plasticbag.org

• Wanted – thirty Chinamen and a Zeppelin…
  And if you want to know why, you’ll have to follow the link.
• BoingBoing releases five years of posts for people to download and muck around with, and cites me as an inspiration. Aw……
  “To celebrate our first half-decade as a blog, we’ve put together a single html file containing 17,000+ posts (every post as of yesterday mid-day) in Movable Type export format.”
• Awesome graphing analysis of BoingBoing reveals a surprising obsession with the BBC…
  I love this little browsable app – it gives a real perspective on what the Boingers are interested in. Also it’s more evidence that Cory either has too much energy or not enough to do…

This evening I took some photos with my camera and sent them to Flickr. And when I went to Flickr, this is what I saw:

Vodafone, my mobile phone provider have started to turn all outgoing e-mails that go through their system into image-full HTML e-mails, dripping with highly-branded bullshit advertising crap that clearly they believe I’ve been clamouring out for. Except of course it breaks Flickr completely. Each photo I post is now complemented by spacer gifs, little logos, gif text and dumb bloody icons. Flickr treats each as a separate image. The act of posting four photos makes pages of empty marketing guff appear across my photostream – and by consequence all over my weblog. Effectively, with one flick of a switch, my camera phone has become useless and my desire to use Vodafone immediately and effectively zero.

What kind of cretinous organisation does this kind of thing? I mean I’m already paying to send multimedia messages and e-mails via their service – and they still want to cover it in advertising? I mean – I’d leave for the advertising and the HTML e-mails alone, but to make me pay for it too? Excruciating. I’m also an evangelist – promoting picture messaging via the Flickr box on my site – and a good customer. I pay more for data transfer each month than I do for making phone calls. What on earth were they thinking?

I rang up in a fury and they’re looking into it, but if I don’t get a satisfactory response I don’t think I can stay with them any longer. No doubt there is a way around this stuff, but mobile phone connectivity is excruciating to set up, and covered in proprietorial crap that seems designed to do nothing but confuse. And if it’s confusing me a lot, then I’m assuming that other people will be as or more confused by the whole thing. Therefore, at this precise moment in time, I’d say if you were thinking of using your cameraphone to post to your weblog or to Flickr, then you should seriously consider staying well away from Vodafone. And if you’re stuck with them already – ring them up, shout at them or send them e-mails telling them to stop trying to milk every last penny of value from every picture message that someone sends, because it’s sure as hell going to start hurting their bloody business if it’s not possible to use these services in the way that see fit…

In the meantime, if anyone knows how I can get photographs onto Flickr using my Nokia 6230 without getting all these vile guff, then please post in the comments below. In return, I’ll give you my first born child. Unless I actually have a child. In which case, maybe I’ll get you a coke.

• The Haddock Family Tree
  Interesting life and development of a mailing list this one. You can see me spring parthenogenically into the mix in 2001…
• Spandexman.com – Super Hero Unitards
  Contains an intensely scary number of grown men wearing super-hero style lycra body suits – some of which come with zips from from crotch to butt

• Now even Metafilter is using tags – by the time we’re talking about our work in this area I wonder if it’ll still be fashionable?
  The implementation here though is a bit odd – you can only tag stuff that you’ve written, and there doesn’t appear to be any immediate personal benefit for doing so, except maybe self-promotion…
• PLAN Pervasive and Locative Arts Network
  First Workshop of the Pervasive and Locative Arts Network – looks interesting – I shall probably be there…

• Definition of Anomie from Wikipedia
  “Anomie, in contemporary English means the absence of any kind of rule, law, principle or order.”
• “A vampire is on the loose in Birmingham. And an inept one, if reports are to be believed. Which they aren’t.”
  Despite the complete lack of evidence, no rise in bite-related injuries and the like, there is apparently a vampire stalking the streets of Birmingham
• Wikipedia’s description of Discordianism is fascinating both for its accuracy and for reading more like a Discordian text than a Wikipedia article. I wonder where the edges are?
  “Discordianism has been described as both an elaborate joke disguised as a religion and a religion disguised as an elaborate joke. Some of its followers make the claim that it is “a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion.”
• An article I wrote for the Guardian a little over a year ago on the future of weblog culture and technologies…
  “The real growth area in the next five years will be in these contextualising tools – the mechanisms that make weblog culture more accessible and accountable.”

• Together in electric dreams: statistical analysis used to determine hit songs
  “From unsigned acts dreaming in their garage, to multinationals such as Sony and Universal, everyone is clandestinely using a new and controversial technology to gain an edge on their competitors.”
• Mind Hacks: Review in The Guardian
  Mr Webb’s book gets a glowing review / regurgitation of the press release in Guardian Review. The book remains highly recommended!

• All of the net, all of the time… Warning – I’m about to be really scathing about this…
  Could this article on wifi access in bars and cafes be the most tedious article ever written by a human being?

• Pitchfork’s had an interesting redesign that pushes it widescreen and almost unbrands itself – pushing enormous amounts of content onto the homepage
  As ever with these things, you wonder if the obscurantism is partly intentional to make the brand zinelike or hipster. Quite beautiful, but maybe more suitable for a weblog layout?
• Foot-based mobile interaction with games
  Intriguing one this, and really up there in the embodied interaction stakes I guess. Putting bits of yourself into the game. Blurring digital and real. Intriguing.
• Creating and Marketing Your Own Podcast in 4 Hours..! What do Heineken and the BBC know that you might not?
  Really funny! Found via an Adword on Google. Now you too can set up your own podcast with help from our free video and opt-in newsletter! Or – I guess – you could read the page on Wikipedia instead…
• Big news of the day is Technorati’s new implementation of tags and hooks into del.icio.us and Flickr
  Don’t know what I think about this one yet – haven’t quite digested it. I think its success basically depends on SixApart moving towards something like a default tagging rather than categories interface for MT…
• Body-drawing communicator for distant partners
  And my point is: if this is the kind of thing that Media Lab Europe spent all their time on, is it really any wonder that they’ve had to shut down…
• Media Lab Europe to close
  “I imagine it’s similar to the atomosphere that the MIT Media Lab had at its inception: tons of space, enthusiastic students and an experimental attidude that assumes nothing is impossible.”
• The Independent pisses me off in two ways, first by writing something dumb about weblogs as online journals and secondly by suggesting I pay to read it…
  Twits. Anyway, I’ll say this again – a weblog is not publishing. Or at least, publishing and journal writing may be loss-leader, but the end result is weblog as communicative medium in public space…
• Composite image of the surface of Titan from Huygens’ descent to the moon
  At first glance it really does look like a coastline and some form of liquid sea. I love this stuff. I was gutted when the Beagle 2 failed. Totally gutted.
• A coloured image of the surface of Titan
  I don’t really understand this stuff – I don’t really see why you couldn’t take a colour photo. Surely people on earth want to see what it would be like to experience Titan directly?
• Paul Mison on the iPod Shuffle’s apparent disregard for podcasting
  Highly entertaining rant which I thoroughly agree with (except for the characterisation of amateur media as always shit)

• Clearing up confusion about the Mac mini…
  “Yes, it will boot headless, meaning with no display or video device connected, enabling you to have what I like to call an iServe.”
  (categories: mac apple macmini design computer computing server desktop commercial business technology)
• Apple’s Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses
  “The Sweet Spot. Until January 2005, Apple had no iPod or PC products that served the mass market. With the launch of iPod Shuffle and Mac mini they have finally converged two product paths with the mass market in mind. This will not only drive more iPod
  (categories: apple product productdesign marketing market business sweetspot infographics design elegant technology computers computer desktop small macmini)

I’ve been getting more hassle online for being gay in the last month or so than I think I’ve had in the preceeding couple of years. Mostly I’m deleting the nasty ones, arguing with the clumsy ones and ridiculing the stupid ones, but it’s starting to get me down a bit. Core problem spot at the moment is some idiot whose IP originates inside Manchester City Council who has been posting on this post: On Belle de Jour (he really should check out his employers discrimination guidelines). But also I’ve had the arguments about my hypothetical business card, been called a faggot a lot by American teenagers and just this morning found another happy little deposit from some idiot on my last Supplementary links post. It’s all so bloody depressing… I thought we’d started to move on from this…