Year: 2003

I’m back in London now, looking around me suspiciously and thinking about what to do next. But the first thing I want to do is resolve an issue that’s been driving me insane for about three years now. When I was a kid, my mother used to listen to fairly terrible cassettes in the car on the way to school – this must have been somewhere between 1981 and 1985. She had this album in the car and it was kind of Motown and it had a song on it which I really liked. Mum swears it was by Deniece Williams. All I remember about it was that it had a line about a guy seeming to be like Jekyll, but actually being like Hyde. You see – clearly a quality song. Anyway – does anyone (i) know what the name of said song is? (ii) know where I could get a CD or decent quality MP3 of it?

From the Financial Times this morning: UpMyStreet.com in Administration

“Upmystreet.com, one of the pioneers of the UK internet sector, yesterday followed many of its long-gone peers into administration as financial pressure led the company to file for protection as it sought a buyer. Tony Blin-Stoyle, founder and managing director of the company that provides local information to users, said the company had chosen a “prudent course of action” that he hoped would give it time to find a buyer. “We have filed for admini-stration, but still have time as we are fully solvent while looking for a buyer,” he said. Upmystreet developed a reputation for high-quality database technology that made use of the internet’s ability to link people with information relevant to them and won a string of awards. Its website links consumers to postcode-based information such as council tax rates, house prices and local businesses, while its commercial services help business and public sector bodies organise their web-based information. The group, owned in part by News International, BSkyB and NM Rothschild, earns annual sales of about £2m but has suffered from the media and technology slowdowns.”

There’s a quote going around the internet at the moment that’s widely attributed to Julius Caesar – and it’s tremendously rousing and potent and apposite. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that it’s not also total bunk.

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

I’m a bit of an enforced holiday at the moment. Evidently I’ve been getting too crazed with work as last week my boss started passing me notes saying things like “You need a holiday” and “Get out of my company”. So it’s ironic that after all those months of carefully tending UpMyStreet Conversations that it should be the first workday that I’m out of the office this year that the site gets Slashdotted.

I haven’t had a chance to read through all the comments yet but mostly people seem interested in the concept of geocoding content generally – with Conversations itself getting fairly limited coverage. Nonetheless I’m hoping for a few insights here and there… It’s a pity that Slashdot’s audience is so US-centric, of course – since the site is designed for people who have UK postcodes. Most of the people who come via Slashdot won’t be able to participate in any particularly meaningful way.

Lots to get through this morning – all the stuff that I’ve meant to talk about in greater depth but haven’t had time to do so… Apologies to all concerned for trivialising your hard work…

• My favourite new kind-of-weblog is definitely 2lmc.org. I’m a particular fan of the design, but also the really funny geek humour;
• Giles Turnbull – esteemed British web enthusiast – has written a piece called Camino and Safari Compared for O’Reilly. Good sensible stuff;
• An annoying article for Adobe compares the performance of After Effects on the PC vs. After Effects on the Mac and comes to the conclusion that Macs are half the speed. I’m not going to dispute the results, only that people should bear in mind that it’s equally possible that the two versions of After Effects might not be of the same speed or quality;
• My co-worker Dorian’s stunningly cute and gorgeous little baby boy has started doing little early-morning exercises. Aw…
• Sex in the X-men? Maybe not in the movie, but certainly in the comic book – Sex in the X-men (via The LinkMachine);
• Is Nick Jordan – esteemed British weblogger – also Nick Jordan – esteemed provider of penis-enlargment pills?
• Joho the Blog’s piece on Links with Value is a better version of what I was trying to say in my piece The Responsibility of Linkage;
• I just bought this Tucano Second Skin case for my iBook – and it’s much recommended. The only way it could be improved is if it zipped fully open so you could leave your computer sitting on it;
• Jason’s finally given in and kottke.org is now syndicating full posts through .rdf. Frankly this is delightful and means that my daily NetNewsWire browsing experience is better than ever;
• Found on textism..com – a neat way to clean up Word HTML. This works pretty well, but also seems to strip out several special characters rather than encoding them (later note – oops – should read the instructions properly);
• Lance talks about coming to London – it was great to finally meet him and I hope we showed him a good time.

This probably couldn’t be any more trivial, ridiculous or infantile. But – just occasionally – OSX’s Mail.app’s tendency to truncate e-mail subjects and place an ellipsis at the end of the line has unintentionally funny side-effects…

There’s a page on this site that’s recently been getting a fair amount of traffic. It’s a page in the gallery which includes pictures of an establishment in Norwich, Norfolk called the George Bush Funeral Home. I don’t know how I feel about this. I took the pictures a couple of Christmasses ago after September 11th but before any massive pro or anti-war demonstrations were happening – and way before Iraq was even back on the international agenda. I’d seen the building years before of course – on my way back from school when I was a kid – only suddenly becoming a source of black satisfaction when George Bush the first got into power and when the first Gulf War was underway…

I don’t get that feeling any more. People linking to those pictures in ‘approving’ terms’ seems cheap to me. Tacky. Glib. It’s not an image that helps people think in different terms about anything. It doesn’t give people any more context or an understanding of any larger issues. It’s too easy an image to be ‘decent’ (in the moral sense). I feel more and more that a grasp of this issue must be fought for, worked at. What’s black humour in times of dissent becomes propogandist in times of war.

A couple of weeks ago I went to visit a friend in Primrose Hill. On the way over the bridge across the train lines I saw a beautiful sky. I like skies. You don’t get to see them enough in cities.