Alex's space

More train stories

Continuing the theme of talking at random strangers had a good chat with someone on the way back from London the other day.

Rather than recount the whole thing here, there were some good nuggets:

There is a magazine based in Brighton for young and trendy golfers (never knew they existed)! called Golf Punk looks like fun, a sort of FHM for golf.

The lady I was talking to also told me (when reminded by someone near us) that one time she was nearly punched in the face for asking someone to turn their music down. Nice.

Earth Rod or Rodcorp

and Lucy B used to call him this …

the MySpace section starts

all done before by other bloggers, so this is from my perspective as a new MySpace member

it is supposed to be the 2nd most visited site on the internet, and currently has 73,663,446 members (although how many of these are active or not ‘spam profiles’ or jokes set up by mates etc ?).

i registered and created a profile, started to learn about what is acceptable there and what is not and got my profile up to date. I then found out you can ‘pimp’ your profile by using CSS and some HTML, my pimped up profile is courtesy of Mike Industries

very importantly Mike (who is a HTML / CSS guru type) spent a lot of time building his pimping kit properly as MySpace seems to be very non complient and a bit of a mess. (rather frustratingly there is no open API there too, so we can’t do interesting mobile things with it, ho-hum).

MySpace is talked about constantly for all sorts of reasons, some times valid sometimes not, but so far the experience is good and a little like on-line dating! more on this as I learn more…

music as a defence system update:

As a follow up to an earlier post music as a defence system Marco Siebertz has come up with a great idea for your ipod shuffle.

Some stickers for your shuffle, one side says ‘do not disturb’ and the other says ‘Talk to me’ so you can determine your ‘chat status’ (or presence) when commuting. (link) very nice idea (via Boingboing)

Its worth browsing around the site as there are some really quite nice designs there.

More commuting experiences – a party night

Was up in London for a party last weekend. I decided to get one of the post pub – pre club trains home to Brighton … so the experiment goes in to full flow. I turn off my walkman phone, put the headphones away and let the interaction come to me.

I know it is cheating, most people in the train are at least slightly merry. I engaged in conversation by a couple of women (30 ish) who had been to see a Rooster concert (so they must have been 2x the average age then)?!

Turns out we were at the back of an 8 carriage train that divides at Hayward’s Heath – so we had to get to the front of the train, my suggestion was to get out at every station along the journey and move 1 carriage forwards, this was agreed and we had many a near scrape getting on just in time and were joined by quite a few Brighton dwellers, doing the same, making for a more than averagely fun trip.

In the context of the experiments again the indications are good, but as we were on a late train and most people were a little intoxicated then the results are probably invalid. Pity.