If I had to chose a moment to last forever from the past, present of future, real or imagined I don’t think I’d pick some distant utopian moment of perfection.

Rather I think I’d chose a moment when everything you hope for feels like it’s just around the corner, attainable and almost within your grasp.

A moment loaded with potential.

Gosh, it’s been a while, how’ve you been? So it’s a 4 months since my last post and even longer since any thing of substance (if ever). There has just been too much life going on, but that’s for another day.

Today i’m enjoying my 5th day in Manila, Philippines (I know, I thought it didn’t need clarifying but you’d be surprised how many people ask). What can I tell you about the Philippinnes? Not a lot I’m afraid as I’ve been here 5 days and it’s a work trip so I’ve not seen a great deal (who sets these priorities). The weather is lovely, it’s the end of rainy season so there has been a couple of storms but nothing exciting like I’ve seen in Thailand before, I think it’s just too late in the year. It’s a touch on the warm side but that’s kinda nice. Not too crazy like a Hangzhou summer.

Manila is huge, unfathomably huge and I’ve only see a tiny sliver of the place. It’s also a city of contrasts, cars, brands, malls all rubbing shoulders with poorer areas, not yet developed. I went for a run on Sunday morning and had a bit of explore (much to my friend’s horror), it really is a great way to explore an area.

So far I’ve had a very pleasant afternoon in a friend’s garden for a BBQ and play in his pool! Met some great people and eaten some fab Filippino food. Why aren’t there more Filippino restaurants around the world? As well as doing lots of hard work of course.

Well that’s it, not much but i’ve broken my duck and posted something. I’m off back to the UK for a few weeks on Friday (thanks to tight new visa restrictions in China). Hope to see some of you there.

How cool is this? A graphical representation of what you’ve been listening, or more accurately what you’ve been scrobbling with last.fm. Made by LastGraph.

Click for larger image.

We’re all still getting daily new updates about the scale of the disaster (earthquake) in China’s Sichuan province but much less frequently about the disaster (cyclone) in Burma. Both are truly horrifying. There is a sense of collective hurting here in China which is finding its expression in a lot of motivation to help in what ever way possible.

For some first-hand accounts from Chengdu in English have a look at Lost Laowai’s series of posts from some expatriates who are in Chengdu assisting with the relief effort.

If you’ve not already done so you may want to consider making a donation to the relief projects in Burma and Sichuan. It is possible to make a donation to both projects on the British Red Cross website.

So since we last spoke the sun span on its axis and arrived back for the 10,958th time at the same point it was at when I entered the world. If you prefer, the earth returned for the 30th time to the point in its orbit of the sun that it was at when I entered the world, i.e. based on a fairly arbitrary counting system I turned 30.

It fell on a running club night so I celebrated by running 20k (clinging to the 20s) and then a few beers. It was a good birthday.
Unsurprisingly I don’t feel very different. Maybe a little fitter, maybe my level of fitness was OK for a 20 something but good for 30 something…

I bought a 15.4 inch MacBook Pro about six months ago. It had been 10 years since I’d last purchased a Mac, I don’t think of myself as someone who left the fold and came back in, I was just a long time between purchases (not counting an iPod Mini and his and hers iPod Nanos). The machine I purchased in 1997 (a PowerBook 1400cs) served me well all the way through uni until I left in 2000. At which point I was given a work laptop (windows of course) and my job meant that among other things I was a Windows SA. When I finally purchased a computer again in 2006 it was a fairly run of the mill self build (by the guy in the computer market) Windows machine because it was a) cheap and b) girlfriend compatible.I gave up the work laptop not long after as it was by this point already 2-3 years old and therefore only functional as a paperweight. I spent the following year or so kind of squatting using the PC at home ‘D’s PC’ and a desktop in the office. I felt homeless. After a great deal of deliberation I decided to spend the money and get myself the MacBook Pro as it was everything I needed and more, spec wise and would presumably last for years.

I was excited, getting a new toy is always exciting but getting a top of the line Macintosh laptop again after all these years was too much. I was on an ITIL foundation course in Singapore at the time and it was something of an act of self discipline to keep studying. I spent a lot of time drawing diagrams in OmniGraffle and typing up notes as a way to study and play with the new toy. I passed the exam (85%) by the way.

Six months on it’s still my favourite toy ever and by a mile. Which brings me round to trying to answer the question, why?

It works. Just, like, works. I spent a long time trying to get computers to work, trying to get them to do something they didn’t previously or fixing them when they went wrong. I was a Windows SA for a while, after all. Quite frankly, that holds no interest for me anymore, I don’t get a sense of satisfaction from fixing the tool, I’d rather be using the tool to complete the original task, thank you very much. The Mac just works which is good as it’s not an end in itself but a tool I use to do other things. I’ve had to toggle the power once in 6 months and probably count on my fingers the number of times it’s been rebooted in that time, in every other case due to a system update. The rest of the time, I just open the lid, it wakes and we start again where we left off.

Out of the box it does most of the things I need, so far from memory I’ve installed QuickSilver, Firefox, Adium and FreeMind (it came with Microsoft office). iTunes and iPhoto have between them taken over management of my music and photos, a job I’m quite happy to handover. I had to install a plugin to get QuickTime to play .wmv files but other than that I’ve had no compatibility issues. Naturally.

Spotlight search is amazing. I start typing my keyword and before I even finish it’s found what I’m looking for. That kind of sums up the whole experience of the OS, everything is just slick, I don’t feel like I’m ‘using’ the OS, I didn’t need to learn it, I just move around inside it with ease.

Lastly, it’s cool and that’s a factor I’m not going to apologise for, both the device itself and the look and feel of the OS ooze cool. I enjoy using it in the same way I like (or would like) driving a sexy sports car. Design matters, even in a device that is purchased not only for its aesthetic value.

*Photo courtesy of Sonic Julez on Flickr.

I’ve been using jajah.com for a few months now and am really impressed. If, like me, you need to (or would like to) make international calls on regular basis then this is worth a look. It’s particularly good if you want to call people when you’re not at a computer or call people who aren’t at computers.
The way it works is that instead of making a call over the internet from a computer or dedicated device you use the internet to set up a call from and to a regular phone. Setting up a call can be done at a computer (for a future time if necessary), using the web on your mobile phone or using an application you can download for your phone.
Basically you just tell jajah.com which of your numbers you are on and who you want to call. A few seconds later (or at whatever time you specify) you receive a call from Jajah, once you’ve answered it, it calls them. Calls are free between Jajah users and not expensive the rest of the time. If you’re in China or somewhere else where it’s common to pay to receive calls it’s probably worth getting on to a plan that allows you to receive calls for free. Calling a UK landline from China with Jajah is currently 1.7p per minute.
The really beauty of this for me is that it enables me to use little windows of time to call the UK that I otherwise couldn’t, that is to say call when I want to not when at a computer or when I can get the other party to a computer. The back of a taxi, waiting for friends to turn up, on a break at work, etc.

Check it out. And expect more calls.

I’ve spent the last few days writing a big proposal document. During this process I once again referred to The Economist Style Guide. It is based on the style book they give to their journalists and they very kindly share it online. I’ve read it more than once and refer to it often.
Worth a look if, like me, they didn’t really teach you English in English lessons at school but you care about what you produce.

So I discovered the other day that I’m a bit of a Bowie fan, which came as a surprise. A friend lent me the T.V. series Life on Mars which is ok as TV series go but one thing that did strike me was how good the title track is. The title track is, not surprisingly, Life on Mars by Bowie which I don’t think I’d heard before. The show featured some other tracks which were good, Jean Genie is the only one I remember as it was, for reasons that aren’t worth explaining, mentioned in the show. So on the basis of this and memories of liking the one about the space man and the one he did with Queen I decided that it was probably worth a bit of a look. Especially given the fact that I live in a new-music-inspiration-starved vacuum (wow, there are two u’s in vacuum, who knew?).

As a new-music-inspiration-starved-vacuum (we’re going to run out of u’s at this rate) aside, more people using last.fm and adding me as a friend would help, go do it now. I did buy a Ladytron album on the basis of a song cropping up on neighbour radio, the album has lasted longer on the iPod than I expected at first listen. As a further aside I did think until the other night that me and my last.fm neighbour might be the only people who’d heard of Ladytron until a song cropped on the internet radio station that is played in a bar I frequent (being a bit vague here as I’m not sure if this is legit) the other night.

Any hu. So I decided I was going to lay my hands on a Bowie ‘best of’ which brings up the next music and China problem, the selection of legit CD’s (and for that matter non-legit ones) on sale is limited to Chinese music and the few foreign bands that somehow inexplicably seem to get some kind of following here, an odd collection including Backstreet boys, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park. I actually found Fort Minor: The Rising Tied, the solo project of Linkin Park front man Mike Shinoda in my local super market of all places.

And so to the point of the post, I bought the best of album off iTunes and am not 100% comfortable with that. I like owning CDs, I like looking at them, browsing them for inspiration. I’m also fairly convinced that paying the same price for music electronically as I used to pay for a CD and getting less functionality is kinda wrong but I seem to be slipping into it through a lack of alternatives.

Thoroughly enjoying the Bowie album by the way.