Category: Random

• 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!

• A BBC analysis column explores the politics and positioning behind the Internet governance discussions “Internet professor Michael Geist explains why the arguments over who runs the internet are far from over”
• An astonishing set of images of scenes and structures constructed out of paper that sit on or with the original sheet, the negative space of which add context. It’s really difficult to describe. You have to see this, and scroll right down to the end when it starts getting astonishing and almost confusingly great…
• A video of strange things you can do with air, weird liquids and vibrations… It starts off slow, but the last thirty seconds or so are absolutely mesmerising and extraordinary. A definite must-see…
• More of the beautiful paper creations by Peter Callesen that I linked to earlier in the day Mostly larger scale items, including ladders and replicas of architectural features constructed entirely out of paper with an astonishing attention to detail
• Doc Searls writes about how to protect the internet from the hands of the carriers “We’re hearing tales of two scenarios–one pessimistic, one optimistic–for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net’s toast. If they’re not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven’t talked about before.”
• The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles Popular Science must have the most aggravating pagination scheme of all time, but the story – about the project to find a way to create multi-coloured bubbles for kids – is weirdly amazing and the picture is beautiful…
• “E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago” – Business Week talks about how the abuse of e-mail as broadcast has led to its redundancy and looks towards IM, wikis and blogs as replacements… It’s all pretty obvious and the tools are useful. I wouldn’t be without a decent workplace wiki now. But the aggravating thing is that internal e-mail only got so useless because of corporate insistence on broadcast messaging. Idiots.
• Wired News explore the Sony malware installation and questions why anti-virus and security companies did so little about the whole thing… I’m kind of stunned by the Sony move – installing software without the permission of your users, software that exposes their computers to viruses and worms. That’s astonishing movie-villain behaviour, surely?!
• Ruby the Rival – an investigation of whether Ruby is proving a potential replacement or rival to Java I’m increasingly finding this stuff interesting as time passes. I guess I’m getting nerdier.

• Riya – photo search by face recognition This looks totally fascinating, although unfortunately since it only works on IE6 for Windows I can’t look to see how well it works.
• ‘Tom! The token gay friend!’ is best thing I’ve seen recently about our new status as happy nice desexualised and funny little pet people who don’t have anything to worry about… “As we learn from Tom, talking to friends and family about equality isn’t always easy. In fact, it can be an adventure.”

• Wikipedia has an article on the “Two-Spirit” identity that Native Americans with unconventional sexual or gender identities have claimed for their own… “Two-Spirit is a term for third gender people (for example, woman-living-man) that are among many, if not most, Native American and Canadian First Nations tribes. It usually implies a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit living in the same body.”
• The world’s least usable lavatory – my Flickr photoset of the confusing ablution arrangements at Yahoo… Mr Willison and I decided that we had to document the whole experience. Do not mock us. This is important “Design of Everyday Things” kind of stuff…
• Russell Beattie talks about his own experiences with the world‚Äôs most user-hostile bathroom “Foreign bathrooms are hard enough to operate while dealing with Jet Lag, but man that one wins a prize.”
• Five years after Meg and Jason were featured in the New Yorker’s weblogging article, Meg has an announcement to make. “So for everyone who’s been reading for five years, I just wanted you to know: a few months ago Jason and I got engaged. We’re going to be married early next year.”

• The history of Power Girl is a history of enormous comic book breasts. There’s a lot of insight into the minds of teenage male comic book readers in this piece… “Seriously, she has got to be the most sexualized ‚Äì dare I say, objectified? ‚Äì heroine in mainstream spandex comics.”
• Bill Gates stands before a hideous and apparently meaningless slide about Windows God, does anyone have the slightest idea what Microsoft are on about?

• Google Analytics has a really nicely implemented site overlay feature The analytics service basically looks like a good web stats product with extra features to help people optimise advertising and keywords. The overlay feature is particularly interesting.
• The Flickrization of Yahoo “How the founders of a hot young photo-sharing site are helping to change the focus of the search engine giant — and turning its fight with Google into a battle of man vs. machine.”