Year: 2005

• MeetWithApproval.com – “Arrange a meeting or event. Work out which day is good for everyone & keep track of who is coming.” This is a lovely piece of kit – pretty easy to assemble, but really elegant. This would be a charming component of a larger social calendaring enterprise.
• Consumating.com gets bought by CNET There really does seem to be a bit of an explosion of really early-stage acquisitions going on around the place at the moment. It’s interesting…

• The BBC has investigated the product placement claims I linked to a few days ago… “The investigation found that … where products had been sourced for free, this was done in accordance with the BBC’s guidelines. However, the investigation found … there were instances of product prominence that were not editorially justified…”

Right then. This is a short post because I’ve got to set up a printer, do my washing, pack, pay my rent, package up a couple of letters, find all my dodgy peripherals, set alarms and clean up and stuff, but for those of you who are interested, I’ll be in the Bay Area for the next couple of weeks on work-related stuff (visiting the mothership). I don’t imagine I’ll have an enormous amount of time, but I just thought I’d let people know so they could ping me and we could try and work something out.

Which reminds me. I’m looking for someone better at Latin than I to write a convincing motto that goes something like “Honour and Fun”, for a completely personal project that I don’t have time to implement. Anyone up to the challenge?

• An evening with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show – in London, in about a week! No idea if they have any tickets left, and I’m not going to be able to go because I’m in the US, but I can’t imagine that it would be anything but pretty bloody awesome. Go if you have motor function anywhere.
• There’s an entertaining web development kind of cartoon over at Scaryideas today And you know what it indicates to me – that you’d be much better having fewer people on a project and that communication is above all the most important element – hence rapid iterative multi-disciplinary work is best. Which I knew already!
• Nick Denton spells out the web apps and businesses that every start-up should be using… Some great stuff here, although much of it is more appropriate to the US than it is to us poor saps living in Start-Up Free Britain…
• Surprise! Computer scientists model the exclamation point I find myself newly interested in the science of the exclamation mark after joining Yahoo(!) I’ll be honest, the brand’s punctuation offends my grumpy old sod tendencies and desire to write non-offensive English… Perhaps science can help…
• Cameron Moll talks about 180 days of freelancing… I work freelance for a few months about four / five years ago and I was a disaster. I had no idea how to promote my work, manage cashflow. Total nightmare. I’m only now beginning to think that I’d be capable doing it properly.
• Interesting Psychology Today article on training yourself to wake up in the mornings… I’ve not had an alarm clock for about six years now, and I’m always awake at roughly the right time. If I have a special event I need to be up for, I look at the clock and visualise the hands turning around until the time I want to wake up, and then – alm
• Firefox 1.5 is launched And although I had some weird confusions trying to download it through Safari, I can state without question that the page works perfectly in Firefox 1
• Clearing out my Inbox of things to write about, I find that the BBC has been inadvertantly (geddit?) broadcasting product placements… “Companies are paying fees of up to ¬£40,000 to advertise their products covertly on BBC programmes, often in breach of the corporation‚Äôs rules.”
• Onlife – keeps track of pretty much everything you’re doing, keeping an impromptu record of your life… I wanted to write about this when it came out, but as usual decided it needed a greater degree of depth than a linklog post and – as a result – wrote nothing. The idea is great. The execution is pretty good. It slowed down my mac a fair deal though.

• Channel 4 rapped over ‘Lost’ ad breaks Sixty-four minutes of apparent programming contained only thirty-six minutes of new editorial content. I buy Channel 4’s excuse a bit, but it’s still a shame – bad advertising spaces and overlong breaks make shows less watchable. It hurts them in the end.
• Monkeyhub presents a music video to the single JCB by band Nizlopi It’s a pretty fluffy song, and kind of gimmicky, but the sentiment appears genuine and the video is pretty amazing. They want to be Christmas #1 and I see no reaason not to help them achieve it…
• Why Yahoo! will be the center of the million-channel universe. A Wired Magazine article about Yahoo that features my new boss Bradley Horowitz. There’s not quite enough about him online for me to feel that I know him well though…
• “Boy band Take That have announced that they are to reform for a tour – 10 years after they split up.” Odds of Robbie Williams joining in are substantially less than zero, I would imagine…

There is a trivial flaw with my passport that was queried when I last landed in the UK. The damage has got fractionally worse since then. I’m supposed to go on a business trip to the US a week today so I rang up the Passport office to check if it would be okay to fly with it. They – unsurprisingly – said I should get a new one. Getting a new passport in a hurry is a real pain in the arse. If I can get it all organised in time, it is likely to cost me £89. The consequence is that I am really irritable right about now. And I need to get new passport photographs.

• Jessica’s Trans-Traffic Interesting little thing this – it’s a bit of javascript you add to your weblog which tells you which other weblogs your visitors are reading. I quite like the idea of it helping people find unexpected peers.

• Penn Jillette says, “There is No God” I’m an atheist, and I have been since I seriously thought about it. My mother has ‘converted’ too. I agree with everything Mr Jillette says. I’m still stunned people have to actually say it any more though.
• How many steaks (or how much meat) is there on a cow and how long would it take you to eat at the rate of one meal a day? I asked Metafilter for an answer to a question that was puzzling me, after a dumb comment in a news article. And boy did they come up with the goods!
• Zoology student will go to extraordinary lengths to get to see the baby panda in Washington zoo… This story is mostly interesting because there’s a picture of the panda and it’s seriously cute.
• Celebrate your love of Sony BMG with an ‘I {heart} rootkit’ t-shirt Show your love for the arch super-villains today!