Jamie Clark’s Posterous

I actually kind of like travelling. I especially like the journey - sometimes more than the place/attraction/person that we've travelled to see. As I'm blessed with lacking the ability to drive a car I almost always find myself in the backseat. The only stress is deciding what to watch/listen to on my iPod and I can watch the world go by. And side note: I actually like buses as well. I like waiting for them (providing they show up at some point around the time they're supposed to) and I like watching the other people. And I like reading the Metro too.

But I have a condition, and this condition can sometimes ruin the enjoyment of a journey for me - as it did yesterday on my plane home from my holiday. It can only be described as "arse-cramp" and it's horrible. Once it takes hold it's impossible to sit comfortably, and nothing I do to try and take my mind off it seems to work.

What's strange is I haven't yet figured out a correlation between the journey and the condition. Originally, I thought it was related to the length of the journey, ie. the longer the journey the worse the arse-cramp, but I've been forced to abandon this way of thinking. Back in June I sat on a plane to New York for 7 hours, and coming home I was sat for 8 or 9 hours due to turtles on the runway. Neither of these flights gave me any trouble.

So I have a new theory, I've already mentioned that distractions don't seem to ease my pain, but I do wonder whether boredom is the cause to begin with. For example, on my flights to and from New York I had my own little TV from which I could pick and choose from countless TV shows, movies and music albums. So I lost myself in The Simpsons, Yes Man, Top Gear, the US-version of Life On Mars, the first ten minutes of Seven Pounds and The IT Crowd, amongst others. On my flight to Menorca I watched The Simpsons, Lead Balloon and Top Gear with everybody else. But on yesterday's arse-cramp flight back all that was on was Piers Morgan.

And this theory stays strong when I think about the situations I find myself in before the cramping attacks. I'm usually bored of the stuff on my iPod (or I've left it at home) and the car window offers nothing but a continuous stream of boring motorway and the chance to watch boring people in their boring cars get from one boring place to another in their boring lives.

So that is my conclusion. Sitting in a moving vehicle is just fine. But as soon as you as boredom to this mixture it's miserable. You're frustrated because you're not at your destination yet, you're bored and now arse-cramp has decided to join the party. And if you're really unlucky, Piers Morgan will be on.

OK, so I'm going on holiday to Menorca tomorrow, and I'll be gone for a week. That (probably) means no updates [unless... hmm, possibly...] - OK, let's assume there will be no updates then anything else is a bonus.

I did hope I'd be able to post a "Second Opinion" kind-of post for Okami before I left, but as I haven't even started it yet that looks unlikely. Though I will have lots of pictures and video to post from my holiday, so that will be spiffing I'm sure.

Anyway, see you guys on the other side...

I think this officially makes me a geek, just in case there was any doubt previously.

I'd submitted a "Top 5 Gmail Labs" list to Chris Pirillo which he very kindly read out on his live show. Chris is an avid blogger and continues to run Lockergnome, a blogging network which he created. He'd previously presented the TechTV program Call For Help. Chris can now be found at his personal blog (chris.pirillo.com) or at live.pirillo.com, which showcases his live video-stream from his home 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Update: Chris has posted the list complete with my reasons for choosing them on his blog. Naturally he had cut things out for the video. If you'd like to read it, it can be found here.

I like Gmail. I like the filter options, spam protection, labels, interface, speed and labs features. But there's always been one area where it lets itself down, and it's not what you'd expect.

The Gmail message search function SUCKS! Whilst it can do some useful stuff, for example I can use the "in:" operator to specify which label I want to search within, it still fails when given some basic search terms.

First of all, you can't do partial searches. Go to Google.com, and search for "face". Facebook.com is the first result. How come when I search for "face" in Gmail none of my Facebook messages are returned? OK sure, if I was looking for messages about Facebook, I wouldn't search for "face", but what if I was searching for messages about podcasts? Searching "podcast" won't bring back any messages featuring "podcasts".

Now, in any decent search engine you could just use a wildcard! Yay! Except "podcast*" returns the same results as "podcast". Gmail search doesn't have a wildcard feature.

What's most surprising about all of this is that Gmail IS Google! Y'know, only the biggest search engine - by a huge margin! How can it be this bad? I've searched the web (using Google - of course) and I can't find any substitue for using an asterisk for a wildcard - making partial searches a complete no-no.

And one other thing - why do Google feel the need to have a seperate box for quick contact searching? Couldn't this functionality just be moved the main search box?

Rant over.

Just been reading the latest post "What Difference Does It Make?" from the blog Cigarettes and Parkbenches. It's about the writer's perception of her own work.

Read it. Then read it again. Then comment. Then explore the rest of the blog. Superb.

Every year my village hosts a carnival for the city - and this seems to be a pretty big thing. Though I find it hard to believe, people really do come from all over York for this thing.

This year we had bands such as Elliot Minor, Club Smith and The Sneakypeeks. The music... well it's not to my tastes, but everyone seems to have a pretty good time. I actually went along this year, to document the event on behalf of the internet.

     

I thought I'd try out Posterous' email functionality just to see if it really is as good as everyone says it is. Think of this post as a test. In fact, the website does seem like a bit of a mess of the moment. I'm finding it difficult to navigate and remember where options are. For example, I remember seeing an option to change your default blog, but I can't seem to find it again. Plus posting through the website us basic and not fun.

Anyway, we'll see how this comes out. It'll be a lot easier to slyly blog from work (on my lunch, of course!) if Posterous works well.