Category: Random

Yet another Tiny Tom Time Out Microproject. All you Londoners, win tickets to MTV’s Five Night Stand.

I keep being reassured, but this still alarms me:

“If you become too indispensable to a specific project, then that is likely to be your project forever. If you get bored with that project, too bad. If you want to learn new, saleable expericence in case something does happen to your job or to your project, too bad. I can understand not wanting to move into management, but if that is what you want, too bad. Finding one particular job that you want to stick with is great, but it could become an albatross around your neck.” [Excerpt from Considered Harmful]

Today I feel jittery, unable to concentrate, prone to extraordinary mood-swings, exhausted, claustrophobic and wired. I have no idea why I should feel so awful, although I am currently researching Sleep Deprivation.

If you do a search on Yahoo! for “Sleep Deprivation”, the first thing you come up with is needcoffee.com. It’s not that helpful, frankly, but it is quite entertaining…

So I have been a bit lax on the old weblogging over the last couple of days, which frankly is unforgivable. But all that is about to end. I stumbled upon the Guerilla Banner Project today, and I haven’t been as chuffed for ages (translation for Americans: thrilled/pleased). These random people look at their favourite sites and produce alternative banners for them. Most of them are pretty cool. Particular favourite of the moment “Love Me, Love My Penis… Prehensile Tales.

There are reasons for my recent laxity though. One of the unpleasant ones involves the bill finally arriving for March’s excess bandwidth. I have to grab together another $150 to pay them off, and (in doing so) dispose of the epic Nexus debts. This charge having been disposed of, I can get down to the business of moving hosts. I didn’t want to do anything until the bill finally arrived (and I had actually put down the deposit on a flat) and now it looks like that was the right thing to do!

Something to make people jealous here. You never can tell in these situations, so it might be a fraud, but I appear to have been sent an extremely entertaining and in depth e-mail by none other than Michael Moorcock of Jerry Cornelius fame. And it’s all about The Bomb and Grant Morrison…

Never been so exhausted in my life. May have found a house in Arsenal of all places. Completely gorgeous little place – only problem is that one of our number has to sleep in a half completed loft conversion.

Ever more Hard Includes. Will the madness never end?

If I told you that I had spent today with my co-worker starting the process of changing 16,000 separate web pages to work with new banner and button ad coding (requiring around 165 separate hard includes), would any of you feel any sympathy for me? Said enterprise (plus last night’s uncomfortable sofa cushions) have resulted in a dull pulsing headache which feels like someone has stuck an air pump into my brain and is slowly inflating it against my skull. All in all, the last 24/48 hours have been completely overwhelming – there has been no area of my life which hasn’t been confusing or confounding or intense. That’s not to say it’s all bad stuff – not by any means – but there’s just too much of it.

So, Project Cool recommended Lockjaw today. I guess I can see why, it’s quite ably put together. I was just wondering about the lo-fi feel of the site – and the preponderance of grainy imagery. It reminded me of a trend in print design a while back for an almost fanzine feel. I don’t know if it translates that well to the web though – I mean there is so much real lo-fi stuff, I am not sure that it is easy to tell when it is intentional.

Evil Nick is off to visit a young woman in Los Angeles. He’s never been out of Europe before. I try and figure out what to say to him about the trip and can only come up with, “you’ll be surprised how alien you feel”. In order to get a flight at short notice, he has had to go via Frankfurt. Total length of outgoing flight – 14 hours. That’s got to hurt.

I don’t love Ben Brown, I just think he’s nice.

At some point in the last day or so (according to my referrer log), Zeldman linked to me. But then when I try and look at his site, I keep getting timed out. What’s that about? Can someone tell me what he said?

Oh, and if you have a minute to spare – have a glance at my latest microproject – the Best London Cinema poll. I’m never really sure whether or not they are any good or not – I mean they work, and they do what they are supposed to, but they are hardly the most attractive of designs. I was much happier with the Eating and Drinking Awards one. But then I had more than an hour for that…

If this isn’t unabashed.com angling for links, I don’t know what is:

“i’m not sure i’ll ever get many people visiting my site… i’m not into that whole ‘blog everybody else’ mentality. i don’t want to post that someone else has a good post… just to get some reciprocal links happening. i have a list of sites that i like to visit… because they’re good. cuz i like them… i’m not looking for anything from them– or anybody else for that matter.
that’s it. c’est tout.”

I was a late-comer to haughey.com, but I really enjoyed it when I found it. But with its recent redesign has shifted it into another gear. Very much to be recommended.

And I had a lovely evening last night with Sam and various friends of his. Just in case you were wondering…

Barbelith goes metalogic:

• Who links to me?
  I hadn’t even noticed that you could search blogger until today. The best thing is that you can see when other webloggers linked to your own site. It’s self-indulgent, but then, you know, weblogging isn’t?
• Beebo.org’s metalog
  Beebo.org is almost an obsession to me. It’s a combination of popularity contest and content filtering system. Just to undermine the point of the metalog section – why not visit these popular links: Microsoft Anti-Trust Case [Wired], A Pillow That Looks Like a Penis, The End of the 5k Award, “Bunky, I’m Confused”, Slightly Implausible Microsoft Site, Mount Etna Blows Smoke-Rings. And all of that is doubly meta-tastic, because it will now include the fact that I have linked to them in its stats…
• Hotlist
  The most linked to weblogs, courtesy of weblogs.com.