Category: Random

• People discuss my emotional state at dinner parties
  Which is a little strange. I wonder what conclusions they came to?
• Commentary links my recent rants on refactoring weblogs to Marc Canter’s concept of a digital lifestyle aggregator
  Interesting piece – I’m trying to work out how much of what I do here is about me talking in public and how much of it is about me organising myself in public
• Thoughts on the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator
  Lots of conversations around creating some kind of monolithic internal lifestyle admin interface, which I’m both interested and slightly horrified by…
• Marc Canter’s original post on Digital Lifestyle Aggregation
  I wonder if we could pursue a componentised vision by creating mediating interfaces that completely circumvent the individual weblog / flickr / whatever interfaces…
• Are cut-scenes in video games trying to make them too much like movies?
  ” As I’m sitting there, waiting to start mashing buttons again, I can’t help but think that this is kind of lazy design. Isn’t there a better way to do this inside the game itself? Why ask the player to stop playing?”
• Boing Boing talk up ETech, earlybird registration (I think this has passed) and set some pretty high expectations for our talk…
  And ha! Biddulph and Hammond don’t get nicknames. Suck on that!
• Top 10 Web Companies to Work For
  It’s a shame that the BBC isn’t on that list, but I’m not sure it’s an enormous surprise…
• Push to Talk
  I watched a show about Push to Talk on the BBC the other day. I’d never heard of it before, but apparently it’s huge in the states. Is this true?
• Nominees for the 16th Annual GLAAD Media Awards
  “The GLAAD Media Awards recognize and honor the media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the issues that affect their lives”
• I went to see Ocean’s Twelve at the weekend (and this is Metacritic’s page for it)
  Jesus that’s a strange meta-film / celebrity circle-jerk. Can’t figure out what I think about it. Lots of front, lots of charm, not terribly good…
• jbum’s Flickr photostream is full of interesting Flickr visualisations and exciting meta-uses of Flickr-sourced imagery
  Fascinating and beautiful stuff found via the glorious Fiona Romeo’s weblog

What follows is pretty much the archetypical weblog post. I mean it doesn’t have cats in it or anything, but it’s the next best thing. It’s like practically award-winningly archetypical. You want to give someone a lifetime achievement award for weblogging or something, then it would be for quality posts like this one, right? Right?

When I was a kid – and I mean something like seven or eight years old – I lived in a house in Norwich on a road called Sunningdale. My mother used to do a lot of her local shopping in a tiny little shop on Unthank road. I cannot remember its name. Anyway, my mother used to get me these biscuits – they were made by Bahlsen and were called ABC biscuits – and I used to love them. They were absolutely, undoubtedly my total favourite biscuits. It was my special treat to get a packet of these biscuits.

Anyway, one day they weren’t there any more. Just like that, they were gone. And after a few brief weeks of hoping they’d turn up again, my tiny child-brain got used to the idea that they weren’t coming back and somehow I managed to get on with my life. Every so often I’ve found myself in a shop with Bahlsen biscuits and I’ve had a bit of a scout around to see if they had them. But they didn’t. But hey – no biggie, right?

Recently, however, my family went on holiday and what should they find in some obscure shop is southern Spain, but packets upon packets of my favourite biscuits. And so they bought them. Six packets of them. And I tried them, and they were really nice. And now I’ve only got one packet left (pictured below). So here’s where you guys come in. I don’t want to sound like an addict, but does anyone know where I can get more of these gorgeous beautiful biscuits? I’ll send you cash money for them. If you know a shop in London where I can get them, I’ll be overwhelmed with good-will towards you.

So there you are – a long post about biscuits in the tradition of English weblogging. But yet also somehow with a touch of self-aware poignancy, because these aren’t just biscuits. They’re also a part of my personal narrative – a piece of my living history rediscovered! Crunchy history! Chocolaty history! Mmm… History..!

• John Rawl’s Veil of ignorance
  “Imagine that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue.”
  (categories: johnrawls philosophy socialcontract veilofignorance morality society politics)
• Annoying article about Waterstones must be regretting firing that annoying weblog guy for calling them Bastardstone’s etc…
  But he was an arse! He deserved to get fired! I can see how grey areas could emerge, but this doesn’t appear to be one. I think this is making the webloggers look dumb, not Waterstones…
  (categories: waterstones weblog weblogs blog blogs employment)

• Star Trek: Enterprise has been cancelled. Ah well… Lost is better anyway…
  “The creators, stars and crew of Star Trek: Enterprise ambitiously and proudly upheld the fine traditions of the Star Trek franchise. We are grateful for their contributions to the legacy of Trek…”
  (categories: startrek television tv upn sciencefiction scifi fantasy entertainment)

• Microsoft plan to call EU version of Windows something like: Windows XP – dorky EU edition for losers and whiny people…
  I may have made that up a bit, but only a bit.
  (categories: windows windowsxp microsoft eu)

• A parody of the latest issue of new ETech patron saint, Iron Man
  Warren Ellis is taking Iron Man in a fascinating direction, based around the contemporary tech community. But not everyone’s as thrilled by that as me…
  (categories: warrenellis comic comicbooks comics ironman tonystark parody humour)
• Pharmacopoeia’s amazing “Cradle to Grave” art exhibity that I saw at the British Museum on Sunday
  A beautiful piece of cloth has thousands of pills sewn into it creating a biography in medication…
  (categories: pills art cloth pharmacopoeia britishmuseum pharmacy drugs)
• Four million pictures have been uploaded to Flickr
  And this is the four millionth – it’s a picture of cups!
  (categories: flickr statistics photo photographs)
• Mr Biddulph’s del.icio.us tag stemmer reveals how redundant many of my tags are
  Which no doubt will give Mr Schachter even more ammunition for his occasional stern eyebrows in my direction
  (categories: joshschachter delicious mattbiddulph tags folksonomy folksonomies tag folktags)
• Mr Biddulph also has decided to graft together the Radio 3 site with del.icio.us
  Clearly we’re not keeping him busy enough at work!
  (categories: radio3 bbc delicious)
• Alex Wright on Sanford Berman, the ‘original freetagger’ – interesting because of the coinage of yet another folksonomy synonym?
  “Back in the 1970s, Sanford (Sandy) Berman, the head cataloger at Hennepin County Library in Minnesota, did something librarians rarely do: He started making up his own subject headings.”
  (categories: freetags alexwright sanfordberman sandyberman catalogue library libraryscience taxonomy classification)

• America hates spoilers!
  Kottke versus everything that’s good in the world…
  (categories: jasonkottke america flickr flag antiamericanism antiamerica spoilers CNN)

• Former minister, Chris Smith, is HIV positive and has been for 17 years…
  I have tremendous respect for him for this whole thing – maintaining his life, and working at such a high level for such a long period of time. Hopefully it’ll change how people think about people who are HIV positive…

• Apple-like-styled sub-Sony Aibo ‘iDog’
  Sings music from a stock set of phrases, responds emotionally to touch and can be plugged into an iPod – at which point it will dance
  (categories: idog technology sony aibo apple design beautiful music audio mp3 ipod)
• A strangely serious piece of coverage of the Bloggies
  “A number of web pioneers have been overlooked again this year, notably Dave Winer, with Tom Coates from Plastic Bag and Derek Powazek lining up as favourites for the Lifetime Achievement Awards.”
  (categories: awards bloggies weblogs weblog blog blogs)

• Teen Bear – Awesome idea for new American gay magazine
  Although I’m slightly horrified by the idea that someone with about six chest hairs might be considered wild and manly. Ho hum.