Where's Wil?

Despite popular opinion, I actually have many friends that don't work in tech! Shocking, I know. One of these friends is a very talented lass called Frances Leviston, who is, I am reliably informed, the most exciting young poet in Britain today. Her first collection, called Public Dream, has been called "One of the most eagerly-awaited debuts in years."

So for the sake of seven quid, why don't you go and get it from Amazon? (UK link, US link) Even geeks need a bit of culture, and this is about as good as it gets!

We are in death.

New birth: My brand new 17" MacBook Pro, 2.4GHz, 4GB, 250GB with uprated 1920x1200 screen. Abso-freaking-lutely fantastic. The screen is gorgeous. OSX was made for this DPI.

Death: My iPhone. It flew out of my hand as a coach driver braked hard going round a corner, and smashed on the floor. I attempted to replace the smashed screen, but just ended up busting up the casing and failing to re-connect the buttons properly. I got 90% of the way through the insane repair, and stuffed up the last 10%, dagnabbit.

So I'm now £2000 out on a new MacBook, and soon to be £300 out on a new iPhone. Oh yeah, and some insurance, I think.

Ack!

So my latest video today shows some of my pet peeves with Leopard and some ways to fix them. Enjoy. Give me a Digg too!

Digg this!

If you love something... steal it. So here's my 'stealing from Jason Calacanis' (again) post.

1. So when you're conscious for 17 hours of every 24 hour day, you'd think there'd be enough time to get things done. I mean, 17 hours - that's a lot of stuff. And it's true, there's plenty of time - until things go wrong. My weekend got eaten by the fact some video capture we did last week for PlayDigital went completely awry and I had to re-do it. This is the peril of doing a startup with such a small team - when something goes wrong, there's only one guy with the capacity to pick up the slack - you. So that's what I was up to - not a lot of fun.

2. I seriously don't know how the folks like Calacanis et al find the time to write massive blog posts - I guess life for him isn't quite the startup life I have. I suppose that's the difference between a $16m startup and a $50k startup! Every hour I spend in front of the computer I'm either editing, writing, administrating or trying to pimp our site. Every minute I'm not in front of the computer I'm trying desperately to keep Alex happy with actual 'face time' as opposed to 'facebook time' :o)

3. But that said, I wouldn't change it. The great thing about a startup is that, if you do it write, everything happens so fast.

4. We had over 50,000 viewers last month watching almost 150,000 videos. That's a good result in my book. I honestly had no idea whether people would even like the videos, let alone come back and watch more. Our subscription numbers are slowly going up in iTunes, which suggests that we're picking up new readers and keeping the old ones. Can't ask for much more than that.

5. My business model for ChannelFlip was always based on wide distribution -folks viewing the videos on sites other than ours. We're talking to a few big hitters right now about running our content, and that's going to see our numbers go through the roof assuming we can pull it off. But who knows, spanners are lying around everywhere.

6. The new series of 24 looks interesting - I wasn't so amped for it after the last season which was kinda lame, but the previews look actually decent. If only Hulu didn't lock itself down to US only - Bittorrent all the way. Welcome to globalisation?

7. I have stopped watching Heroes (appalling season opening) and Prison Break (again? seriously?) House is holding me, still, but I feel I've been spoiled by watching West Wing back to back. I mean, does TV get any better? At the moment, it seems not.

8. On the same note, I'm on the fence on the whole HD thing. I love the idea of watching movies in higher quality, great picture etc. But I'm not really sure I see the point in buying a new player for it. It's not like I spend a great deal of time watching movies - I'd rather a machine that handled internet TV better (think AppleTV but with Divx support).

9. Back to HD, we picked up a PS3 for the office last week so we can get to grips with the Christmas release schedule. What a joke. £299 for the basic package, which doesn't even include an HD cable. Yes, you heard me, £300 with no games and a COMPOSITE cable. Nice. Compare that to £250 for the X360 with ProEvo 08 and Forza 2 and it's not hard to see why PS3 isn't selling so well. The experience of setting up a PSStore account is a total nightmare, the interface is so badly designed. Makes it easy to appreciate the work MS has done into keeping the 360 experience totally consistent.

10. My sixth form college has asked me to write a little bit about starting a business and what we're doing at CF for their newsletter. That makes me very happy. One of my bugbears about education is that when you're taught about careers etc, nobody ever tells you that starting your own business doing something that's not in any of the career books is an option. More kids need to learn that leaving university and going into banking or law isn't the only option.

Anyway, enough for now. These posts are actually pretty good fun, I could get into this. Basically just a big old brain dump. I'm not sure my brain is that interesting. :o)