I’ve always been impressed with the way Sweden and other nordic countries seem to balance a successful economy while providing very high public services and social care.

UpMyStreet.com’s neighbourhood profiles are pretty good.

Here’s what they say about my area:
Neighbourhoods fitting this profile are found primarily in Inner London in Westminster, Camden, Islington, Haringey and Hackney as well as in Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Here is an overview of the likely preferences and features of your neighbourhood:
Family income Very high
Interest in current affairs Very high
Housing - with mortgage Low
Educated - to degree Very high
Couples with children Very low
Have satellite TV Low

This type more closely follows current affairs than any other. Like other urban groups, they will buy a daily paper to read on the way to work and will choose from the Financial Times, The Guardian and Independent. On Sundays they choose the Observer and The Sunday Times.

This pretty much describes me exactly, well exactly some of it is more what I would like to be than currently am (ie, keen reader, arts, full use of leisure time, high salary).

So, a couple of years a go we had a teacher shortage crisis, today we are still short of teachers, recruiting from all over the world to fill the shortage. With such a high demand, those who do not really have the right skills (even if they have the qualifications) to teach, inspire and control a class are finding jobs. Oh and add to that a large number of teachers are soon to retire. You are the government, what do you do? reduce the number of teacher training places of course. Obvious. That’s why mere mortals like us will never be able to come up with such great ideas.

Google Reader. Summary: nice way of reading your favorite blogs and news sites. Keyboard short cuts are great.

The less good bits: no way to mark all posts as read, usefuil if haven’t read for a couple of days. Also very slow to add a number of feeds at once. Add each feed takes five or so clicks, and you end up back at your Google Reader homepage, and so have to repeat process all over again.

Finally, there seems to be a whole load of stories that are never marked as read for me, and currently constantly sitting at the top of my ‘to be read list’. annoying.

Time to take stock on how much I rely on my google drip of goodness and tools. What happens if they take it away from me. Cold turkey like. I would die dear reader. die.

Any way, So for work I use Google Scholar, and I’ve set ‘Google University search as our University departmental website search engine. Then there’s my gmail account (which I can not mention without slipping in that I was one of the first to get one, and was invited by Google themselves, yes, I’m on first names terms with Larry and Sergey… um sort of) and my ‘google groups’ account for newsgroups.

I read the news with Google news, and have various news alerts coming to me each week (which are real useful). I’ve installed Google Desktop, and Firefox of course uses Google search by default.

I love Google maps, so much quicker than multimap.com. I contantly use the various tools and extras and often check google labs. I’ve signed up for Google adsense (adverts on my website), and almost made a whole dollar. And lets not forget my old blogger.com account plus Picasa and Google Earth software.

Now there’s Google Reader, a Feedster alike RSS reader. It can import RSS subscription list from other sources. What would have the best list to import? Of couse that would be Google Desktop at work, which displays emails, news feeds and loads of other stuff down the side of my desktop. It adds RSS fields to it’s list of news sources as I browse. So I’m importing from one Google app to another.

They have my email, files, RSS feeds, newgroups I read and know who clicks on my adverts, If Google ever turn evil then I’m fucked.

Something I bumped in to when playing with geourl… Worldkit, displays a world map, and can display various long/lat co-ords on to it, the cool thing is that the points it plots (and the Urls these points link to) are generated from a RSS feed. It’s free and takes seconds to install, such as my attempt here. The guy who wrote it actually went to the University of Sussex, where I work. Small world (well, actually it isn’t. I bumped in to it by using geourl to see websites near me, and then clicked on to the developer’s site, where he had an example) You can also see it intergrated with geourl on my page here.

Mulberry achieved something which is pretty hard. It made telnetting to the IMAP port of your mail server seem like an enjoyable user experience.

I hated it. Half the inferface was just odd, the other half just looked ugly and though you couldn’t put your finger on it, you knew it was some how slowing your trawl through email down.

Eg. The search box. How hard can search a few mail folders be? you search them… Mulberry would show cryptic icons next to each briefly, which you had no idea what they meant, and then take you to the search results of the first mail folder… ok so the first folder either had none, or at least not the email i wanted… how to get to the next folder i just searched, the original dialogue had gone and clicking on the folder showed the folder as per normal. After years of using it I never figured it out, and I must have tried every possible method.

That’s just one example, but the whole interface was odd.

For some people, they would create a new folder but it wouldn’t show up. Create it again, and it would produce an error saying it already existed. I would find the missing mail folder (a file on the UNIX server) sitting in the person’s home directory, instead of within the ‘Mail/’ directory. And yet, others, with identical settings - especially regarding server locations and directories - would be fine.

Or there’s the fact that to create a folder you have to right click on an exact bit of right space to do so. Or that unlike every other program in the world, going in to preferences and changing a setting and then clicking OK to close would not save the change. That would be too easy. No, you have to click on ’save defaults’ - obviously - and then OK for the setting to be remembered.

Oh and the same company had a webmail client, called silkymail. This was a joke. It seems to be based on a early version of IMP/HORDE, only with the interface changed to look shit.

I only used this a few times. I never seemed to have much luck. If it worked at all, it would be go slow, or an essential row of icons would just not show up making it impossible to use. It had a fantastic feature that if you had more than a certain number of mail boxes, you had go to go to some non-obvious preferences page and set yourself to advance before being able to see all your mail folders. So imagine your average manager, with hundreds of folders, sitting at a conference and knowing to do that.

Anyway, the good news is it looks like they will be no more. The company is filing for bankruptcy. Which would be a sad thing, but if after 10 years you can’t get such basics as the GUI right then maybe it is for the best.