Travel

The Package Trip – Day 3 and 4

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Note: Yes, this is a few days at once.
And a bit shortened.
You see I got a text from o2 to say: “You’ve spent £20 on data so far while you’ve been abroad in Europe. We’ll send you another message if you reach £40.”
£20?! That’s about 6.5mb of data.
6mb from a few photos? The occasional twitter update?
Plus international texts at 10p each?
Turns out my email has been downloading full mails, and I forgot to close it properly, but I’m still surprised.
Anyway – in for a penny, in for £20.

Day 3

Today I tried out a big local supermarket.
No cheaper than Spar, much bigger, busier, noisier, longer queues. Think I’ll use Spar next time.
Bought some extremely disappointing apples. Royal Gala, apparently from Europe, but they were very soft.

I bought a touristy t-shirt with a picture of a lizard on it from a funny ‘suitcases, teatowels and t-shirts’ shop.
It’s been adopted as a kind of symbol for Ibiza due to the number of them there are, about.
I quite like the lizard as a logo for the country. It’d look more fun on a flag than something boring like stripes of different colours. And it’d be better for people who are colour blind.
Not much else of note – I spent a long time looking for (and failing to find) a public toilet, before buying something in a cafe, so I could use theirs.

Day 4

Got up early(ish) this morning.
Went to breakfast and didn’t feel the need to have a second bowl of cereal. I think the charm of all-you-can-eat buffet breakfasts is finally wearing off.

Off out, and without any help from reps at the hotel, or travel agents, my girlfriend and I caught a bus to a nearby town.
€1.85 each (single).
It was quick, clean, driver friendly. We went about 10km for that money too, which seems a bit of a bargain really.

We got on, and I’d swear the heating was on. I immediately opened a window, and when the driver got on and we set off, he switched on the air conditioning.
It’s October, but in Ibiza, it was 22 degrees c.
I was in a t-shirt.
However, I guess if you live here, you become acclimatised to it.
Several Spanish people pulled their shirts tighter as if they were cold. Some were wearing jumpers.
When we got to our destination (Ibiza Town/Eivissa), some people had coats on!

Ibiza Town is nice. There’s a whole walled city with houses, shops (and the ugliest cat I’ve ever seen) in it. I took his picture. But it’s on my other camera, and I don’t have any way of transferring it, so I’ll post it when I’m back.
It’s a lot less touristy – a lot of signs are not in English (they almost all are in English and Spanish, where we’re staying).
That said, everyone still speaks English.
A Dutch guy gave me a business card advertising a mock-Irish bar and said I should visit because they have Guinness on draught. He couldn’t have been further from his target customer.

Today, I described Ibiza as “like England, only warmer, cleaner, and the people are nicer”.
I can see why people retire to Spain.

On the way back to our hotel, 45 cents for 2l of Spar’s own-brand bottled water. Yes.

Another shopping note:
I’m not sure my (vegetarian) girlfriend will ever get used to the amount of meat.
You’ll be shopping and right there next to the chocolate biscuits – will be half a pig.
I saw a woman yesterday with the trotters of a whole pig’s leg poking out the top of her shopping basket.

This evening’s entertainment in the hotel interested my girlfriend. Previous nights have included bingo, and a pensioner singing ballads, but tonight was some African acrobats. I wondered how they were planning to do this on our tiny hotel stage, but they use a lot of chairs and other props, so don’t require as much space as I had thought.
Apparently they were at the Bristol harbour festival and had been popular.
I didn’t think I’d be that impressed, but credit where it’s due – it looked pretty difficult. Must involve a lot of training.

Anyway, tonight’s entertainment takes place in the same place as the others. A room with a lot of pillars. Less of an issue with singers, but more of an issue with a visual act, given that a massive chavvy family have turned up, and were sitting in the way, chatting away.
It almost seemed like a sitcom at one point, when there was three Africans forming a human pyramid, while this lot sat with their backs to what was happening and pestered the waiter for another drink.

Now I can see this sort of act might not be of interest to everyone, but if you’re at a festival and an act comes on you don’t like, you move off somewhere else, to let others who do want to, see.
Anyway, rant over. Time for bed.
If you’ve got this far, please enjoy this slightly-racist-sounding product I found in a shop.

Daily Life, Travel

The Package Trip – Day 2

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Amendment to yesterday: it isn’t as expensive as I first thought.

Today I discovered our hotel (and directly around it for a street or so) is quite abnormally expensive.
Venturing a bit further we discovered a few Spar shops (there are loads – it’s like the equivalent of Tesco Express in the UK) where prices are much lower.
500ml of water at our hotel bar is €2.
Spar sells 1.5l bottles of the same brand of water for €0.65. Bargain.
Saw an advert on tv for a budget supermarket which packages things very plainly (ala Tesco Value), but haven’t tried there yet.
The water thing is handy, because although we’re half board (and so get breakfast and evening meal included), the evening meal doesn’t come with a drink.
There’s all-you-can-drink tea, coffee and orange squash at breakfast, but not even water free in the evening. Odd.

We thought we’d save some money this lunchtime and have a picnic. Quite tricky really.
Cheese isn’t available in small amounts, and we don’t have a fridge to keep it in. That also rules out yoghurts (only really in packs of four or above), fruit juice, or anything else that needs to be chilled.
I joked that the Cheddar cheese probably wasn’t from Cheddar (if you’ve seen that Channel4 moaning food programme recently, you’ll appreciate that), only to find out it practically was. A farm in Somerset, listed right there on the back. Curiously orange colour though.

Chocolate seems very expensive still. Cheapest I found any today was still about €0.80. Comparatively, you can buy a huge bag of crisps for €0.65, so it isn’t an “unhealthy tax” or anything.
Also saw at least two bars of Cadbury’s chocolate which I’ve never seen in the UK. I had no idea they had non-UK products that they sold around the world.

The meeting with our rep went well. He’s not at all pushy, seems quite friendly. Very camp.
He mentioned that you can hire a car for about €40. Sadly, being overly worried about getting them stolen, neither me nor my girlfriend bought our driving licences with us, so that’s a bit of a #fail.
There is a land train – of the sort you get up/down Weston Pier – which does 3 hour excursions. It drives down main roads and everything. I’m almost tempted purely for the bizarre-factor.

If I take away one thing from this trip, so far, it’ll be how much one culture merges with another.
My tv was advertising Hannah Montana a few hours ago.
There’s a KFC and Pizza Hut within walking distance.
In a corner shop earlier, the cashier counted the change back to us in a very British manner.
Spar sell Dorset Cereal bars. And Heinz ketchup.
This afternoon I walked past a sign essentially offering “Cash for Gold”.
Quite amazing how international everything is. I’m surprised you can’t get Colon washing powder in the UK though – for that really really deep clean.

Daily Life, Travel

The Package Trip – Day 1

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Today I went on holiday. I’m there right now. In a hotel. Somewhere else in Europe. They speak Spanish (and are also fluent in English).
I’m typing on an iPhone into the WordPress app, ready to take advantage of international data roaming. 2010, it is.

This is only the second time in my life I’ve ever been on a package holiday. The first was a Club 18-30 holiday that a friend won in a competition (which he didn’t remember entering because he was drunk at the time), and invited me along.
It was almost exactly like you imagine. Chavs, and a knackered old coach from the airport, which must have done a complete lap of every other hotel in Corfu, before finally arriving at ours. Then the early start next morning (after very little sleep) to try and get you drunk on Ouzo, and to sell you excursions.
I upset one rep on the first day by telling her I couldn’t afford all the events she was flogging, and that I could get drunk without her help. We bought three in the end because my friend fancied her. Two were a complete waste of money.

Then we upset most of the other Club 18-30 holidaymakers before lunch, by going to the bar and, while they took a Budweiser and sat down, me and my friend ordered a tea and a coffee.
The bartender seemed excited at the prospect of doing something other than opening another bottle, and proclaimed that he was about to make a really good cappuccino. The bartender really went out of his way.
He took ages.
I don’t know if you’ve ever held up a queue of chavs desperate to get drunk, while ordering a cappuccino and tea, but it’s an uncomfortable feeling.
We bought a kettle from a nearby supermarket and made our own from that point on.

Anyway, let’s see if this holiday is going better than that one, shall we?

Nice things:
– Taxi to airport was early, driver not too chatty (it was really early – far too early for talking).
Last package trip: long drive to London. This holiday wins.

– Thomson staff are very professional and helpful, when there was a problem (see below).
Last package holiday: our main hotel rep (not the one I upset) was arrested, then deported, a couple of months after my trip, for fellating a man on a public, family beach, during a drinking game.

– Off the plane, pretty quick onto a (nice, air conditioned) coach, and away. At our hotel in under 30mins.
Last package trip: ages in a bus that looked like it hadn’t been serviced since before I was born.

– Other people staying at our hotel are quite nice/friendly. Chatted briefly to several, and they’re nice. They are somewhat older than us, though. At a guess, I’d say the average age is about 55. Maybe slightly higher.
Last package trip: they were 90% complete idiots (if not higher).

Bad things:
– Showing on the screens during our flight was Glee, followed by a James May documentary about space travel. Glee is irritating as hell.
I like James May, but a documentary looking at the history of flight inevitably includes a “things don’t always go right” section, that reminds you that when flight goes wrong, it REALLY goes wrong.
I was a bit nervous as I haven’t been on a plane in such a long time.
Last package holiday: flight showed several episodes of My Family. I think that’s a draw.

– We’d paid for breakfast, my girlfriend had specified vegetarian, but they didn’t have her down as such. Hence she got a meat-included one, and enjoyed a nice bread roll, orange juice and cup of tea.

– Sadly, I actually got the breakfast I ordered. It’s been so long since I’ve been on a plane, I’d forgotten how horrible airline food is.
They just over overcomplicate it.
When it’s 7:45am and I’ve been up since 4, after about 2 hours sleep, what I want is maybe a chocolate croissant and cup of tea.
So given that everyone else was in a similar situation, and the limited cooking facilities they must have to heat food, why do they aim so insanely high?
They attempted tomatoes, omelette, sausage, and bacon-potato rostis.
I know that, because it was stamped on the outside of the foil packet it came in.
I managed about half the sausage. Tried the rest but it was all pretty grim.
I also enjoyed a bread roll, some orange juice and cup of tea.
And considering the time I spent at the airport, I could have eaten actual food there.
Last package holiday flight food: just as grim. Must remember to refuse flight meals on next trip.

– Everything seems quite expensive.
There are vending machines here selling 500ml of water for €2.
The exchange rate at the moment makes that nearly £2. For a 500ml bottle of water?
To put that in perspective, a UK motorway services charge about £1.30 for that.
Standard bar of chocolate is about €1.50.
I saw an English version of today’s Daily Mail earlier for €2. That’s at least €2 too much.
Last package trip: water was, if anything, cheaper than UK supermarkets. However, Corfu’s tap water is definitely undrinkable, and there are street fountains here now. I guess if everyone in the country uses something, it gets cheaper.

Anyway I should get to sleep. It’s been a very long day, and there’s a meeting tomorrow morning to sell us excursions…

Random Silliness

Teabagging

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I’ve been working in an office since April.
Shortly after I started, I was commenting to somebody about how I didn’t think much to the Fairtrade teabags that our office buys.
What an evil and ungrateful bastard I must sound.
They’re just a bit bland. I’m not anti-Fairtrade obviously, but Sainsbury’s English Breakfast Fairtrade teabags are so much nicer in my opinion.

Aforementioned person told me that they don’t like the Fairtrade teabags either.
“So that’s why I drink these ones”, and with that, he opened a cupboard, reached in, and pulled out a PG Tips Pyramid bag.

I assumed from that point on, that the teabags in that cupboard were for the use of anybody. Right up until the point when this happened:

The empty box

It turns out I’ve been drinking someone else’s tea. Worse, the message was signed off by my boss. Oops.
In my defence, I had noticed we were running low, and so hadn’t used the last 2-3 teabags, assuming somebody had forgotten to replenish them.

I tweeted the above picture and admitted it was me.
Then my friend @coffeebucks suggested that as my boss had used a closed question, I might like to just add “yes” to the end. This seemed like an excellent idea at the time.

The empty box, much improved

As the day went on, I started to feel marginally guilty.
At least one person thought I was responsible. This was most likely caused by the fact that I had been quite obviously taking teabags from the cupboard. In front of them. For months.
I overheard conversations in our open-plan office along the lines of:
Colleague 1: “I can’t believe some robbing bastard has been taking his teabags.”
Colleague 2: “They’re even put away in the cupboard. Everybody knows that stuff in the cupboard are people’s own things.”
Colleague 1: “Well if I catch anyone nicking my teabags…. <list of violent acts>”
I thought it would be funny to interrupt this conversation, and ask colleague 1 which teabags are his. Partly for fun, and partly so I don’t end up using anything else that belongs to somebody. He described the clearly communal ones as his, and several people laughed.

Throughout the day, I came up with an idea that was quite brilliant. On reflection, it’s not nearly as funny as I thought it was at the time. It’s pretty stupid really.

I left work at the end of the day, and rather than go home, I went to the supermarket round the corner. I bought a replacement box of teabags of the same brand, and exactly the same shape and size as the box that was now empty. How nice of me?

For my own amusement, I then emptied all but about five of the teabags from the box, into a carrier bag, and returned to the office via a backstreet method, parking in another company’s car park. Colleague 1 and colleague 2 were leaving at that point, and they took ages doing so.

Like a bad actor playing the part of a cop in a bad TV movie, I sat in my car on my mock stakeout, and chose my moment until they were both out of sight of me and our office, then snuck back into the office, into the kitchen, and put the nearly-empty new box back in the cupboard.

My hope was that in the morning, my boss (who had left already before I did) would arrive in the office, open the cupboard and be delighted that someone had replaced his teabags. Then, imagine his disappointment as he opened the box and discovered this:

New box - still practically empty

What a bastard I am.

But it doesn’t stop there. The following day, I would take in two sets of additional teabags, one of which would be hidden about my person.
Every time I go to make a cup of tea, instead of taking any out, I put 4-5 back in. He’ll know someone is doing it, but won’t know who. Which might be fun?

The flaw in this plan is that IF he knows there are no teabags then WHY would he open the cupboard, see the box, open it, and discover it nearly empty? I would just have to take a punt that for some reason, he would.

The next morning, I went in to continue this plan, to find he had replaced the box of teabags himself. However, he hadn’t opened them, having seen that some kind soul had replaced the box they used, with a nearly empty box.

Over the course of the next few days, I kept this up. Adding teabags instead of taking any away.
By Friday, I was a bit bored of this game. I had no idea whether he had even registered how many teabags were in there, or was amused, bemused, angry or what. So I returned all the teabags to the box from whence they came.

This was a bit of a problem, because although 160 teabags came out of the box, 160 would not go back in (even allowing for the ones he had drank during the week). See:

OK - too many teabags now

First day the following week, I happened to go into the kitchen to make a cup of tea (from my own stash of teabags), at the same time my boss was in there, just about to make himself one.
He opens the cupboard, looks, laughs.

Him: “I think someone’s making a point – do you know anything about that?”
Me: “No?”
Him: “When I was away, someone was using my teabags. I wrote a message on a box asking if anyone knew anything about that….” (you know the rest)
Him: “Now it’s got to this point. There’s more and more in there each day.”
Me: “Well I think they’ll struggle – there’s no more room left in there!”
(and I also put all the rest I had back in on Friday..though now I know he’s noticed I’m tempted to buy another box and carry on.)
Teabags
No, I didn’t.
Gripes, Technology

iPhone Twitter clients. Not as good as they used to be.

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A year ago I was happily using Tweetie on the iPhone.
Then the guy who created it, announced that he was creating a new version. He’d changed the colour scheme and I didn’t like the new version, so I stuck with the old version.
Another while longer, and he announces he’s selling up to Twitter – and Tweetie would become the official Twitter application for the iPhone.
Great! Nothing could go wrong there, could it?
And so Twitter for iPhone was born. An official app at last, with the proper backing of the company that created the service. It should almost certainly be better, and have new features included at a much faster rate than before.
It transferred, changed name from Tweetie to “Twitter for iPhone” and while it is undoubtedly a cleaner interface, it really isn’t very good.
I was right about them implementing new features quickly – far too quickly.
When Twitter decided to go from old style RT: or via retweets, to new style retweets, the now-official Twitter app stopped supporting the old method instantly.
Sometimes it’s nice to add a comment/joke to something you’re retweeting. You can “quote tweet” but it’s not the same.
But I was alright – I was happy using the old version of Tweetie from before the sale. Happy that is, right up until it started crashing a lot.
Then when Twitter made some changes to the way you log into the service, Tweetie stopped working altogether. It won’t log in at all.
Tweetie no longer works
I was forced to abandon the best Twitter app ever made, and start looking around for an alternative app.

Twitterific

I used this when I first joined Twitter. It made a pleasing twittery-bird noise when you started the app, but I eventually stopped using it, because locations and photo updates were a bit fiddly/non-existent.
I returned to it now, only to find out they have completely screwed the layout.
Where’s all the buttons?
I’m all for a clean interface, but not if that means having to click “benparkatbjs“, every time before I can load anything else. Crap.
Twitterific screen showing main feed
And there’s ample space at the bottom of the main screen for some buttons, too. Seems silly not to have included them.

Tweetdeck

The iPhone version of the full-screen mission-control style interface you get on Mac/PC/Linux.
When it launched, it was heralded as being really quite good.
What makes Tweetdeck so good is just how customisable it is. You can add columns, a quick swipe left or right goes from mentions to the classic Twitter timeline and back again. You can specify keyword searches and save it as a column, for when you’re armchair surfing while watching the apprentice, or another program with a live Twitter debate happening.
Tweetdeck is very customisable
It features Retweet new style and retweet “classic” style, and has a dark theme.
However, it keeps crashing on me.
There’s really only so many times I can type a message and have the app crash as I try to send it, before I give up and use something else.
If it could be stabilised to stop it crashing all the time, I might well use Tweetdeck as my main client.

Hootsuite

While this ticks a lot of boxes for me, it fails on some things that are so spectacularly silly.
Why is the inbox and outbox for DirectMessages, separate?
When replying to a message, sometimes it can be handy to see the conversation from earlier – to make sure I’m not repeating myself, and in the case of some people who don’t reply quickly – I may well have forgotten what I asked by the time they reply.
Hootsuite's main feed
I like the dots at the base of the screen, which similarly to Tweetdeck lets you see which screen you’re on.
It suffers from the same problem as Twitbird in the way that if you want to go from the main feed to mentions, you either have to have configured them to be next to each other, swipe multiple times left or right, or exit to the menu to then select the one you want from there.
The “contacts” tab is an unncessary button. If I want to reference them, surely I’d start a new message. From there, there should either be a users list option in there, or to work as Echofon does, where you start typing a message and it guesses who you are referencing.

Twitbird

What the hell were they thinking with this interface?
Twitbird's bizarre main feed screen
The buttons at the bottom left are possibly the least helpful things you could need.
From left to right, far left button returns you to the top of the screen. Pointless – just tap the top of the screen and it returns there anyway.
Next along is a tick box. Click it and you get only one option – to mark all as read. Again – surely it could do that automatically when you reach the top of the screen?
The middle button of the flower. What does that do? Probably something urgent that I need regularly.
I urgently need to change the wallpaper
Set the wallpaper? You’ve got to be kidding me? On the main screen?
How often do I change the background wallpaper, that it needs a button on the main screen?
The funnel-icon is a filter, with options to display all tweets, latest unread or first unread. Just not sure that’s really necessary.
Where’s the option to view my mentions, or see my Direct Messages? How can I see my favorites?
Go left, gives you an option of mentions, direct messages, but it’s a clunky ‘mentions – back – direct messages – back’ sort of menu structure. It’s just a bit poor really.

Echofon

I won’t lie. What first attracted to me to Echofon is the fact that it looks a bit like the old version of Tweetie. It’s got a sort-of “dark” theme for reading in bed, and has the ability to disable screen rotation (for when you’re reading in bed, and lying on your side, you can tilt the phone sideways without it tilting the words the wrong way from you again).

Echofon's main feed screen
It has a very handy feature that auto guesses who you’re messaging, as you start typing the username (much like sending an sms on the iPhone). This comes in incredibly handy.
Echofon's autosuggest
Echofon isn’t perfect either though.
While it supports the iPhone4’s multitasking mode and runs in the background, the Direct Message count never updates properly.
Consequently, I have always received the “direct message from <user>” email from Twitter, a long long long time before Echofon notices (which is rare).
To be even more frustrating, when you reply to a DM sent to you in Echofon, it doesn’t at that point check if you’ve received any messages – so it can look as if you’re constantly messaging someone who isn’t replying to you (which is only very occasionally the case).
Until it crashes.
When it crashes, and you open it again, it will suddenly check the DMs and update them all the right way around.
Another annoyance with this is how clunky it is to get to your favorites.
I favorite things A LOT during the day – especially pictures and video clips – to look at later when I’m not busy working. It is rather annoying to have to click menu, favorites to see them. Then you can’t just swipe one to delete it, you have to click it, then press a tiny yellow star. Not ideal at all.
Preferably, I’d like a button at the top or bottom to link directly to favorites. I very rarely use the “lists” button.
Recently Twitpic have been having some technical difficulties. I either can’t access the site to view pics, or I can’t post anything.
In the options, the only other photo services you can use with Echofon are Tweetphoto or Flickr. It would be nice if it worked with Google Picasa, or had some kind of FTP option to upload photos to my own webspace, as I don’t really like uploading photos to third party sites at all – which you’ll know if you’ve read my post about privacy (to be fair, none of the other apps support either of these options, either).

What none of them can manage.

This new style of retweets that Twitter has adopted makes it really awkward to see if someone has retweeted you.
Why can none of the software clients just show them in the “mentions” tab? If someone is retweeting you, even by the new style, they’re still mentioning you. They should just be combined into one column.
At the moment, I get completely lost looking for whether I’ve been retweeted or not, and it’s nice to know (and thank the person involved) if someone thought the twaddle I’ve just spoken was actually worth retweeting.
Several clients above have a “my tweets retweeted” screen. That’s great, but it doesn’t tell you WHO retweeted them.
They can for tweets others have retweeted. I can see that one of my friends retweeted something that Duncan Bannatyne said. Why can’t I see who retweeted my crappy joke?
For the moment, Echofon is my preferred client as the best all-rounder.
Hootsuite probably second.
It could all change though if Tweetdeck could just make their app stop crashing.
Technology

Facebook dull. Twitter better.

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So this morning, I received an email from Facebook telling me:

“You haven’t been back to Facebook recently. You have received notifications while you were gone.”

My first reply to this was “meh”.
This evening, I got home, and had another look at the email. Apparently I have “9 photo tags”.

Is that right? Does that mean I’ve been tagged in 9 photos? That seems pretty unlikely really.

What’s more odd is that clicking the link to see these 9 photo tags, takes me to this page.

Right. What’s that about then? No photo tags, just Facebook trying to get me to spam a load of my friends, surely? Classy.

I’m giving serious thought to completely deleting my Facebook account lately.
I rarely log in, because it is really boring.

If I wanted to keep in contact with people I went to school with, I’d have remained doing just that. And as for whether a friend of a friend likes the same films as me, I’m not that interested. Farmville schmarmville – I’ve got better games to play.

During a recent conversation with someone who hates a lot of modern technology, we discussed Twitter and Facebook. I described Twitter as an information sharing tool, and Facebook as a complete waste of time.

For me, Twitter is a way of sharing information in real-time.
Yes, there are people who are “having breakfast”, but not many. There’s a lot more “have you heard this interesting news? <link>” or “I’m watching a really cool animation at <link>” or pointing me in the direction of an interesting news story that has literally just broke. It’s constantly updating. An endless stream of instant news from around the world. It’s news one minute, it’s old news an hour later. But you can still dip in and out, because the really interesting video clips and news stories will spark debate and stick around.

Through hashtags, you can share the experience of a really interesting TV show. I can sit and watch Dragons Den, and if I wonder whether everyone thinks this idea is as stupid as I do, I can find out, via a quick search of #dragonsden, all in nearly real time.

Facebook is allegedly for keeping in touch with people you already know, but I think it’s just a big noise machine.

Remember Sarah? That hot girl at school you never really spoke to? Look – why not make her your “friend”, and go and look at all her photos.

Remember Dave? He’s got a better job than you, a bigger house than you, and he’s just spent 3 weeks having a better holiday than you’re going to have this year. Here’s 50 photos to prove it!

Remember Kerry? Well Kerry’s had 2 kids already – here’s a 150-picture slideshow of incredibly-similar pictures of them.

It’s like signing up to the Michael Buble newsletter. I might get to see exclusive galleries, and know what his favourite film is, but who the fuck cares? It’s just boring tedious photos and other information about someone boring that I don’t know, care about or like.

Yes I could do the sharing of information via Facebook, but there’s so many more adverts and other distracting shit I don’t need, and honing in on one live topic seems a lot harder.
If you’re with a group of friends and someone tells a funny joke, that’s all you need to pass on. Nobody needs to see 50 photos of how you got to the room where the joke took place, with all the individuals tagged and named.

The twitter version of someone coming back from holiday might be “Finally back in the UK. Greece hot, sunny, beautiful. Can’t recommend it enough. So what have I missed here?”

The Facebook equivalent involves a boring slideshow of 100 pictures, and having the same conversation over and over because each of them can only see one side of your wall chatter.

Several people have told me that Facebook helps keep them in touch, or organise social whatnots, but it’s a load of bullshit. There is nobody in the world who has so many good actual friends, that they literally never have time to see them in person, or call them on the phone.

The people in real life you don’t email, text or phone, are the people you can’t really be bothered keeping up with.

It’s certainly true of me.