My wife managed to get hold of the kitten and pull him out. A shocking site. He had horrific build up of gunk round his eyes that had left him blind, was covered in ticks, and was so underweight you could barely feel him. We phoned the RSPCA who asked us to take him to the local vets where we were told his chance of survival was less than 50%. The vet had never seen so many ticks on a cat before, and thought that the eye discharge was likely to be a horrible case of cat flu. Coupled with the diarrhoea and weight loss, she was not hopeful that he would pull through.

I’m pleased to say that I collected him from the vets this morning, and he has made a full and complete recovery. He’s full of life, playful and making up for lack of food by piling on the weight he had lost. It’s unbearable to think that anyone could have dumped such a tiny animal at the side of the road, but the vet couldn’t see how else he got where he was. Still, he’s safe now, and we look forward to welcoming Virgil into our house as our new pet – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

The graphics are stunning in that they aren’t really noticeable. As far as I was concerned I was watching raw footage – here actually be dragons. In one of the extras the director talks about getting the right place for the trolls to live, and then shooting in those actual locations, ‘because people in Norway would know if it was wrong’. This authenticity and commitment is readily apparent in watching the film and means that a 100-foot tall troll smashing around the mountains really doesn’t look out of place at all.

A lot of films in this style theorise and introspect endlessly about themselves – Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, et al. “Look at us we’re making a film about making a film, and the dialogue is all really self-aware because we’re in a film – do you see?” This doesn’t do that at all, it’s just very natural, well-paced and real. This may well be a function of being a Norwegian film rather than a product of America; whatever it is it works well. As I was writing this review I realised that I’ve been thinking about this film as a documentary – not a film about making a documentary, but an actual documentary. I originally started this paragraph, ‘The crew are really good on camera as well’ – probably the best praise I can give really!

I’d highly recommend this film, even if the idea of a film about trolls feels a bit too nerdy. It’s really about people and place and is real and human without trying too hard, or being overly self-aware. Watch it before they screw everything up and do the US remake.

There is a very poorly researched and statistically invalid pattern that I’ve noticed on what these different users _do_ on their laptops:

Mac users – tend to be doing something creative or consuming entertainment: making something or watching movies. More watchers than creaters, but quite a bit of garageband tweaking.

Windows users tend to be consuming work: reading email, looking at presentations, looking at spreadsheets.

Linux users (of which I have seen 2) use emacs. Not a large study group but that’s what both of them were doing.

Conclusions? Well, I’d guess that the real answer is that Mac users are using their own machines and therefore working on personal projects (or able to watch movies), and Windows users are using a work machine and are therefore consuming more work. And maybe the Mac users are just killing time until they can get back to email, secretly envying the Windows users who can get a 3G dongle to work…

I got my log-in for Diaspora today. I registered with them a while ago as I liked the idea of what they are aiming to do, and I was pleased that they have carried on and look to have made a great job of it. Trouble is, I already find that I can’t keep up with all of this stuff, so I now need to make a decision on which to keep.

The candidates are:

• identi.ca: great community, interesting people, lively debate – a keeper
• twitter: lots of people I know in the real world, but not much community and can’t see it growing for me
• Google+: nice features, but it doesn’t feel right to me. Quite a crowd of folks I already know from other services, but I don’t see much traffic that interests me
• Facebook: Old school friends that don’t use any other services, but abhorrent privacy polisy that will only ever get worse
• Flickr: can’t remember last time I logged in

OK, so there’s only 5 here, but that’s a lot of time to check all, and because I think cross-posting is shameful and rude, I am trying to juggle different aspects of online sharing on each. Net result is that I don’t really share as much as I might because it’s too much of a drag.

I think I’m going to stick with identi.ca for shorter posts and ‘chat’ and will hope that Diaspora catches on with enough people for it to be valuable to me. Two key things stick out from thinking about this stuff:

• federation is key – if you can run a service (such as statusnet or Diaspora) yourself while still connecting with others, you have the best of all worlds. Everyone can be part of the community that means something to them, but still participate in the wider ecosystem. I hope these services catch on and usurp the ‘one site to rule them all’ mentality of the others.
• aspects (in Diaspora, ‘circles’ in Google+) are a useful idea, but I miss the view onto a users whole profile. On identi.ca you see everything that everyone posts (apart from DMs) and I think this is great. On Google+ I am connected to a whole host of folks, but can’t help feel that it’s all a little redundant if I’m not in any of their circles.

Exciting times, and I am really keen to see where all these services lead. It’s great that people are trying to do something genuinely different rather than trying to just be ‘the new Facebook’, and I hope that true collaboration and sharing can win over advertising, greed and ‘monetization’. Excuse me, I have to go and wash my fingers after typing that word.

Last night I had decided to finalise a couple of admin things on tasksapp – things that I can easily change in the database for my use, but which need to made visible to other users to be able to amend themselves. I got this done and was fixing a few glitches in testing when I had a barley sugar moment. Sure, this will work fine, and it will allow me to get logins out to beta testers sooner, but what about long-term? How would I be able to extend this when I need to (as I inevitably will)? Similarly with dealing with registering users; I’ve set up a standalone script to add people who register interest to the database, but again this felt wrong on testing. I have a robust user class that I use to handle all other user interaction, and what I should do is extend this to allow for different user types. All this I know, but the drive to get things ‘finished’ so I could add new people in to run the beta test led me to take a shortcut.

The short point here is that there will be a bit of a delay before I can get logins out for folks to use for testing. However, when I get feedback I will be able to make amends in a much more formalised way, without my (currently stable and clean) codebase becoming clogged up with hastily-written code. Please do register if you’re interested though, but be patient if you don’t get a log-in for a short while!