subsphere.co.uk

The recent launch of the UKeSA hasn’t gone unnoticed by the mainstream media. There is a blog post on The Guardian website asking “could competitive gaming finally be entering the mainstream?” - something to which the answer is ‘yes’, if they keep covering it!

I’ve just posted the following musing in response:

I’m all for “eSports” breaking into the mainstream. I myself have enjoyed watching a number of very close matches between extremely talented teams, with professional commentary bristling with the kind of enthusiasm you would get from Murray Walker in Formula 1. It was a very enjoyable experience and was equally as entertaining as watching a football match. What’s more it’s not a patch on the ‘rock star’ status and high production values seen for eSports in Korea (@Greg Howson: where PC gamers are sexy!). Read the rest of this entry »

Some people find it hard to believe that I use Internet Explorer. Many of these people because of their unwavering fanaticism towards setting woodland urban animals ablaze. In fact I use pretty much 6 browsers almost every day (IE7, FF, Opera, Safari, IE6 & Chrome). I probably spend the most time in Firefox (developing using the excellent Firebug), however IE is my default browser. The truth is I’m not so much a fan of IE as much as a fan of the Google Toolbar for IE.

This wonderful Swiss Army knife additional to my browser transformed the way I browsed the web, long before I was using tabs. Adding a handy search box, spell checker, in page search for keywords at the click of a button and bookmarks you can get access to from any PC were just some of the features I found incredibly useful; and still use today. Some of these (such as custom search) I’d seen before, but these 25px across the top of my window seemed easy to use. Even now, Firefox users are still catching up in this regard, with version 5 of the toolbar, with syncing widgets and buttons, fully released for IE, whilst it’s still in beta for FF.

Perhaps then this was part of my excitement when I learned that Google were going to be releasing a browser.

Ok, so I’m slightly late to the party on this one, but I finally signed up for a twitter account the other day, to see what all the fuss is about.

I’ve read a number of articles and blog posts (many of which I’m afraid I can’t for the life of me find) about the scalability and load issues faced by the chirpy social site and my initial (and subsequent) experiences using the site have confirmed each and every one of them. Page load times are slow, often with CSS failing to load at all. It took me a number of attempts to even register to use the service!

I also question the how on a service called ‘twitter’, the individual updates are ‘tweets’. Surely they’re ‘twits’, or is that the name to a user? Not very good for marketing, granted, but perhaps more gramatically correct?

Not put off, although confused as to how anyone ever manages to post anything given my registration experience, I’m gonna give it a go and have found me some people to follow! How exciting!

I’ve also got the twitterific app for my iPhone, which seems nicely polished.

All I’ve got to do now is use it a bit, I suppose… see you on Twitter @rtoldham!