Category: Random

So anyway, I signed up for Gmail a while back and basically I don’t really use it even though it’s pretty well assembled and has some nice features and now I’ve been given three invitations but everyone who I know who wants an account already has one. I imagine the big craze for offering people enormous gifts and proposing amorous liasons in exchange for One Gigabyte of Full-On E-mail Pleasure has passed, but if you can think of a reason why I should invite you rather than just making three new accounts with funny names, then post a comment below or chuck me an e-mail to my fairly guessable normal e-mail address (hint: it starts tom@) and I’ll see what I can do…

[Update: I’m afraid all three invitations have now gone. As soon as I get any others I will post them up and people can make a case for why they should get one. Sorry if I didn’t send one to you. It’s not personal…]

Second update: I got another five invitations this morning and have given away four of them to some of the other people who contacted me about them either on this post or by e-mail. That means I have one more left if anyone out there wants it. Yet again – make a good case and I’ll give it to you. I’m adding one condition now – if you get an account and eventually get the ability to give out invitations, you have to give away at least one of those invitations to someone who says something funny on the internet. You can’t give em all to friends. I have no way of enforcing this, of course, but I will consider you a person without honour if I found out you have wilfully ignored your obligations.

That period before a launch is always stressful. This time is no exception. It’s occupying my entire head almost 24/7 no matter whether I try and leave work on time or whether I’m there for twelve or fourteen hour days. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s just there in my head and it probably will be until a couple of weeks after it’s finally launched. C’est la vie. It’s the nature of the beast.

In real life, of course, people can sense when you’re busy and don’t feel particularly upset if you aren’t able to give them the time that you would like to. They might not be thrilled about it of course, but they understand. But the signals that I can give off in public through my weblog are less clear. Has he just abandoned the thing? No. Why doesn’t he have anything interesting to say anymore? Well, I do! Probably more than ever at the moment. I just can’t find the headspace to work with to write them down. Why isn’t he commenting on that thing that’s so obviously one of his core interests? Well, it’s because I’m not commenting on anything – the only creative thing I’m able to do outside work at the moment is doodle in Illustrator.

What I need is some way of actually ambiently reflecting my personal weather – without all that clunkiness of actively choosing states of mind. What I actually need is some way of representing that I’m just really really behind… A first suggestion – some way of representing the number of unread posts I have in NetNewsWire at any given moment (currently way over six hundred). Except that my path of posting tends to be more circuitous than that. NetNewsWire posts get opened in browser tabs if they look interesting, read thoroughly and then (if they’re not something I want to follow-up upon) they get immediately closed. The number of open tabs reflects pretty much exactly the number of things I actively want to talk about at any given moment. If there are lots open, it probably means that I have a lot I want to write about and no time to do it in. Except that doesn’t work either, because in addition to the six hundred things in NetNewsWire I haven’t filtered and the fifty tabs I have open at the moment, I also have four folders in my bookmarks called “State of Play 1-4” that were the sum total of all the things I wanted to talk about and had open in Safari but then had to store quickly so that I could install a Max OSX update. That’s another two hundred discussions I really want to get involved in – that I want to contribute to. And then there’s the four or five little projects I have on the side that I’ve been trying to write up but have been incapable of doing so.

So six hundred unfiltered posts, fifty open tabs representing fifty filtered posts to talk about, two hundred bookmarks representing two hundred even more filtered conversations to get into, plus four or five multi-page documents (one around 6,000 words) that have been growing in the sidelines that I’m unable to push out into the world in any effective way. That is the index of how busy and behind I feel. That is the measure of my total absence of cerebral RAM. Do you now understand why I’m not posting that much?

6.30am: The Police call around and get me to open the front door. They knock on my neighbour’s door and ring the doorbell a couple of dozen times. Looking out the back window, the entire block is surrounded by plain clothes policemen. My neighbour doesn’t answer. This probably means that their son has beaten his girlfriend to a bloody pulp again.

So work’s still going a bit nuts and I have no time at all. It should all be over soon (couple of weeks max), then I’ll be throwing myself back into the world more than ever. In the meantime, a few little catchups from the few things I’ve managed to get done outside the BBC.

I went to see Harry Potter on Monday with my younger brother and bloody Cory who did his ‘taking photos of the “don’t take photos” sign’ thing to general hilarity from the rest of the auditorium. Again. And – of course – the Englishman dies quietly of shame inside (but it wouldn’t have been the same without him). Personal verdict – still flawed, but better than anything else in the rest of the series so far. Four stars. Well done to all involved etc.

And on Wednesday night, I finally got to see the Pixies in concert at Brixton Academy. It was a dream come true in many ways – and one of the most tight, sharp and systematically well assembled concerts I’ve ever been to. But it was also a slightly sad experience I think – tinged somehow with the fact that I’ve worn all the songs to the bone with repeated listening. Looking on the stage it looked a bit like Frank Black and Kim Deal felt pretty much the same way…

This weekend I’m planning to detox a bit tomorrow and generally get my head in order – maybe teach myself some more Illustrator to stop myself going nuts with thinking about the web. And of course I’ll be at NotCon on Sunday, as indeed should you be.

From a relatively old article (at least in terms of webloggia’s attention-span) comes some pointers on improving design through simplicity:

• Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because, in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of buying and storing music.
• Be transparent. People like to have a mental model of how things work.
• Edit. Simplicity hinges as much on cutting nonessential features as on adding helpful ones, the Newton MessagePad and the Palm Pilot being prime examples.
• Prototype. Push beyond proof-of-technology demos and build prototypes that people can interact with.

This is a good set of assumptions for trying out new ideas and building new products and pretty close to the way we’ve been working in R&Mi when we do our rapid prototyping sprints. I should really write that stuff up sometime…

Yesterday evening, after a few too many cocktails with lovely people from work and an emergency Italian meal, we walked back towards Charing Cross to catch the tube only to see a van full of police officers looking weird and mischievous while playing the theme tune to Mission Impossible incredibly loudly and driving up and down the Strand. They all looked about seventeen, and like they were wearing their dads’ uniforms. These are not the uniformed whores from Morrissey’s The World is Full of Crashing Bores and that’s quite nice. I wasn’t scared of them or anything. But I wasn’t exactly filled with confidence either…

The TV miniseries Earthquake 10.5 is just airing in the UK. It is – bluntly – an unmitigated pile of shit. Interestingly if you search for it online, pretty much the first thing you get is a long page by earthquake experts explaining precisely why it’s total bunk:

Fiction: There can be a magnitude 10.5 earthquake
Fact: The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs–the longer the fault, the larger the earthquake. In order to have a magnitude 10.5 earthquake you would have to have a fault that circles the Earth – no such fault exists.

Fiction: Thinking an earthquake is an aftershock because they couldn’t find an epicenter – all earthquakes have epicenters
Fact: Aftershocks ARE earthquakes!! The only difference is that they occur after a larger earthquake instead of by themselves.

Fiction: Nuclear explosions can “seal” faults
Fact: Nuclear explosions CANNOT seal faults. Earthquakes are part of a global tectonic process that generally occurs well beyond the influence or control of humans.

Additional Earthquake 10.5 fictions that are enough to drive you nuts:

• An earthquake creates dust clouds visible on satellite radar
• Using the term lateral skip
• Earthquakes can cause trucks to sink in dirt, long after the earthquake happened
• Scientists being able to successfully predict earthquakes over short time intervals
• Plates conjoin at 324 feet below the earth’s surface
• The magnitude of an earthquake in progress cannot decrease/stabilize
• Water draining into the faultline
• Fault opening at the ocean and water rushing up the fault

Now I know it’s churlish to expect entertainment to be completely accurate, but this is just a few things from a list of dozens! I’d like to think that people doing stuff like this had some grasp of what they were talking about, but evidently not…

Apparently some people using IE6 are having trouble logging into Typekey via plasticbag.org and as a result can’t post comments. Most other browsers seem to be working OK – certainly all Mac browsers that I’ve tried – but obviously this is a problem that I need to resolve. If anyone has any idea why this is happening (presumably I’ve messed up some aspect of the template), then I’d be delighted if they could e-mail me on my normal e-mail address: tom {at} plasticbag {dot} org. Otherwise I’ll look into it more thoroughly tomorrow evening, once I’ve slept and worked the requisite number of hours.

So my installation of Movable Type has never been the simplest of things. I’ve had to use cgiwrap to avoid some of the more arcane problems with pair’s process throttling and I’ve got MT installed in a completely different directory and domain to my site. For someone with as little overt server knowledge as myself, this means that every time something’s supposed to be a simple installation or adaptation process, everything goes completely wrong. This is all by way of me saying that I’ve still got lots of problems around the place with integrating the Typekey registration system, including but not limited to it randomly not working, having lots of really nasty preview screens that remain totally untemplated and generally feeling more than a little rough around the edges. I’ll endeavour to get it all sorted out this evening so that the Monday morning crowd don’t start snarking out at me… Plus: Lots of actually interesting posts on real subjects to come soon!

First impressions of the new MT are generally really positive. I’m still having the same problems with incredibly slow performance that I had before, which I’m now assuming are to be laid at the door of my $140 a month host – pair.com. While I can now manage to do a full-site rebuild without my server throttling the process, if I pre-moderate or delete more than two or three comments in one go the whole thing shudders to a grotesque halt. For this reason (and because I’ve had some twat try and pump another forty incest-related bits of spam through the site), I’m putting the ultra-draconian comment management features into effect from this point on. I’m afraid if you want to make yourself heard on this site from now on you’ll have to register with Typekey. I’m terribly sorry, guys, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my site prop up the porn empire of some grotesque little money-grubbing freak who thinks that pissing around with the personal sites of well-meaning people in order to make 0.01 cents a pop is a legitimate thing to do. Wankers.