Geoff Jones

Dark foreboding in Norfolk

Great day fixing sheds and blackberry picking in Norfolk.

I loved this cloudscape with its foreboding of a storm and the lightning scarred Oak tree silhouletted by the dark clouds.

Taken with my iPhone as well

Tags: england, Norfolk

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iPhone front screen

I created myself a simple & neat ‘if found’ or ICE (In case of emergency) front screen on the iphone.

I used a regular photo which I over printed with my details using Skitch. I then uploaded it to the iphone by creating an album for the image which I synchronized . Once on the iPhone selecting the Use as Wallpaper option (the little arrow in the left corner when you click on the image), converts the image for the front screen. Seems to work quite well

Tags: apple, iphone

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The little eager stream

Originally uploaded by geofones

Sally and I passed this little bridge on the way home from seeing cloudgazer.

It immediately reminded me of my Uncle Les’s humanist funeral. Where his eulogy made reference to life being like a stream. Starting out as a tiny spring then playfully growing into a larger stream rushing with great vigour and force and then broadening and meandering before finally going into a estuary and then getting merged with the sea.

All very fitting after meeting  cloudgazer  her bio says “A daydreamer, loves clouds and the sky. Many interests. love people and words, animals and flowers”

A great day…

Tags: Twitter

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I get an enormous number of 404 errors on this site (269 in last 10 hours), they stem mainly from when I migrated the old blogger posts to wordpress. On blogger the post url’s ended with .html when I transferred them to Wordpress the .html was stripped off

So now if you click on an old google search term it comes up with File not Found (404) error. Not good for ones rankings.

I am using John Godleys redirection plugin but to make full use of it I need to learn how to create regular expressions, so far with no luck! (anyone out there willing to help, please). I have created a help topic on the regex advice forum and also asked John Godley for advice too.

Today Google came to the rescue with a neat 404 webpage that is customised to your site if you use Google Webmaster Tools. So now you get this useful little page:-

But I really need to get the hang of \b(http://geoffjones.com/2.*?)\.\w+/(?!\w) and its ilk plus how to add them to a .htaccess file….

Tags: Blogger, Google, Google Search, Google Webmaster Tools, John Godley

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One of the curses of my life is being born with a big head, I need a size 60 or 7³â„₈ hat and buying glasses is a nightmare requiring an extended temple length.

Today I discovered the real meaning of ‘pollard’ according to ancestry.com. Pollard is a “nickname for a person with a large or unusually shaped
head, from Middle English poll ‘head’ (Middle Low German
polle ‘(top of the) head’) + the pejorative suffix
-ard.” Which is obviously why the name is also given to pruning willow trees where a distinctive large crown is produced.

So I obviously have all those Heage Pollard’s to blame

The things I learn….

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Very bad news from Twitter,. Twitters USP here in the UK was the ability to send & receive tweets by SMS (Text messaging) as of today, with no warning whatsoever, they have cut of receiving updates here in the UK by text.

Their so called UK number, actually its a number based in the Isle of Man, was outside most UK users calling plans (O2 it was included in the free texts) so most folks would not update their twitters at 20p or so at a time. However, incoming texts in the UK are free so Twitter was a neat way of sending texts to mobile phones from a PC. and also a way of amplifying texts 1 text to many. Alas no more.

The reasons given are cost they argue “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year” Which doesn’t add up to me as Bulk SMS’s seem to cost between 2p and 1.3p according to Bulksms.org

Its interesting that they did not even offer an option to pay for receiving texts or even severely limit the number of texts per user? We are not all Scobles with thousands of followers.

Their alternative idea of using the internet on your phone is not so hot either, although Twinkle and twitterific work OK on the iPhone they cannot run in the background or alert you in the same way that texting does.

I think they have now left the market wide open for Google to come in with Jaiku, although the omens don’t look good on that front.

I guess the good news is that the twitter service may now be more reliable as users flood away leaving the fail whale beached rather than suspended.

Update:

First people trying to bridge the gap with tweetsms

Meanwhile over on AVC, Fred Wilson an investor in Twitter, wrote in reply to my comment:-

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geofones 9 hours ago 1 point

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Pity that Twitter has just hammered us in the UK. Just as i was getting my social circle to start using it via text on their phones
Also very poor customer service just chopping of SMS with no warning at all. Perhaps they hadn’t paid their texting phone bill!

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Tags: Google, iphone, Jaiku, Mobile phone, Short message service, Twitter, UK

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Decided to look at my Google web history. Here are the sad graphs of my life with Google:-

It says my total number of Google searches is 12,418 with its first entry in March 2006 (14 searches a day on average). Interesting to see the winter peaks and Summer lows. I like the peaks at 6pm and 10pm

Top site searched was Wikipedia, top clicks were on Google maps. Least used Google service is Google News & products.

All fascinating stuff.

Tags: Google, Google Maps, Google News, List of Google products, Wikipedia

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Just signed up for the new Yahoo location service, FireEagle. They reassuringly sent me this message:

So I will get two days notice to put my affairs in order and my time is up!

Tags: Fire Eagle, Location-based service, Yahoo

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One of the items shared by Scoble in my Google reader, was this post from RB on “15 Desktop blogging tools reviewed”

The new one for me was Bleezer which is available for all operating systems and even better its free

It seemed a breeze or should it be bleeze to set up. Lets see if this posts!

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One of my ambitions since getting my apartment in Les Gets has been to snow shoe walk up and board down the impressive Roc d’Enfer (2200m) which you can see from the top of my favourite hill, Mont Chery.

Dangerous walk on Roc d'Enfer

Last week with Sally and Ray we explored Roc d’Enfer (nb. Enfer is the French word for hell) with some trepidation as it starts with this little warning “Very dangerous route not fitted out with safety device. You walk here at your own risk” Which after walking the GR5, GR10 and GR20 with no such warnings made me wonder

Well, to say its interesting is perhaps an understatement. The walk starts off as a standard alpine route (550m in 3km) . However, once you get to Col de Graydon it becomes a full blown (for a walker) hands and feet job (200 vertical metres in about 400metres). Upon reaching the white cross (le Creux des Neiges) you get to see the awesome task you have set yourself as the path snakes along a ridge 1m wide - not flat but more like the edge of a saw! Pretty scary stuff for someone who suffers a bit from vertigo (having  thoughts about accidentally falling off, not the dizzyness associated with classical vertigo) since both sides of the path are essentially vertical drops and it didn’t help following someone who decides to stop every so often on the narrow path!

The worst is yet to come, that’s right you obviously have to descend at some point! Not easy on crumbly rock covered with a thin layer of soil and grass. Once you get to a ‘normal’ ridge at Tete de Charseuvre everything seems so easy

We eventually made it, taking about 6 hours from l Encreanz to le Foron.

Here is the map and photographs:-

Le Roc d’Enfer ridge walk

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Not sure if I’m so keen about snowboarding it now

Tags: hiking, st jean d'aulp

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