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Spoonfed Video Tour

At the risk of documenting something that will be a source of long-term embarrassment (if only because I always hate the sound of my own voice once it’s recorded) I’m just doing a quick update to share one of two videos I made for Spoonfed. This is a site tour for some of the basic features. Yes… I am an American doing the narration for a website about London. Unfortunately David Attenborough wasn’t available. Enjoy!


Whew, what a week.

Well, first of my random musings – you know how you supposedly build your immune system in your first few years of life? Of course, you’re exposed to all these things that your body recognises as foreign so you build up antibodies and blah blah blah science happens and then when you’re an adult you don’t get sick every time someone in the room sneezes.  I’ve come to the conclusion that there are in fact two very important times in life that lead to the development of the adult immune system.  One, when you’re a newborn.  The other is when you first start cooking for yourself and living on a budget.  I’m pretty sure most of the things I’ve eaten in the last few months have been undercooked or overcooked or expired or unwashed or improperly stored or slightly moldy or just plan bad.  And this isn’t a comment on the quality of English food (I’ll do that later).  It’s just inexperience in preparing my meals day after day and not having the budget to have my life catered.  What this means, however, is that I am probably assaulting my immune system with lord-knows-what kinds of microscopic things that make people sick.  In fact I’m amazed I’ve lasted this long.  Of course, this must be a right of passage everyone goes through – and the real reason health declines in old age is that you’ve figured out how to cook properly and aren’t giving your immune system a complete workout three times a day.

This week was… ridiculous.  I’m not going to go into it but I managed to pull the most boneheaded stunt possible at work this week on Tuesday (to put it briefly, I was hired to do useful things with the analytics data.  Last I checked, accidentally deleting it entirely is generally considered less than useful).  I spent the next 24 hours in complete shock (and slight amazement I wasn’t fired) and it was fairly emotionally exhausting – and, to be fair, physically exhausting as I didn’t sleep much that night.  The next day I tried to get back into the swing of things quite literally by going to a jive dancing class with Sarah and her fiance after a long day at work where I got to see my glaring mistake of the day before every time I opened the internet.  The dance class was incredibly fun but it was another quite late night and then Thursday and Friday, not only was our intern out of the office so I was behind on a bunch of work, but I had seven interviews over the course of two days for some more interns for the team.  All in all, it was a crazy week and next week, we’ve managed to pick up four (!!) interns to start on Tuesday so things should continue to be a bit insane.

This weekend is definitely going to be about relaxing.  I’ve just be chilling out this morning and doing a bit of work to try to find someone to buy or help me manage DormWise (I’ve figured the best thing to do is sell it or let someone take over the site as it’s such a shame it’s sitting there and I can’t work on it at all).  I’ve got a bit of a cold which I’m fairly sure is from the lack of sleep and not undercooked food.  Next week will be a push, and then the week after I’m working four days, taking Friday off to get ready for a trip and then leaving Saturday for a three day bus trip through Wales.  Monday is the bank holiday so it’s another day off work.  It should be incredibly beautiful and fun and I’m looking forward to it!

Hopefully at some point this weekend I’ll leave the flat, but if not… hey, there’s nothing wrong with 48 hours of sleep.


Hurray!

The website is live!

(and as promised; here is the London Line Dancing article I wrote)


I’ll do a proper update this weekend, I promise. As per usual, there’s not a ton to say when I’m just going to work every day :-). But I did want to link to this article – IMVU was the company I worked with for about a year (on and off) and I still sort of feel as if I work for them. I miss the people there a lot and the culture was great. I hope I’ll end up back there, or at least working with some of the incredibly creative team members from the company. In any case, IMVU recently had their big launch to a lot of press fanfare (hurray!) and not two weeks later, Google announced their entry into the 3D Virtual World’s internet space with their product Lively. There were a number of rumours circulating about the fact that Lively is not much more than a knock off of IMVU, supported by the idea (confirmed by IMVU’s CEO Cary Rosenzweig as mentioned in the article below) that a former IMVU cofounder defected to Google to help build Lively.

I’ve got to say, having Google as competition makes me a bit nervous, but IMVU has always had a very solid following of people who might be turned off by the idea of joining a network produced by a big cooperation. Also, look at Orkut – Google’s response to the social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It’s no where near as big or as well known.

Suffice it to say, IMVU has their work cut out for them with Google as competition. But they have quite a head start and just because they don’t have a swimming pool, full gym and smoothie bar in their office doesn’t mean they can’t kick some Google butt.

read more | digg story


Page Views

I can’t make much of a post now because I’m at work, but I would just like to point out, for the record, that this journal is getting more daily page views than DormWise which means two things.

1) More of you need to start leaving me comments so I know who’s out there reading this.
2) All of you need to start going to DormWise as well – although to be fair there hasn’t been any new content there in a while because I don’t have anyone helping me write it. *cough*hint*cought*

After work today I’m going out to dinner with Kathryn and her friend Jenny again and hopefully to a swing dancing class as well! Hope to have an update later!