Category: Random

I’ve added a couple of nice little things to the right-hand menu of the site today. You can now talk to people who live near me and work near me via UpMyStreet Conversations. The site’s progressing quite well – there are more conversations every day and new uses for the software keep emerging. Some people are just asking about areas they are moving to, debating London’s new congestion charges or complaining (at length) about layabout teenagers – but others are using it to answer very specific questions or even just to meet new people. I’d love it if UK webloggers decided to put a link to their local areas on their weblogs – I think that could really make it a useful and interesting place to relate to your local geography… But I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if that takes off…

New today – there’s a huge slab-like rambling tome of an interview with Grant Morrison over at my other major ongoing project (barbelith.com). Here’s a sexy quotable:

“The space in The Invisibles, the idea of reclaiming space is based on Situationist ideas – I’m interested in the idea of re-empowering the imaginative city and making detournements through the architectural spaces; that was a thing my friends and I used to do a lot. And cameras; because obviously they’re the real colonisers of space just now, social space, they’re keeping the homeless out of the multiplex shopping centres, they prevent ‘bad things’ from happening to it, there are more and more of them all the time.”

I know it’s not finished yet and everything, but Technorati still hasn’t figured out that plasticbag.org is a weblog or that plasticbag.org, www.plasticbag.org and plasticbag.org/index.shml are the same page. I just want to have my own little ‘Cosmos’. It doesn’t seem too much to ask..

Here’s a not-particularly-good example of how diseconomies of scale can interfere with the practices of those who would abuse the network and transform it into something it was never supposed to be – a broadcast medium… The BBC News article Computer viruses face slow down (a couple of days old now) talks about how creating bottle-necks in the network can interfere with the spread of computer viruses. A virus is – I suppose I could argue – a weird entity that changes bits of the network into broadcast nodes, eventually bringing it all down as a direct consequence…

My friend Fenner is getting married, and he’s having a stag weekend abroad that I can’t go to. So he and I met up with mutual friend Nick yesterday to kind of see him off. We went to Nick’s club, which was closed. And then to a restaurant that Nick chose, but then rejected because there were no hamburgers. Eventually we found a Mexican place with cocktails. So I drank quite a few, and we talked of lasers in the Antarctic, mermaids with irritated nipples and the benefits of the “Breakfast Margarita”, a glorious concept that puts pink grapefruit juice into the standard recipe making it eminently suitable for calming the nerves before that early-morning meeting. Not that I’d ever do that, obviously.

When we finally parted company four hours later, I was a little drunk and excitable. I met another Nick in Soho and we wandered up to the Yard, where this photo was taken. Then it was off to the cinema to see L.I.E. where I managed to embarrass Nick by pointing at people (before the film) and saying in a stage whisper, “Do you think he’s a paederast? No? How about him? He looks like a paederast…” Some people have no sense of humour… Oh and I saw a guy in a bar who made me double-take. So if you were out in Rupert Street yesterday evening and you were wearing a grey t-shirt with a kind of laced-up front and you have a little beard tuft in the middle of your chin, then Hello, my name is Tom – can I buy you a drink? is what I meant to say…

For anyone who uses NetNewsWire or a similar rss/rdf reader or is interested in the sites that I read on a daily basis – here’s a complete list of the feeds that I check each day: ( blogdex: recent ), BBC Technology, Ben Hammersley, BlackBeltJones Work, BoingBoing.net, CityofSound, diveintomark.org, ext | circ, Google Weblog, Google News Search: Gay, Hypermedia and Virtual Communities, iamcal.com, Interconnected.org, kottke.org, LinkMachineGo, LoFoTo, maccentral, megnut, metafilter, minor 9th, Mo Morgan, Radio Free Blogistan, Rushkoff.blog, Scripting.com, tomalak.org, Wired, Write The Web. Or you can download the whole list.

The first in a series of found images – stumbled upon without significant context… This one being for the geeks in the audience…

I met someone for lunch today. And he said I wasn’t like he was expecting at all. He said I seemed more naive than he’d thought I’d be… Which I think was a compliment, but I’m not quite sure… He said I was taller than the person he’d mistaken for me in the pub with the barbie-dolls on the walls, which I think was a compliment but I’m not quite sure… He wasn’t quite like I thought he’d be either. But he was charming, intelligent and very good company.

I work with this guy. He’s wearing a jelly ring on his nose. It’s got “Lord of the Rings” branding on it. Earlier today I tried to draw a little red patch on his hair with a white-board marker when he wasn’t looking.

Right-ho. I’m off to bed in a minute, but before I go I thought a couple of nice Lord of the Rings links might compensate for all the obsessively technical stuff I’ve been forcing down your throats recently. So let’s start with a fascinating article about the CGI involved in producing a cinematic version of the Battle of Helm’s Deep and end with the first review I’ve seen of the Two Towers – and it’s a five-star one at that…