Archive for February, 2010

Why am I not photographing the Apple Newcastle launch?

February 17th, 2010

The answer is simple. They will not let me.

As you know I like to take photographs. Some are what you might call “Artistic” and others are more of a documentation of history. Personally I love looking at old images form when I was younger, or of places before I knew them in the past. Because of this I take pictures of the here and now for people to look back on in the future.

As the an Apple store opening is something that draws the crowds I thought this was something I should look at capturing on (virtual) film. Before I did this I emailed Apple and asked if there was a problem with me doing this out of politeness.

Sadly Apple responded stating that they have a policy of no photography in the stores and would not be able to mane an exception for the launch. They did say that if I queued up and only took a couple of pictures then there “shouldn’t be a problem”. Not overly happy with being told that I am not allowed to take a picture, but almost saying that I could get away with taking a couple, I pushed for a definitive Yes or No. I was not surprised to get back a polite No.

In the end I decided not bother going down to capture the day and I suspect there will be plenty of pictures taken by camera phones. Most of the phones were probably iPhones so the image quality will be low and the pictures out of focus, but at least we have some records of the day. :-P

So, I have had my rant, and Apple have dropped a long way in my estimation of customer relations. In the interests of neutrality I feel it important to point out I did not ask for permission to photograph inside the Sony Shop, but Ikea have said yes (and that is bizarrely true).

7 comments »

Posted in Rant

What domain should I use?

February 13th, 2010

I have now decided to move my blog to WordPress following Blogger discontinuing there FTP service. Thank you for the words of advice.

I have another decision to make now and your input would be appreciated. The question is… Should I move this main “tech, rant, fun” blog to another domain.

A while ago I registered “alistairmacdonald.org” and “macdonald.info”. My intention was to use these as my professional front-end and keep my “agm.me.uk” for more personal projects. Last year I managed to register “alistairmacdonald.com” that I was planning to use instead of the “.org”. I also have a few “.co.uk” domains that I never used in the end including “Millisecond”, “Multitrack”, and “Stereophonic”.

I know a few people don’t like my “agm.me.uk” address. The reason why I like it is that it is short, AGM (my initials) are memorable, and it is controlled by Nominet so subject to UK and not oversees law. The down side is that the domain does not instantly identify it’s self as mine, the “.me.uk” is often sometimes with “.co.uk”, and more recently people have been missing off the “.uk” with the addition of the “.me” top level domain.

No matter what happens I anticipate still using “agm.me.uk” for my pet projects and micro sites. I am also actively moving some pet projects to the domain in a cost saving exercise.

So, what are your thoughts?

1 comment »

Posted in Tech

My blog will be moving

February 3rd, 2010

My blog here is managed by Google’s Blogger and hosted on my own web site on a Rails Playground server. This is done by giving Blogger FTP access to my site that is used to upload the pages when they change. Sadly Google are deprecating this FTP feature and I will either have to run the blog from the Blogger’s servers (but I can use my own domain name) or host the my blog myself.

I have always had a plan in place to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress. This will continue to be hosted on my web site and the URLs will not change. You never know when a service will disappear so I tend to plan ahead like this. There is a nice migration path and this is currently my favoured solution.

My main concern about moving to WordPress is the amount of comment spam that friends get despite using recaptcha. I have had to disable the comments on the BarCampNorthEast web site that was receiving a couple of spam comments a day.

So, do you think I am doing the right thing. Should I use WordPress or something else? Should I use another comment service like Disqus to cut down on spam, or should I host the whole thing somewhere else? All comments welcome (unless they are spam :-) ).

4 comments »

Posted in Tech

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