How exciting. Today I finally got a Google+ invite. The apps on Droid are certainly very pretty. Much more slick than either tweetdeck or Facebook or the HTC sense versions.
But its eerily quiet with few people in my circles signed up yet.
I like that the permissioning on posts seems mid way between both Facebook and Twitter. It seems strange that circling is not mutual like ‘friending’ on Facebook. But its not as  one reviewer put it, the same as Twitter. In fact its the opposite. I’m pushing my info to my friends.  Unfortunately hardly any one is pushing to me yet, so I haven’t seen how filtering of my news stream will work

See my photos from Swing Patrol dancing at the Blitz Party on flickr .

We danced much of the night, with live music from the Dixie Ticklers. Drinking from enamelled mugs. I even sprouted a Moustache for the occasion.

Had a great time this weekend at the inaugural Berlin Swing Dance Exchange.
Berlin is still probably my favourite city in Europe ( of the ones I’ve visited ) . It’s got a simultaneously run-down but gentrified vibe. The myriad solar powered beauties here are also more likely to have interesting haircuts.
This time I broke away from the more heavily touristed areas and climbed to the top of an abandoned NSA radar spy base. Also, finally made it to the lovely Potsdam and spent nearly 5 hours wandering park sansoussi.

My recovering knee meant dancy time was freed for taking photos. My new canon 580 ex ii is delightful, but chess through batteries. I have additional sets of rechargeables on order.  the gallery will make it on line ASAP – But my last was hacked via php exploit. .

Got Thu s recipe from john b and cant wait to try it
3 heads of broccoli, chop it in to pieces. Get two saucepans, put in the broccoli, add enough boiling water go almost cover it, put in a Knorr chicken stock pot to each pan, boil until broccoli is soft, blitz with a hand blender, chop up 2 x 200g blocks of Stilton including rind, put half in each pan, leave the cheese to melt for 5 mins, then blitz again. Serve straight away or freeze when cool! Mmmmmm

I’ve given in and decided to join the crowd of my geeky
peers and decided to get an iPad. Of those who have one they all
loved it. mostly as a way of consuming media. For most of this week
I’ve been using it at work as a giant iPod – it’s larger capacity
than my iPhone means less song repetition. Its also been brilliant
for silly games like cut the rope. Right now I’m trying to use the
wordpress app to write a blog post. this very one that no one is
reading. And how’s the experience? Well, it took some time to get
it to connect thanks to some tips here

http://ios.forums.wordpress.org/topic/incorrect-usernamepassword-self-hosted-site/page/3

It seems the necessary steps for me to get it working were
* enable
xmlrpc on the setting page
* upgrade to 3.0.3 ( from 3.0.2 )
* use the URL lbpaine.com/wordpress
* waited a while
* changed the password

Eventually I was able to add the site to the list. Though
it initially didn’t show any blog posts a few rounds of removing
and then re-adding and here I am now: Tapping away. It’s
surprisingly easy to touch type on the iPad in landscape mode. In
this app though the text display lags well behind my typing. Making
it quite difficult to catch errors. For instance, this is now about
three sentences behind where I’m at. In this entire paragraph
though despite not being able to see anything on screen as typed it
there were only two errors. so not too bad, but a wee bit
reminiscent of word-processing on my Amstrad in the 80s.

In summary – amazing country. I felt like I was going to be mugged everywhere I went, but I wasn’t. Everyone was nice and friendly, especially in the North East (Bahia).

It rained a lot, but not so much in the Amazon, where the water levels were at a 40 year low!

My moo cards made it easy to give details out when I met people. I think I’ve already almost run out. How many people did I meet?!?

Just got my new mini cards from moo.com today.
These are great little business cards that can be customised with up to 50 of your own pictures, each having a different picture. The result is great, and you can get cute little holders for them too.
Check them out at http://www.moo.com
If you mail me I might be able to give you a discount coupon for 15% your first order