Category: Random

I was out drinking with webloggers last night and Matt and I were busy comparing toys, and he showed me the article that he pubished on upsideclown today. And I was blown away.

Damn him. Damn him for being less crap than me. Damn him for redesigning Brainsluice brilliantly in the amount of time it takes me to move a piece of text three pixels to the left, sweat, have a panic attack and lie down. Related question: Is Davo a Hobbit? He does come from Noozle-land, after all…

Suggestion for a really divisive website: So you go to Blogdex and you travel to the all-time links section. Pulling out the information from that page dynamically, you tag up all the weblogs in the top two-hundred listings. And then you automatically divide this into chunks. The top twenty are labelled “A-list”, the next forty are labelled “B-list”, the next sixty are labelled “C-list”. The final eight are labelled “D-list”. No one else is mentioned… Hilarity ensues…

Google Groups has now fully archived the last twenty years worth of Usenet posts – which means that you can now experience several historical events as they were experienced by people of the time. Or alternatively, you can do what I did, and try and find your first post on Usenet – which seems to be May 1995 for me…

Terrifyingly accurately, a How British Are You? quiz told me, “I am 77.5% British, just like Michael Caine Though you know your way around London you are most likely to retire to the West Coast of the USA.”

Phew! The Secret Santa e-mails have gone out – I only WISH that they’d done so smoothly… All but 45 of the 621 final Santa e-mails were sent out this morning – the other forty-five (which included some of the … let us call them … most vocal of the UK blogging scene) got stuck somewhere in our server and couldn’t be retrieved for love nor money…

When we finally did manage to get them out from the damn server, Cal had to go, only having time to export them to a not entirely Mac / PC compatible format, which I was then unable to import into my e-mail program. So the last forty-five e-mails had to be cut and pasted in by hand – since every single one is unique. Which would have been been great if I hadn’t been a bit frayed from a day of relatively unsuccessful design work, and put the wrong wishlist URL in ten of them. So there then followed an incredibly apologetic e-mail, a careful and comprehensive checking of the whole process, and then another e-mail sent out to those people with all the details in it, this time all present and correct…

Most of the immediate responses seem to be unbelievably positive. I know that I’ve already bought my present for the person I’m Secret Santa-ing for…

Secret Santa‘s hat is full! Check your e-mail if you’ve been participating…

You really have to love Chris. I mean, he’s out for a stroll and he just can’t resist that one extra dig. KPMG.

With flatmates out of the country for the weekend, peace slowly descends on Tomville…

I’d be very interested in hearing the experiences of people who have signed up to The Direct Marketing Authority’s lists. They claim to reduce your spam e-mail, the crap through your letterbox and the number of annoying people who ring you up to sell you double-glazing. You can do all these things through this site. Perhaps unsurprisingly – I’m resistant to give my home details and e-mail address to a direct marketing organisation – no matter how apparently honourable their intentions…