39 years old today - as usual I'd forgotten it was my birthday.
You see me here in my lovely new rugby shirt - been wanting one for a while - on my way (via bus, since the car is still b0rked) to Windsor for a lovely lunch.
So, ever since I got the Macbook Pro I've felt uncomfortable enough wearing a wrist watch that I've stopped doing it.
I've been a little uncomfortable with it for a while, although I love my wristwatch: perhaps my wrists are getting fatter. It was never quite the same since I fell on it awkwardly (the watch, not so much the wrist.) But with the Macbook, it was Ti scratching on Al every time I typed and I did not like it.
Of course I still need to know the time and I'm too old to get into the modern style of using your phone as your watch. The answer, then, seems obvious: a pocket watch. By the way, Steve Jobs, that's what that little pocket in your jeans is for.
What I'm looking for: a new watch (old is beautiful but I also need reliable), attractive, not insanely expensive, a full hunter (never quite liked half hunters), mechanical, stem wound, a way to see the movement running (although seeing the mechanism thru the front often seems to make the face too busy. Oh, and I want it to play the tune from "Per qualche dollaro in più", but I'm not holding out much hope for that.
So, obviously, like any geek, I know all the words, but where can I source such a thing? You can get them in High Street jewelery stores but there's not much of a selection and they're pretty obviously sold as either retirement gifts or as decorations for wedding suits. Google can find me plenty of beautiful and expensive hundred year old examples. But apart from that - not much luck.
Then, yesterday, as mentioned below I got my idea to follow people on Twitter based on finding interesting tweets on the public timeline and, if their history and blogs are also interesting, adding them.
Almost immediately @RhiRhi mentions she has some new stuff on Etsy - so I go over to take a look, since I've never heard of Etsy. It turns out to be a sort of eBay for hand-made crafts. RhiRhi has some very nice knitware on there - love the worm scarves in particular.
But then I have a brainstorm. Hand-made craft stuff - might someone be making watches on there? Well, turns out there is: check out this beauty for a start.
And what's more, I also had a second brainstorm, because a lot of the more ornate watches on Etsy are being marketed to the steampunks. And I know where they hang out - so if Etsy doesn't have what I want, then I bet someone on Whitechapel will.
After two brainstorms I really ought to go lie down, but work beckons.
So, from my new house I can walk into the office, or bike; and although I've been eyeing up a new bike I must say that walking in does seem to encourage my brain to come up with ideas.
The photo (one of my ideas was remembering that I can photoblog) is of Castle Street in Maidenhead - it looks like a country road, but about 3 feet below that hedge is the A4.
My idea of pulling people from the Public timeline has born fruit. .More later when I'm at my PC.
I seem to be getting into Twitter a lot lately. Think I'm starting to get my head round it: as I tweeted recently, when someone explains Twitter to you it sounds utterly pointless.
But... if I think about how I handle blogs. I have my blogs in Google Reader and I go in a few times a day and page thru them, in the Scoble style, seeing what catches my eye. And of course I have my own blog, and occasionally I post something myself when I think of something interesting (at least to me!) to say.
Twitter is similar except that the 140 character limit means it's small enough to keep in an open window on one of my screens and glance over to it. I've always found those RSS readers that live in the Vista sidebar or similar to be pointless, because all you have room for is a title and a few words, and I hate clicking through. But Twitter is small enough to take the whole thing in at a glance. It's like speed blog reading...
The secret then, will be in following interesting people. I follow some of the usual suspects, but I just had an idea to go look at the public timeline and see who looks interesting. http://twitter.com/heroinepretend and http://twitter.com/RhiRhi do: and a look at their linked blogs agrees that they might well be, so I'm following them to see what they have to say. If I do this say once a week I'll probably overload twitter before long, but it seems worth the experiment.
Of course all this theorising is slightly moot when Twitter keeps going wrong, but hey - any excuse to use the word "moot" in a sentence cant be all bad.
"CCTV in operation, so f**k off!"
UPDATE: Huzzah for Flickr, and for Kully, because here's a photo of it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkully/2326978631/
