Since i have switched my accounts to a post office account i have taken off the ability to have overdrafts, being able to take money out of a machine - etc. Right now i only get some benefits onto that card and i know every few weeks i get that amount. This makes paying for other services that require visa cards and stuff very difficult to organise quickly. It's a case of getting cash out and putting into my own/someones visa card and calling up to get the payment done manually. I'm having to do this today to pay of my bethere account as i got disconnected last night at home. ugh.

But it started making me think about a few suggestions and ideas for payment systems that i have previously used when i ran my own gameserver provider (gsp) called clanlife mainly for clan members that were under 18 and had no access to visa cards but did get pocket money (some £10+ a week) and they wanted an easy way to chip in together to make payments for their clan server. We tried to make the process ultra easy - the first thing we tried was mobile payments. Everyone sent a text message to a certain number and paid £3 -> £6 and between them they clubbed together and paided off the server for four weeks. This worked really well and we had a great callback system that updated the total so you could see who had paid.

If you updated that for the social network arena today and did a crowd sourced service for services, sorta like a social cloud payments system for people to help out paying certain 'services' - for instance dreamhost one of my server hosts has a simple donations system that is hooked up with paypal that works well, even that could be extended with something like google checkout - the ultimate is 1 or 2 clicks for a user to pay quickly. that's why i like google checkout so much you can do that after you have signed up and added/verified your payment details. works extremely well, the ultimate thing is not to stress your client - i'm surprised that more taxi ranks do not have a prepaid kind of system in place.

The only problem with the mobile phone sms message system was that most operators operate on a three month cycle before you get payment and they often argued the amount of messages they received and so for a small company it was always hoping that you were going to get paid the money and if the total was correct. This might have changed since and might be a faster timeframe to get paid but for a very small startup like i was having regular monthly cashflow was very important.

The other thing we went to try was splashplastic. A card similar to the post office card but mainly aimed at under 18's to be able to top up the card with money that can then be used online. Of course it required a visit to the post office (and loads of them seem to be closing down!) to topup the card but the concept was good. Would be good if you could cross it over somehow and have some donation based system for paying into the card without going to the post office.

I'm hoping that more places think about adding additional ways to pay.

Ever since i got onto tumblr and found out about allison weiss from the default music player on the test theme pages (great exposure btw to get featured like that) i have loved her music, passion and small content producer spirit that she has. she really is a one woman army and i love her track 'i'm ready' from one of her previous albums. she has the new album out now 'was right all along' and i'm looking forward to picking that up when i have the fundage to grab it!

http://asmarterplanet.com - A tour of some of IBM's innovations to help build smarter cities and reduce the carbon footprint, gotta have mad respect for the humans we have that think that extra bit for us.

Now don't get me wrong here. I think having one of these on a keyring is part of an annoying bastards toolkit - probably a given these days. Hell, if you dig enough you can even change the traffic lights here in the uk and the US with the right IR codes and a unit you strap in your front windowscreen. No, seriously you can.

Firstly some background about my games with IR in my past. I used to have the first casio wristwatch that had this great chunking IR unit on the top - it was like something buzz lightyear would wear. You point your existing remote control at it and you could 'train' the watch to remember the codes. Pretty epic for a 15 year old. Of course, my saturday morning mission after running programs on the spectrums in john menzins that would loop and print messages about shite they actually were that you could not break out of until you pulled the power out - of course if they pulled the power the alarm went off. The dude got tired of that pretty quickly. Always finding ways to make a statement was something i did early on in my computing life. It never really left me did it now?

Anyway, i used to train my watch in the tv shop for the latest and greatest projection television set on a late friday night before i got the bus home knowing that i would have fun on the following saturday morning. I used to sit across from the shop on the bench at watch how one of the sales guys with his off white shirt and stubby black tie tried to manipulate the customer with tales about it being the latest and greatest and it would go with his new car he recently bought. Most TV Projectors had awesome sound on them because of the massive cabinet section at the bottom and i would always program the subwoofer IR for added kick as i just kept jacking the volume up from across the street as the sales rep was shaking the remote control thinking that 'maybe a button was sticking' - that tv sat in that window for quite some time.

I guess the reason i worry about this telly terminate is because it feels like it's ok to have this stuff when clearly, it's not. It's like turning up at a border in the middle east with a shipment of uranium 232 and saying 'oh it's a mates, he left it at the bar' - the fact that it's advertised as the 'telly terminate' sorta excites me because i would love to see tv programming in the current format die off. But what worries me the most is this message of 'control'

This whole advert worries me - 'teach people a lesson and secretly switch it off' - teach them a lesson? - wow, have we really come this far that we make adverts and sing from the rooftops about our hacks? - knowledge moves pretty fast these days. are you informed on everything that might be effecting your day to day existence?

Maybe i'm totally over-reacting but i'm half expecting an email newsletter next for high powered green lasers so i can 'blind you favourite pilots at your local airfield' follow up.

So i have this problem with audiogravity and vlomo posts that i want to post in the past. I have two options, just post it and it will have todays date on and will send to all the autopost places as normal (i normally then edit manual and replace the posterous converted video with the vimeo embed) and i can then go in and also adjust the date manually to put it back onto the right day.

But i'm awkward and hate the idea of lots of posts out of sync causing confusion so i post them as private which allows me to go in and edit the date manually and just stealthy drop the posts back in as if they were not missing. but in doing this they do not obviously autopost - i sorta hoped that my unticking the private box however that it would then do the autopost - i guess it is messy and probably should ask me if i want to do that. Is there a way to set the date manually from the subject line? - i know i can do tags but i was wondering if possible to force dates as well. I also seem to be having a problem with twitter with tags in that they are no longer posting some of the hashtags as tags in the tweet.

Posterous now has support for flickr sets by just putting in the url of the set for a slideshow. that's pretty neat.

As i posted this i am watching in awe as ella is managing to understand the 'pinch' of the iphone UI. You can really see where all this is going too - i have visions of a video conference update fly in to the side of the program or media to ask me if i authorise the use of my credit card by ella at a location. the future is going to be more than just orange - it's going to be really busy.

ROFL. this is my humour. i'm so gonna burn.

Nuff said. Helping you through to thursday if your having that midweek blues. remember conkertu.com this weekend. gonna be awesome. the wifi might not hold up, but will be well worth it regardless to get started. most important thing in life, make a start. make things happen - if you have the skills and talents do not let anything hold you back, go for it.

   

Click here to download:

a_full_circle_feeling_at_my_mi.zip (54 KB)

not a great night sleep but regardless this is an exciting day. running on hope and pure passion. 

After a fairly straight forward drive to reading i arrived at microsoft campus around 9:15am - my interview is at 11am. I'm really excited just to get the opportunity to be invited for an interview. really, i just feel that way about it right now. i'm a heavy karma influenced person just lately. in fact that last 8 weeks alone have almost been like the biggest wakeup call i can recall in a very long time. As my audioboo i posted the day before ( here ) will attest too i felt a wave of change come over me recently but building up to yesterday.

I've been on a bit of a mental free fall regarding career, homelife and future - it has been so random that it was hard to see which areas i should have been concentrating on. Working on the conker tweetup for the last four weeks has given me some clarity about how i should be making adjustments to my life and i feel that a lot of these decisions have all dovetailed into the new focused version of me, back to the older me. one that was a bit more relaxed maybe.

I thought the interview went well. I had to present a 'tell a story' - i recorded it ahead of time just in case as well, you can hear that here

I know with the right team behind me and the same level of passion we can use these tools not just for business but for social change. i really do hope i get a callback for microsoft but at the same time it was the interview that also set me straight again. Wonderful place thou building five. amazing airy space.

I did not frame this picture.

I literally just pulled the contents of stuff out of my pocket and then put various things i was carrying down on top of this suitcase of stuff that i have been slowly filling up. then i stood for a moment staring at this layout - have been having a series of these moments recently, almost like coded messages from the etherealm. water, food, money/health, music and friends. Although i'll probably get it 'in the neck' as we brits say for the evian bottled water and it's packaging i'm starting to notice more again these days about what gives me clarity.

I'm always saying to people about living not existing but the fine line between doing either can be often manipulated just by your surrounding - the constant sell sell of advertising for instance is one such diversion. I have real trouble watching any kind of television unless the program is one that i know will have little ads. talking of ads would it not be amazing to have ads, videos or audioboo clips from your social networks in between tv programs instead of the commercial ones (why does coca cola need to tell you to buy more coca cola at christmas anyway) - you could watch television and catchup with your friends at the same time. someone should build that.

So yeah, feel like a robocop, terminator and all other robots of the system that became self aware at the moment. working on the hyper-local projects are enlightening and i feel required for work/play balance. we cannot just flip a switch and change the world but being respectful about not abusing it, just a little bit each at a time surely has to be worth it.

*update* - the knife, spoon and fork were sent to me by @rojopelo - they are made of bamboo and i feel that whenever i wear my big black windbreaker coat i should have them on me.  how weird is that - they remind of good times in austin and yet at the same time to be respectful of nature, i'm carrying mother earth with me.  rofl, that sounded so hippy!