Month: July 2002

So it occurs to me that if the Cook Islands formatted their top-level domains in the same way as the UK does, then you could get a site which would end in .co.ck – which shouldn’t really completely amuse me, but somehow does anyway. If Austria did it you’d get co.at – which isn’t anywhere near as funny, but is a bit like my last name. If Canada did it and Lao People’s Democratic Republic did it too, and you combined them you’d get the name of a leading soft-drink manufacturer and the core ingredient in cocaine. Germanians would be speaking in co.de. In South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands you’d be able to hear the co.gs turning when you visited their sites. All Lithuanian guns would be co.lts. While Morocco would be in a co.ma. In Niger they’d have ice cream co.nes. Probably that would make Peru so jealous that they wouldn’t be able to co.pe anymore. There are many more potential ones on this page, but I’m at work so shouldn’t be buggering around…

If you’re a Mac OSX user (and as such probably using NetNewsWire all over the place since I recommended it a couple of days ago), then you might be vaguely interested in seeing who I’m currently reading! And if you’ve got NetNewsWire you can directly import it!

I’ve just experienced the first text ad that I’ve actually wanted to click on. More than that, even – I’ve just experienced the first text ad that against all the odds I did click on. What did it say? “Suicide girls – punk/goth girls. read their blogs, see them naked.” That’s got to be the best advert ever. Even if you’re a poof. And much respect must go to metafilter – even when it takes ads for porno, it’s got to be stunningly well-designed.

Fertile customers of plasticbag drivel-log – would that I had time to chat! But for the first time in over a week I have hot running-water at home and I’m so excited I might … wash myself! And I have a lot of self-cleaning to do – because after seeing these stunning Tufte-related diagrams I’m covered in a thick glutinous layer of human drool.

If you have a use for it, then you can now get an RSS feed from plasticbag.org at http://www.plasticbag.org/rss/plasticbag.xml. And why should you want such a thing? Well one good reason is because if you’re on a Mac you could read the whole site through NetNewsWire Lite instead of coming to this dumb page every day. It’s a bloody wonderful little application – try it immediately if you can…

Things that other webloggers are talking about today that I don’t think are very interesting:

• Salon’s Weblogs
  It’s a dumb idea. When I was writing Learning from Weblogs (PowerPoint, large) I thought a lot about how people might think about adding weblog features to their sites in order to enhance their communities. The actual hosting of weblogs seemed to me a dumb idea mainly because of collisions of branding and the association of your site with crap – or even offensive – content. It might work, I guess, but I don’t understand why you’d want to do it anyway… [Dork]

• Asteroids destroying the world
  Blah, blah, blah. Is this all anyone ever talks about nowadays? How can I put this carefully – it’s very unlikely to happen! Channel 4 in the UK have a breakfast TV show called RI:SE – and they spent most of this morning talking about what you’d do if an asteroid was destroying the world tomorrow. I think the whole thing’s a bit of a relief – now I don’t have to worry about pensions, getting fat, contracting any unpleasant diseases or going jogging regularly. Plus no more need to worry about recycling. I can become the boorish horror I always aspired to be.

Amusing fact about Guardian Best British Blog award judge Anita Roddick. She’s supposed to be running her own site, except if you want to write to her the only e-mail address you can use is staff@anitaroddick.com. Thanks to Mr Morgan for that one (and for looking after my flat while the gas man came).

If you’ve been as fascinated by the whole warchalking thing as most of the geeks on the web seem to have been, then you’ll be delighted to know that there was a piece on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News about it yesterday – if you’ve got Realplayer, you can still watch it. It only vaguely misses the point – which is a significant improvement on most mainstream media…

One of the most gob-smacking parts of my birthday weekend was when my web-chums circled around me and, separating me from the flock of non-geeks, herded me gently but insistently into the conservatory. There they revealed to me that there had been a huge behind-the-scenes conspiracy going on for some weeks to get together enough money for me to get a digital camera. My eyes got a bit weird and scared when they told me this. Wider and weirder when they told me about this and mentioned who had contributed…

Well today I went with Katie and Mo Morgan to a little camera shop in North London and bought a little Ixus V2 with the ill-gotten gains, so finally you can expect a decent amount of pictures on plasticbag.org. It was really surprisingly exciting and I felt all weird but kind of nice about it. Well anyway – I’m going to e-mail everyone independently, but I thought I should do it all publically too. So lots of thanks to:

• Cal the Conspiratorial
• Tom the Terrible Dark Overlord in Charge of Schemes
• Vaughn the Vital Component
• Haughey the American Agent
• Nico the “Not-doing-anything, honest!”
• Mo the Mostly Secretive
• Graybo the Generally Useful
• Paul the Co-Plotter
• Darren the Devious
• Meg the Mastermind
• Matt the Arch-Manipulator
• Michael the Mischievous
• Caroline the Collaborator
• Davo the Most Lovely and Most Missed
• Jason the Joint-Agent

While I’m at it – thanks to Ms Hourihan for her instructions on how to destroy the world with computers – and to the other couple of people who sent me stuff from my wishlist – but didn’t put their names in!