Year: 2002

Ok, so tomorrow afternoon I should hear whether I got through the whole Occupational Psychologists’ testing – first stage of my interview process for the BBC job that I would cheerfully kill for. I’m not feeling very positive about it – in fact I feel heartily ill about it. I’ll go into full detail about the horrific experience tomorrow morning, at the moment I just want to pretend it never happened.

At the time of writing, the price of buying someone to come and kick your own ass was a mere $1.75. I wonder if it’s more if you want them to beat up other people…

Firda has created the CSS Colouring book featuring several table-less CSS designs for weblogs which you can run off with and adapt to your own sick needs. Firda rules.

A rude cartoon found via cal. Note that I tried for a while to find a picture of ‘Viacal’ – the fizzy limescale remover – on the interhighweb. But without any success. Leaving me to think that the world is conspiring to fuck up my jokes today. [Thanks to Gina for revealing that the world has indeed fucked up all my jokes by secretly changing the name of the damn limescale remover while I wasn’t paying attention – I present: Viakal]

So last night I went to eat Ethiopian food in a restaurant called Merkato in Islington with the team of people with whom I freelance. We roamed full and free from the menu, as Danny and Polly have both visited Ethiopia and know what to ask for. The food was frankly more unusual than I’d expected – slightly soggy sour pancakes are layered on a big plate and then supermarket-meal sized blobs of strangely bubbly meat-related products are dolloped out upon it. To eat, simply tear off pancake piece and shovel food into mouth with it.

And yet for all the excitement of the meal itself, the best bit was that one of our party – Neil – arrived at the restaurant at precisely 20.02 on 20/2/02 – a glorious conceit of a date that I commented on loudly at the beginning of my interview to the eyebrow-raisings of my assessors and which has been talked about at length by Mr Kottke.

It would be excessively harsh to say that I hated Occupational Psychologists. But it would not be excessively harsh to say that I don’t enjoy being tested by them. Let’s leave it at that…

Today is Online Community News day at plasticbag towers. Regular updates through next couple of hours:

• StreamingMediaWorld.com
  More than you could ever legitimately need to know about streaming video and audio media.
• CNN Community no more
  Looks like it’s been like it for a while, but CNN has completely closed down the vast majority of its community operations, leaving only occasional hosted webchats and as-and-when-necessary news-event related message-boards. This is probably because the page impressions these parts of sites provide are not worth the same financially – people using online communities don’t tend to click on adverts – and the legal worries and moderation costs.
• Top Ten Trends for Online Communities
  Particularly interesting survey of the Community sectors that are actually making money – including ‘search’, ‘education’ and ‘trading’ communities.
• Future uncertain for feedback sites
  The most depressing part of the dot-com boom for me will always be that people miss the fact that the internet at the moment is a relatively low-cost, low-overhead environment. And great sites like Epinions still end up relatively over-staffed and expected to produce huge profits. It’s not going to happen. I still have one issue with Epinions – one that I think is core – you can ask for an opinion about a toaster oven, but if you want to know which is the best toaster oven under a certain price, you have to dig around for hours. Makes no sense to me…
• Estats: Online Communities
  A fairly strange and motley set of statistics about the inter-relationship of IRL groups and the involvement of individuals who experience them online.
• What happened when plastic came back
  A couple of months ago plastic.com resurfaced. And what were the first reactions…? Pretty much what you’d expect…

There’s a book called Running Weblogs with Slash. For a little while this confused me. Why would anyone need a book for that? But then – of course, revelation – and I realised that you’d probably need a guidebook as to how to persuade his agent to let him do it, ways to placate him when he got a bit drunk and mad, ways to stop the other members of Guns ‘n’ Roses turning up at your place of work every twenty minutes asking to scab a fiver.

• Wednesday, February 20
  Today Slash and I went to the shops. And we had the best time!!! I guess that just goes to show that we’re really good friends after all. Slash got some fish fingers and I splashed out on some Tartare sauce. He nearly burnt his hair on the way out of the newsagents. God it was so funny. He showed me his new smiley earlier today – it’s great – I;{P – I think it sums him up perfectly. Except for the moustache, which I don’t really get. We’ll have a party when we get home, Slash says. He’s my best friend.
• Tuesday, February 19
  Slash won’t put the toilet seat down after going to the bathroom. He’s driving me insane.
• Monday, February 18
  Slash went to some big party yesterday and when he got home he was really drunk. I wouldn’t normally mind, but I live here too, y’know? The most annoying thing was that when I got up I had to remove all his stringy bits of hair from the shower plug-hole to stop it overflowing all over the floor. Honestly, I don’t think people know what it’s like living with an ex-rock god. Aren’t my needs important?! I had to get to Kinko’s by ten this morning as well…
• Saturday, February 16
  Today Slash said he thought Nick Jordan was the best British weblogger. How wrong can a guy be!? I keep trying to tell him that it’s clearly not going to be Nick Jordan. It’s GOT to be Graybo. Slash drank quite a lot after our argument, trashed the hotel room and refused to let me play Unreal Tournament on his PS2 even though he didn’t really want to watch Futurama on Fox. I hate him when he’s like this. In the end I had to get my Mom to ring him up on his cellphone when he was in the bath. I heard all this laughing from the bathroom, so I guess he’s forgiven me… Mom’s sure ringing a lot nowadays…

Go forth my minions! Perhaps you could resolve the biggest gripe that people have about the new plasticbag.org design – the lack of attractive looking permalinks. The problem is code-related – I have always scrupulously placed paragraph tags around each and every one of my posts on plasticbag.org. Unfortunately this means that unless I want my permalinks to sit in another paragraph after or before each post, it’s very difficult to format them. What I would really like is to have the permalinks as little floating circles to the left or right of the main content box, but every attempt I make to produce them results in a huge and unsightly gap between posts.

The Rules:

• Remember, a post may be more than one paragraph long! You have to preserve the spacing between paragraphs.
• This whole thing could be done pretty easily with tables, but let’s face it – tables are retro-tech. plasticbag.org is almost entirely CSS and your solution should be too.
• The best solution (shown to me on another site) gets the mother of all links for a week. Something really big and sexy, plus – er… $10 in their Paypal accounts if they have one.

Just as everyone in the western world has finally succumbed and bought a player – be warned: DVDs are obselete.