Category: Random

Jet-lag equals brain death – I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s like the whole cognitive part of your brain is replaced with blind incomprepension. I get hungry at completely random times, go to sleep at random times and between four and six pm every day start looking at people’s heads to try and work out where I can hit them so they’ll be quiet and let me sleep. I hate jet-lag. Jet-lag hates me.

Anyway, in the four or five hours a day that my brief periods of being awake and sane intersect with everyone else’s, it all seems to be going well. I’m heading off to FooCamp this afternoon, which is intimidating and exciting in pretty much equal measure. I think I’m going to be talking about social media and user-generated metadata – and hopefully will be able to demo the Phonetags project that Matt Webb and I worked on earlier in the year with Gavin Bell and Graham Beale. I might even be able to finally put up the post about the project that I’ve been threatening since ETech.

After Foo, I’m back in San Francisco for Sunday and Monday night before returning to the UK. At the moment I haven’t quite figured out anywhere to stay for those nights, so if anyone has any suggestions that would be great. And if anyone – as ever – wants to get together and chat about media navigation, social media, social software or design for Web 2.0, then they should send me a note to tom at the name of this website, as usual.

• “Newsreader Michael Buerk has said “almost all the big jobs in broadcasting are held by women” who “decide what we see and hear”.” “All [men] are is sperm donors, and most women aren’t going to want an unemployable sperm donor loafing around and making the house look untidy.”
• Bit of a weird one – BBC News does a Blur v Oasis timeline in Flash Don’t quite get the point, but it is interesting to see the two bands move in relation to one another. More interesting would be to put people like Franz Ferdinand in there as well…

I have a new favourite website representing two of my favourite people, Matt Webb and Jack Schulze who have formed a new company developing expermental prototypes in “software, display, manufacture, computing, networks, graphics and fiction”. If you’re looking for clued-up people to help you develop some ideas or to work with you to find new directions, then – after a year and a half of working with Webb – I can’t recommend them enough.

Having said all that, I’m really here to talk about how sexy their site is, how completely it bucks the current design trends towards simplicity and text, and how much it represents some of the weird bubbling goo that they have in their skulls. The URL again: schulzeandwebb.com

• Did the BBC spam Wikipedia as part of a marketing ploy for alternative reality game, Jamie Kane? This is the first of two posts on this subject over the last day or so – read the other before making your judgement
• Rob Cooper from the Jamie Kane game replies with the BBC’s line on the alleged Wikipedia spamming “Just to confirm, the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. The first posting was simply a case of a fan of the game getting into the spirit of alternative reality a little too much”
• An interesting piece on a Web 2.0 panel held in the US recently “With Web 2.0 apps, the data might be from one place, the metadata from another, and the interface from a third party or a remix”
• Ian Gomeche Public Information Service reports that Ian Gomeche is in custody and has been sectioned
• One of my absolute favourite websites – Metacritic – has been absorbed into the belly of a larger beast. Hopefully it will find safe haven with CNET. I love you Metacritic… “After relying on a small group of volunteers as well as our own hard (and unpaid) labor over the past six years, we are extremely happy to announce that Metacritic.com will now be part of CNET’s Games & Entertainment family of websites”
• Whatever happened to Jaye Davidson – Oscar nominated star of The Crying Game and Stargate Basically nothing – he just withdrew completely from the industry after two films and returned to working in fashion. Just didn’t like it, I guess…
• Apple stocks are rising all over the place after rumours suggest that they may be about to annouce a deal connecting the iTunes music store with Google “The rumored deal would pair the nation’s leading online music store with its leading search engine”
• Art that celebrates our creation by the Giant Spaghetti Monster For more on this emerging new faith, I can recommend venganza.org
• A fascinating article from the Ecologist Online about the UK’s food culture and why it is the way it is… “No European country is as reliant on supermarkets for its food shopping as Britain. It is no coincidence that the UK also has the worst eating habits in Europe”
• Charlie Brooker’s dissection of this year’s Big Brother in the UK “Finally, the award for Unprecedented Dignitycide goes to Kinga, who … celebrated her second night in the house by masturbating with a wine bottle in the middle of the lawn”

I’m still running around like a chicken with its head cut off, so you’re just going to have to bear with me. Well, maybe that’s overstating it a little bit. I suppose I haven’t been running around insanely all the time – I have had a few breaks here and there. I’ve just not really had the energy to engage with the larger issues of the day. Instead I’ve mostly been lowering myself into a warm, milky bath of lame TV where I can destress with a bit of Battlestar Galactica (freaky body horror – awesome), Stargate Atlantis (aka Rodney McKay’s show) and Stargate SG-1 (the Pizza Express of TV sci-fi action). And then of course there’s been the wonderful relief of a three-DVD box-set of the Daily Show’s Indecision 2004 election coverage, which the dear Mr Sweeney sent me from the States.

I don’t think there’s anything I can say about the Daily Show that a thousand people haven’t said before. I became a fan whlie watching clips on the internet – an addiction that was enhanced by staying with Daily Show obsessives in the States. It’s bloody awesome television – smart, satiric and rude – that mostly retains a balanced and healthy scepticism for all kinds of political bullshit from all parts of the spectrum. The DVD box set is particularly awesome – covering the Democratic and Republican Conventions in depth and then a whole bunch of other stuff running up to Election Day itself. I’ve watched every minute of it and every feature and haven’t laughed so consistently in years. That is of course until the denouement, because of course not every story has a happy ending. It’s actually kind of heartbreaking to see Jon Stewart read out the list of states that outlawed any idea of gay marriage – the normal balance of the show rent with a kind of weird desperate horror at the emerging result. I’ll tell you this much for nothing – the DVD would have been a more consistently funny experience if the bad guys didn’t win at the end… Still, there’s always next time. Right? Right?

• An interesting – if slightly predictable – article about how Microsoft will die from an Apple website Bit old, sorry about that. Been a bit busy. You wanna make something of it?

• You see the thing about Ruby on Rael is that it makes it so much easier to get complicated things done… Like, er… Pick apples from high trees or um… Keep Sam Ruby from getting tired…

• Top 10 dot-com flops “Few of these companies actually made enough money to recoup that cash, and when their investors fled to the hills, these start-ups died dramatic deaths. These are the celebrity victims of the new-economy bust.”
• In which Daring Fireball takes Cory to task for a post on Apple and Trusted Computing Interesting one this – Cory treats any technology in his machines that could potentially be used to limit his freedoms as an invasion and an imminent danger, John points out that it’s not in Apple’s interest to utilise it. My head’s with John, my heart’s with Cory.
• Google Maps EZ Some easy code and a walkthrough for using the Google Maps API on your own sites
• Remote-Controlled Humans – by delivering electric currents behind the ear, you can steer human beings… “A demonstration video shows a young man walking down the street nearly run over by a passing motorcycle, steered to safety at the last minute by a guardian angel wielding a remote control. “
• “American researchers claim to have found convincing evidence that locates the site of the lost kingdom of Atlantis off the coast of Cyprus.” I used to teach myth at University and for the most part the academic approach to this is to say that the myth or idea of Atlantis is way more important than any real place – and to remind people that Plato used a lot of metaphors and fables to illustrate his philosophy.
• Bacteria froze the Earth, researchers say “Humans apparently aren’t the first species to change the climate of the planet. Bacteria living 2.3 billion years ago could have plunged the planet into deep freeze, researchers at the California Institute of Technology claim in a new report.”
• Apparently you can ‘hack’ lifts by pressing ‘door close’ and the floor you want to go to.. I’ve tried this at the BBC several times and the results have been inconclusive. Treat with suspicion!
• Ruby and Python Compared I’m just getting myself started in programming, after years of concentrating on navigation design, client-side design and code – Ruby is looking like it might be the language for me…
• What I’d say to the Martians (being a really funny New Yorker rant) “People of Mars, you say we are brutes and savages. But let me tell you one thing: if I could get loose from this cage you have me in, would tear you guys a new Martian asshole”
• An uncut interview with Joss Whedon from In Focus… “An interview with Joss Whedon, the renowned script doctor and “Toy Story” scribe who created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” – and makes his feature directorial debut with the sci-fi actioner “Serenity”
• BBC News’ obituary of Robin Cook “Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, 59, has died after collapsing while out hill walking in Scotland.”

Day One was frantic panic and mopping up water and washing saturated clothes and trying to clear everything up. Day Two was all launderettes and friends coming around and newspaper and second order mopping up. Day Three is a day at home half-working and half-dealing with landlords and people coming to see if the carpet’s salvageable. Day Four (and maybe Day Five and Day Six and … ) will be back at work, and dealing with the insurance company and trying to work out how to get all the carpet in all the rooms of the house replaced at the same time while working normal hours and keeping everything I own somewhere inside the flat. It’s just a distraction, but it’s clogging up a lot of my time at the moment.

• After Apple’s Mighty Mouse, comes their new – and funnier – Danger Mouse Probably only funny for British people of a certain age…