Lots of things going on in blogland that are worth talking about. Sometimes though I wonder whether it’s just better to stand back and be quiet. Familiar fights, old arguments, new people to have them with. Old battles still worth fighting, but I may not be the person to do it.
Category: Random
Links for 2005-09-22
- How To Turn Your Hamster into a Fighting Machine! Really helpful. Lots of spelling mistakes. But at least now I know where I went wrong in strapping the spade to poor little Fidgit…
- HTMLstamps – intriguing and slightly random way for web designers to indicate how the pages should be coded up… I don’t really know what I think about this, but then again I’ve always been slightly suspicious of designing web sites in Illustrator or Photoshop, even though I do it too…
- Daring Fireball takes the piss out of the Dell MP3 player It’s just a bit rubbish. It’s all so dull. Why won’t someone do something good. Surely it can’t be that hard!?
- Ian Betteridge explains (to folks in the UK) what to do when a PC goes wrong Bloody good advice. Really interesting. Little bastards won’t know what hit ’em…
Links for 2005-09-21
- ce matin un lapin So I never have to search for it again – a classic flash cartoon from the depths of internet history!
- Ja Da Another one from the archive – and classic late-Friday afternoon UpMyStreet fodder too, from before I worked at b3ta
- Apple head attacks record firms “Greedy” record companies are pushing for an increase in the price of music downloads, Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs has said.
Links for 2005-09-20
- I can’t quite believe I didn’t recommend this at the time: Pandora Music Recommendations engine I’m talking to a lot of people at the moment who think that one (folksonomic) way of navigating data is going to win over all the others. But it’s ludicrous, we need all the dimensions we can get and user-generated stuff sits perfectly well alongside and/or on top of top-down or expert categorisations
- Mobile Music Workshop 2006 at the University of Sussex – looks pretty neat… “How can we push forward the already successful combination of music and mobile technology? What new forms of interaction with music lie ahead, as locative media and music use merge into new forms of everyday experiences?”
- Consider this an appeal – can someone with clue please fix the Wikipedia article on “Penis envy”? So, I’ve studied a fair amount of psychoanalysis, and I know this article on penis envy is bullshit, and it’s been on my ‘to do’ list of things to fix for weeks, and I’ve got nowhere. So I’m putting out an appeal – can you make this better?
- “Flickr and Yahoo: please support open identity standards” Interesting piece this. Open Identity standards are pretty complex things, but it does seem pretty clear that there would be enormous benefits to be reaped from being the first organisation to embrace these standards (ie. all your services would already work with the identity system that everyone wanted to use)
- A new Penny Arcade depicts a historic conversation between myself and Matt Biddulph So far, it all appears to be working quite well. Speaking of which, back to ETech stuff…
Links for 2005-09-19
- Global Warming ‘past the point of no return’ “You’re essentially changing land into ocean and the creation of a huge area of open ocean where there was once land will have a very big impact on other climate parameters”
- Beatles hailed ‘best of British’ “The 1967 Beatles track A Day In The Life has been hailed the best British song of all time.”
- How single people are facing financial meltdown… It’s way way way more expensive to live by yourself, or to buy a home buy yourself, than it is to do so with a partner to share the burden…
- BBC News reports that Blair ‘attacked BBC over Katrina’ ‘Prime Minister Tony Blair believes BBC coverage of Hurricane Katrina is “full of hate” for America, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has claimed in a speech.’
- The Guardian’s report: Blair attacks BBC for ‘anti-US bias’ “The comments threatened a new rift between the government and the BBC following the Andrew Gilligan affair over events leading to the Iraq war and recent criticisms of ministers Today presenter John Humphrys, which were controversially leaked to the pres
- The Independent’s coverage of the alleged comments by Tony Blair to Rupert Murdoch Greg Dyke’s comment: “It may not come as a great surprise that the Prime Minister aims to please Murdoch but it comes as a bit of a shock he goes this far.”
Links for 2005-09-18
- Yahoo! Movies hosts the trailers for Brokeback Mountain What can I say – it looks moving, interesting, depressing and er… kinda hot. Um.
- The Question: Is it OK for a public figure to say arse ? “What happens with a lot of these words, like arse and piss and shit, is that they’re acceptable until about 1450,” says Jonathon Green…
- You hate yourself & you must die (on Flickr) Notes in offices got less and less subtle as the years passed…
- US teens ‘reject’ key freedoms “Over a third of the 100,000 students questioned felt the First Amendment went “too far” in guaranteeing freedom of speech, press, worship and assembly.”
- The Independent talks about Kate Bush’s reappearance after twelve years… “She was wacky, she was mysterious, she was a child prodigy who topped the charts… and then she disappeared without trace. This month Kate Bush is back with her first single in more than a decade”
- Nintendo Revolution Controller Unveiled, And It’s Revolutionary Mr Webb will be please – haptic interfaces, accelerometers and the like make it unlike any other controller on the market. Game interfaces are up for experimentation for the first time in years and it’s all nintendo’s fault…
- There’s a party over at the Flickr ranch on Monday (I think) and everyone’s invited Of course, I’m several thousand miles away so I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it…
- He Man does 4-non-blondes So it’s basically a gay joke and I’m a bit conflicted about it, but what the hell… S’kind of funny…
- Troubling Exits At Microsoft “There’s a plea for action to Gates and Ballmer to do more — slash the bureaucracy, tend to morale, and make it easier to innovate. But is anyone listening?”
- meebo.com – bloody astonishing multi-platform IM client in your browser Doesn’t seem to work so well on Safari – or at least not with the amount of tabs I have open normally, but still.
Help me decide what to write about…
I have an almost impossible amount of stuff to do this weekend, and a good block of them involve writing things for this site, and it’s already eight o’clock on Saturday evening. I don’t know where the time goes. I want to talk about my trip into the heart of government a week and a half ago (Andy Budd wrote a lot about it) and I want to talk about going to Our Social World a week ago and what I thought of that. And I want to put the presentations I did at each of them online in some form. I also want to remind people to get their ETech proposals in by Monday. That one’s very very important. There’s another post I really want to write about Microformats, and yet more about replacing controlled vocabularies with URL clouds, using pre-existing semantic structures to navigate around tagged content, and conceptual page-rank following on from Mr Biddulph’s post from the other day. And I have about a billion links to post – in varying levels of detail. And there’s at least one really big thing that I need to talk about that I’m not quite ready for yet. Oh and I really want to talk about the web-like qualities of Guardian redesign as well.
I genuinely have no idea where to start. I feel like I need a month off work to get everything out of my head and somewhere more useful. So in the absence of any discrimination from my side, and with absolutely no commitment from my side to actually write about any of the things above, what would be most interesting to you guys? I don’t really agree with the idea of a weblog having an audience, but I do believe in the idea of it being my voice in a community of peers. So what do you want to hear about?
Links for 2005-09-15
- Critics savage Ritchie’s new film The ads have looked good(ish) but the reviewers aren’t so keen. Interested to see what it’s like…
- Privacy Enhanced Computer Display A lovely bit of tech this one that makes what’s on your monitor only visible through special glasses. Reminds me of the LCD screen that’s completely unreadable from the sides…
- The Guardian’s Editor’s Weblog shows immediately the discussions and background behind the decision to un-drop Doonesbury At the smallest level this really does seem to have been a way that the editorial team can talk outside the publication in a less formal voice than ever before. Interesting stuff…
- A new design over on BenHammersley.com A new aesthetic that reflects – perhaps – his new hairless kilted visage as seen down the pub this evening.
Links for 2005-09-14
- Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age This piece really reminds me of my old boss Stefan Magdalinski, except without the slightly crazed look, bead of sweat and slathering…
- Xenu – “In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs.” It’s no wonder I’m an atheist – the faith of my forefathers is so dull. I want aliens and lasers. Now there’s something to believe in…
- ‘Proof’ our brains are evolving – a really interesting BBC News piece on genes associated with acculturation.. “The microcephalin variant appeared along with the emergence of traits such as art and music, religious practices and sophisticated tool-making techniques, which date back to about 50,000 years ago.”
- Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain takes top prize at Venice I’m kind of obsessed by this film, because it’s been a long time since I saw a compelling mainstream drama with gay people in it. Plus they’re cowboys. Hot cowboys.
- Shelley Powers takes Our Social World apart for being too dominated by males and not having enough minorities. (1) I am gay, (2) I spent three post-grad years working around identity politics, feminism and queer theory, (3) There are iniquities that need to be rectfied, (4) I think this argument is illogical, insular, self-defeating and insulting.
Links for 2005-09-12
- Some page scans from the first issue of the new Grant Morrison / Frank Quitely “All Star Superman” It’s kind of nice to see a good old-fashioned super-intelligent super-villain again. Missed those…
- An animated short film about trusted computing Pretty interesting and beautifully animated piece explaining the issues behind the industry’s adaptation of the concept
- “Anti-gay activists who stood up to be counted are counted” I don’t know what I think about this – it’s like some kind of bigot-outing, which seems both poetic justice and a little cruel…