Category: Random

• A court in the Pennsylvanian town of Dover has declared it unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design in the town’s schools… I think my favourite comment about the whole thing comes from Pat Robertson who said that the move risked provoking the wratch of God – despite the ID prononent’s assertion that it wasn’t a religious theory…
• “One in 10 UK websites fail to work properly on the open source Firefox web browser, a study shows” And the Odeon website is explicitly named again! That must be years now after they were first taken to task for it. They’ve made some improvements it’s true, but how long will it take for them to realise that it needs root-and-branch rebuilding?
• Kevin Marks explodes Susan Cheever’s ludicrous take on the copying of digital artifacts… “It’s a strange experience to see your own property so appreciated. It’s disorienting and beguiling. You’ve been quoted. That’s how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace…”
• DIY Paper bookmarks This has been all around the web, but still – it’s a neat and simple idea. Printable corners that you can stick on books to keep your place or to annotate the content at that point. Annotation is everywhere.
• An awesome post by a Barbelite colleague on “Christmas Trees and the God of Yule” I bloody loved reading this – it’s all about Freyr, a Norse god of fertility, one of whose symbols was the Christmas tree – within which each Winter he would be reborn. This is way more fun and spiritually satisfying than Christianity!
• Wikipedia has an awesome article on Freyr full of enticingly obvious symbolism! “The most important Freyr myth relates Freyr’s falling in love with the giantess Ger√∞r. Eventually she becomes his wife but first Freyr has to give away his magical sword.”
• “How Google woos the best and brightest” One thing occurs to me is that such structures should either be well known, or kept very secret. All recruitment seems to be a gameable system. Ideally they should be well-known, so that everyone has equal access to the cheats…
• ‘Gay weddings’ first for Belfast “Two women, Shannon Sickles and Grainne Close, exchanged vows at Belfast City Hall, followed by a gay couple and another lesbian couple.” Lovely. And about time, frankly.
• A Flickr photoset of the notes taken during the inaugural ORG meeting, designed to try and capture the major issues that people felt about digital rights… Named, “Digital Rights in the UK: Your Rights, Your Issues”, this gets to the heart of many of the core issues that people are worried about w/r/t digital rights, although I’m sure there are more. Probably worth annotating for clarity?

• One Billion Internet Users (from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) “Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Because we have no central register of Internet users, we don’t know who that user was, or when he or she first logged on.”
• The guy from Suprnova explains why the site went offline a year ago… He tells the story quickly, but it sounds like quite a scary situation to find yourself in. Still, it also sounds like the story ended fairly well. I wonder what happens next…
• Roger Ebert describes his best 10 Movies of 2005, and mentions a whole lot of other films that nearly made the list or deserved a mention It’s a fascinating group of pictures. I can’t quite fathom why everyone in the US was so taken with Crash – it didn’t work so well for me, and I don’t think it did enormously well in the UK box office. Maybe it’s a cultural thing.
• Saturday Night Live’s “The Chronic of Narnia Rap” This one’s really spreading – I heard about it on a mailing list from a friend in the US about six hours before Cal sent me the URL. I’m guessing it’ll have eaten the internet by Thursday.

• John Spencer, who played The West Wing’s Leo McGarry, has died aged 58 God, what terrible news. I’m astonished that he was only 58 – he looked ten years older at least. It turns out that he was younger than my stepfather.

• Wikipedia survives research test “The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows. The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy.”

• Alexa Web Search Platform “The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents — even create their own search engines — using Alexa’s search and publication tools.”

• The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 I’m not buying the Web 2.0 = web app concept as such, but this is still a pretty solid list of good web apps out there and hence (at the very least) pretty much a place to find the gold standard to get inspired by…
• The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users I know pretty much all of this stuff, but del.icio.us can have a bit of a learning curve for new users. It’s generally worth it in the end though. Explore away!
• Punk photographer Andy Rosen has signed up for Flickr and is starting to post his private collection… Astonishing stuff – and apparently confirmed by various people around the place. Mass amateurisation goes both ways, as professionals start to take advantage of the more innovative tools of the little guys…
• Openomy – an online file-system with tags Haven’t had a play with this yet, but I’m intrigued by the idea of enhancing the very idea of online storage in various ways. Bears further investigation…
• Yahoo! offers Movable Type as part of its offering for small professional outfits “Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for small business users, taking advantage of its scale and efficiency, Anil Dash, vice president of professional products for San Francisco-based Six Apart, said in a phone interview.”
• Hotwiring Your Search Engine Repulsive SEOs wallow in their own crapulence over on Newsweek, happy to ignore the evidence that search engine position based on lies is always going to be under attack from search engines eager to reduce spam.

• Metacritic reviews The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – and likes it! I’ve fallen over with a revolting stomach bug overnight and feel like crap, but I’m still completely looking forward to the Narnia film and King Kong. Maybe I can persuade Cal to go too…
• Another film I’m looking forward to a lot – Brokeback Mountain 89 out of 100 for a gay cowboy movie. It’s difficult to see anything here that’s not worth investigating in greater depth…

• 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?