Damn him. Damn him for being less crap than me. Damn him for redesigning Brainsluice brilliantly in the amount of time it takes me to move a piece of text three pixels to the left, sweat, have a panic attack and lie down. Related question: Is Davo a Hobbit? He does come from Noozle-land, after all…
Suggestion for a really divisive website: So you go to Blogdex and you travel to the all-time links section. Pulling out the information from that page dynamically, you tag up all the weblogs in the top two-hundred listings. And then you automatically divide this into chunks. The top twenty are labelled “A-list”, the next forty are labelled “B-list”, the next sixty are labelled “C-list”. The final eight are labelled “D-list”. No one else is mentioned… Hilarity ensues…
I found this one via Blogdex, which is always a shameful confession for me: Geoff Nunberg talks about the weblogging phenomenon (Real Audio). In this little radio segment, he compares weblogging, with all it’s diarist minutiae to Diary of a Nobody – which started me thinking. Exactly when did the weblogging format cease to be seen as a medium designed for insight and critical judgement and start being viewed as a place where people obsess about the trivia of their lives? I don’t think it had occurred to me before that this form of weblog was now the most prevalant – almost to the exclusion of other types. I don’t know how I feel about this…
Jason finally reveals what Danza/WHAT is, and all I can say is I’ve got to get me one. They look neat! [And yes, I was in on the joke, I’m afraid].
I just got an iPod. I’ve been thinking about it for ages, and the angst of my financial situation has always consumed me. But a momentary glimmer of financial light appeared, and rather than invest in my future I decided that the time had come for frivolity once more. And this glimmer coincided with the fortuitous arrival of said tech item at my local Micro Anvika.
So I’m busy making a pact with Matt that he’ll be there when I do the evil deed, and Rob overhears my evil scheme and decides he wants in. And rightly so, because it’s going to be an epic trip…
So we hop on a bus after a crafty fag and emerge bouncing and over-caffeinated at Tottenham Court Road. The iPods are almost throwing themselves off the shelves and into people’s grubby little mitts. I get the second to last one. They only came in that morning… Matt’s waiting outside, because he didn’t realise that we couldn’t wait for him. Rob accidentally buys himself a Sony Clié. And then we went and ate pies in a pub and it was really nice.
Then miraculously (and only two hours after we left) we’re back in the office, and I discover that the iMac I work on doesn’t have a firewire port, so I’m left frustrated for still more hours. I fiddle around for a while longer at work and run home to play.
Ten minutes later I’m hideously disappointed. And then half an hour after that, I’m bouncing with excitement once again. Then Kate comes home and we watch Bridget Jones’ Diary on video, which she got through the post at work today. Last time we watched it, it was a rough cut – and there’s this great bit in the middle of the fight where the screen goes all black and it says “FACE POV / DARCY” or something similar and it kind of spoilt the flow. This time, however, I have to confess I really enjoyed it. Although I now find myself consigned to the mass population of this country who want to bone Colin Firth. But I digress…
It’s almost midnight and I have to sleep and this entire post is over-excited arse, but who the hell cares, right? Woo. My iPod is full to bursting with dodgy MP3s of crappy songs from the eighties and I’m kind of tired and I’m going to bed, exhausted and happy and who needs a goddam boyfriend anyway?!
Google Groups has now fully archived the last twenty years worth of Usenet posts – which means that you can now experience several historical events as they were experienced by people of the time. Or alternatively, you can do what I did, and try and find your first post on Usenet – which seems to be May 1995 for me…
Terrifyingly accurately, a How British Are You? quiz told me, “I am 77.5% British, just like Michael Caine Though you know your way around London you are most likely to retire to the West Coast of the USA.”
Phew! The Secret Santa e-mails have gone out – I only WISH that they’d done so smoothly… All but 45 of the 621 final Santa e-mails were sent out this morning – the other forty-five (which included some of the … let us call them … most vocal of the UK blogging scene) got stuck somewhere in our server and couldn’t be retrieved for love nor money…
When we finally did manage to get them out from the damn server, Cal had to go, only having time to export them to a not entirely Mac / PC compatible format, which I was then unable to import into my e-mail program. So the last forty-five e-mails had to be cut and pasted in by hand – since every single one is unique. Which would have been been great if I hadn’t been a bit frayed from a day of relatively unsuccessful design work, and put the wrong wishlist URL in ten of them. So there then followed an incredibly apologetic e-mail, a careful and comprehensive checking of the whole process, and then another e-mail sent out to those people with all the details in it, this time all present and correct…
Most of the immediate responses seem to be unbelievably positive. I know that I’ve already bought my present for the person I’m Secret Santa-ing for…
Secret Santa‘s hat is full! Check your e-mail if you’ve been participating…
