dang
ovan
.com

No, probably not. But then Hotmail isn't dead either, despite being demonstrably shit (I mean they send an advert with every email, it's that bad), ditto Myspace; sold last week for only 6% of what it was supposedly worth six years ago. They're slightly laughable, outmoded, archaic, past it, but far from dead.

Back in 2004 everyone used Hotmail (*cough* and Yahoo!); it was the most widespread and accessible browser-based email, nicely tying into messenger and all the rest of it. You could only hold 1 megabyte in your inbox though, and if it got full you had to start clearing stuff out. On top of that it also seemed to attract spam like flies to shit. It sucked, but we really didn't know any better. When gmail came out that year with a flawless spam filter and a 1 gigabyte(!!!) inbox limit, everyone who cared about these sorts of things said "LOL BAI!" and promptly jumped ship. Microsoft Hotmail scrabbled around to increase their storage, and even amusingly blocked gmail invites but the damage was done.

I feel like we're in the same place now with Facebook. It's obviously got huge traction, with half the country having an account, but I don't think anywhere near that proportion actually likes it. Lets be honest they seem to delight in dicking around its users; changing layouts and features for some users and not for others, not telling anyone about it in either case, not always for the better, and always needing yet another set of notification boxes to unclick. All the message threads that once started are impossible to add or remove people from. The number of times I've attempted to upload a bunch of pictures only to have it say "upload failed" after an hour, or spent an hour using its purportedly nifty tagging systems only to hit submit and find only about a dozen of the hundreds of tags actually stuck... It's glitchy, to put it kindly.

So now Google Plus is suddenly on the scene, the interweb giant finally answering Facebook's gradual encroachment on Google's "we are the web" turf. I was sceptical after their lame Buzz and Wave efforts, but it really looks like they're going all-out on this one. It's already pretty comparable to Facebook, who actually made the news yesterday when it announced video chat, something that's already available on Plus. And Skype, and Messenger, and whatever else.

Plus minuses:

• No walls. It's debatable whether walls are needed but it does mean no birthday spam which kinda sucks.
• No direct messages. I guess they'll integrate it with gmail at some point, which makes a lot of sense, but at the moment it looks like something is missing.
• Ditto events. This could be a killer feature if they sort it and integrate it with Google calender. Here's hoping.
• Paucity of invites. It's still in beta (whatever that means thse days) so not everyone who wants to get in, can get in.

Plus pluses:

• Circles. Some people don't like the overt social stratification but only you can see how you're categorised your contacts, so I don't think that matters. For my part I like that it's not hidden under several sub menus a la Facebook, and the interface is much, MUCH better.
• Speed. Everything's faster. You only really notice when skimming through photos but it makes Facebook's theatre viewer thing look like it's grabbing everything by dialup in comparison.
• No adverts. They'll probably change this eventually but frankly I think they're much more interested in uptake than revenue for the moment; Google have deep pockets. Besides this is all about how it is now, not how it will be, plus Google ads are always less obtrusive and more relevant than Facebook ads. Fact.
• Integration with googledocs / gmail / gcalender. In the top bar for these sites you can now see how many "red squares of joy" you have pending on Plus, and not only this but when you click on it you get a dropdown that shows you the relevant content and allows you to add comments as if you were on the page. You can also use the chat function on gmail too, so basically you can stay completely uptodate without leaving your email page.
• I'm told the web app is outstanding from everyone that's used it.
• Picasa: Google Plus images is essentially picasaweb, which is already integrated with a desktop version. Things tagged on the web are tagged on my computer, and I'm pretty sure I could upload all my 19k photos onto Google Plus (at no charge), something I wouldn't dare even think about with facebook. In fact yesterday I deleted 50 photo albums on facebook. It took 45 minutes, and I left ones that were either too epic or too recent, but I want to do a little bit to wean myself (and my friends) off it.
• You can delete. Completely. Sounds silly but you can't on Facebook. I think that speaks volumes about their relative ethoses. Is that a word? We'll go with it for now.

Either Facebook stays rubbish and all but the blissfully ignorant bail to Plus, or they up their game in response to their first real competitor. I know which one I'm betting on, but either way we win. I'm excited.

I really need to stay on top of my photos. I whittled 1000 pics down to 200 and tweaked them within an inch of their lives last week. Exhausting though it was I’m kinda chuffed with the results, though it does make me wonder what I could achieve with a “real” camera. My new favourite thing when I’m working on a pic and it still looks a bit rubbish is to make it black and white and whack the contrast and clarity up. I SO ARTY. Good times. Anyways this week it’s getting a bit silly as I’ve been trying to do the same with another 600 pictures, including ones from Dom/Dolly/Chris’s birthday night out which was amazing. Any night out that features a lot of facepaint or makeup is amazing, it always improves the vibe, I don’t know why.

I’ve updated my set of favourite pics and made it so those are the ones that appear on the front page of this site, which is pretty nifty. The portfolio section is complete too, with improved navigation that I’ve extended to the other pages, and the CV page is ACTUALLY up to date for the first time in years! I’ll probably trim and prune at it like an errant bonsai for weeks yet - the compulsive editor that I am - but it’s nice to have something done that’s been “pending” for so long. Added to the recent work on how the site looks at varying widths, and the whole thing’s kinda finished! It’s a slight embarrassment really, I’m going to have to think up more things to augment. Perhaps a bit of jQuery.ajax shenanigans next?

But for a brief moment the site is done. It’s been a long road and shit. Here’s some of the Best Bits! I.E. some mercifully low quality screenshots of what my site used to look like in its previous iterations. Also my first use of images in the blog for an age, I should do that more. It’s not like I’m short on jpegs.

Mynciboi: done in dreamweaver. Sorry. To be fair it was 2002 and I had no idea what I was doing.

Mynciboi 2.0: don’t remember how I coded it but it was a Blogger back end.

Mynciboi 3: Ugly.

Mochaholic I moved to Movable Type coz I was a GROWNUP.

DanGovan 0.5: never actually coded up! Shame. I liked it but most people said it was awful.
They were wrong, right?

DanGovan 1.0: Simple, classy, ever so slightly plagiarised.

Cya next month for more stuff you don’t care about! AND OMG STOP JUDGING ME.

My new computer, which I dutifully blogged about almost two months ago, has come with few changes. Surprisingly I've not been rushing to buy all the latest shiny games, instead I've been getting into current RPGs like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Dragon Age:Origins and Dragon Age 2, and despairing at the difficulties of mods and DLC. Gone are the times when you only had to wait a couple of weeks after release before buying a game to give them time to patch it. Now the optimum time to buy is six months or a year later, to get all the DLC and make sure the mods are at least half stable. This realisation has somewhat dampened my otherwise rabid anticipation for the upcoming Skyrim.

A unexpected side effect of a more powerful computer is a renewed interest in photography: having switched to some better software to do all my post-processing and with the new hardware juggling thousands of edits to hundreds pics without raising a sweat, I find that while I still spend the same time, I can do much more with it. I'm trying to raise the bar though; being more picky with which pics I keep. Given I look back at albums from a couple of months ago, deleting some and seeing things I should have done differently with others, I guess it might be working? That would be nice. I'm learning. It's quite exciting.

Facebook's image viewer is ropey and small so I've been uploading pics to flickr first, which means I can see how many people look at them; it's nice getting a few thousand hits from people curious to see the damage over the weekend. It must it give them time to get used to them too as there's been less whining about photo tagging recently, but maybe will pass. In the continued spirit of self aggrandisement I've also set up a set of my favourite recent pics to try and see some progress and showcase pics that I like individually and outside of the usual narrative documentary context.

In other news, I've also been working on this here website: The portfolio page now has actual content like you might expect of an bona fide web professional, and the layout changes at four different page widths. Change the browser width, go on, you know you want to. Oh, wait, you're using Internet Explorer? No shiny nift for you; get out.

As I mentioned in my last post, so long Oscar, hello Atlas, my brand-spanking new computer. It was meant to be an upgrade, but if you want to use the latest Intel Processor you have to get a new CPU fan and motherboard, and if you do that then you might as well add faster ram, and you need a 64 bit operating system to use that extra ram, which means it's a good time to get a bigger hard drive to put the new Windows 7 on... See, it all makes perfect sense!

That was as far as the plan went, unfortunately it turned out that the old CD drive wasn't compatible with the motherboard so I had to rush off to comet to get a new one, and to add insult to injury I've just received delivery of replacement case fans; having been given a sweet sweet taste of a silent gaming machine I really want to make sure it stays that way. After all that the only thing that hasn't been upgraded is the power supply and the box they all go in! Having most of the components for a computer just lying around feels like a bit of a waste, but I don't want to spend £130ish to resurrect a computer that I'd never use. Given I recently started paying into a pension, bought tickets to Malaga, four Threadless tees and Dragon Age 2 on top of all this hardware, I really need to stop spending.

Some pics on flickr: Boxes of shiny technology!, Oscar + dust, Old GPU vs new GPU, OMG that's a big heatsink, Build success!

This being my first post-XP machine I've been nerding up on Lifehacker, researching Windows 7 tips and tricks, and I stumbled across something called Rainmeter. You can apazzles use it to srsly mod your desktop, and as I used to spend days customising my UI in World of Warcraft in lieu of actually playing it, the prospect of giving my PC the same treatment is veeery interesting... I haven't had a chance to tinker with it yet though; been spending too much time using those two extra terabytes to do a massive computer spring clean, including getting all my pictures together, deleting duplicates and sorting by year. There are about 16,000 in total, about 4000 from 2010 alone. ZOMG SO MANY PICTURES.

Which reminds me, I need to get to work on those. Or I could play more Dragon Age 2... Hmm decisions decisions.

I was telling a friend recently about my computer upgrade and being smug about the awesomeness therein, and he said "This is all just to play WoW isn't it." I replied "WoW? No I quit that for good." He feigned a stroke in surprise and disbelief. Yeah, trufax, the seven year love affair is finally over.

Back in 2004 I had been a big fan of Blizzard and Warcraft 3, particularly multiplayer mods for it like the now-famous DOTA, so I was on tenterhooks watching the drip-feed of information on the upcoming "World of Warcraft" MMO. I got into the US open beta and was blown away, but it was only a week or two long, so I got into the EU open beta a couple of months later too. I was amazed. All the characters and beasties I'd seen in the previous games were brought to life, and I was running around with them! The lore solid was solid and the immersion was like nothing I'd seen: I was totally hooked.

When release finally hit in early 2005 I played a Night Elf feral druid. It was a horribly gimped character class due to terrible imbalances, but I didn't really care, after all it let me turn into a kitty and scamper about at 130% running speed which was awesome, plus I somehow got into an awesome guild who didn't stress at me if I wasn't healing every (read: any) raid. After reaching level the then level cap, 60, I got into PvP instead of dunegoneering, hiding in bushes and ambushing warlocks in the massive rolling battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill was so much more fun than spelunking in the Molten Core for a random chance at lewtz. When PvP moved into a Warsong Gulch - a then-new competitive capture-the-flag type battleground with actual objectives and scores - I moved with it. With a combination of charm and 1337 skill I got into the top Alliance team at the time, which was great. We became known for steam rolling the Horde players so badly that many tended to AKF'd out of the match rather than lose to us... (Which given how long alliance players had to queue for a match was really annoying to be honest.) Still, the epic clashes against the Horde guild Mortalis were the stuff of legend. At the peak of my playing I was the 3rd best druid on the server and the 5th best player on the Alliance side. Random people would run up and ask me where I got the orange armour I was wearing as I was the only person on the server with it. Good times. However the constant queueing and BG camping that was needed became too much and I burnt out, cancelling my subscription for the first time after 10 months.

I was back in early 2006 though; Blizzard had released Ahn'qiraj; a new dungeon full of giant bugs which had some hitherto unknown feral gear in it! I swapped out the tedium, camaraderie, banter and coordinated tactics of hardcore PvP for a more laid back but very structured PvE. It made a nice change for a while but being tied to a strict raiding schedule was tiresome and the cruelty of RNG loot drops was a needless stress. Plus my previous PvP achievements had been not only surpassed but nerfed in my absence, they were now achievable by scores of people instead of a handful: lamers were running around with MY armour! So I quit again.

The next time I rejoined was for a full expansion called The Burning Crusade in December '06, with 10 new levels and a whole new continent! There was so much to do with more battle grounds, arenas, reputations to grind and loads of new dungeons. Also, feral druid was finally a viable choice for fulfilling either the tanking or DPS role in dungeons, which was amazing. I wasn't that interested in hardcore PvP or PvE this time, so though I played a lot I played like a "casual", grinding reps or money for cheeps. Eventually I switched most of my play to meta-gaming: "theorycrafting" in spreadsheets to find the optimum feral gear configurations and rotation for the other more active druids in the guild who were much more used to a Restoration spec. I also spent time customising my UI playing on the in-game auction house, but eventually even that got dull and I quit yet again.

October 2008 I was back for the next expansion: Wrath of the Lich King, getting to the new level cap again, exploring some of the new dungeons again, grinding the right reputations and profession skills again. Again I quit in the spring, and rejoined in the autumn. For something to do I started collecting in-game pets and mounts and racking up achievements points, a new system Blizzard had introduced for tracking how many virtual hoops you get your character to jump through. Random dungeons took away the bellyache of having to organise a team to do the five-man content, so that was yet another area of the game opened to me. For most of 2010 I watched the community news on what was going to be in the next expansion, new races, new levels, new skills dungons, areas, mechanics, they were even going to overhaul all the old questing areas that had lain untouched since 2005. I started a few alts in preparation, and levelled up their profession so I could make a lot more money on the AH. I also stockpiled commodities that I thought would gain value on release of the new expansion in anticipation.

The Cataclysm expansion finally hit, and it's amazing. The overhaul of the levels 1-60 questing areas are brilliant; I played a few alts (including the new werewolf race) and had a blast. I also sold all the short-term speculation stock and made 70k gold; 5 times what I'd ever had before. Everything was looking rosy on paper, but when it came down to playing my main characters I just couldn't be bothered. I think much of the unique attraction of World of Warcraft for me was the implied longevity, I've had Lews for 6 years and his litany of exploits could continue yet, but I no longer know how long for. With Blizzard working on a new as-yet unnamed MMO, and my other favourite games company Bioware releasing a Star Wars MMO in the autumn (which I HAVE to try), not to mention new kid on the block Rift apparently kickin ass, WoW just doesn't have the invulnerability it used to. Though it's better now than it's ever been, its days are self-evidently numbered, it's time we parted ways.

Between going out and processing pictures of my goings out, I barely have any time anyways. A month ago I cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription and deleted it from by hard drive. Last week I sent a farewell email to a few guildies. Bai Lews. I'd link to picture of him on the online armoury but he's been "inactive too long" so I can't. The fuckers.

If you know me at all, you'll know I heart my computer. Or at least you do now. I HEART IT. There's nothing to beat the sensory overload from playing a game, video chatting, surfing the web and watching a film all at once and on the same machine, and though it's much more fashionable to have separate devices for each, nothing but a decent computer could process my weekly deluge of photos, facilitate weekend web development or satisfy my occasional urge for obscure anime, so I'm fully comp4lyfe.

Unfortunately my dear machine is almost five years old now, and getting a little long in the tooth... It still runs everything fine, but no longer at max settings, and it's begun to complain with the over-the-top multitasking I always put it through. It's time for an upgrade, especially with the new and reasonably priced Sandy Bridge Intel processors outperforming even their high end predecessors. It's also long past time I upgraded to Windows 7 with its DirectX 11 graphics goodness. It's a shame the uber fast and shiny solid state drives are in such a state of flux; they're improving so quickly that anything I get now will have me kicking myself in only a few months... So having passed on that (and also resisting the temptation to get a third monitor), I've settled on this lot, using my old case, power supply unit and optical drive.

• Intel Core i5 2500K
• Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced CPU Cooler
• Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3
• 1GB MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II/OC
• 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600
• 2Tb Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home

Unlike last time I shelled out for a computer, I'll be building and possibly overclocking it myself! Excitement!

• Bless you and all who sail in you. As said to those pining, fawning or being a slut, but in an endearing way. Always followed by protestations of topness or versness.
• That’ll do pig. God only knows where it comes from but the number of unrelated people who have told me this is unnerving.
• It has recently been drawn to my attention that I love... POP CULTURE REFERENCES! It’s the new “I’M READY”.
• I struggle. As said by those finding simple things difficult.
• Life is hard. As said to those struggling, in lieu of sympathy.
• I was [rhymes with born] this [rhymes with way]. Because it’s fun to be meta ironic.
• ...all over your face. The smuttier version of “your face is”, applicable as an omni-response in 99% of situations. See also “that’s what she said”.
• That’s not even a thing is now totally a thing. I mentioned metairony right?
• Nobody likes a hateful ho. Girl you gotta be sweet. Words to live by, as said by a bloke in a dress.
• Fuck and let fuck. Because life’s too short.