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Wow, what a city! I didn’t really know what to expect from Beijing, the closest I came to China previously was living in Hong Kong, about 2000 km south of Beijing, and that was about 12 years ago! I’ve come away with two main views; it’s massive, it’s over-crowded.

The word massive just doesn’t do the size justice. Greater London is 1,577.3 km² vs Beijing’s Municipality 16,801.25 km², it’s just massive! Take the Forbidden City for example, it’s literally a city in a city! Or the Great Wall of China, it really is great, it’s vast, it’s never-ending!

And the over-crowdedness made me feel uneasy at times. I got the impression that jobs were been created as something to do in many instances, just keeping the population active when often there was no real need for said job. This seemed to breed an attitude of apathy to the surrounding world on many topic; self awareness, politics, social. It was as if an acceptance of mediocrity was present (a concept I personally struggle with), however when the alternative is the wrath of the CPC… but then, while in China I heard stories of entrepreneurs in Beijing and Shanghai who obviously don’t accept that mediocrity, and the current Tibetan protests happening is a very bold move, obviously not accepting the CPC, reminding me of lyrics from Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder they Come:

"But I’d rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave"

That brings me onto the topic of censorship, for that reason alone I couldn’t work in China, ignoring any freedom of speech beliefs, I literally couldn’t work, sites we take for granted such as Wikipedia, blocked. Blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

I had planned to get together with some of Beijing’s web folk, however jet lag kindly canceled that for me. I also managed to sleep through Beijing Bloggers Dinner which was a shame. Next time. I did however make it to the CBGB’s of Beijing, D22, and also found the most amazing monk-run restaurant, Pure Lotus. Go to it, ’nuff said.

All in all though, I had a great time. Beijing has killed my somewhat poetic view of China established from the various China history books I collect, however walking through the Imperial Gardens while listening to Be Good Tanya’s did have a romantics, poetic ring - it certainly put a spring in my step and a smile on my face. I’m already looking forward to my next trip there, whenever it may be. Photos, as I’m sure you expected are on Flickr.

Plugg is over, it was the first of I’m sure many Plugg events to be held. Overall the event was great; organized well, wifi worked perfectly, fantastic venue, adequate food, etc. however I couldn’t help but feel an overall lack of direction while at the event. It flowed a bit like an amateur band… stopping between every song at a gig, that however didn’t stop it being a great event.

The numbers presented about the games industry in Max Niederhofer’s session were not what I expected at all, the market for flash games massively out-weights console games. I got a question in about Silverlight’s game capabilities, Max however isn’t a Silverlight expert (.. turns out he’s a hell-of-a WoWer though!)

Both the Entrepreneur & the Investor panels were interesting conversations with a number of good questions from the audience. It was great to meet Paul Fisher, he seems to know the advertising world like the back of his hand, days of conversations to be had there I’m sure!

From what I saw of the Start-Ups Rally sessions they worked well (although, I’m convinced there’s a better solution to collect the votes from the audience) which Viewdle won, while Zilok got the best audience rating. I also skipped most of Tom Raftery’s session ‘Radically reducing your IT carbon footprint’ fearing it would be similar to previous sessions of his, however the topic is very relevant and only becoming more-so.

Jet lag was starting to get the better of me and I needed to stand up to stay awake so got some “LobbyConning” in, which is always interesting, meeting a number of interesting folks.

Jet lag was really setting in so I never made it to the official after party, but not before enjoying dinner with a bunch of great folks. A big thank you to Robin Wauters for organizing Plugg.

Looks like I’m going, hopefully next week (still need to get Visa!), then back to Europe for Plugg. Just wondering if any of my readers have any “you’ve gotta” tips. I’m also interested in any web startups/networking in the area, that are happy for me to drop in and say “hi”.

Yes, I’m a work-a-holic, live with it!

Aral is one of Brighton’s resident flash/flex guru’s. He’s doing a intro course to flex. For more info, check his blog post on the topic. If Flash/Flex is your thing, tomorrow there is a Flash Brighton focusing on Framework Development, or check out Sussex Digital for more Brighton events.

(Disclaimer: Aral is my partner in crime working on Pistach.io)

A few of you probably spotted the “What is” badge appear over on the right of the site, if you clicked it you’ll have learnt nothing, until that is last Monday the 4th of February. Aral announced with his blog post This is Singularity that Singularity is an online conference.

(Disclaimer: Aral and I are business partners working on Pistach.io)

I’ve known about Singularity for a few weeks now, and it’s sounding very impressive, no small fete & with some great speakers “over 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities” [some of which haven't confirmed so I can't blog, but, wow]. If Singularity wasn’t on your radar, make sure it is!

Join the Facebook group, subscribe to the blog at Singularity08.com, it’s not one to miss! Here’s Aral being interviewed on the topic while at LIFT last week.

My good friend Ben told me about his workshop for non-geeks on Friday while at the weekly coworking. I think it is a fantastic idea, and if you know someone in the area that would benefit from an introduction to any of the following, let them know:

• How the web is changing
• Social Bookmarking
• Feeds (RSS)
• Blogging
• Collaboration
• Shared Calendars

I’ve worked with Ben in the past, and known him for nearly 10 years (… really that long already Ben?). I’ve been following him on Seesmic recently, much to my enjoyment, because he’s a thinker, and in-turn continually makes me think. I’m sure he can get your non-geeky friends thinking about what social media can do for them.

Sign up over at the Upcoming event, or check out Sussex Digital for more Brighton events.

MyBlogLog (acquired for $10m about a year ago by Yahoo!) is a nice idea. You include a small line of code on your site & it displays who your readers are. I won’t go into the stats you can collect from from doing something like that, but needless to say you can get a lot of information. It’s valuable information as well.

To your website visitors it provides social proof; that they are in the right place, that your content is worth reading, that their friends read your site. For you it provides reputation by association. But, it’s a lie.

• Visiting a site doesn’t make me a reader
• I don’t consider myself to be associated to someone because I read their blog
• By visiting a site, I don’t endorse it, or it’s content.

It’s not social proof, but it’s cleverly disguised as social proof. What’s more, I think people trust it as social proof.

p.s. screenshot of MyBlogLog’s widget nicked from Will McInnes’s blog. Few familiar faces in there; Nic Brisbourne, Ivan Pope to name a few. See, social proof?

p.p.s. with people moving from visiting sites to feed readers how valuable is it really? Google saw that, and with Google Reader & Feedburner need I say more…

p.p.p.s. without manually removing cookies from your browser there is no way to stop it tracking you (logging out won’t work)

In two Wednesdays time (13th of February) WiredSussex are putting on Brighton Digital Media Job Fair at the Jury’s Inn. They’ve got four main sessions; The Lunchtime Session, Freelancers Session, Brighton Internship Programme Event, & Informal networking drinks so plenty of networking! Brighton’s home to some really cool companies, a number which have stands at the job fair:

• Second Life
• iCrossing (formerly Spannerworks)
• Relentless Software
• WPM
• NCsoft Europe
• Cogapp
• Club Penguin (a Disney company, and new in Brighton)
• Designate
• Madgex

Sign up over at the Upcoming event, or check out Sussex Digital for more Brighton events.

There’s nothing technical about this post (sorry for all those that expect me to be a techie 24×7). It’s about story telling, and my realization of a few things. Yesterday I made a lead, you know, a lead to plug two things, or as Wikipedia says, “An electrical connection consisting of a length of wire”. I hear you asking, “um, what’s the online bit of the title”, well, I Flickr‘d and Twitter‘d it as I went.

• 01:38 PM Argh, I don’t have the right leads to plug my studio monitors in. I need loud music fix.
• 01:38 PM Screw it! Out comes soldering iron/mini blow torch, audio leads, connectors & adapters etc. Real hacking kids.
• 02:05 PM The prototype works, http://flickr.com/photos/bu… now the soldering. Note how I ran out of real tape, brown had to do.
• 03:21 PM Prototype to finished product, http://flickr.com/photos/bu… & successfully listening to music on studio monitors.

I had great fun with this. Yes, it was basic, but I’m not really good with wires (yet, I’d love to learn more), onto ‘my realization of a few things’:

• It’s always software these days. Seeing finished objects (no matter how small) rocks. It’s so easy to forget this when we deal with software day-in-day-out. Touchable, real world “stuff” is where it’s at.
• Eargasm is a word (well, by Urban Dictionary standards)
• Story telling is another subject I’m not great at, but I’m getting the feeling Twitter is good for telling your story. What your thinking & doing. It’s obvious, but what with Twitter being full of people just @replying sometimes it’s worth reminding yourself

The more technical bit

Ok, couldn’t resist. If your eagle eyed you may have spotted that I machine tagged the photo of the final product, I’ve thought for a while it’d be cool to have a service that tracks specific conversations on Twitter, you could also pull images from Flickr about that conversations.

Disclaimer: I’m writing this as I get emailed about RSI often (as someone who has suffered, and still uses computers far too much). However, I’m not a medicinal practitioner. Seek real advice if your are suffering.

This is primarily for those that feel pain often described as ’sharp needle like pain’ or ‘feels skin deep’ which is likely to be nerves.

1. Take a break. Time off, away, go, now!
2. Go see a psychotherapist (only a recommend one, most don’t "get" RSI) and get them to check for trigger points from your neck, downwards.
3. Fix your work station. You might already be following the rules, but it’s individual (…if you’re in pain something’s not right, maybe your workstation?). Posture is very important, e.g.
   • screen too low makes you drop your head a little over the day, in-turn, you could pinch the nerve below your collar bone and above first rib
   • leaning on elbows, 1 of the 3 main nerves that run down the arm circles the elbow.

   In both examples you could start to notice via pain in the wrist, it’s not always a localized problem.

4. Then you’ll need to figure out what causes it to flare up, and learn to manage that. i.e. for me personally, neck/shoulder/back I solved with deep tissue massage, for smaller areas, e.g. wrist, acupuncture worked much better. Overall wellness, Chi Gung worked well. However, it’s very individual - learn your body.
5. Buy this book: It’s Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome!: RSI Theory and Therapy for Computer Professionals

If you are in the UK, I can recommend: ES Physical Therapy on Harley Street, London. Tesso (if I remember correctly) did a great job of helping me understand, and manage my RSI. I’ve also heard great things about other practitioners there.

I’ve decided I’m going to try Mahalo out, after I saw Chris Baskind’s tweet. I’ve played with it a little, but it’s not my default search - I’m going to test it properly, so now, it is my default search, from Safari (current browser of choice).

I couldn’t find any howto’s on changing the default search in Safari to Mahalo, so here it is:

1. Open Terminal
2. Run:
   perl -pi -e 's/google.com\/%@\?q=%@&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8/mahalo.com\/Special:Search\?%@=%@&0=00/g' /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari(this should all be on one line within Terminal)

P.S. I take no responsibility if it breaks Safari. If it does breaks, just uninstall and reinstall Safari and all should be fine. If it’s not, leave a comment and I’ll try and figure that out for you (within limits)

I assumed since having a Nokia N73, and joining Vodafone that getting the notice “Note: Active Diverts” was normal. When I moved to my iPhone I still got it and that got me wondering as I’ve always found it annoying! So, if you are on Vodafone:

• Dial 1210 to turn it off
• Dial 1211 to turn it on

Back in May I blogged about changing my passwords to be more mobile friendly, The year of mobile/cell? New passwords, now however, being on an iPhone, I’m on a QWERTY keyboard again. It was at this point I remembered a password generator I threw together in May/June time.

It uses quotationsbook.com’s feeds. Basically, you remember the quote, and, in-turn get a secure password. For example, search for keyword anarchy, and you’ll find the quote “Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy“, which as a password is “fwoiafwoid“. So, check it out: Password Generator

I’m blogging this for Google, hopefully others find it and get it sorted faster then I did! When I connected my iPhone to Vodafone, I got the error, “Could not activate EDGE: you are not subscribed to EDGE”. You need to update your settings on your iPhone in: Settings > General > Network > EDGE, however I didn’t know what my settings should have been for Vodafone. If you have the same problem, enter the following:

• APN: internet
• Username:
• Password:

(yes, Username & Password are blank, that isn’t a mistake!)

I blogged about fon back in June. Tanya who works there just left a comment, and they’re doing a national survey in the UK to discover if Britain is a sharing nation over at wouldtheyshare.com and they’ll be giving away “hundreds of La Fonera + routers and a trip to Madrid among voters”.

Cool! I’d love to see more Fon hot spots in the UK. Go check it out, win a La Fonera (?) and become a member!