Category: Random

Gratias tibi ago, Domine. Haec credam a deo pio, a Deo justo, a Deo scito? Cruciatus in crucem. Tuus in terra servus, nuntius fui; officium perfeci. Cruciatus in crucem – eas in crucem.

Here’s a few things that I’ve found on the internet recently and really wanted to be able to write about in something vaguely resembling detail, but let’s just face it, it’s probably not going to bloody happen. Which is a shame. So here are the links, all the links and nothing but the links:

• Search for web’s favourite colour
• Just how fast is Friendster growing?
• Sony Ericsson T610 Usability
  (I’ve been wanting to say this myself for a while)
• Beautiful Pictures of Earth from the Air
• Seriously neat metafilter thread (via Ben)

So in the dream I’m back at University and I’m in one of those literature classes that you actually only get at school, where people are supposed to give their massive critical insights on a chunk of a play that’s about twenty lines long. I remember getting extremely irritable when someone cited a massive bastardisation of one of my favourite critics, but somehow the fact that people were applying theoretical approaches to Wifi to literature passed me by…

It’s been driving me mad for weeks, but now I finally know the music that’s playing in the diet coke advert where the girl is on a train and everything she reads around her seems to be suggesting that she gets down and dirty with the guy opposite her… The song is by the Brothers Johnson, is called “Strawberry Letter 23” and is available on the Jackie Brown soundtrack. Bits of the song sound creepily like “I wanna sex you up”. Other bits sound like Supertramp only with more soul. Weird song. Cool, though…

So someone wants to be my friend on Friendster. Yawn. God I’m popular. Blah blah blah. Except – what’s this – they have a user number of something like 750,000!? My god, how many people are on this damn thing!? So I go digging around in the ‘new people’ pane and the user numbers are around one million two hundred and fifty thousand! That’s insane! So I dig around and figure out you can get your own user number by clicking onto the second page of your list of friends. Assuming, of course, that you have that many friends. (Shines fingernails, looks smug.) And it turns out that my user number is 2175. Which I think demonstrates how awesomely cool I am, until I then figure out that the person I know with the lowest Friendster number is Azeem, which rather puts paid to that theory. (Shit-eating grin to camera.)

It’s such a shame we didn’t figure all this out earlier – I’d love to have tracked this stuff in some way – see a graph of how the member numbers have gone up over time. (Much like Mr Webb did with the Blogger post ids. Which makes me think – did he ever make that public? Hmm. Probably not.) So anyway – now I’ve got all these friends, what am I supposed to do with them? I had a sudden realisation that for many of my friends, I’m the only gay person they know. The whole point of Friendster is that you meet hot cool people through the hot cool people you already know. Then you make out and move in with each other. Which all rather depends on (1) Having cool friends and (2) Them knowing hot poofs. Darn it. This isn’t going to work at all…

While digging around in my site to try and find some quotes for a piece I’m presenting at EUvolt today (I’m so bloody busy my ears are bleeding), I stumbled upon an old piece on Newspaper columnists that Keither Waterhouse wrote years ago for The Journalist and which I – rather cheekily – transcribed because it was so pertinent to webloggers. Read it immediately: Keith Waterhouse on Weblogs?

“It is 106 years since Jerome K Jerome related his difficulties in trying to open a tin of pineapple in Three Men In A Boat. Unless you can improve this classic account, keep your problems with packaging to yourself.”

My colleague, Mr Webb, has done it again. Today’s project is an attempt to find The Web’s favourite colour. Here’s how it works – you take a photo of your favourite colour with your camera phone and send it via MMS to avit@historicalfact.com. Then behind the scenes, the colours in the photo are completely averaged out, creating a representation of your colour that can be given a hex value. All the colours sent in are averaged out and the background of the page comes gradually to represent the web’s favourite colour…

At the moment, the site’s quite sparse – and the favourite colour appears to be (rather unfortunately) grey. But I get the impression that there’s much more work being done. Obvious things that leap to mind would be a display of the most recently sent in pictures and rolling averages of the last hour, last day, last month. Matt’s probably way ahead of me on all that stuff though, so I’ll shut up before I embarrass myself further…

Another quote from The Cambridge Spies because I got it for my birthday and I’m watching it again because I really enjoyed it last time…

Queen: “Never trust a man with a bad moustache. Homosexualists never have moustaches… Have you noticed? I think it’s a signal… To other chaps… ‘Look! No moustache! Come and get me!’ Ponces and spies, Anthony. The people with the most to hide never have moustaches. So which are you, Anthony? Ponce or spy?”

Anthony Blunt: “Oh… A little of both… Aren’t we all?”

On The Cambridge Spies: “In a dirty bogus business, riddled with deceit, manipulation and betrayal, an intelligence service maintains it sanity by developing its own concept of what it believes to be the truth. Those agents who confirm this perceived truth – even if it is wrong – prosper. Those who deny it – even if they are right – fall under suspicion.” It all sounds terribly familiar. Perhaps internet punditry is the new espionage?

The awesome stairs of Broadcasting House…