Binary Balance

In March this year, I finally jumped on the tablet bandwagon and got myself the new iPad, the Wi-Fi + 4G model. I purchased the iPad outright mainly so that I would have maximum flexibility in choosing a data plan to go with it. So not long after, I began researching mobile data plans and was pretty appalled by what I found.

Now I was already aware before making my purchase that the new iPad’s 4G capability wasn’t compatible with Australia’s 4G network provided by Telstra, this sucks but I wasn’t too upset. I had initially thought I would likely go with one of these pre-paid options I’d heard of, I was looking for something around the $30/month mark at most, as I have Wi-Fi at home and just needed something to get me by when I’m out and about. On the face of it, a pre-paid, no lock-in kind of deal sounded pretty appealing, but that was until I started reading the fine print that seems to come standard with pre-paid mobile data plans in Australia. Read more...

It seems that social media is everywhere today. Live tweet our show using the hash tag ‘#WhyJustWatchWhenYouCanCriticise’! There’s other websites as well as Facebook? But how do do your friends know about your inane comments on those ones?! One could be forgiven for thinking the read/write web is getting old hat these days. Web 2.0, how unfashionable an epithet for use by today’s modern web hipster. Read more...

There’s been a fair bit written about how people are noticing that the Internet is changing the way our minds work in subtle and perhaps disturbing ways. The gist of it being that the always on, fire hose of information that the Internet has become is turning us into ‘digital gold fish’ and could be the cause or enabler of such coined maladies as ‘Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder’ (somewhat tongue in cheek) or ‘Internet Anxiety Disorder’ (less tongue in cheek). The previous links are a little old, but the more recent articles on this subject are pretty much still saying the same thing. There was even a book written on the subject called The Shallows. Read more...

I’ve been working in the web industry for about a decade now. My first job was customer facing technical support for an ISP, but I soon moved towards web design and development.

Throughout my life and career, I’ve never kept a blog (until now). I almost exclusively posted on forums, mailing lists, chatted on IRC etc. under a pseudonym. I stopped really even thinking about it, it became just the way I rolled.

I only created a Facebook account in late 2007 mainly to see what all the fuss was about and to appease a friend who wanted to initiate me into the Transformers Archive. I got onto Twitter in early 2009. I suspect that I created a LinkedIn account only last year also. So what’s the reason for this impressively late uptake of some of the most popular online social networking sites, especially for a person who works with the web every day? Read more...