Category: Random

• Mr Webb takes the Musical baton and writes a huge, epic, rambling and rather gorgeous post about books instead Typically contrarian and typically engaging – well worth a read…
• Microsoft adopts web file styles The company is to base most of its document formats on XML instead of random propriterary formats
• Ben’s chewing gum art – a beautiful and engaging photoset on Flickr at the moment This is really stunning – a guy kneels down and paints all the pieces of gum on the road with stylised imagery of houses and waves and people…
• Bad Wolf – who is bad wolf? what is bad wolf? A BBC site launched today complete with more fodder to help support the Bad Wolf intrigue… Two weeks to go until we find out, I guess…

• The Record Effect, by Alex Ross “How technology has transformed the sound of music”
• A quick pass through the regulatory framework concerned with the distribution of Thorium I don’t know why this interests me so much, but there’s something glorious and intricate in the form-filling and process. It’s like coral…

Are there many decent online communities out there concerned with the thorough discussion of the aesthetic, narrative, psychological, theoretical, philosophical and economical implications of games and gaming (both online or offline)? Or are they all about asking questions about where you use the green key and how to kill the end of level boss? I know of a fair number of people who are fascinated by the cultural implications of gaming (Ben Cerveny, Stewart Butterfield and Alice Taylor leap straight to mind). I also know of a fair number of decent weblogs around the subject, including The Ludologist (best Economist design-rip off ever) and the Terra Nova folks. But what I don’t know of any good communities for these higher level discussions.

Folks on Barbelith are trying to work out at the moment whether to start such a forum. The board already has a more-engaged-than-normal clientele and the level of discussion is generally pretty good, so I suspect we could make a go of something fairly classy, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if there was an acknowledged need for a space for a community of intellectual gaming enthusiasts to colonise. Anyone out there got any opinions or recommendations? it would really help us inform this debate…

• Enormously SPOILER-full thread about upcoming Doctor Who episode “Bad Wolf” seems to rather stomp all over my little theories Definitely don’t read this unless you’re okay with the idea that big chunks of the mystery might be dispelled for you (or not if it’s all bunk, of course)
• John Gruber on some details of Tiger that you might have missed Really nice stuff here on interface improvements, tweaks, tips, shortcuts and apps. Highly recommended read…
• A Gamers’ Manifesto Good fun read for people who have played a few console games over the years. Not a lot of vision, but some good solid opinions…
• Oh wow! I’ve just missed my ten year anniversary of my first (nervous) post to Usenet… And it would have to be a bloody Babylon 5 group, wouldn’t it. This is not the life-history of a Nobel prize winner…
• A proposal for a really divisive website… (a post from plasticbag.org in December 2001) An old post I found on my site today which is kind of entertaining considering the whole kerfuffle over Blogebrity…
• Open Tech 2005 – 23rd July in Hammersmith, London – from the makers of NotCon BBC Backstage is sponsoring the Open Tech low-cost micro-conference in London. NotCon was ace, I expect this to be as good…
• Joel’s Programmer’s Bookshelf “This is the short list of all the books that I honestly think that every working programmer needs to read, with my own book hidden in there in case you didn’t notice…”
• The Desperate Housewives dumb “Which Housewife are you?” Quiz pegged me (and Matt Biddulph and Gareth Klose) as Susan… I really didn’t think I’d get into Desperate Housewives, but the last episode just blew me away!
• The classic Threadless “this was supposed to be the future” T-shirt has been reprinting and is available for sale again If I had a little more cash and T-shirts with words on them suited me a little more, I’d so be buying this…
• Another threadless t-shirt: Darth enjoyed gardening Awesome, stunning t-shirt that unfortunately happens to also be green, which is not a colour that suits a lot of people…

• Awesome Doctor Who-inspired T-shirts for people who really want to creep out people on the bus Apparently if you’re interested, then you e-mail “gasmaskshirt” at the domain address “comicfestival.co.uk”
• Some book pages on Amazon have Flickr-style visualisations of top words in the book, along with reading-ease analysis stats This is fascinating stuff – particularly because Amazon are clearly looking for ways to sell more stuff through the revelation of some quite complex data…
• Loic talks about the new Nokia N90 and drops a little interesting hint about Tiger’s support for Nokia phones If it means that I have a little more choice in what phones I can use properly with my computer, then I’ll be delighted…

If I was to wander over to San Francisco sometime between the 13th and the 27th June, would anyone be around? Are you all going to be off at some weird festival or something? Would there be time to hang and muck around at all? And if necessary – would anyone have a spare sofa or bed I could crash in for some of the time? Flights have suddenly got extremely expensive (US$1000 for a return to San Fran from Heathrow!) If you can see any possibilities, then send e-mails to the usual address, post a comment below or ping me on IM (plasticbagUK) or whatever… It’s all a bit impromptu, I’m afraid. If it comes off. Which it may not.

• A Joy of Tech “Blast from the Past” posted as a riposte to that Waterstones guy… “Mr Dewbottom! Get Into My Office Immediately!”
• How to Become an Early Riser An interesting post on sleep which mirrors a lot of my own experience
• Heather Champ joins the Flickr crew because she is so awesome and they’re incomplete without her Yay Heather! Yay! Finally Ludicorp gets some classy people working for it…
• A new digital camera takes several photos at split-second intervals and throws away the ones where too many people are blinking… I love that we’re at a place in the technology cycle where it becomes possible to conceive of ludicrously excessive ways of solving simple real-world problems inexpensively
• Yahoo’s Mindset is an ‘intent-driven search’ interface that gives you a slider to help you influence the results you receive between ‘research’ and ‘shopping’ polar extremes It’s an interesting concept. Two thoughts: Are the axes correct? Do the results correspond to them properly? Not sure about either…
• For Lost fans: The most important thing you’ll click on today See the hidden trailer for next season’s episodes, see the on-screen slogans and feel the lust for knowledge all over again…
• Homophobia “hard-wired” by evolution A slightly random piece of writing describes some slightly implausible research that suggests that homophobia might be an adaptive trait
• How to write a business proposal and tips for business proposal writing No idea how good this one is, but it looked interesting and I want to plough my way through it later…

• The ‘Missing Words’ Round (BBC Backstage prototype) A glorious, if impossible, game based on part of the popular “Have I Got News For You” TV Quiz

• Congratulations to ex-co-worker and b3ta godfather Rob Manuel on the birth of his son, Angus I give it an hour before the child’s picture is in three thousand viral animations…
• Firefox gets a question on US quiz show, “Jeopardy” “I’m now using the Firefox Web Browser that got its start from this Time Warner company’s Netscape division”
• “Bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon! Mushroom! Mushroom!” Awesome little video that makes me feel a little queasy, but is kind of funny and cool…
• “Father appeals order in divorce decree that prevents couple from exposing son to Wicca” This one’s really strange. One judge who believes in the ludicrously supernatural stops a divorcing couple from raising their son with other ludicrous beliefs. If it wasn’t for the rights implications it would be difficult to care…
• The Usability of Subscribing to Feeds I’m interested in applying the Odeo model to centralising aggregator sites, and also in the exposed input box approach from BBC Radio sites…
• “All parents are supposed to think their children are attractive – but Canadian researchers claim that “ugly” offspring are treated differently.” Bit old this article, but interesting in terms of the unconscious cues that govern our behaviour.
• A weird little almost-anti-long-tail story from Nature.com: How long did it take you to find this story? It’s states that most people who are ever going to read an online news story (blog post) will have done so within three days of publishing…
• An awesome representation of the Internet on a Threadless T-shirt by Oliver J Moss They don’t have it in my size unfortunately, otherwise I’d buy it right now. It could help me in my Nathan Barley aspirations…
• From the new issue of Wired: The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea Two articles in the same Wired about highly implausible geniuses with theories that the mainstream are suspicious of – getting more visionary or am I reading Fortean Times?
• A co-worker went to TED and talked to someone at the Google stand who asked about me… Anyone know who this was? Would be cool to wave and say hi…

So without wanting to give too much away, did I just go nuts or did The Doctor just flirt outrageously with a group-sex-having, slutty, bisexual, American futurist space-rogue (and zoophile) and then invite said rogue to move into his travelling S&Mish trans-dimensional dance club with him and a teenage girl he picked up on Earth a few months before? I swear, this series gets better and better…