Year: 2003

This is going to sound ridiculous, but when I turned thirty, never in my wildest dreams did I actually think that time was going to continue moving after said birthday. Certainly I didn’t think that there would be birthdays after my thirtieth. It seemed so final – such an achievement! So it’s coming as a bit of a shock that this coming Saturday I’m going to turn thirty-one. Here’s an random analogy which might explain the sensation a bit – you climb Everest and you’re terribly proud of yourself and then suddenly you turn around and the mountain’s grown another few thousand feet. And then some nutter with a whip turns out and makes you start climbing. Or maybe it should be that you’re on a sledge going down a steep ravine and you can see the end in sight and the sledge slows down and frankly you’re a bit relieved, but then you’ve got slightly too much momentum and you end up zooming right past the relatively flat bit and down yet another ravine. It’s kind of like that.

Hmm. Anyway – it would seem cheap to direct people towards my wishlist, and god knows I’m not a cheap man. So, obviously, I won’t be doing that… No sirree. I’ll just stand here patiently making knowing looks and whistling to myself… Ho hum…

A selection of carefully filtered Apple-related linkery for your popular consumption, many of which had their origin in the monkey brains of 2lmc:

• Fetch Art for iTunes
• Haughey’s Migrating between Macs
• Macintosh Keyboard Shortcuts
• Detour controls where all your audio is going
• VoodooPad as a Desktop Wiki?
• PocketDock for New (bah) iPods
• More interesting responses about Panther

Digging around in my search requests for a laugh, I find this lovely little gem posted in the last few hours:

“Holy shit, for the first time since I have begun visiting this site (about 3 years or so) I noticed that your header image is an actual plastic bag”

The new job is proceeding apace – I’ve spent more consecutive man-hours in meetings than ever before in my life. Or so it seems at least. The edges of the job are beginning to become clear, and it’s all terribly exciting. One consequence of this is that I’ve not been keeping up with the world very effectively. Another consequence is that I haven’t had a lot of time to look after Barbelith. I shall catch up with everything this weekend. In the meantime, here are some more links about weblogs:

• Bloggers gain libel protection in the US
  An intriguing case about forwarded e-mail and editing has wide-ranging repercussions in the States for the legal implications of weblog content, e-mail lists and message-boads online;
• Are weblogs author-first or content first?
  It seems clear to me that – for whatever reasons – the form of the weblog has been adopted primarily by individuals. Whether this is for good or ill, it’s now our responsibility to find the best ways to derive value from this state of affairs;
• Blogchatter
  An iframe shows the latest activity around the weblog-world as derived from weblogs.com. It may get take-up, but it’s essentially a nice little curiosity;
• My-expressions.com
  Moblogging be-damned – picture messaging to weblogs is likely to be huge. If you can’t set it up centrally, you could always get a Typepad account and moblog into a javascript file that you could include into your main weblog. More on this as I get it working;
• Should Old Media Embrace Blogging
  “Traditional publishing is about putting on a show; building a network of weblogs is like hosting a party,” says Simon Waldman, head of digital publishing at the Guardian.
• Media Guardian 100 #94
  “The art of “blogging” – or web-logging – has been around almost as long as the internet itself. Techies have always kept online diaries, even if no one bothered to read them.”

Freud on super-heroes and super-villains?

The man who, in consequence of his unyielding constitution, cannot fall in with this suppression of instinct, becomes a ‘criminal’, an ‘outlaw’, in the face of society – unless his social position or his exceptional capacities enable him to impose himself upon it as a great man, a ‘hero’.

‘Civilised’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908)

A few CSS links from around the internet recently:

• Lurking in Shadows: CSS and drop shadow effects
• About hebig title pictures
• Information on border slants

I’ll be buggered if I can figure out how to get photo-messaging or e-mail or the interweb working on my little T610, which they don’t tell you but doesn’t actually make images of a decent useful size (not 640×480, but 288×352 of all sizes). I’ve fiddled with the settings incessantly. Maybe I need to talk to the company themselves. Anyway – I’ll be buggered if I can send ’em, but I can sure as hell take ’em. Presenting a collage of the first few days with my new phone…