Author: Tom Coates

• YouTube presents “Brokeback to the future” Okay now this is just genuinely awesome almost beyond the counting of the ways. Obviously it helps if you’ve seen Brokeback Mountain, were obsessed about the Back to the Future trilogy and had a bit of a crush on Michael J Fox…
• 2005 Venture Capital Web 2.0 investment statistics: US entrepreneurs raise ten times more than Europe I don’t know how much faith to put in these numbers, but the truthiness of them is beyond reproach, and that’s got to count for something, right? European start-up and innovation seems generally pretty troubling to me right about now…
• Dan Futterman’s page on IMDB Dan Futterman was the cute American in Shooting Fish, the son in the Birdcage and object of a minor crush of mine. I’m stunned and impressed to see that he’s also the Academy Award-nominated writer of Capote…
• Find the missing Keynote 2 animations in Keynote 3 Apparently Keynote 3 removed several of the transitions that were in the earlier product, including “Burn” which was Simon’s favourite. It turns out that they’re all there in the new version, just turned off. Very weird / cool.
• There’s a … specialist … painting representing scenes from Brokeback Mountain for sale on ebay at the moment… It’s actually not that bad. They were aiming for $50 to start off with, but now the price is up to $255. If we make it prominent enough, then I think one of their agents will buy if for their office.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja He’s an Irish Ninja whose parents are ashamed of him because he became a doctor instead of joining the Yakuza. What’s not to like?!
• Pink’s new video is a pretty entertaining tirade in favour of smart, ambitious women It’s really cool to see some positive reinforcement in the mass media for a version of womanhood that isn’t about tight clothes, booty, bling and boobs.
• Mekwa & Beam Station Project A pretty fascinating presentation expressing a different kind of personalised toy avatar widget that sits on phones and can travel around the world. I don’t know if I’ve explained it particularly well…
• Wasp performs roach-brain-surgery to make zombie slave-roaches Pretty fascinating, if creepy, story about how some species of wasp brainwash and then control roaches which they then steer back to their lairs, laying eggs in them while they’re still alive…
• Metacritic’s list of lists reveals US film critics’ 2005 Top Tens (and usefully aggregates them) There’s so much more value in aggregation than people realise. All of metacritic could be rebuilt in a bottom-up kind of way using a few simple microformat style things and some decent aggregation tech…
• Alongside the Metacritic Critics lists, they’ve also compiled a full list of 2005 Film Awards & Nominations Good to see Brokeback Mountain doing so well in that selection as well…
• Could Pledgebank help Wikipedia? Thoughts: (1) Pledgebank is about increasing the perceived effect of ones actions by connecting it to a larger purpose (2) Wikipedia already seems to have that mechanism but (3) I like the idea of building social processes alongside wikipedia a lot…
• Omnidrive ploughs straight into one of my areas of fascination – how you could make all storage social I don’t know what I think about the implementation, and of course one major problem is that I can’t easily test it.

I’m doing this for Heather and for anyone who ever reads this site because I’ve been too busy and too distracted trying to get some movement in various areas of my life to post here as much as I’d like. So even though it’s filler…

Four jobs I’ve had:

• Trolley Collector (Roys of Wroxham)
• Postgraduate Teaching Assistant – Ancient Greek, Greek Tragedy, Greek Myth (University of Bristol)
• Reviewer of Films and of London gay bars
• Social/Media Technologist, Yahoo!, BBC and others

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• The Royal Tenenbaums
• The Cannonball Run
• 2001
• The Powerpuff Girls

Four places I’ve liked

• Belaugh
• Ephesus
• San Francisco
• Bristol

Four TV shows I love

• Battlestar Galactica
• The Daily Show
• Celebrity Big Brother
• The West Wing

Four places I’ve vacationed:

• Prague
• New York
• Cornwall
• Tijuana

Four Five of my favorite dishes:

• Salt Beef and Latkes
• Goan Chicken Curry with Aloo Patak
• Tea & Scones with Clotted Cream and Strawberry Jam
• Roast Beef and Yorkshire Puddings
• Treacle Sponge

Four sites I visit daily:

• del.icio.us popular (new)
• BBC News
• Flickr
• Barbelith

Four places I would rather be right now:

• California (“The beach goes on forever”)
• Morzine
• Cairo
• Bed.

Four bloggers minxes I am tagging:

• Meg
• Simon
• Cal
• Suw

• The Flickr logo-maker allows you to construct your own personalised logo in the Flickr style that we’ve all come to know and love
  it’s potentially difficult to tell why such a device is so useful, given that the logo itself isn’t exactly the most complex, but still – it’s nice and it’s sort of funny.

• The West Wing has been axed – the last episode will air on May 14th 2006 I can’t believe this – admittedly it went through a bit of a dull patch a couple of years ago, but it’s been uniformly good ever since, and the whole Santos campaign has been astonishingly good stuff! What the fuck!?

• The Slanket is the best blanket ever – very large, very warm and with sleeves so you can change TV channels! If they hadn’t sold out of these, I’d have already ordered one. They look toasty.
• How to trace an e-mail, and report its sender for abuse The process of scouting around for trolls on messageboards is pretty similar, but e-mail makes it way way easier to find the information than web submission forms.
• “Katie Holmes Turns 27 Amongst Other Imprisoned Playthings” For her birthday, she apparently got given a DVD boxed set of all Tom Cruise’s movies. The picture on this article alone is astonishing. You know you shouldn’t find this interesting, but it just is.
• Lucas Blog talks about cowardice at the Golden Globes Despite the success of Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica, most of the established talent prefer to talk generically about the “difficult circumstances” of their characters rather than even mention that they could be gay.
• Ferrofluid Sculptures by Sachiko Kodama Ferrofluid can be manipulated and turn solid in response to magnetic fields. Skip past the writing on the page to the link just above the comments – there’s a video that will demonstrate this extraordinary material in action.
• The BBC reports that British teenagers think science is interesting and important, but not for ‘normal people’ ‘Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: “Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family”, and “because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female”.’
• There’s a job going in the Social Software team at Apple And it looks incredibly depressing! Apparently social software can be conflated with RSS frameworks. It’s no wonder that Apple aren’t exploiting this area if this is how they view it…
• Darren Shrubsole – relentless Link Machine – reveals the doom-and-gloom agenda of London’s Evening Standard headline writers He’s produced a Flickr photoset of some of the best (read most alarmist) Evening Standard Headline’s of 2005
• Know Your Type – Starting points for Typographic Inspiration Very interesting primer in Typography that I don’t entirely agree with, but has given me a different perspective on what I’ve been doing on plasticbag. Hopefully at some point soon an iterative redesign will appear
• Broadcast Flag is back, this time it covers iPods and PSPs, too “Under the DCPA proposal, digital media technologies would be restricted to using technologies that had been certified by the FCC as being not unduly disruptive to entertainment industry business-models.”
• EgoSurf search for Tom Coates EgoSurf is possibly the least useful website I’ve ever seen – you can use it to give yourself a score about how nominally important you are online, with no positive scores at all – you’re either a nobody, ordinary or stuck-up
• Firefox to include a new ‘ping’ attribute I’m quite interested in this one. It seems to have generated a fair amount of dissent on privacy grounds, but I’ve got two thoughts – what distributed services could you make with this, and how easy is it going to be to spam the trackers?

• Apple pulls past Dell’s stock price and Steve Jobs is delighted Apparently a few years ago, Dell suggested that Apple should be sold and the money returned to its shareholders. This was before Steve Jobs’ return to the business, of course…
• Cameron Moll opens up a discussion about the new Apple iLife packaging Hot or not? I’d have to say not. I get why they’ve decided to change it, last year’s one was beautiful but maybe not too clear. But the new one seems to play too much on the film metaphor. Could do better.

• Albert Hoffman, the father of LSD talks about his ‘problem child’ to the New York Times This is one that’s lurked in my stash of ‘things I must post’ for a good few weeks, but as usual I’m not prepared to actually stick it on my site until I’ve read it through. It’s slight, but it’s interesting.
• YouTube hosts a video comparing the boot times of an iMac G5 with a new Intel iMac It’s not the most scientific of tests, but the Intel Mac trounces the G5 pretty massively. I’m hoping to get myself a new Intel iMac later this week – I’ll be popping in tomorrow in fact to see if they’ve got them in yet…
• Design Observer writes about the glacially beautiful pace of design innovation at the New Yorker A lovely article, which really explores the careful custodianship and development of a design pattern. I understand the authors frustration with the speed of design shifts now, but I think it’s just what happens in response to a new medium…
• I hope you’re all celebrating Calmas, in accordance with the wishes of our forefathers… One father, Two fathers, Three fathers, FOREFATHERS! Bad joke. See also – forebrain, forebears (FOUR BEARS!) I should probably retire it to my internal monologue, where I’m able to laugh at my funny thoughts without alienating anyone…