- The Seventh Annual Weblog Awards are running again… I think it’s fair to say that it has not been a good year for plasticbag.org and that I’ve not written anywhere near as much stuff or at such high quality. So go vote for someone else!
- eStarling has a range of wifi enabled photo frames for sale which look really interesting I’ve been waiting for one of these to turn up for ages, so now the question is when to get one and what can be built against it…
- My friend Kerry gets sent scripts for a living and received one recently about a guy who has to live with a gay guy for three months to get an inheritance… You really have to read the rest to really get it. My thoughts: increasingly somehow gay stereotyping has been disconnected from apparent anti-gay sentiment. We’ve gained freedom but lost our dignity. And it’s something that I find infuriating.
- Phil Gyford posts his top tunes of 2006, complete with MP3s. I’m going to explore that straightaway… He also mentions his most-played artists of the year, which seems to me to be an eminently good idea. Next linklogged thingy, I should think…
- My rolling year chart at last.fm reveal that I listened primarily to Beck, Goldfrapp, Nina Simone and Sean Lennon last year, which is maybe a bit embarrassing… Most played tracks, weirdly, were all electronica from Balance 005 or by Minilogue. Most-played albums were Goldfrapp’s Supernature, Joanna Newsom’s Milk-Eyed Mender, Alison Moyet’s (!) Hoodoo, Beck’s Guerolito and The Editor’s Back Room…
- Matt Biddulph demonstrates how he can now exert pressure on objects in a virtual space by manipulating objects in real space This is fascinating and lovely. Teledildonics leaps to mind, of course, but then it would. After that, you get into more interesting relationships between ambient connected devices and virtual worlds, and that’s when I get all moist.
- Maps of War has a Flash map supposedly illustrating the evolution and territorial expansion of the world’s religions Frankly it’s a pile of balls. Firstly it represents legally atheistic countries as Christian, does not distinguish between radically different sects of the same religion and totally ignores polytheistic religions. Judaism gets a particularly hard representation.
- Another review of The God Delusion – this time from the Independent and by Murrough O’Brien, and full of extraordinarily bad argument and logical fallacies… O’Brien cites Darwin’s influence on Hitler as a bad thing. It is, but logic (unlike religion) does not require the use of knowledge to be positive. Similarly, it is not reasonable to argue that longevity of the religious idea constitutes any evidence to its validity…
- Okay – only a few more of these to go – another review of The God Delusion, this time by Mary Wakefield of The Daily Telegraph, who again says that it won’t convince anyone… The assumption of these reviews is that an individual is either a Christian or an atheist. I disagree. I think there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians who when faced with the actuality of what they’re supposed to believe look stunned and incredulous. The most obvious people to persuade to abandon Christianity are the ones who have believed it by default and have never given the question sufficient attention.
- Jim Holt reviews The God Delusion for the New York Times Another review that argues the book won’t convince anyone and which muddles up Dawkins’ thinking with group selection, before arguing it’s reasonable to ignore the way one would operate in any other situation when confronted with a religious question…
- The Google Reader blog talks about the work on the trends stuff that Veen and Doug have been doing… I’ve still not actually had a play with this yet, which is pretty much unforgivable, particularly as I have such trouble with keeping up with my newsreader.
- Dan Hill’s leaving the BBC to run off and work on pretty-much-ideally-perfect magazine multimedia concept Monocle… I’m sort of jealous in some ways. Everyone’s running off across to hybridised media or physical devices, and I’m still with my internets in the middle. Good luck old chap.
- New York is going to make it so that its 911 and 311 emergency and irritation lines can accept images and video I love this idea, if they can effectively hook it together so that images and phone calls are effectively matched together. The idea of taking a picture of a criminal and sending it with your call, or of the wound of a car crash victim. Very smart…
- Awesome video from eboy made using pixel art and featuring Albert Einstein It’s like someone brought magical life to pixels and they snogged some Habbos, hung out with Lego models and ended up cooler than all of em…
- YouTube has a wonderful silent film version of Star Wars which only takes a few minutes to watch… Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers seem particularly entertaining. And the Ewoks. Them too.
- Steven Pinker writes on ‘The Mystery of Consciousness’ in Time Magazine… The brain has an evaluative quality thatalong with biochemical stimulicauses individuals to operate in coherent ways. It should be beneficial to an individual to model other entities’ behaviour. Maybe consciousness is that skill turned on oneself?
- BoingBoing is being talked about on BBC News today because of the effect a blogger boycott can generate… I’m not sure what I think of this stuff. Exactly the same tactics could be and can be used by people with very different, intolerant and mainstream beliefs. I’m not sure I like the idea of a boycott of people who don’t approve of gay people, for example..
Category: Random
- Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for the Presidency of the United States on her site It’s all a little bit Oprah, but it’s certainly interesting.
- The Guardian reports on Jade Goody’s eviction from the Celebrity Big Brother house I watched the eviction with a couple of friends and we agreed that whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, the Big Brother episode worked really hard to get Jade out of the building. Any illusion of balance was gone.
- Media Guardian talks about the impact the Big Brother race row could have on the respective futures of Channel 4 and Endemol In the end, it’s a TV show, and I suspect six months down the line it will seem like a very small event indeed, although the repercussions themselves will last and last…
- There’s another interesting Media Guardian article about the effect of the license fee settlement on the BBC I could write a substantial rant about how much of the BBC’s time is spent on getting the next license fee. Instead, I’ll just remind the Guardian that some of the BBC services they describe are BBC Worldwide ventures and not funded by the fee at all…
- Flickr plus the semantically analysed structures of advertising language equals auto-generated advertising Honestly, this is the kind of thing that should be in art galleries at the moment rather than on the internet – this stuff is the readymades of the early 21st century…
- Upcoming photos from Simon Willison and the Order of the Phoenix have been released I’m sorry, but really, my poor old colleague is going to have endless trouble with this one…
- I’m watching Contact on television again and finding it again troubling in terms of its depiction of the tensions between reason and faith Now I read the book probably twenty years ago now, and I don’t remember it in enormous detail, but it seems to me that the film makes the tension between science and faith the core of its narrative, much more so than the book.
- From a while back – Stephen Colbert wags his finger at Apple and the iPhone I’ve been distracted by other far more elaborate and confusing things than the internet for the last few weeks/months so this is a bit late in the day. Good. Funny. Stuff like that.
- Joan Bakewell reviews Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in glowing terms… “Religions have the secular world running scared. This book is a clarion call to cower no longer. Primed by anger, redeemed by humour, it will, I trust, offend many.”
- The Independent’s review of The God Delusion is a little more equivocal… It’s a flawed review in that it attempts to defeat Dawkins on his own terms – ie. by describing religion as a trait that provides its adherents with greater adaptive success, rather than by looking towards the meme as the unit of selection.
- There’s an interesting discussion going on on the microformats list about how to depict television and radio programmes The standard confusions and complexities apply – the distinctions between a broadcast and an episode (where the episode corresponds to something on a tape that can be replayed), and between episodes and the brands that link them…
- David Carr talks in the New York Times about the benefits and costs of new web-native ways of reading and writing to the business of writing newspapers… Now this is a really good article. It balances the value of ‘most read’ pages and blogs with the risks towards popularisation and ratings-grabbing while accepting that one way or another they’re here to stay. No head in the sand.
- Spaceship Entertainment talks about symptoms of addiction in World of Warcraft and references something I wrote a while back on the subject… I’m starting to wonder ifcontra Raph Kostergaming is the memetic equivalent of sugar. That is to say it’s something nutritionally empty that hijacks biological drives at the expense of its consumer…
- Andrew Leonard of Salon responds to the David Carr post I wrote about earlier and in not enormously flattering terms… And he’s also got a point! saturation in the marketplace doesn’t mean that everyone writes about Britney, it means that people specialise and there’s more choice. The capitalist would argue that market failure is the biggest threat, not competition…
- Employment (II) (1633) by George Herbert “Man is no starre, but a quick coal of mortall fire; Who blows it not, nor doth controll A faint desire, Let’s his own ashes choke his soul”
- Presentation Zen writes about Steve Jobs at Macworld and the stinking presence of Cingularity Doing good talks is something that I wish I knew more about. Mine go quite well, but they cost me so much in preparation that I have to do them a few times to make them worth the time they take to write…
- The Carson Future of Web Design conference in April looks pretty interesting Nice to see he's making a family out of these events – and I'm loving the visual design for the conference site.
- YouTube has video of the Jeep Waterfall I linked to something like this a while back – a system of valves programmed to open and close very rapidly release inkjet like blobs of water, creating a fountain in which words fall from the air. Very cool.
- Jeff Veen writes about the trends pages of Google Reader and mentions his increasing lust for recombinable life data streams I really think there’s something here – life dashboards or something. I’d love to be able to see my financial burn rate, my location, my energy usage, my tracked weightall of this stuffvisable and interpretable.
- This Flickr set contains pictures of an iPhone Cardboard mock-up with rounded corners I love that people have time to do these things, and I really appreciate their existence. I’m a bit jealous, actually. I’d love to spend time like this…
- Does anyone know much about the DLD conference? I’m thinking of going (at quite short notice) but I don’t know enough about it to make a reasonable judgement about it.
- Mark Pilgrim has a rather negative view of Steve Jobs’ announcement about iPhone software I’m a bit new to this particular shitstorm that seems to be coursing over the internet, but it seems to me that this is no more or less spectacular than Nokia’s requirement that you get applications signed before they can be run on Series 60…
- There’s probably some history to the use of the line, “Macs are for queers” in this Penny Arcade cartoon that I’d love it if someone could explain to me… In the meantime, without the benefit of history (like many other readers of that strip), I’m going to pretend it says, “Macs are for n*****s”, come to my own conclusions and move right along…
- Ooh, there’s now a rounded version of the Gotham typeface (used everywhere, including in Yahoo product names) If anyone’s ever seem me talk at conferences, they’ll know that I’m a bit of a fan of the rounded font. It’s a bit of a Web 2.0 fetish as well. Personally at the moment I like the uniform stroke widths of VAG Rounded, but this looks pretty interesting…
- Typographica writes about Gotham Rounded and compares it to various other rounded faces… An interesting overview, complete with reference to Bryant, which has some lovely stemless variants of m, n, u and w
- The BBC has an article about people who think all this technology stuff is just moving a bit too fast, really. It cites the iPhone as an example. It is a dumb article. In the UK, many people are confused by technology but still end up with Sky+ and mobile phones. Point is, there will always be confusing stuff as long as there is new stuff. Eventually, people like Apple make it usable and useful for the mainstream. Duh.
- The Burning Crusade is out on Monday and I have to say I’m actually really looking forward to it… After a few months off the Warcrack, I’ve now developed a more reasonable and sustainable habit which I’m enjoying quite a lot. Burning Crusade should feed it nicely.
- The ModBook is a splicing of a MacBook and a WaCom screen/tablet and it looks actually pretty lovely… I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one of these. Apparently tablets are mainly used inside hospitals and for deliveries and stuff and so aren’t a good market for Apple. Still, it’s pretty nice…
- Flash Element TD seems to be some kind of towers-based game and I’ve played it a fair bit and it’s stupidly addictive…I’m not sure you’re supposed to be able to splat towers over one another. Surprisingly intellectually invigorating. Lots of nice bits of logic and animal instinct overlaps…
- Lovely Preston strides off Buzzcocks set in unlikely to endear himself to the public move… So I have a bit of a thing about lovely Preston, and I even quite like that Chantelle woman and I know that this is not necessarily the kind of thing you people want to know about. But I find it interesting. Poor chap. He’s going to get roasted.
- Apparently Cisco are suing Apple for use of the iPhone trademark Apple are being typically bullish about the whole thing. Interesting to see which way this one turns out.
- Jason Kottke has mocked up the size of the new iPhone in cardboard with pictures to get a sense of its form factor God I’m keen on that iPhone although it is the most expensive thing ever made in the world. Jason’s model makes it look a litlte on the large size, but considerably smaller and sexier than the Nokia N770 or most of the smart phones…
- Joel Veitch’s 12 Days Of Christmas for charity Referencing this is a bit late and clumsy, but I’ve been a bit distracted and I’m only now starting to come out of my hole…
- According to a campaigning group, staff at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to officially comment on the of the geological feature Apparently, the reason is that the geologic age is way in excess of the apparently 6000 year old age of the planet according to Creationists. Not sure I believe the story, and will look into it further…
- Lifehacker’s awesome list of iTunes power tips There are actually some decent ones hereie. things you didn’t already know if you used it regularlywhich are worth exploring. Multiple libraries and PDF storage are both quite interesting…
Categories
Taking a little time off…
It may not surprise many of you to know that the last month or so has not been without its stresses. I’ve made, unmade and remade a number of significant decisions in a number of weird areas of significant impact to my lifemore of which in the new year. I’ve also been rather swamped in both my work and personal life. And finally I’ve found myself in the company of a great many people in lamenting the death of a friend and pioneer of the creative and expressive web. I’ve wanted to write a proper post about Leslie since the moment I heard the news, but I’ve not really known what to say. So I’ve been remembering her with friends off the web instead. The world is much the worse without her.
Anyway, during the last month or two, my site has suffered enormously. Many things I’ve wanted to write remain unwritten, many things I’ve wanted to take apart remain unscrutinised and I’ve made a conscious commitment not to take on any more commitments until such time that I get everything in order, which has meant missing out on a few really interesting opportunities. The truth of the matter is I’ve been in danger of burning out a bit and so I’ve decided to take the holiday that I’m due and take a little bit of a break from the web. So I’m planning for the next week or two to be barely online, to not be posting unless I just find myself doing it and to basicallywelllet my brain get its shape back.
I’ve still got a lot I want to get out, and I’m thinking the period after Christmas or in the early New Year might be a good time to do so, but for the moment I just wanted to say Merry Christmas to everyone. Spend time with your loved ones, make something for fun and change your environment for a little while and I’m sure it’ll do you the same world of good that my two days in Norfolk so far is already doing for me. I’ll see you all soon! x Tom