Where's Wil?

As you may or may not know, I'm getting married next month.

Erk.

I'm actually super psyched, since my girlfriend is total hotness. However, we all know that marriage is an excuse to party, so I hit Vegas with a few of my buds. The carnage is detailed here, on Flickr.

Apologies, again, for the total lack of updates. ChannelFlip has been keeping me rather busy, as I'm sure you can imagine. Why not head over there and check out the fruits of my extensive labours?

Why I haven't updated by blog in a couple of months:

ChannelFlip.com.

We have relaunched the site, raised a little money, and now I'm based down in London, delivering 10+ 5-min videos per week across Tech, Games and Film - and with a bunch more content sections launching very soon.

This is keeping me very busy.

We have assembled a great new team to work on ChannelFlip - Justin, my co-founder, is now working full time with us, and Katharine is also back doing the games show. We've got a great new video producer Arnold, who is not only a whizz in Final Cut but he's got some wizzard After Effects skills too, which should be useful to us in the future. We've also hired a full-time commercial director to sell the advertising on the site, which should keep us afloat.

We're actively chasing cool, new content so make sure you add ChannelFlip to your bookmarks or RSS feeds (or Twitter, for that matter) - details are here if you don't have them.

The process of raising money and starting fresh with ChannelFlip has been insane, and is something I'd genuinely like to sit down and write about at some point in the near future. Dealing with British VCs, my thoughts on business strategy, web businesses, new media content etc - I have learned an awful lot in the last few months. Primarily, I've learned that raising money for a business, moving house and getting married are three things that do not combine well, making the last few months the most stressful of my entire life, I think.

But I genuinely feel like we're getting there - some of the video content we've been putting out is starting to generate respectable numbers, and I think the quality is pretty good. Check out Justin's review of Cloverfield today, as an example (below).

Stay tuned for more updates from CFHQ as and when!

A while back now I blogged about how frustrating it was that the BBC insisted on using Windows Media and, gasp! Real Media for its streaming news programmes on the BBC News website.

A few months after the Flash conversion of the iPlayer, and it seems the BBC is getting with the game - more and more of the news clips being embedded on the site are Flash, and it does seem that DRM'd formats are being phased out, which is definitely a good thing. I've watched a heck of a lot more video on the BBC in the past week or so.

Short Flash clips are a lot more useful to me than longer, DRM'd bulletins. Check out this fantastic post from Justn Webb about the wooing of superdelegates in the US - the first video simply makes the piece.

The Beeb still doesn't allow for embedding of its player - the share button allows you to email a link but won't let you grab the player and put it on your own site, which seems like a slightly strange restriction. MAybe that's a feature for another year?

So I'm walking down the street, listening to some tunes on my iPhone. I turn my head to look at something and - dang! The microphone for the headset catches on my shirt collar.

There's something about the particular length between the iphone, the mic and the cord that makes it catch on pretty much every shirt I wear and the constant tugging on my ear is really aggravating. Thankfully, it seems I'm not the only one.

Surely a campaign of sorts is in order?

So Easter is here, which means a) devout reverence and praise for our Lord Jesus and/or b) consumption of vast amounts of chocolate.

Since it's a bank holiday here in England, I'm going to be taking the time off to tend to do a few things. I intend to go through and edit a few Wikipedia pages to try and make sure that they're up to date: I'll add them in here for people interested as I fiddle with them.

Below is a nice bar of dark chocolate I got from my mother in law from a shop called Sophies, in Chesham, which makes the most insaaane chocolate. Tasty.



EDIT: Scratch that. I decided to have a go at making a Mahalo page instead. I just wrote the search results page for Michael Birch, of Bebo fame. Will see how the final thing comes out!

So my buddy Jes emailed me and asked me to give Twitter another go. After listening to Leo and the gang go on about it incessantly on this week's podcast, I decided I would.

I have previously loved and left Twitter because it simply lacked stability. Every time I would go to post, something would break. AIM support was crucial to me, then was killed. Twitterrific had an awesome UI, but seemed to have a hard time actually connecting to servers. Not to mention the fact that Pownce had more functionality. (Although Pownce had an awful Air desktop app, I'm wondering what it's like now).

But I got back onto Twitter today and I'm starting to see why people are raving about it. It seems more stable now, Twitteriffic has made leaps and bounds (as long as you avoid the hideous Growl add-on - I have no idea why Mac users desire horrid, garish Windows-style notifications) and the whole thing is just a little more useful. I'm already starting to get into some conversations which are helpful.

So add me as @WilHarris if you fancy chatting. Whilst I can't follow everybody, I have direct messages set to ping my Twitteriffic so I can stay on top of them. Top stuff!

Well, I'm slowly working my way down the pounds. The numbers don't tel the whole story, of course - I'm spending a lot of time in the gym working weights, so I'm adding on (heavy) muscle as I burn fat. I definitely seem to be getting fitter and stronger, so the workouts that I'm following (kudos Men's Health magazine) are working.

I've discovered an awesome low(ish) calorie junk food: pizza. You can have half a homebake pizza (M&S pepperoni FTW) for around 350 calories, which makes for an awesome lunch with some salad.

Right, off again to pump some iron...