Category: Random

With only a few hours to go, this is just a last minute reminder that Secret Santa 2002 closes in a couple of hours. Get there quickly before the Elves get irritable…

Of course the most important news in blogdom at the moment is the upcoming big gay wedding of Sparky and the Rooster (thanks to Google Images for those photos). I can’t say congratulations enough! I’m stormingly jealous as well – Dan is a wonderful sweet man who I’ve met once or twice now, and Rooster is… well… really hot. [proper pictures of the lovely couple (you’re looking at number one and two on that page)]

It continually upsets me that things like the Social Software Summit in New York happen and that I don’t get to go to them all. Hearing Clay speak on areas very close to my heart in London recently was tremendously useful and interesting, and I find it intensely frustrating that there are debates ongoing around the world that really matter to me that I can’t attend. Hence my need to buy an iBook, hide in Norfolk and finally assemble some of my thoughts into a publishable form…

P.S. That’s Matt Jones on the left there. And aren’t there are a lot of Apple laptops in concept-forming-land…

This will mean nothing to the people who come here to read rambling usability articles, or stuff on social software – or even the few people who come to hear me ramble on about what happens after-hours. This will only make the slightest sense to those few people in the world who are obsessed with Fame Academy, or more specifically Ainslie. Will the world please explain to me how David, the self-satisfied little pop tramp with a potential career as long as his butt-hair could possibly beat Ainslie? I mean, sure… Ainslie can’t really sing in tune that well… And yes, he has a tendency to get all worked up and run around like a lunatic, and coat himself in mud, and hide in cupboards… But at least he’s not a wanker?

If I had to choose the gay men that I consider to be worthy of the 100 Greatest Gay Britons poll that is happening over at Naked Blog, I would probably make sure that the following were among them: EM Forster, Alan Turing, Siegfried Sassoon, Cary Grant, Dirk Bogarde, Morrissey and Neil Bartlett.

Everyone in the UK pays a license fee for their television which means that we can have a high-quality public-sector television broadcaster: the BBC. The BBC also has the most-popular site in Europe. And yet while I’m delighted that it’s there, and don’t begrudge paying the organisation, there have only really been two things that I use them for – BBC News (TV & web) and Fame Academy. Well now there’s a third reason to pay the license fee: BBC Kitten Cam. Tiny kittens, real-time, 24 hours a day (although at night it tends to be completely dark)…

From Richard Stallman’s (creator of the free software movement and the man behind GNU which is itself at least partially behind Linux) website:

I’m a single atheist white man, 49, reputedly intelligent, with unusual interests in politics, science, music and dance. I’d like to meet a woman with varied interests, curious about the world, comfortable expressing her likes and dislikes (I hate struggling to guess), delighting in her ability to fascinate a man and in being loved tenderly, who values joy, truth, beauty and justice more than “success”–so we can share bouts of intense, passionately kind awareness of each other, alternating with tolerant warmth while we’re absorbed in other aspects of life. My 19-year-old child, the Free Software Movement, occupies most of my life, leaving no room for more children, but I still have room to love a sweetheart. I spend a lot of my time traveling to give speeches, often to Europe, Asia and Latin America; it would be nice if you were free to travel with me some of the time.

I’m a master of the pre-packaged culinary treat. You get it in a packet. You put the packet in the oven. You take the packet out of the oven. You have lovely food. It’s that simple! So as I’m sure you can imagine I was horrified to discover that the Lemon Chicken I purchased from Sainsbury’s required a baking sheet. You have to remove the chicken from the packaging, place it on a baking sheet and then add the sauce shortly afterwards. But if there’s a baking sheet, then it counts as cooking. And if it’s cooking food rather than magic oven food – where’s the pleasure?! It’s an invasion. I feel violated. I’m exhausted.

If I was a better geek, this article on XFML at diveintomark.org would be fascinating, illuminating and revelatory. Instead I stare at it in desperation, terror and confusion as the words change and resolve themselves in front of me to read, “Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb”. This is not the kind of thing I’m supposed to admit in public.

Ok. I can just about buy the idea that you can use soundwaves to cool things down, and that you might be able to assemble a fridge that operated by those principles. I can almost buy the idea that two researchers are using “enormously loud sounds to keep their chiller cabinet cool”. And I’m grudgingly prepared to accept that one might be able to convince people that, “the sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert”. But you have to start laughing when you read that a fully functioning acoustic fridge has been launched into space. And you’re going to look stunned and giggly when you’re told that “sounds of 165 dB would cause a person’s hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion”! [BBC News | Thermoacoustic Research at Penn State University]