Category: Random

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…

I’m partly linking to Mark’s article about the differences between syndication and publishing on my site so that I don’t forget to read it tomorrow when I’m more conscious.

I don’t really approve of sites that use Flash for primary navigation, but if you’re going to do it then make it as classy as this. And while you’re there you can read the article on Mobile Weblogging which isn’t total bunk.

Ok. I’ve had a response from Cory Doctorow about what I wrote earlier today and in the spirit of adequate redress (so it doesn’t look like I’m controlling the media where we’re debating), I’m just going to post it in its entirety so that people can read it and then direct everyone over to Matt’s site where you can see my reply (and any subsequent comments that Cory’s interested in making) in context and on a level playing-field…

Unfortunately, I can’t reply to you on your blog, Tom, so here’s my response: Whether we’re talking about money or effort or difficulty is irrelevant. A computational tax (hash-cache) or an effort tax both translate into an advantage for those who can lay hands on additional resources (i.e., the rich) at the expense of those who can’t. There is no scarcity here. This is an amazing and unprecedented occassion in human history: plenty. A commons that is nonzerosum. We need new tools for managing such a commons, but tariffs that create scarcity where none exists are like “fixing” the problem of high-speed travel by putting horseshoes on railroad engines.

If you enjoyed (or hated) my piece on Apple and the Pirate Everyman, then you might find Matt Haughey’s piece on Digital Rights Restrictions Management interesting:

Whatever replaces Windows XP will be forever married to this type of technology. Sure, open file formats like ogg vorbis or mp3 will stick around, but Microsoft, movie studios, and the record industry will push Windows Media Player and Liquid Media formats as hard as they can, releasing their works only in formats with DRM baked in.

Addendum: And there’s another article over at Mac Musings called: Copyright, Common Sense and Fair Use which is not entirely disconnected from my thoughts on Apple’s lack (so far) of DRM…