• All apps: landscape mode keyboarding. It's great in Safari; I want it in email at the very least
• All apps: Cut-and-paste (yes, I can see it's probably tricky)
• SMS: Send-to-many (this, on the other hand, is simple)
• SMS: Send again (no, seriously, why would you leave that out?)
• SMS: character count on the send screen (or some other way to auto-limit my SMS so they don't overflow on twitter)
• An iPhone-compatible calendar app for Windows (calling Yahoo! Calendar... you can do the contacts but not the calendar?)
Weather: live icon update (you do it for calendar and SMS!)

That's it so far.

(I've hopped months -- see previous excited coverage).

Update: I sorted out the wi-fi. It turns out there's a difference between "password" and "HEX/ASCII password". I'm not certain what the difference between an ASCII and a non-ASCII password is when they're both numbers, but hey, whatever, it works now.

People keep asking about the keyboard, so here's my thoughts.

Bottom line (conveniently at the top): it’s really very good. I’ve been using all weekend and I am much faster with it than I ever was with T9, and I was really good at T9. It’s deceptive, because the interface encourages you to type a lot more, so it feels like it’s the same speed, but you’re actually typing a lot more in the same time. I have entered flickr comments and blog edits, which are unbelievably painful on any other device.

There’s no tactile feedback when you hit a key; it will click if you like but I find that distracting so it’s usually off.

In the browser, when you switch to landscape mode (i.e. put the phone on its side), the keyboard shifts too. This makes it go from a little uncomfortable to totally excellent -- the extra 3cm makes the difference. Unfortunately this great keyboard is not available in other apps; I want it in mail.

The keyboard only has letters most of the time - to get numbers or punctuation, you hit a key, and to get symbols and brackets another key after that. Switching to separate keysets for punctuation is a bit of a pain, but is offset by two features: (1) you don’t need to do it for words like "don’t" and "won’t": just type "wont" and it autocorrects (if you type "as is my wont" a lot you can decline autocorrection, but correcting is the default action). (2) for entering URLs and email addresses the keyboard remaps a bit, so dots, slashes and @s are readily available in those contexts.

In general, the web is usable enough that I occasionally find myself using iPhone as just an extra tab; a third screen. Can you imagine doing that with another phone? I tried to use my old phone and accidentally tried to click the screen -- once you've found you can do it, you try to do it everywhere. I think beginners might even like it on an actual PC -- maybe a laptop. Look out for an Apple tablet PC with motion sensing and a huge multitouch interface.

1981:

I arrived in the world 2 weeks late, in the middle of September. By the miracle of caesarean technology, I did not kill my mother in the process. She said when she woke up I was already awake and looking at her, smugly. Thus the tone was set for the rest of my life.

1982 (zero):

Since I was the third baby, my parents had got bored of taking pictures. There's not a lot of record of this period.

1983 (one):

Learned to walk, I guess. My parents do not remember my first words. Third baby.

1984 (two):

Learned to swim. I remember having inflatable armbands, and not needing them.

1985 (three):

A blue cookie monster birthday cake would have been the best cake ever had the icing not been made of coconut shavings, which I hated. My dear aunt who made it for me wasn't to know.

1986 (four):

A red tricycle featured heavily in my existence. It was the "fastest bike in the world".

1987 (five):

I fell in love with a girl. She left at the end of the school year, and I still wonder what happened to her. She sent me a few postcards. Zosia, do you remember me?

1988 (six):

I went from reading books to devouring them. Matilda, by Roald Dahl, was a particular favourite. She was smarter than everybody else and she had super powers. I totally wished myself there.

1989 (seven):

I started building fake computers by getting boxes and drawing patterns of boxes and screens on them. I spent hours and hours trying out new designs for the interface. Seriously. Culminated in inventing a wristwatch computer, which consisted of the plastic cover from a pack of AA batteries with a small paper interface inserted inside it.

1990 (eight):

Trinidad had an attempted coup by a fundamentalist Islamic group. It failed almost immediately, but plunged the nation into chaos. I remember the smoke from the burning capital; the looters walking calmly down the road with whole beds balanced on their heads; a lady dropped to her knees and begging for her life as a policeman pointed a gun at her.

1991 (nine):

Somebody called me "gay" for the first time. I had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded rude. I went to computer camp, and won a scholarship to come back the next year.

1992 (ten):

I stopped going to the playground and started staying in at lunchtimes to read books. I got my first computer for my 11th birthday.

1993 (eleven):

I used my computer to write and very crudely illustrate stories. I went to sailing camp. I was dreadful, but I won the prize for "most intellectual". The long nightmare that was secondary school began.

1994 (twelve):

My fundamental sense of honesty forced me to answer "non" in French class when asked "aimes-tu des filles?" I learned to suppress my fundamental sense of honesty.

1995 (thirteen):

I skipped a grade at school. Suddenly, I was even smaller and less popular than before. The beatings began. This was tempered by meeting and forming friendships with the very small handful of friends I was to have at that school, who shaped my life, and who are still my friends today.

1996 (fourteen):

The Internet arrived in January. Everything, absolutely everything, changed. It was like somebody took a bag off my head and I saw where I was -- namely, very far away from everything interesting. I looked at Yahoo.com and thought "Damn, I'd like to work for these guys, but they've already built their site, why would they need another HTML guy?" I searched Infoseek for "gay" and discovered what it really meant. "Seldo" the Internet personality was born to keep a barrier of anonymity between the gay teenager and me.

1997 (fifteen):

The nadir of my life. Crying in the shower, I admitted to myself that I was gay. I repulsed myself. I poured my sob stories out over mailing lists on the Internet to keep me sane, and cried myself to sleep more times than I can count. I planned to commit suicide on my 16th birthday -- I had a detailed plan and a note. On the day, I got distracted. Then I had my first kiss, with a boy who wasn't ready to admit he kissed boys, which gave me something else to worry about.

1998 (sixteen):

I discovered that I liked dancing, and that people liked me when I was dancing. My handful of friends ballooned into a posse of twenty-five. Through one of that crowd, I also discovered sex. School continued to be an ongoing nightmare, but evenings and weekends were much improved.

1999 (seventeen):

The long nightmare was finally over. I spent nine months earning pocket change doing personal Internet literacy training for adults and building websites for various clueless companies. I watched Columbine unfold and was bemused at people asking "how could they do it?". Had these people never been to high school? The wonder is that everybody doesn't do it. At the end of the year I left for London.

2000 (eighteen):

BOOM! Eighteen years old and no experience, but you say you know PHP and HTML? No problemo! Sign on the dotted line! Funded by the irrational exuberance of crazed VCs and a white-hot job market I took cabs everywhere and went clubbing 'til 4am twice a week. I also went on my first-ever "date". I wrote an email home to friends: "Know this: now, if at no other time in my life, I am truly happy". As the boom turned to bust, I entered university.

2001 (nineteen):

At university, I became Seldo full-time. I had my first serious relationship. I discovered that I was not nearly as clever as I thought I was. I went dancing three or four times a week. I got a lot better at it. I also met two people who were to become central to my life for the next half a decade. Al-Qaeda struck the towers a few days before my birthday, and changed the world forever.

2002 (twenty):

I came to the sad realization that the people who ran the world were no smarter than most of the people around me. Meanwhile, my antics had got people calling me "boy-band boy". I pretended to be displeased. In a flash of insight, I scribbled out twenty pages of notes and diagrams that described a new way of the web could work, but with no idea how to implement it. A couple years later, people implemented something that looked a lot like it and called it "Ajax".

2003 (twenty-one):

I graduated from Warwick, and with the job market still soft after the bust, I grabbed the first half-decent thing I could find, which was a dreadful mistake. I also met M, who became my constant companion for years afterwards. We fell in love with London together, and my parents got false hope from me spending so much time with a girl.

2004 (twenty-two):

After a year of hating my job, my boss from back in the boom came and rescued me with a lead to a much better job in an expanding, if evil, industry. My days became filled with the tinny sounds of ringtones and an endless supply of tea but my nights were filled with the sound of violent domestic arguments between a flatmate and his girlfriend, so it was time to go.

2005 (twenty-three):

The year of good music and guest list entry. Two DJs/writers for housemates was a lot of fun; I was not nearly cool enough to live with them. The bombs in July freaked me the hell out for months afterwards, and then Katrina drove me to tears of frustrated rage. A call out of the blue asked if I wanted to work for Yahoo!.

2006 (twenty-four):

A rollercoaster year. My longest and best relationship, followed by the breakup. Job security and house-hunting, suddenly whisked out from under my feet and replaced with an even better job, but half the world away. A goodbye to London and a whole culture.

2007 (twenty-five):

The adventure continues.

When your business model involves a young lady wearing mostly pink driving around the country telling kids how cool your product is, you know: the bubble is ON.

Not that I'm complaining, mind.

So, a few months back, the hilarious right-wing pressure group the American Family Association had a poll about boycotting companies which supported gay marriage. I voted in the poll, which turned out to be completely faked -- the numbers didn't change no matter which way you voted. A week later, I discovered that the (multiple, fake) email addresses I had used to register for the poll had been signed up to receive the AFA's weekly newsletter. Since then, it has been a regular source of entertainment to me, as well as an eye-opening look at the crazy workings of the far right.

Today, the organization excelled itself with an article, partially reproduced online, title Hindu to open senate in prayer. Needless to say the AFA, which features that silly Jesus-fish design in its logo, is horrified:

WallBuilders president David Barton is questioning why the U.S. government is seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god. Barton points out that since Hindus worship multiple gods, the prayer will be completely outside the American paradigm, flying in the face of the American motto "One Nation Under God."

This bit is rich with irony. So a monotheistic god is okay... wait. A monotheistic God? Doesn't the use of the indefinite article there imply the existence of multiple monotheistic gods? In fact, isn't the article's implicit acknowledgment that the Hindus have "many, many, many, many, many gods" (that's verbatim) itself a statement of polytheism? But they move quickly from these shallow waters of grammatical inconsistency to the deep ocean of crazy (emphasis mine):

Barton says given the fact that Hindus are a tiny constituency of the American public, he questions the motivation of Senate leaders. This is not a religion that has produced great things in the world, he observes. You look at India, you look at Nepal -- there's persecution going in both of those countries that is gendered by the religious belief that is present there, and Hindu dominates in both of those countries.

Wow. Did the AFA just write off the entire history and achievements of the world's oldest and third-largest religion in a single sentence? It seems like they did. I'm no fan of religions, but if they can claim to achieve anything positive, then Hinduism has at least as good a claim on that as any Christian sect.

The nutjobs at the AFA are also viciously anti-gay, but I'll save that post for the next time they come up with something truly wacky.

Every morning, I brush my teeth to discourage bacteria from growing in my mouth, and eat a yoghurt to encourage them to grow in my gut. I spray anti-perspirant to prevent my armpits getting too wet and eyedrops to prevent my eyes getting too dry. I shampoo my hair to prevent it getting greasy and then apply hair gel.

It seems like there should be an easy way to get these conflicting tendencies to cancel each other out so I don't have to do so much work. Short of periodically sticking my eyes into my armpits.

Book one

Harry: :D

Book two

Harry: :)

Book three

Harry: :|

Book four

Harry: :/

Book five

Harry: :(

Book six

Harry: :'

Via the jolly old beeb. Vote now to pick your favourite summary! (They all spoil all six books so far, so for the love of god don't click the link if you've not read them).

The new book arrives tomorrow, whee!

Surprise, it's the new Seldo.Com! Currently in alpha -- there's quite a few things hanging around unfinished. But the key stuff is here!

What's new

• Everything! The Seldo.Com backend, written over Easter vacation of 2002, has served 5 long years faithfully -- the longest continuous period I've ever used a single piece of software. However, for the last 3 or so years it had become more and more embarrassing as web standards moved on and left it behind. So the new system is built fresh, from nothing, using the rather nifty Code Igniter MVC framework.
• Tags! They're a bit useless at the moment since everything's been auto-tagged according to what section of the old site it was in, and 90% of stuff was in "blog". But as I go I will be modifying tags on the old content and the tags should begin to reflect my actual posting patterns. I may also let you lot start tagging, though I need to do a bit more work before that's possible.
• Commenting on the scratchpad and last.fm songs. People have been attempting to comment on them via the old bubbles in the top-right for years; now each one has its own permanent link and a comments form, so you can comment away.
• Flickr and Twitter streams. Twitter has fast become one of the most frequent targets of life updates for me -- 2 or 3 a day -- so it's about time it showed up. To say nothing of Flickr, which I've been using for years.
• Searching! It's not very good search, but it's reasonably functional and 100% better than the "no search" functionality of before. Plus, the new site is a lot more Google-friendly, so finding stuff that way should work better too.
• Last and so far least, a complete visual redesign. This bit is actually not finished -- as you'll see if you click into any of the sub-pages, or if you're viewing this in any browser that isn't Firefox. I'm still building the visuals, but I couldn't go another weekend of using the crappy old back-end, so from here on in the new software is live and I'll be fixing the CSS as I go.

What's still here

• 95% of the old content. The entire archives of the old blog have been migrated over and are now accessible via nifty, human-readable URLs.
• Most of the old URLs. For instance, the old feed URL still works, it just redirects to the new feed. Most RSS software shouldn't have a problem with that, but if they do, here the new feed URL.
• Bugs. Technically, all the old ones have gone and been replaced by new ones, but I'm not sure that'll please anybody. Please let me know via comments what's broken. And via email if what's broken is commenting :-)

What's gone

The biggest removal has been the dark secret of the old system: sad to say, it was inadvertently directing torrents of third-party spam at anybody unwise enough to enter their email address in the comments box. Now email addresses are never published on the site, so you can comment freely. Plus, Wordpress-style, it will remember your name and your web address if you use the same email every time (but no, this blog is not powered by WordPress in any way.

Still lots to do

Now, unless my big friendly green PUBLISH button doesn't work, this should be the first post on the new system. Wheee! Let me know what you think!

Hey, this text isn't very readable is it? And there are no bullet points! Or gaps between paragraphs! What kind of a shoddy release candidate is this? There isn't even a big BETA sign in the logo!

Will fix soon. Sleep now.

Update: fixed the most important of those problems.

After much feedback I've simplified and compressed the look so that the layout works on laptop screens. Still looks like death on a stick in IE6, but only a few bugs on IE7, and perfect in Safari and Firefox 2. The typography is also finally getting somewhere.

We'll get there eventually, folks... but that's enough for tonight; I have Harry Potter to be reading, after accidentally getting it delivered to the office instead of home...

Really, a direct quote is the only real way to get across the craziness of Paul Kedrovsky's take on Twitter's latest round of funding:

spotting the associated incredulity about Evan's company not having a business plan, reminded me of something: Whatever your feelings about Twitter, business plans are overrated, and profits perhaps even more so.

So a few weeks ago we heard "it's all about eyeballs" again, and this week business plans and profitability are no longer necessary. It's like we're perpetrating a deliberate parody of the dot-com boom, except nobody's laughing and VCs are once again blowing tens of millions of other people's money on laughably poor business ideas.

To be clear: I have nothing against Twitter. It's an intrinsic part of this blog and my everyday life, and I think it would be relatively easy for them to flick the switch that turns on advertising and start turning a profit. However, the bubbliness of the market as a whole scares me.