Category: Random

On Saturday I finished ‘Lord of the Rings’ for the first time. I started reading it almost exactly ten years ago and got about one sixth of the way through it before deciding to ‘have a bit of a break’. I’m doing better with it than I am with Ulysses though. The race continueth – after ten years Rachel’s still on page 34 while I have roared ahead to a remarkable page 46. I’m reading Emergence now. It’s quite an entertaining read. I’m not convinced that much of it is really about emergence and self-organisation, and a lot of it seems to be balanced on some fairly precarious conjecture, but it’s certainly good to think with.

The thing I’m most looking forward to reading about on the internet at the moment is Bart’s thoughts on London. It was very entertaining meeting him, although he looked a little shell-shocked most of the time. But I’m dying to hear what he thought of it all…

It’s probably quite poor quality behaviour to spend your two-minutes’ of silence frantically typing. But it was the only moment in the morning when I felt I had any time at all to get anything done. Does that make me a bad man? It was a very quiet keyboard!

It’s terrifying really – it’s terrifying that it could take as little as three weeks of sporadic updates to halve the traffic a site gets. Halve! You lightweights. You quitters. I don’t know why I bother writing all this guff for you sometimes. It’s like your heart’s not really in it.

You can view the absence of posts over today as shocked silence after having some mad bloke‘s statement that the Queen Mum liked Ali G hideously confirmed. Grotesque imagery. Oldest of all old beligerent crones liking the least pleasant, least funny and least tasteful privileged North London comedy slummer. This hideous collision is like imagining Hitler making macrame place mats or seeing Bernard Manning doing Atomic Kitten impersonations.

I’d just like to apologise to Russell of use.perl.org for posting his adaptation of ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ on plasticbag.org without attributing it to him. I don’t know whether he’d be delighted or horrified to know that it had been circulated around at least two of the mailing lists I regularly contribute to (without its author being mentioned). Anyway – I hope this link makes up for it a bit. Apologies…

Ouch. Early morning alarm when I go to Barbelith and discover that there are over one hundred moderation actions that I’m supposed to investigate. One hundred. One hundred. It is a relief to know that if I don’t do them, someone else will…

Guess who’s coming for dinner. Actually he and I and Davo et al are wandering out for meals and sightseeing over the next couple of days. Very much looking forward to it.

One of the best things abour working with geeks is that they understand the value of the ludicrous metaphor. Think of it this way: You’re building a community site for the BBC, and you have to explain the process of a discussion from germination in someone’s mind, to what’s put on the final page. You can’t do anything intuitive useful like actually discuss real conversations because then you get helpful replies like, “but no one would actually ask a question like that” or “but surely the answer to that one is really obvious?” So instead you have to say things like, “So I’m working at the BBC and I’ve noticed an lamentable absence of badgers in White City – sort it out!” or “I’m a fish – I have no potatoes – what do I have to do to get served around here?” Geeks understand this intuitively and immediately. Real people look at you funny.

So there’s a guy at work who’s twenty-two. He’s really nice, he’s good fun. But for some reason he hasn’t twigged on the whole ‘Tom is a big homo’ thing. In fact I don’t think any of them have. Now in almost every single other job I’ve ever had I’ve made it fairly clear that I’m a great big homo really quickly, but for some reason I quite liked the completely-not-an-issue thing of not having my sexual preference being discussed even a little bit. So I didn’t mention it. And of course now it’s getting harder to say anything. Particularly every time the really nice, well-intentioned 22-year-old makes some dumb joke about how he’s worried I might be gay because I don’t like football much. Very frustrating. I just don’t want to embarrass anyone… Sigh…