You are cordially invited...

So yesterday evening with the usual attendant last minute quivers and quobbles around releasing we pushed out 0.7.1 and started increasing the number of possible users by sending invitations.

Releasing software is 50% anticipation and 50% dread, so today will be slightly unreal. Even if it is 0.7.1 and not 1.0 in a lot of ways we have made a 1.0 just because an ever larger population of users is going to be exposed to it and are going to be expecting 1.0 delivery.

So its keeping feet on the ground time.

Oh and watch the press.

Webit, Webit, Webit

Monday night, in the Dutch Chinese Indonesian restaurant we have a habit of eating in, I may have contributed my own neolgism to the technical vocabulary. Or I may not.

I didn't purposefully invent it I just smushed two words together, web and editing and said webiting.

I haven't googled for it to see if it already exists, except in a poor spelling of Wabbit kind of sense, but it performs as a perfectly good verb.

So what does it mean to webit?

Well I was never happy with the term 'blog', this is a journal, I began it as a journal and not as a blog, I'm pretty sure when I started it the term didn't exist, even if it did its an ugly word and as an ugly word its just waiting for a presentable replacement.

So webiting is to purposefully editorialise on the web:

Webit
Webited
Webiting

Use freely. Donations welcome.

Applications are now closed...

The form where you could apply yourself to join the Beta test for The Venice Project™ is now closed. Those that have already applied should either have received their invites now or will be in the very near future.

This doesn't mean you can't get to play with it, but you will need a direct invitation either from someone involved directly in the project or an existing beta test user that have been granted their own set of invitations. This is pretty much similar to the way that gmail was given wider exposure by Google.

So if you have already applied don't panic, you will get an invite. If you haven't then being nice to me probably isn't going to work (like that's a surprise). Yes I will invite people when I have spare invitations but I won't acknowledge it here and they're scarce even for me (for good reason).

I've seen pleadings for invites in a few places, JOS and one Ebay auction (nothing to do with us), which just goes to show that this method does work. Yes of course we want to create a buzz about The Venice Project but at the same time we do need to manage the ramp up.

Five things

Pushed to do this by Andrea

• I was a Student Union President at 16.


• I have lived fewer days than I've been alive by the calendar.


• I have one book published, too remote of interest to be of any interest.


• My hair was, for a period during the reign of Pope Paul VI, longer than Sander Striker's, there are no known photographs to prove this.


• I was called Mick at one school I was at.

There are other facts so little known about me that even I don't know them, like the size of my big toes but that's probably not what you're looking for.

Boxing Day and wound down

Apart from Agatha winding down waiting for the birds to come take the seeds from the bird table, we went for a walk in the Wyre Forest and just now we're preparing to go to the panto.

I'll post the photographs from the Woods tomorrow.

A walk in the woods

As I said, yesterday we went for a walk in the Wyre Forest. Given the nature of our winters now, the ground is still waterlogged and the churning of mountain bikes can make some of the paths off the wide limestone roads a thick chocolate cream. Its when you walk in the woods at this time of year that you really want it cold and the ground as hard as iron.

We didn't see any deer in the Forest, which given the number of dogs roaming around isnt that surprising. Sometimes its the owners that need putting on leads.

This is one of the photographs I took and I've messed it about a bit with Photoshop, the rest of the set are completely untouched apart from the addition of the watermark with Imagemagick. If you bother to go look at them, yes they are dark, it was fairly gloomy and I shot them at ASA 60. I'm still pondering whether to warm them up a little.