Author: Tom Coates

CODE! CODE! CODE! The lovely Derek reveals his sexy new front-end. LIVE HTML SHOWS! [via prolific]

Cool! Turns out that link I couldn’t get access to yesterday was a weird embittered attack on blogdom. Not necessarily a bad thing of course. Anything that stirs up the dark pits of our collective trans-conscious is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. What’s most amusing to me is that the part that links to me comes in the sentence: “Only if I had the masochistic urge to receive 60,000 acid emails from disgruntled, sharp-tongued (fingered) bloggers would I have the gall to conclude from my brief blogging experience that to blog is to engage in the pursuit of what one extremely popular blogger calls PIPA: Personally Identified Public Anonymity.” Which is bizarre as far as I’m concerned, because I’ve only ever been involved in three major scraps via plasticbag.org in the whole fourteen months that I’ve been running the thing.

Let’s play a game. Rise the challenge. SLAG ME OFF PUBLICLY and I’ll write a VERY STERN post about you in return. There you go – can’t say fairer than that.

So I saw Nick today for lunch and I brought him a copy of the Matrix on DVD as a combined Christmas and Birthday present, which was slightly embarrassing as then he decided that in order to get me a Christmas present by tomorrow evening, we’d have to go then and there, at which point he reappears with ANOTHER copy of the Matrix on DVD (I know it was a different one, because it was still in the plastic) which of course rather delights me, but at the same time seems rather like an excuse for two people to buy themselves something they have been wanting for ages and pretend it has something to do with Christmas.

I’m supposed to be going to a work-mate’s leaving do tonight in Camden. Unfortunately my spirits are at a low (again) and the thought of making cheery conversation while my head is full of bloody murder is not particularly attractive to me. The thought of all the things that I am supposed to be getting done this evening (from washing and packing, Christmas present wrapping to flat-tidying and bill paying) also fills me with a certain degree of horror. I’m off to Norfolk after work tomorrow evening. Finally a break.

Can anyone access this article? I found it in my referrers log and can’t seem to get access to it.

I just stumbled upon Derek‘s new micro-site about the writing and subject of his upcoming book: Design for Community. His first post reads: “Observation number one: writing a book is hard.” From personal experience from my doctoral work, all I can say is expect a hell of a lot of creative work from him over the next six months to a year, as he finds absolutely any humanly possible excuse to not actually put finger to keyboard. I, for one, am tremendously excited…

Scroll down the page a little way to discover the horror that Katy and I went through at a recent screening of Meet The Parents. She and I have had interminable counselling, but I still have flashbacks. The horror. The horror.

Thank You For The Days: Kirsty MacColl is hit by a speedboat in Mexico and dies. [Generic plasticbag.org tasteless comment here.]

“Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships.” Sharon Stone

There may come a day in your life when you find yourself so sick to death of your job, so overwhelmingly frustrated by the lack of respect that your very presence seems to engender, so totally bored by office politics and that boss who you’ve always found intolerable, that it comes to you that the only answer is to resign and go and find something else to spend your time on.

But those letters of resignation aren’t the easiest things to write. You have to be nice, don’t you? You can’t just tell the truth. You can’t catalogue every individual grudge and aggravation that you might have stacked up in your head. I mean, you have to think about your reference, don’t you? It’s important that you should leave in the same (apparent) good spirits that you joined with. But there is a place for all your petty grievances. And that place is called (satisfyingly enough) kissmyfreckledassbye.com.