Category: Random

I don’t think Cal is talking to me at the moment.

I haven’t said anything on plasticbag.org because I’ve been convinced that it would add extra pressure on me and that I’d buckle under it – but I seem to have given up smoking. It’s been almost two weeks now without a cigarette. I still want them quite badly, but I’m not having them. My ashtrays still sit in front of me on my desk – and they’re still full – I feel like if I threw them away that my totem of stubs would betray me and I’d be scratching my way out of the flat towards the local newsagent. It probably wasn’t the best time in the world to quit – but hey…

I don’t know if you’re aware of this fact – but I’m actually going to be thirty years old in roughly four months and twenty-eight days. I only mention this fact now, because clearly thirty is a big milestone and you’ll all want to be saving up so you can buy me a nice big sparkly present rather than the old tat you usually buy me (you know who you are). It occurs to me that if you people actually stopped being quite so useless and each sent me £20 via Paypal a year, then I wouldn’t have to get a damn job at the BBC anyway. Which would – of course – be their loss not mine. Sigh.

Ok, so tomorrow afternoon I should hear whether I got through the whole Occupational Psychologists’ testing – first stage of my interview process for the BBC job that I would cheerfully kill for. I’m not feeling very positive about it – in fact I feel heartily ill about it. I’ll go into full detail about the horrific experience tomorrow morning, at the moment I just want to pretend it never happened.

At the time of writing, the price of buying someone to come and kick your own ass was a mere $1.75. I wonder if it’s more if you want them to beat up other people…

Firda has created the CSS Colouring book featuring several table-less CSS designs for weblogs which you can run off with and adapt to your own sick needs. Firda rules.

A rude cartoon found via cal. Note that I tried for a while to find a picture of ‘Viacal’ – the fizzy limescale remover – on the interhighweb. But without any success. Leaving me to think that the world is conspiring to fuck up my jokes today. [Thanks to Gina for revealing that the world has indeed fucked up all my jokes by secretly changing the name of the damn limescale remover while I wasn’t paying attention – I present: Viakal]

So last night I went to eat Ethiopian food in a restaurant called Merkato in Islington with the team of people with whom I freelance. We roamed full and free from the menu, as Danny and Polly have both visited Ethiopia and know what to ask for. The food was frankly more unusual than I’d expected – slightly soggy sour pancakes are layered on a big plate and then supermarket-meal sized blobs of strangely bubbly meat-related products are dolloped out upon it. To eat, simply tear off pancake piece and shovel food into mouth with it.

And yet for all the excitement of the meal itself, the best bit was that one of our party – Neil – arrived at the restaurant at precisely 20.02 on 20/2/02 – a glorious conceit of a date that I commented on loudly at the beginning of my interview to the eyebrow-raisings of my assessors and which has been talked about at length by Mr Kottke.

It would be excessively harsh to say that I hated Occupational Psychologists. But it would not be excessively harsh to say that I don’t enjoy being tested by them. Let’s leave it at that…

Today is Online Community News day at plasticbag towers. Regular updates through next couple of hours:

• StreamingMediaWorld.com
  More than you could ever legitimately need to know about streaming video and audio media.
• CNN Community no more
  Looks like it’s been like it for a while, but CNN has completely closed down the vast majority of its community operations, leaving only occasional hosted webchats and as-and-when-necessary news-event related message-boards. This is probably because the page impressions these parts of sites provide are not worth the same financially – people using online communities don’t tend to click on adverts – and the legal worries and moderation costs.
• Top Ten Trends for Online Communities
  Particularly interesting survey of the Community sectors that are actually making money – including ‘search’, ‘education’ and ‘trading’ communities.
• Future uncertain for feedback sites
  The most depressing part of the dot-com boom for me will always be that people miss the fact that the internet at the moment is a relatively low-cost, low-overhead environment. And great sites like Epinions still end up relatively over-staffed and expected to produce huge profits. It’s not going to happen. I still have one issue with Epinions – one that I think is core – you can ask for an opinion about a toaster oven, but if you want to know which is the best toaster oven under a certain price, you have to dig around for hours. Makes no sense to me…
• Estats: Online Communities
  A fairly strange and motley set of statistics about the inter-relationship of IRL groups and the involvement of individuals who experience them online.
• What happened when plastic came back
  A couple of months ago plastic.com resurfaced. And what were the first reactions…? Pretty much what you’d expect…