graham’s blog

Memorable evening

Last night my wife and I went to a Roland Petit Gala evening with all ticket sales going to a local charity (Clair Bois)[fr].

We were treated to an evening with excerpts of pas de deux and solistes of many of Roland Petits greatest Ballets including “Pink Floyd Ballet”, “Proust ou les Intermittentes” and “Le pas de deux - Esmeralda Quasimodo from Notre Dame de Paris”.

We were totally enchanted by the dancers and amazed when Roland Petit himself appeared on stage at the end of the evening.

Roland Petit and Zizi Jeanmaire have lived in Geneva for many years. In fact many celebrities from stage, screen and sports live here too. I think a lot of this has to do with being able to live their lives peacefully without the media attention that they suffer elsewhere.

It’s winter

Although the sun is shining it’s very cold today. We’ve had rain lately but when the sun shines it helps the optimism to break through. I thought I’d seize the moment to post a few mobile photos that I’ve taken around the house as it’s been a few days of posts without pics.

Think of this as light relief from the last couple of posts.

Incidentally my good friend southernbelle left a very pertinent comment on my last post.

Whereas blogging is more informative on the trivial and/or exciting things which happen in our lives. A place to vent, a place to reach out to those friends on distant shores whom one has never met but become close friends with.

It’s so nice to get different perspectives on things. I would really like to reach out and have more and more interaction. I’m going to have to work at that by doing a bit of reaching out myself.

One of those Bob Dylan moments

I’ve been blogging for over five years and the archives from this particular blog go back to August 2003. Before that I hosted my own site and had a LiveJournal blog and spent almost a year on Movable Type.

I realised today through reading Stephanie’s latest post on Facebook that blogs have evolved and although they were pivotal a few years ago, their usage has changed over the past few years with the advent of social spaces like MySpace, Bebo and of course Facebook.

These are the places that people go to now to keep in touch with each other while they go to blogs to read developments and articles that expand on comments made elsewhere.

Stephanie say’s (In French)

Je pense que 90% des gens qui passent par ici ignorent le contenu de mes sidebars. Je les laisse car je pense que ça peut avoir une valeur pour la personne qui débarque ici pour la première fois — mais clairement, c’est pas fait pour ça.

My translation is she thinks that 90% of those that visit her blog ignore the contents of her sidebars. She leaves them because she thinks that they have some value for first-time visitors but that clearly they aren’t made for that.

So the times they are a changing. (Hence the title of this post)

Whilst I agree with her, this heralds a change in paradigm where social interaction would occur in MySpace/Facebook (whatever) and the blog would remain a place for development and for saying what needs to be said with just a few links to what is relevant in your life (links to social sites, photo and film archives for example).

Squeezed in between these two layers would be Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku, Seesmic etc.

Or perhaps these latter tools are the icing on the social network cake whereas Blogs and Social spaces are the deeper layers. I’ll have to draw this later. 

I am beginning to visualize some sort of Social Architecture here.

Data portability : demolishing the walls around your garden?

Reading my feeds this morning I came across two articles reporting that “the DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks.” The first article is from ReadWriteWeb.

Mashable goes on to say that

After months of competing platforms, privacy showdowns, arguments over who owns your social networking data, and something called “Scoblegate,” a huge announcement from the DataPortability Workgroup today: Google, Facebook, and Plaxo are in. What does this mean? From the announcement:

“… Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems …”

 This is very encouraging news as it is a major gripe. I’ve already disabled my Facebook account once and emptied my profile.

Concerning Facebook, Stephanie wrote a very good article yesterday and extracted the essential.

Facebook has become a gigantic app-fest, and I regret it. Many newcomers around me see only that, and fail to understand where Facebook’s real value lies. Not in the Vampires, Superwalls, or Secret Crushes. But in the network of people you have there, and what you can do with them: plan events, share online doings, or discover more about them.

I would be happier if my profile was sufficiently granular to enable me to define clearly what segments were personal and what were professional. The notion of friends and followers departs from real world experience.

Now if the Data Portability do their work properly I can define what parts of my “profile” are for what segment of people across multiple social sites thus demolishing the walls around these “gardens”.

Cultural adventure

I have, I think, very wide musical tastes that range from classical to folk and from jazz to rock. I’m only uncomfortable with “difficult to listen to Jazz” and Rap. Obviously there are things that I enjoy listening to more than others but In the main I’m OK with most music.

One genre I was never really happy with was Opera which is strange becasue I sang a lot as a teenager and even these past few years I have sang in a local choir with great pleasure. The only reason I stopped was due to lack of time. Life demands that you make choices.

Late last year I was listening to Katherine Jenkins on the BBC, great looks and a great voice too so I listened more attentively and then branched out on a musical journey, Hayley Westenra and Natasha Marsh led to Natalie Dessay and Celia Bartoli to Anna Netrebko, Angela Gheorghiu and Renee Fleming. Without realising I had embarked for the Diva Dimension!

Watching is even better than just listening so I’ve booked seats for the Opera next month (Le Cenerentola) and this summer (La Traviata).

Tonight I’m going to a recital by Sonia Ganassi, my very first recital which is strange and I would never have imagined going to a recital one day.

Happy New Year!

Well Christmas is over and New Year’s Eve has come and gone and here we are on the 1st of January 2008.

This is the perfect time and place to wish you all an unbelievably Happy New Year. I hope that all your dreams will come true and that any nightmares you might have had have been engulfed overnight never to rear their heads again.

Thanks for dropping by this blog from time to time. I’ll be doing my best so that you will feel like coming back again regularly.

I really feel that 2008 will be a great year. Let’s make that happen!

A cheerier pic!

Looking again at my last post it looks a little bleak and I feel like making a cheerier contribution! Here it is!

Happy Christmas!

A very happy Christmas to all my patient readers and to anyone else that happens to drop by. I hope you have an absolutely marvelous time with your family and friends!

Testing offline blogging editors

This post is made with another editor (ecto) which I have downloaded and have a 21 day trial period.

The photo was taken on a walk my wife and I made in the Geneva countryside towards the end of September (a very nice walk by the way).

So more about me.

As you know i went into hospital in mid-October for an operation and stayed for 10 days. Since then I’ve been laying low and convalescing.

I’m feeling a lot better now although it all took a lot longer than I expected. I am due to go back to work on the 3rd of december.

I thought I would have the time to do things around the house but in the end watching tv, reading and listening to music have been my mainstay these past few weeks.

I took advantage of the time given to purchase an aluminium iMac and immediately installed Leopard. The first days were a bit frustrating because I was a victim of the famous iMac freezes but since the last update and graphics card update I’ve not had a (touch wood) freeze so all seems well.

I don’t miss my pc (and in any case I have a vm on parallels and another on Bootcamp so I’m covered.

The only things left to resolve are drivers for printers and my pen scanner for my banking apps and in the meantime these are installed on the vm. I’m not gaming for the meantime but some mmorpgs have osx clients so it’s looking good.

I’ll see you later.

I’m back!

I wasn’t planning this but had decided yesterday that it was time I started posting again and then I came across this pic in my webtravels earlier.

As you might know I have been known to meditate regularly although through illness and convalescence I haven’t done so lately. It’s only a question of time though I feel.

In addition I have switched from a pc to a mac (I have an iMac and am enchanted with it). So I’m trying out various tools to make blogging easier on this platform.

I used various offline editors on the pc and funnily enough it was MS Live Writer that I was most comfortable with. It is, of course, unavailable for osx.

For this post I have returned to using the Flock Browser which is now at version 1.0 (ouch).

I’ll get back to you later (and by the way it’s good to be back!)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Meditation, blogging, osx, pc, offline editors