Martin asked me to advertise the ICOS Tour website (variously known as “OpSoc Tour” or “MTSoc Tour” or even (misguidedly, perhaps) as “DramSoc Tour” or “Let’s all get pissed in Devon Tour”, or, best of all, plain old “Tour”. So there we go. I know that Dan Young is planning on playing around with stylesheets and suchlike (and I can see he’s been doing so already), and so I’ll plug some of my old posts about stylesheets and stuff.

But more importantly, either go on Tour, or pay some money to go watch it.

Not that I’m bored, (and neither, of course, is Martin,) but we’ve been having a little play around with Google. Having a look at the Image Search, I was quite impressed that a photo of me comes first in the list of results for “Andy Allan”, but I’m going to try and get this photo of Andy Allan slightly higher in the list (i.e. on it at all). Or maybe a photo of Andy Allan in Peru instead. Whichever.

Oh, and the real point of this post is to point out how handsome that guy called “Gary Ewer” is. Ha Ha!

Post your own face-spotting links in the comments below…

Update - Damn. The image results seem to be somewhat volatile - when I posted this (a good three or four minutes ago), it was a photo of me at the top of the results for Gary. But by the time Gary appeared in the storeroom about two minutes later, it had all rearranged itself. Nevermind.

Spotted on Slashdot - but is this a rather obvious oversight (surely Google knows about having a robots.txt file?), or just a cunning way of trapping ill-educated spammers? My money’s on the latter - only a few hundred email addresses can be harvested from this, and if it was real, I’d expect that a few hundred thousand (at least) would have signed up by now.

And bonus points for anyone who tells me how to search the internet (using Google, natch) for the term ’site:google.com inurl:gmail +”a-”‘, so I can see if anyone else is talking about it.

I saw a Segway today, on Queens Gate Place, being used by someone actually going somewhere (so not any faffing around, demos or anything like that). He looked a bit of a pillock, but I’m not sure whether that was entirely the Segway’s fault. Still, it’s on the list of verbotten transportation, so I can’t be the only one who is slightly skeptical of them.

Well, I don’t have a Gmail account. Unless they change one or two important details, I don’t really want one either - I’m with Steve on this one. Gmail sounds really interesting, but I pay good money to have all my email coming from gravitystorm.co.uk - and I’ve found in the past that having more than one email address, even if they all end up in the same place, just leads to people getting confused and constantly enquiring as to which email address they should use. If I could use Gmail silently, that is, with all my emails transparently appearing to come from and go to gravitystorm.co.uk, then I’d give it a go. Reply-to just doesn’t cut it.

Maybe it’ll be possible in the future, since what’s going on with Gmail is a slightly interesting attempt at guerilla marketing, and not being able to change the From address is surely part of the tactics. They announced the service, being much better than anything currently on offer, with a small catch - you couldn’t use it. There was a closed list of beta testers, and that was it. But cunningly, the beta testers were, occaisionally, allowed to invite a small number of people to join the list of testers. When word got around about these ‘invites’, they became valuable - everyone wanted one, and more importantly, everyone wanted to be given one. There was a lot of cred in having a Gmail account, since that showed that you knew someone important enough to have them to hand out. So I think there were a few people who might have tried it out, but definitely went for it when they were Invited.

But Google seems to be ramping up the number of users, and I don’t think the invite system has much more life in it. In my little group of friends, Adam was the source of it all, and still seems able to get rid of his invites. But Steve, Gary, Ed, Mike and Steve King have all had invites available over the last few days. It’s not just in my little sphere of influence either- Asa Dotzler and Pavlov are using contests to give theirs away. I reckon within the next week or so, the number of outstanding Gmail invites will be huge, and unless Google has a cunning plan up their sleeves (and, be honest, that’s fairly likely), there won’t be much point in not opening it up to the public. Except for loosing the guerrilla promotion they’ve been getting over the whole thing.

Which I’m only adding to!

Went bouldering in Sherfield again today, and came up with some good moves - I finally got onto the overhang wall coming from the left wall, which I think is a first amongst us lot, and I’ve also come up with a groovy move starting from the other side of the overhang and dancing along the wall onto the final stretch. So if (ha!) I manage to get the overhanging wall under control, that’ll almost be the whole thing sorted. Hmmm. The bouldering wall in Sherfield really is kinda hard.

I did challenge myself to go climbing more than once per month, and so far I’m doing quite well. I went bouldering yesterday evening; climbing for 5 hours on Sunday; Tuesday and Thursday last week were bouldering; the previous Sunday was also climbing - I think I’ve managed my ‘once a month’ for June.