and Dad.

1 month ago
A month ago, I was looking forward to my first couple of weeks off work in months - preparing to take the girls on their first “real” seaside holiday with us - to stay with my parents in Cornwall.

1 day ago
I spent much of yesterday locked in a room with a laptop and a large sheet of paper, trying to figure out what on earth was going on with something far too complex to bother explaining here.

1 hour ago
An hour ago I was writing all manner of diagnostic code to avoid the database autopsy situation I found myself in yesterday.

There you go. Copy it. Have fun. It doesn’t take long.

I have been playing with Google Chrome throughout most of today (while not fighting fires with C#, SQL Server and K2), and thought it might be worth recording them for posterity.

For those who have been either living under a rock, or have some sort of life, “Google Chrome” is the long rumoured web browser from Google. It has been in development for the last two years, with the first public beta being made available yesterday.

Here’s the official video introducing the project…

It didn’t dawn on me at first why Google should do what they have done - but after discovering two or three key features of Chrome, everything started to fall into place. It’s worth saying right here and now that Microsoft are probably very worried indeed.

• Google Chrome uses tabs just like any other browser - but it assigns each tab it’s own process internally - meaning that one web page cannot crash the entire browser (or at least that’s the theory). Given the time we invest in content authoring within the browser - GMail, Wordpress, Google Docs - this is a very good thing.
• Google Chrome has an entirely new Javascript engine. The dynamic language that modern websites use is becoming a bottleneck, and the engineers at Google realised this. Websites are slowly becoming bigger and more complex - so having a browser that can run them up to 1000% percent faster means the goalposts have been moved. Sites will start doing more, because the browser can handle it.
• Here’s the kicker. Google Chrome has a menu item called “Create Application Shortcut”. This makes an icon on your desktop specific to the webpage you do it from. The resulting window that launches when you click the icon looks for all the world like a Windows application… except of course it’s Chrome, running a website. Think about it. Sandboxed web sites, that look like applications.

I am impressed with Google Chrome. For a beta, and a first version, it is fantastic. What’s more, the entire browser, rendering engine, and javascript engine are fully open source - so you can see how they did everything and even use elements of it yourself if you really want to. Chrome also has Google Gears built in - meaning supporting web applications continue to work when you disconnect the machine from the internet. Very clever.

I’m sure Steve Ballmer will put out a press statement rubbishing Chrome over the next day or two, and then privately start screaming at the Internet Explorer development managers. It’s not going to be pretty.

I just ordered a replacement for our venerable desktop computer at home. I could bore you with specifications, but I am not going to. Suffice to say it’s many times faster than the current machine sat in front of me, has many times more memory, many times more storage, and a humongous screen.

It will be nice just to have a computer that doesn’t almost catch fire when stressed anywhere beyond “doing nothing”. It will also be nice to have a computer who’s guts are not hanging from it’s side after repeated botched upgrades and repairs.

It will be nice to have a machine we can both login to, and leave ourselves logged in.

In short, it’s going to be nice to have a computer that just works.

Our eldest and youngest returned respectively to school and playgroup this morning after six long weeks off. The morning schedule resumed with a bump at 6:30am when I woke 10 seconds before the iPhone alarm erupted.

I seem to be able to handle mornings - as evidenced by the 5 oclock starts when commuting into London - whereas Wendy does less well. This morning I had got all the children up, washed, dressed, through breakfast, and packed lunches made before Wendy showed up. We also did a photo shoot with the eldest wearing her new school uniform - up to junior school today!

This year marks the complete seperation of our children for the first time - the youngest will be at playgroup, the middle one in the infants, and the eldest in the juniors. We think it will do them all the world of good - force them to make their own friends, and perhaps most importantly - learn to lose.

The next few weeks are going to be fun.

While out for a walk at lunchtime in London, I picked up a copy of “Generation X” to read at last - the final well known book by Douglas Coupland that I have not read.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about it;

Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation- Generation X. Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser’s target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves adrift in the California desert. Unsure of their futures, they immerse themselves in a regime of heavy drinking and working in no future Mc Jobs in the service industry. Underemployed, overeducated and intensely private and unpredicatable, they have nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie. So they tell stories: disturbingly funny tales that reveal their barricaded inner world. A world populated with dead TV shows, ‘Elvis moments’ and semi-disposible Swedish furniture.

Have you read it? What did you think of it?

I’m sat here wondering if I might be able to find a use for Posterous. Normally I write here at “The Enormous Waste of Webspace“, but Posterous is persuasive… perhaps even more so than Tumblr.

We appear to have four levels of blog platform now;

• Micro Blogs (Twitter, Identica)
• Mini Blogs (Posterous, Tumblr)
• Hosted Blogs (Wordpress, Blogger)
• Independants (installed copies of Wordpress, Moveable Type, etc)

The next few years are going to be interesting - considering that nobody thought “blogging” would last as long as it has. I guess if you give people a communication medium, they do what people do - communicate - find each other.

The best friendships I have were forged on the internet. They were unlikely, they happened by chance, but we found each other.

Today was one of those days when it doesn’t just feel like all you’ve done is tell the children off all day - you know it’s all you’ve done all day.

After various escapades throughout the day (when I was trying desperately to work in our study), the middle daughter capped off her day’s performance while her Mum was out at the opticians by letting out all the recliner chairs, and shouting at her younger sister “Lets slide down and jump on them like a bouncy castle!”.

After I had been watching for a few moments through the kitchen doorway she noticed me, shot off the couch like lightning, stood with her hands behind her back and said “sorry Daddy… we were just going to sleep”.

After depositing the youngest into the playroom on her own, and ordering little miss trouble maker to her room for ten minutes, the air raid sirens started up from both ends of the house. Wendy then of course arrived home and wondered what on earth was going on.

Several attempts to illicit a story from the little perpetrator were responded to with shrugs, shakes of the head and silence - leading Wendy to walk away from her too. “If you’re not going to tell me why you are in your room, you can stay there then”.

Amid sounds of laughter downstairs a little while later, a pathetic voice drifted down from the landing. “Can I come down yet?”

Just to finish the day off with a flourish, while I took them to the play park after finishing work, she instructed her little sister (who does everything suggested of her) to “run down the slide!”. A fifteen foot long metal slide. She was going to do it too until I bellowed across the park.

Every kid in the place froze. It was like the scene from Jurassic Park where Alan Grant shouts “Freeze!” in front of the Tyrannosaurus.

The lesson was finally learned at dinner time when little miss trouble decided she liked nan bread better than curry, so stopped eating her curry and rice. “When you’ve eaten some more curry you can have some more nan bread”. Shrug. She then watched while the nan bread was slowly shared between everybody else. With one piece left, I held it up and warned her “if you eat some more curry, you can have this. Otherwise I am going to eat it.”… shrug. I ate it in front of her.

If looks could have killed… lol

We do have a rule in the house though - nobody goes to bed in trouble. I ran the youngest’s bath, and played with them. We talked about lessons being learned, and that we would try much harder tomorrow to be nice to each other.

Of course, little madam has no idea what “big school” is really going to be like - or that she starts in two days. It will do her good to get pushed around, and to lose. To lose friends through unthinking actions. To try and win new friends. To find her place.

The problem with being the predictable, dependable person that everybody knows, that everybody expects to remain the same, and that everybody expects a smile and help from is that the dependable person doesn’t always feel the way he looks.

Sometimes he feels detached, and actually quite lonely.

You float like a quiet ship through people’s lives - sometimes doing good, sometimes doing harm - and little traces of you are left here and there. Others take a little here, a little there. They go on with their lives, and you meander off towards others.

Sometimes you hit a calm stretch though, and look back over your shoulder - wondering if you are doing the right thing - passing through and never stopping. Wondering what if.