Category: Random

I think there must be nothing I’d rather do at the moment than pop over and spend a couple of nights in Paris with Jason and Meg. Money and time are stupid things and annoyingly scarce.

So again – I don’t know if this image is accurate or whether it’s a piss-take, and I can’t tell whether it’s offensive or incredibly funny. It’s probably doing the rounds of e-mail at the moment so I’ll apologise straight-off if you’ve seen it dozens of times before. But whether it’s true or not, thanks to Davo for sending me an image of this receipt – apparently given to someone who’d ordered a Bacardi Breezer…

You’d never know it to look at the amount of writing I’m currently pumping through plasticbag.org at the moment, but I’m currently experiencing a fairly alarming creative block. I have three pieces of longer writing on the go at the moment – three pieces that are addressing issues that I often write about on this site (the relationship between personal and mainstream publishing, the relationship between weblogs and journalism, and the implicit politics of the discussion board). None of them are going well. Each and every one of them is in my head in an essentially complete form, but there’s something between my mind and my fingers that is interfering with their transcription. This is yet another one of the reasons I left academia – because the process of writing became a painful and difficult one – a situation rife with angst in it’s literal Old High German sense… Eurgh…

I finished reading Elements of Typographic Style a couple of weeks ago now, and I’ve not stopped raving about it since. It’s truly a stunning book – a bible of technique – that encompasses the whole range of typographical behaviours from the appropriate use of hyphens, the most functional and effective page layouts through to a detailed examination of elements of individual type-faces, glyphs and the art of being respectful to the writing you are type-setting… More importantly, I think it gives a degree of insight into a man’s belief in the integrity, intelligence and quiet dignity of artisanship – which is something that may sometimes seem inflexible and uncreative, but which is a sure mark of absolute and total quality. Very much recommended.

This was pointed out by a friend of mine. It seems now that Amazon is so worried about offending it’s naturist clientele that it refuses to even imply that all its customers might be wearing clothes. More worrying is the concept that you can buy unclean underwear from the web’s largest online store. And perhaps more disturbing still is that the customers who buy this stuff are the same customers that decided to buy Licence to Kill on DVD. The image of Bond-watching, clean-underwear-sniffing, spy-lovin’ naturists is almost enough to put me off my fascinating daily workload…

So I’ve been being all creative recently. First I redesigned Venusberg.org for Dan, and then Phil and I helped out Mr Webb with his CSS. Designing Dan’s site was particularly interesting for me – it’s my first design that’s based entirely around typography (although of course that doesn’t mean that some of the typography isn’t rendered as an image). Mostly I’m very happy with it, except a few irritations have crept in – there aren’t enough date formats for me in Blogger, so that doestn’t look as classy as I might have liked – and there are some irritations with the way it translates line breaks as well that meant I couldn’t do the half-em paragraph breaks that I wanted. But otherwise, I’m pretty happy with it and I hope he will be too… My favourite part? The font for the logo is based on the letters at the base of Trajan’s column…

This relates to my earlier post today, particularly with reference to the Gore Vidal article which a friend and colleague was reading out loud to me. The friend concerned finished reading out a particularly horrifying bit and then said, “And it’s Gore Vidal… Gore Vidal!” At which point, for some reason, in a completely flat and apparently innocent tone – with nary a trace of eyebrow flicker, I replied, “I rather think that gay people should restrict their opinions to interior design and clothes and leave matters of international politics to heterosexual men, don’t you?” The fraction of a second of stunned silence was truly transcendent.

I’m posting a link to the Gore Vidal Observer article that was published a few weeks ago. At this point I’m going to take the cowardly option and declare up front that I’m not posting it because I either agree with it or disagree with it – in fact, on the vast majority of key points I’m far from able to confirm or deny any of the facts or opinions stated – but simply because I have as yet not seen it published anywhere online. Again – it may have been put online by someone weeks ago, and I may have simply missed it. So here it is: Gore Vidal on the enemy.

I don’t know whether to be delighted or grumpy about iBlog – the new weblogging software package for Mac OSX. I’m delighted because I’ve been thinking about how you might develop something very much like it. And I’m grumpy because I’ve been thinking about how you might develop something very much like it. Do you see how that works? In fact, I spent a good couple of days working on a design / concept mock-up of how I thought such an application should work. This work is now essentially useless. Still never mind.

Nonetheless, here are some of my thoughts about desktop weblogging applications:

• Firstly, an application of this kind should allow people to design modules and interfaces for the various packages, services and softwares already in existence (Blogger, Movable Type etc).
• Secondly (and related to the first point), the application should be able to function as an interface to an online service where posts could be stored centrally , Blogger-style. This would allow a web interface which is a crucial part of the whole ease-of-use weblogging aspect. The application could sync with the most recently updated or created posts, which can then be worked on and edited offline without compromising that sense of possession and security that comes of having the files locally.
• Thirdly, Apple should be building an application of this kind as an iApp because it extends the ability of the less web-savvy, web newcomers and the people who turn to Apple because of clarity and ease of interface. They should also be doing it because it could potentially add substantial value and utility to the .mac service.
• Fourthly, Apple controls a vast amount of other information which can be published to the web or specifically to .mac services – from iCal diaries, address book contact information and iPhoto albums. Even iTunes has spawned applications designed to make it easy to place what you’re listening to online. I makes total sense to organise a potential central point where you could bring all this information together – just as personal weblogs have been doing for the last few years.
• Fifthly, Apple made a terrible mistake in allowing other people to use the brushed metal finish which has been associated with their core applications. The metal made them seem stable, solid, reliable and core to the operating system – ie. trustworthy and reliable. This piece of branding genius is now inevitably going to be compromised….
• Sixthly, I much prefer the name iJournal, myself…

For more debate and discussion e-mail me or post a comment to the Blogroots thread, which I will check on regularly…

The Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends (number 17): “This buddy of mine who works in San Francisco – he knows this guy who worked for a DotCom company that wrote a business plan, broke even, cut costs, and is on the road to profitability!” [via Mr Webb]