Celebrityscraps

Merry Christmas everyone!

I’m currently sitting in the living-room of my parents house waiting to be fed

The Celebrityscraps Xmas competition is fast approaching. This year we’ve got a signed picture of the cast of new UK Sci-Fi Demons.

The competition will be going up between Boxing Day and New Year!

Once again Merry Xmas from Celebrityscraps!

I’ve first got to apologise for the lack of anything new being published on this site for the last few days. The reason for it is good… but there is a story behind it.

It all started on a day like any other… I was tweeting my life away and had the gall to say this:

Ohhhh what a fool I was to tempt fate and be oh so cocky.

Within 24 hours the powers that toy with our lives (and mine more than most) decided to reward my confidence with the worst head cold ever inflicted on any human being.

It actually felt like my head was going to pop….. also the 50% rise in Kleenex shares is down to me!

So resigned not to be ill over the entire Xmas period I decided to Quarentine myself, fast for a few days and drink tons of water!

To my surprise and after 4 grusome days I emerged from my Quarentine zone with just a tiny cold which is trivial in comparison to what I had.

I do feel a bit guilty though as one of my housemates has now contracted what I affectionatly named “Ebola X”….. sorry Helen and hope you get well soon.

So there… I wasn’t blogging cos I was “Incapacitated”……. my head felt like it was going to do an impression of the guy at the beginning of the film “Scanners”!!…. watch it and you’ll get the idea!

Merry Xmas all…. hope you don’t get what I had!

Twitter is the place to be nowadays, but not everyone has access to it!. Lil’ @kickbee is fresh on the scene and tweeting directly from the womb. That’s right - his / her nerdy father Mr “Kickbee Sr.” has wrapped his expecting better half with a gizmo that detects baby kicks, transmits the info via Bluetooth to a MacBook Pro, which beams the info on up to Twitter!

How cool is that!!!

A few weeks ago a random series of events led me to four year veteran online TV channel ‘Coin-Op.TV‘, and I’m glad that I found it as it’s filled a hole in my sphere of online entertainment.

The show goes out live every Thursday from L.A. and a few other glam locations, and has a hybridized personal/professional feel. One which I find uncommon among today’s wannabe web-tv channels…. and Coin-Op.TV is far from wannabe….!

I’d place a bet that Coin-Op.TV will continue to be forging the mould by example on the best and brightest way to broadcast a television show via the web.

Good job Rob, Hailey and the rest!!!

This weekend I managed to get 90% of my Xmas pressies in one fail swoop! I even managed to wrap them already!

I must say I’m quite chuffed with myself as I usually get them on 24th Dec each year in one mad rush.

Remember that the Celebrityscraps annual competition with thousands of glamorous prizes will be up soon…. I BET YOU CAN’T WAIT!

So every week I visit the official site of the TV series ‘the Unit’ to view the week’s installment.

Last week’s ep was a ‘to be continued’ so I’ve been patient for a week. I check if it’s online today…..nope….. ok, so I check if it was actually aired yesterday…….nope….. so I check with epguides.com and low and behold it doesn’t list any more episodes……. W-T-F!!!

Give me the next episode of the Unit damn you! … and none of this Xmas break nonsense please!

Ok.. so I see it every day….say it every day but still people do not listen…!

Let me reiterate what i’ve been saying for a long time……  Creating a blog and spamming corporate content within it as a marketing exercise is NOT an effective use of blogging.

Blogs are manys things…. but should primarily be a creative medium that is both personal and trustworthy.

If I promoted a specific product…. say for example “Walkers Crisps” in 90% of my posts amongst the content, would you want to come back and read my blog.????….. No… because if I did, it would be obvious that I am using my blog as a Walkers crisp marketing portal and would therefore render it untrustworthy!

This is a village mistake I see every day with a number of my clients, and hard as I might try to steer them in the right direction some of them still keep on doing it!

I find it funny that people employ me as an expert in community conversation but fail to assimilate even the most basic lessons. This is because of what I call the “Client-Education-Shield” (CES).

So you may ask what the CES is?? Well it’s basically a barrier that you have to break through with each client.

It’s not the same with each client and is usually either proportional to the level of self confidence the client possesses.. or down to the client’s failure to admit they are having trouble understanding what you are saying.

It’s down to you to convince your clients to take your advice seriously! If you do not break through the CES you’ll end up spending extra time training your clients and correcting their mistakes….

Today one of the numerous Adobe applications that I have on my computer decided to add a nice little icon in the sys-tray. I clicked on it to discover that it had taken it on itself to download a 295mb update.

This ticked me off a little bit because it didn’t even give me the option of confirming that I want 1/33 of my internet download limit for the month wasted on updating a piece of software that I use twice a year and is also working fine!

I guess the main root of my anger at this is not Adobe’s software default telling me when I need a update (although that is annoying). But the fact that it would take up 1/33 of my download limit cos the UNLIMITED package my Internet service provider supplies me has a capped download limit of 10gb…… now does that sound like unlimited to you????!

It’s called an “acceptable usage policy”. It basically means they sell you the package as “UNLIMITED” and then in the small print say “we misled you… it’s actually a 10gb download limit”….. DOES THAT SOUND LIKE UNLIMITED TO YOU!!!

And to make matters worse our line is capable of 5mb download speed and was at that speed for 6 months… then they capped it at 2mb - probably so they could increase service in our area (more cash for them) at the cost of our download speed. When I called orange support they had the nerve to tell me the line was not physically capable of getting 5mb download speed….. er… wake up Orange….. we had 5mb for 6 months!

I give up with them I really do! I can’t be bothered to change to another either cos I have to speak to their “experts” in India to cancel…. *sigh*

If you think that any TV you want to watch should be available at the touch of a button, then you’re of the same school of thinking that I am!

I don’t want wave after wave of adverts slammed in the middle of my programs, and to be honest would pay double the subscription to have them removed.

This is why today people choose Netflix, Tivo, and Hulu.

It’s interesting that the broadcasters in the US are one step ahead of Europe in many ways. The BBC have their on demand service… but most shows often choose to host their episodes on their websites, making them only available to viewers in the US!

If I go to the trouble of using a US proxy to channel my connection I can view episodes of Supernatural and Battlestar Galactica. I shouldn’t have to do this though….Why is this service unavailable through standard web connections in the UK?

The shows are on UK terrestrial TV and we all pay a TV license, so we should be able to watch them online without painful workarounds!

HULU is the ultimate in viewing and I really wish that a mainstream service like this was available in the UK!