Category: Random

I started my contract at EMAP yesterday, which might explain the lack of recent entries. I’ll try and be better behaved today.

According to Peoplenews, Brendan Fraser is about to take to the stage at the Lyric Theatre in a new production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And he’ll be wearing boxer shorts. And little else. Not that I care, you understand. Nothing to do with me.

“Still I’d rather be famous than righteous and holy. Anyday, anyday, anyday.”

Prince William explains why he decided to miss Fresher’s Week at St. Andrews: “I thought I would probably end up in a gutter completely wrecked, and the people I had met that week wouldn’t end up being my friends anyway.” [BBC]

Brilliantly, I’ve managed to completely underestimate the amount of freelance work that I have to get done. What seemed initially to be just a question of knocking up twelve HTML pages in a template that I’ve already built has suddenly turned into navigational development, the complete rewriting of a section of code that currently appears buried in forty different pages and the generation of a completely different set of templates to handle what was supposed to be an easy transition from one part of a site to another. Suddenly I find myself consumed by an excess of work that I could have easily accomplished if I’d given myself a little more time to do so.

Just seen: Nestle do an advert for Frosted and Coco Shreddies with the tagline “Too tasty for geeks”. I hereby propose a boycott of all Shreddies related products. Rise up, geek brother and sisters.

Astonishing discovery of the week – the thing that has made life worth living? Orange and Cranberry Barley Water. What a genius idea. I’m in love.

Phil Zimmerman struggles with the possibility that terrorists could have been using PGP. We should all remember that tools like encryption, like the internet, like the telephone, like the petrol engine – all of these things empower everyone – good or bad alike, and that the tools shouldn’t be blamed for the actions of the people who use them.

The whole world is talking about A Tribute to Heroes this morning. Apparently it was shown simultaneously on forty American TV stations – well it was also live on BBC1 and ITV1 in the UK, starting at 2am and finishing at 4am. I decided to watch it, and I can’t say that I wasn’t moved by it. But in the back of mind the whole time I was thinking that the people who supported the attacks on America could have watched the show and – almost to a song – found strength in them for their cause. And I was thinking that the same people could have heard the speeches of some of the celebrities, changed the name of the institution that they were fighting for, and they’d have believed it just as forcefully as America does. I watched Tom Petty, one of my favourite musicians in my youth, singing “Won’t Back Down” with steely eyes and tightly drawn lips. And I imagined some shadowy figure facing him singing exactly the same thing. I think that scared me more than anything else.

I used to be so much better at this stuff than I am now. In the past, people would post on Metafilter if my site went down. And they wrote really nice things about how good I was at HTML and design and stuff. No longer. I am a relic of a more childlike time on the web, when people could be impressed by pretty colours and occasional non-imbecilic utterances.