Rob Manuel

Here’s a page that didn’t make the Sick Joke Book due to a last minute production issue, which was a shame as it was one of my favourite ideas: cut these jokes out and stick them in the crackers to liven up Christmas.

Anyway, you can download it as an A4 PDF for printing, and tell me if you do actually do this, this Christmas. Of course, if you’re stuck for present ideas? Buy the book.

It’s my solemn duty to inform you that you can now buy the B3ta Book of Sick Jokes in the shops. Huzzah!

Here’s some comments I’ve already had about it.

• “Love the Sick Jokes book – it’s stomach churningly good” (Steven D Wright, TV Exec, Shine LTD)
• “It’s the perfect boy present!” (Rebecca, October Films)
• “My Dad loves it.” (CaroWallis, who also took some photos)
• “Just picked up my copy from Waterstones in Macclesfield today, really nicely put together. Well done! Wonder how long before the complaints start rolling in?” (DrDerekDoctors, illustrator)
• “Have you noticed that when you click your name on Amazon it takes you to a page that also has a book about AIDS on it?” (Elliot, B3ta lurker)
• “Waterstones Oxford St: Nice stack of the book on the ‘humour’ table. Good visibility, it’s in front of you as you enter the store. Bought a copy, looks great.” (Fraser, Kittenwar.com)

Anyways, enough rabbiting, go and buy the book on Amazon.

Last night Channel 4 put out the show my wife produced for October Films, and I made the graphics. Apparently it did well in the ratings, averaged at just over 2 million viewers with a peak of 2.685 m.

The best bit was a comment I read on B3ta, “I think it’s brilliant that Rob is married to a woman who peddles filth to the masses.”

Anyway, on the off chance that someone from TV land is reading and fancies giving me work, here’s a low-res rendering of the titles.

Google sent me an email the other day asking whether I’d take part in a month long trial by placing video adverts on BabyVsBaby.

I figure I’ll learn more by saying yes than no and so I’ve said yes.

My thoughts so far:

• The ads are quite large. Surely there must be a clever ajaxy way of making a small preview that grows when the user clicks?
• Before you click the ad, the view is rather uncompelling. (See screen grab above.)
• Like all internet advertising, success depends on relevance. Currently the box is playing two adverts, one for a kids TV show (fair enough), and another for a bit of computer hardware (probably less interesting to fans of baby photos.)
• I really have no idea whether this is a blind alley or the next big thing, but my gut feeling is that video adverts are probably going to best placed on video websites like YouTube.

Anyway, hopefully I haven’t breached any confidentiality agreements by posting this, and don’t ask me about the money side of this because A. I can get booted out of Adsense for discussing such things and B) I won’t know how much money it earns until people click them.

So, if you fancy a look at the possibly future of web advertising then go to babyvsbaby.com now.

UPDATE! I’ve just watched the kids TV ad properly and it’s a thing of weird perverted genius. Wonder Pets. By day they are classroom pets, and by night they are superheroes who save poorly dolphins and elephants. Who says focus groups can’t create mind-boggling art?

UPDATE 2! The campaign is now over, and Google sent me a lava lamp to say thanks. Which was nice, but I don’t really need a lava lamp and so I’ve given it to my newsletter co-writer Dave. Hopefully this is now rocking his world.

UPDATE3! Dave has given the lava lamp to his girlfriend as a birthday present. Shush! She doesn’t know that he didn’t pay for it.

Blimey. Had to get up at the unfeasibly shit time of 7:30 today to go on the radio, as I have the occasional job of being the stand-in technological correspondent for Phill Jupitus’s breakfast show.

The brief is basically to bring in some noisy toys and witter about them for two 5 minute slots.

The trick? Send emails to the usual suspects (Firebox and Iwoot) and blag some gear. I mentioned this to a journalist the other day and she said, “Shit! Don’t give away the trade secrets!”

Good Vibrations

First off we talked about a USB massager, which unsurprisingly plugs into your PC and then vibrates. Maybe it cures backpain, but the best thing is that the vibrations make it walk across the desk. I imagine you could also use it on your sex-bits.

DIY Cylons

My second item goes down better, as I’d brought it in as an excuse to tell a little story that had happened to me:

“I didn’t want to keep my wife and son awake by reading into the night, so I looked about to buy a torch I could strap to my head. A bit of ebaying later, no problem, I find one. The only problem? Wearing it attracted moths to my head. I even poked my own eye trying to swat one.”

Anyway, it mainly goes down well as wearing it makes me look like a complete arsehat.

Let the drums do the talking

Ah! The USB Finger Drums. What can you say about this? It’s just a good novelty to play with.

And so it’s time for a break and they play another record whilst I set up my final item.

Turn Turn Turn

Found this item and I just went “yeah! this’ll work for a 6 Music audience.” What self-respecting 30 something geek with a huge record collection wouldn’t want a USB turn table?

Actually the best bit about this, is that I went for a coffee after the show and left the deck outside the cafe when I grabbed a taxi. I had to make the cabbie drive back to get it. “Bleeding ‘ell you were lucky mate” was what I heard all the way home.

Any other business

• Jupitus played Suedehead by Morrissey as I finished up, a more paranoid or egotistical person than I would think the opening lyrics “Why do you come here? And why do you hang around?” might have been picked for mischief.
• I was told off for not bringing a list of links in. Bad me, hence I’m making a big fat blog post here to make up for it.
• I asked if I could plug my book sometime, and was told, “You can plug it, but not here” Gah!

Link round-up

• Listen to an MP3 grab of me on the radio
• Buy a USB Turn Table (thanks Jackie Franklin at Firebox)
• Buy a Finger Drum or a USB massager (thanks Stephanie Prentice at Iwoot)
• Learn more about the Phill Jupitus Breakfast Show, including how to listen online.

Oooh, it’s very exciting. That photo above you, that’s proofs that is. If you squint, you can see where I’ve stuck some biro on the page to change a bit of the text. Anyway, here’s an update.

• Book published on the 20th of October 2006.
• Preorder at Amazon UK or Amazon US
• Joel from Rathergood.com has sent me a video of himself performing his favourite joke from the book.
• The book is basically finished, the design done, we’re just doing the final stages of proofing as we speak.
• It’s been designed by Jason Taylor, who has done a job beyond the call of duty. Give this man work!

The net has been about too long for people to be able to get the domain names they want. Everything in the dictionary has long been registered.

The best names are

Yay. I’ve just launched sickipedia

It exists for the following reasons:

The Beeb have launched a new comedy website, the idea is to get people creating funny stuff via the interwebs and the best stuff might end up as TV show.

They very nicely showered me with cash to write some tips.

King of Chavs TV Titles

And in other news, the Keith Allen documentary on Michael Carroll was broadcast on Channel 4 the other day. I did the titles, which you can watch here. WARNING: Contains loud swearing.

Working with the Internet my entire adult life, I’ve mostly seen Macs as a source of irritation. I’ll be working on a website and the designer gives me a bunch of files without file extensions and I have to spend half an hour working out what application will load them, or I’ll be adding two days extra development time to a project as I debug the CSS so that the site will display on IE.

Actually the largest source of irritation is file endings. I co-write the B3ta Newsletter with my friend David Stevenson, a keen Mac user, and the endless ‘fixing the line endings’ and ‘removing the curly quotes’ as we exchange drafts on email has driven me to distraction.

And yet, two weeks ago, I bought a Mac. Why?

I needed a laptop for my wife to do a bit of email, as my other PC laptop is heavy, it’s often unavailable as I’ve left it in the office.

The secret reason was a bit more boys-toys: “working out how how to use a Mac will be something to geek out on over a dull weekend.”

Scooted about on eBay and found I could buy a 2005 12″ Powerbook at around £550. As these retail new at over £1000, it felt like a bargain.

And I’ll tell you something. Over the last two weeks I’ve fallen in love with my Mac, I’ve turned into a Mac bore. So I figure I’ll just get it over and done with quickly, and instead of winding up all my PC friends by phoning them up one by one, I’ll just write something and let them ignore it in one easy go.

Ten reasons I love my Mac

• The 12″ powerbook is so small I can carry it on the tube without my shoulder hurting.
• Battery life. I get 3 to 4 hrs, meaning I can actually use it for a solid bit of work without plugging it in. Unlike my Compaq which lasts about 1 hr before plaintively bleeping that it needs more juice.
• Having a Mac is like moving to America. Everything is basically the same as the UK, but assuming you can afford it, stuff just works better.
• Tight iLife / iWorks integration. I am so in love with it. For example:
• iPhoto. This weekend a friend and her baby popped over. I took a few snaps and dropped them into a slideshow complete with a Madonna backing track via iTunes. She thought I was a genius and couldn’t believe I’d managed to achieve all that whilst holding down a conversation about prams.
• Mac users are better looking. I took my wife to the Apple store so I could buy a laptop bag and she said, “Gosh. I should send my single friends here. They could pull.” As compared to the time I dragged her to the computer fair off Tottenham Crt Rd, “These people smell. Can we leave?”
• Built-in bluetooth. I transfered my photos off my phone with no faffing about, unlike my PC where I visited a shop, bought a USB dongle and then spent two hours fighting with passkeys trying to get everything to talk to each other.
• Talking point. Last week I was working in a new office full of PC users. Everyone wanted to come over and talk to the Mac user and see how life was different on the other side. It’s a bit like being the token gay in the office. Although as I use a PC at home, it’s probably more like being secretly bisexual.
• I was up and running within minutes. I thought I’d be all twat-fingered and not being able to get stuff to work. On the day my Mac turned-up, I managed to use it to build a quick messageboard / blog website for a friend. It wasn’t any easier, but the fact that it wasn’t any harder than normal means that there’s no reason not to use a Mac as the main tool of my trade.
• It’s so small and shiny.

Ten things that have annoyed me

• No # key. I had to Google to find out how to add a hash to a document. And yet Apple think that I need a § key? Who the hell needs that?
• Bouncy dock items. It’s like having a unruly child with Attention Deficit Disorder. Yes MSN, I can see you’ve managed to sign yourself out, but why do have to keep pestering me until I get clicky on your ass?
• Line endings. Gah. All my posts on Yahoo-groups appear to have random carriage returns placed halfway through sentences. It’s making my emails look retarded.
• Smug friends, who on telling them I really like my Mac, launch into a “I’ve been using a Mac since 1984. Windows is rubbish” zealotry.
• Right click! Yes I know Windows people laugh at Macs for the right click issue, and then Mac people go, “A-ha! But you can plug in a two button one if you like.” But I don’t want to plug in a second mouse – it’s a laptop – I’m currently typing this on my lap. Where would the mouse go? On my knee?
• That six months ago I didn’t tell my mum to buy one and she’s stuck with a PC which she finds tricky to use.
• Fn / Ctrl / Alt / Option / Windows – between the Mac and the PC there are five keys that work as shortcut modifiers. How on earth am I meant to switch between the two machines and know which ones to press? Cut and paste is the worst. On the PC it’s Ctrl C whilst the Mac it’s Apple C. And the Apple key is in the same place as the ALT key on the PC. Gah, it’s slowing me down. Roll on magic keyboards of the future with mini LCDs in each key.
• You know what? I can’t find ten things that annoy me about the Mac. I’ve been racking my brains and there’s no more. In fact, I’m writing this within a web browser and I’ve just realised that there is a spellcheck built into Safari. How cool is that? Not only is it cool, it’s the same spellcheck that works in Textedit and Pages so any words I add to the dictionary are available in all aps. God damn it, I love my Mac. It’s giving me the horn.

End bit

So the question is… Do I replace my desktop with a Mac? Oh gawd, I really want to say yes, but I haven’t really got the spare cash at the moment, but every fiber in my body is going, “yes! never use a PC again. Windows is rubbish.”

And incase you’re wondering. No, my wife can’t have my lovely Mac. She can have the (actually much higher specced) PC laptop that’s currently sitting unloved on the floor.

But I’ll tell you something about this ‘switch’ business. Ex-smokers are always the most irritating type of non-smoker. Are ex-PC users the most boring type of Mac user? Er.. I suspect they are, so if you see me knocking about, remind me to shut up about Macs.