Category: Random

Mad outbursts in national newspapers are like the rays of sunshine glinting through the storm clouds of international news. It’s lovely to be able to sense the person who wrote the news, and get a sense of his or her vibrant perspective on the events they’re writing about. It adds interest to information that you might otherwise wish to totally disregard. Like for example information on Cricket! So let’s turn towards today’s cricket report on Guardian Unlimited. It starts reasonably enough:

“It’s really simple: India are already through, New Zealand have to win.”

But then it goes a little pear-shaped:

“Meanwhile, have you ever thought what sort of life is this and what the hell am I doing boarding a train for Moorgate at 6.30 In the morning and then standing around for ages waiting for a tube while staring at a sign telling you that if you wait for four minutes you can board a train to Uxbridge I’d rather wait four hours for a journey with the Grim Reaper quite frankly and then you get to work and then there’s this and I know the cricket’s good and all that but I’ve got out of the wrong side of bed this morning and in any case it’s not as if I’ll write a cracking match report and then get rewarded by being sent on a wonderful assignment around the world because I’ll be very surprised if any of my bosses will read any of this let’s be honest they won’t although on the other hand that’s probably just as well..”

And that’s before the weblog-style grumpy commentary kicks in! I mean – classy, fascinating comments emerge like, “Asger Kring works for a Copenhagen media company that publishes several newspapers. “Do you want me to inquire whether they are looking for an over-by-over commentary guy?” Yes. Yes. YES! YES! YES!!!! Not that I’m desperate or anything.” By the ninth over, people are writing in with their improvisational ‘hit the keyboard with your fists’ comments:

“I must have a different keyboard-banging technique from Leonard,” types John Kirby with his big fists. “I get ‘ytcdskljojnvds.lkzsedli;j un fesalmjni vfesa;lmija;mju fceiv faewj;omivrewaomiu; svfeomijuhlvesmu;oilgvrstmjloivtrseomiju,’ which looks rather like Finnish.”

God, my sides would be shaking hard as Shakin’ Stephens if it wasn’t (as Matt has pointed out to me) potentially a ‘wacky’ Red Nose Day thing. Wouldn’t that just drain all the life out of it? Like all the life out of it? I hate Red Nose Day. It’s so desperate and tiring and forced. And they think they’re being so cool and down with the kids. Grrr. Wankers.

Addendum: Worth reading the comments on this one – you might learn something. I certainly did.

So here’s a hypothetical situation for you. Let’s say that there’s a Starbucks in the high street. Let’s say that this Starbucks runs a wireless network in association with T-mobile. And let’s say that they charge for access to this wireless network. Now let’s say that above this Starbucks is a flat. And let’s say that in that flat is a geek. And let’s say that this geek is running his own Wifi node, that he leaves open to the general public and advertises on something like consume.net. So the average customer to Starbucks has two options – the pay-for service supplied by Starbucks or the free one run by the guy upstairs.

Now here’s the thing – how long do we think it would be before Starbucks tried to shut him down? Days? Hours? Minutes? And why do I get the feeling that they’d probably be successful in doing so? This seems to be a situation that’s likely to crop up in the next six to eight months or so (if it hasn’t done so already) so I’m interested – what would the legal implications be?

Right. I’m on a mission. I’m wacked out on Dr Pepper and dog-related endorphins, I’ve just watched Mission Impossible on TV and I’ve got at least three posts I want to get written by eleven o’clock. Let’s be honest with each other for a moment – I’m not going to get any of them done if I fanny around ‘thinking’ about them or ‘trying to get the spelling right’. So let’s get on with it, shall we – starting with an appeal to the godhead of microcontent voting… “Please Mr Blogdex (if you haven’t done so already) could you fix it for these links to get absurdly popular?”

• Reinvigorate.net
  I don’t know who the hell these people are, but they sure know how to make elegant and well-assembled real-time stat-checking web interfaces. Unlike places like thecounter.com or extreme stats, there’s no advertising, no monthly fee and your stats are all nice and password protected. More entertaining still is the fact that you can have a little Flash MX window open that shows you traffic to your site in real-time as it happens. It can’t possibly scale, of course, but it’s bloody nice now. Have a play while you still can…

• Trash Addict
  This post is merely another part of my semi-regular plugging of Trash Addict as one of the most generally and genuinely entertaining weblogs out there. The reason I keep getting surprised by its excellence is that it (like so many other weblogs I’d like to read regularly) doesn’t have an RSS feed. So I can’t read it via NetNewsWire. This makes my reading of it more sporadic – with the weird side effect that I’m always surprised how good it is.

• SETI project reaches next stage
  Any article that starts with the line, “After more than a million years of computation…” is going to be OK with me. In full-on web-geek Star-Trek loving, Farscape-missing dorky can’t-get-a-boyfriend mode, I find the SETI@home project endlessly fascinating and exciting. The idea that they’ve now got a reasonable assortment of potential signals from across the universe to investigate is ludicrously wonderful. Dear God, I hope that any aliens we find aren’t interested in quite smart, dextrous new beasts of burden. [More at Wired]

I wonder if it’s converting to Movable Type that means that I find it so hard to write. I wonder if it’s the fact that each entry gets its own full page to sit-upon that makes me nervous about short posts or fragments of life-commentary. I get this anxiety that I won’t be able to think of enough to say to warrant a full stark blank white page. And if I know I’ve got enough to say, then I get angsty because writing then becomes this significant job of work that really should take second-place to something more work-minded…

• Could the Universe be shaped like a doughnut?
  A particularly good debate has arisen about the shape of the universe – does it infinitely extend in all directions or does it curve back upon itself? Cosmologists are always having these kinds of debates – just a few years back some nutters were trying to convince us that the world was spherical.

• Wifi in Starbucks
  T-mobile extends its plans to put wireless internet access in Starbucks branches, but makes the UK prices four times as expensive as the US ones.

• Tom Steinberg comments on UpMyStreet Conversations
  In the process he references an ongoing thread that criticises the site for reflecting the interests of its current users. In my opinion this represents a stunning misconception of the purpose of the site and ‘politics’ in general.

• The increasingly brilliant politX posts about Section 28
  Section 28 is the piece of legislation designed to stop teachers talking to students about gay people and what it means to be gay. Conservative backbenchers are fighting to keep it in place, despite the fact that gay teenagers are most at risk of attempted (and successful) suicides.

You know, really, if you think about it, it’s totally ok just to steal links from Popdex, Blogdex and Daypop because you’re still only going to steal the good links and that helps everything self-filter even more effectively. Or something…

• Grant Morrison on ‘The Filth’ [via Darren]
  Innoculating readers by injecting them with dirt.

• The Tyranny of E-mail
  Clear and intelligent instructions on ‘how to get things done’.

• Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies
  “N is for Neville who died of ennui.”

• The New McCarthyism
  We’ve heard the phrase “Anti-American” before…

More later in the day when I’ve had another stab at finishing my long piece on weblogs as conversation.

I’m still reeling from writing that last post in a blast of confused and desperate-to-get-it-out-there enthusiasm. And I still have no idea whether it’s total bunk or not. So I’m going to throw out my linklog for the evening and leave it at that. Tomorrow I may write about any of the following things that have been going on:

• Giving a statement to the police about my burglar;
• Getting tickets to see The Bangles live in concert;
• Spotting Jake Gyllenhaal in Chalk Farm tube;

But all that’s for tomorrow. Tonight, you must simply accept limited microcontent votage with a little snide commentary. This is what’s going down:

• Google’s Memory Upgrade
  The relationship between Google/Blogger and the Memex as explored by Steven Johnson. And in the process, Mr Webb’s thoughts are referenced.

• Let them hate as long as they fear
  “So oderint dum metuant it is. I could talk about the foolishness of such blatant bullying — or about the incredible risks, in a multiethnic, multiracial society, of even hinting that one might encourage a backlash against Hispanics.”

• Weblogs are all blah blah blah
  From the people who brought you, “God, isn’t it annoying how the world is still round?!” and “Don’t you find it infuriating how light, you know, works?!”

• Camino 0.7 is released
  Only interesting to those of you with OSX of course. Camino is the new name for the browser-previously-known-as-Chimera.

As a result of one of the most profoundly tiring days I’ve had in a very long time, please accept this link-log with my apologies. I’m so exhausted I feel like I’m melting into goo. Back to your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow morning:

• A great article on UI / usability / tabbed browsing
• Game Theory Lecture Notes
• Lomo Effects with Photoshop
• plasticbag.org in Japanese
• Cool Smell-related article
• Beautiful new-born baby blog

Ok. Next year I want to be a Best Gay Chap nominee again. Do you understand me? I’m not satisfied with just being known for my design skills. I want to be the world’s best homo. I know I don’t talk about it very much, but that’s just because being gay is really boring, not because I’m not any good at it. I’m really good at it. I’m the Leonardo Da Vinci of Big Gay Shit. Am I convincing anyone? I should stick to talking about weblogs really. At least then I know what I’m talking about…

• Jonno’s Cute Dead Guy of the Week
  My personal favourite has to be Louis Lingg, who was not only an anarchist and really hot, but also blew himself up in jail by putting a bomb in his mouth. You don’t get much cooler than that.

• Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful video [real: lo | med | hi]
  You know when pop-stars can be as sensitive as this, it’s almost worth having them exploit our pain to sell records! I hope she gets another really big house. I really do.

• Diesel Sweeties’ tasteful take on gay lovin’
  “I am an eccentric millionaire. Indie-Rock Pete, I will pay you for eccentric gay sex experimentation.”

• Soccer Practice by Gay Pimp
  This utterly terrible song about hot soccer jocks is mostly entertaining for its dodgy gay subversion of ‘ho’-centred rap/pop videos. Also partially entertaining for taking the piss out of sporty straight-boys. Warning: Quite rude, ungodly and just plain wrong.

Being a brief list of the celebrities that I’ve come into fleeting contact with over the last month or so. The gentle reader is expected to bear in mind that said celebrities are unlikely to be of the stature of your major Hollywood Oscar winner, since most were spotted milling around Covent Garden, Soho or Piccadilly Circus…

• The guy with the hair from the Salon TV show.
  For the Americans among us, The Salon is a reality TV show set in a hair and beauty establishment (allegedly just off London’s shimmeringly glamourless Shaftesbury Avenue). The gentleman I spotted from the show was strolling down towards Piccadilly Circus one late-winter’s evening, with a few passers-by taking pictures of him. He looked slightly dumb-founded and as if he was rather enjoying it.

• Matt Lucas, TV’s entertaining man-in-a-baby-suit.
  Matt Lucas (alias “What are the final scores?” George Dawes) went to the same university as me. In fact he not only went to the same university as me, but he went at the same time and was friends with a couple of friends of mine. But I barely new him, and so didn’t feel an urge to reintroduce myself to him when we both found ourselves stuffing our faces on nearby tables in the Leicester Square Kentucky Fried Chicken. Some poor, rather dumb-looking chap tried to get an autograph, but clearly it wasn’t an appropriate time.

• The quite-cute-one-off-The-Office.
  Celebrities are clearly intrinsically grumpy people. I go to this hair place in Soho, and have done since I worked at Time Out. I always knew that it used to be cool, but I’d never seen an actual living celebrity in there before. Today was different, however. Because Martin Freeman (who plays the nice one from the Office) stomped in eager for hair-rescue. The only unfortunate thing about this encounter is probably that he’s not really known (primarily at least) for the quality of his haircuts. In fact maybe a bit anti-known. So in a sense him coming into my hair place probably isn’t the best sign of my continued style.

• Stephen Gately.
  The anaemic butterfly in bizarrely successful prefab pop-group Boyzone somehow managed to defy nature by becoming a weird fat caterpillar-like non-solo-star. But that was then – as the other day my work colleagues and I spotted the bad-skinned and newly-skinny, tiny pop-singing, proto-West-End-starring Joseph-in-his-designer-stressed-denim while on our way to a nice little restaurant in Covent Garden. He kind of had that look on his face that Chandler got in Friends when he came into the room with his new Tom Selleck-alike moustache. Only scarier and much less good-natured. We avoided him. And maybe pointed a little.

So there you go. My last month’s celebrity encounters. Anyone spotted anyone more interesting?

There’s some fascinating stuff around about the relationship of depressive illness to strategies of harm avoidance:

Clinical depression is associated with two modulations occurring simultaneously and chronically, dysphoria and the generalized stress response. Dysphoria is a modulation that is part of the harm perception/avoidance axis. This is an emotion we all feel when we perceive a futility in our current behavior and experience disappointment. In contrast, we experience anger and aggression when the disappointment is perceived as being caused by an external source. When the disappointment causes dysphoria, the modulation shift increases behavioral inhibition, increases anticipation of harm, increases harm avoidance, increases introspection, decreases exploration of the environment, decreases reactivity to external stimuli, decreases appetite for food and decreases sexual appetite.

In short, it coordinates functions that allow us to retreat, introspect and to redirect our efforts in a more effective direction. In this instance, dysphoria facilitates adaptation to disappointment. [mentalhealthandillness.com]

I like that. Dysphoria faciliates adaptation to disappointment. Lots of interesting things fall out of investigations like these, but this sense of harm avoidance is the one that interests me most – that the depressive personality and the introverted personality are heavily connected. That the wallflower reacts to disappointment, attributed internally. Fascinating stuff.