Category: Random

• OK/Cancel comments on the new argument that ugly design is attractive to users Reminds me of a talk at SXSW about humans poorly evaluating odds/stats. Don’t forget the ugly sites that don’t succeed! You’d need to compare the proportion of ugly sites that succeed with the proportion of pretty ones to have a leg to stand on.
• Tom Baker apparently singing various songs in a sort-of Wiliam Shatner stylee… If you thought you coudln’t bear to go to your grave without hearing Doctor Who ‘singing’ The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now” then feel free to rest at last. Extraordinary.
• Americans are starting to think that maybe Mexican Coca-Cola is the real thing (given that it’s made with sugar rather than corn syrup) They say there’s no perceptable taste difference?! Balls! Without an enormous amount of ice, I find American Coke completely repulsive. Coke in Europe tastes less syrupy and congealing. I always seek out Mexican Coke when I’m in the US.
• “The Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud brick building in the world and is considered by many architects to be the greatest achievement of the Sudano-Sahelian architectural style” Absolutely extraordinary – I’ve been watching images of this programme on TV and it’s quite extraordinary how it fits in with the environment around it, and how well suited to purpose it is. Craftsmanship and design together…
• Flickr has some beautiful Creative Commons Attribution-only pictures of Djenné’s Great Mosque I’m increasibly stunned by the breadth and beauty of some of the images that Flickr contains. Really almost whatever you can think about is represented in there. There are more of Djenné under less open licenses…
• George Clooney and Brad Pitt are moving forward with Ocean’s 13 Can I just say that I thought Ocean’s Twelve was absolute rubbish and I got quite angry during the whole Julia Roberts metanarrative arsery.
• World of Warcraft announce the second race from their upcoming expansion pack and it is… Wisps?! So we’re all basically assuming that this is an April Fools joke right? Specifically the bit about turning into trees in the middle of combat and taking a massive hit in defence against axes…
• A terrifying story from a Minnesotan newspaper – Americans trust atheists less than recent immigrants and gay people! “Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as ‘sharing their vision of American society.’ Americans are also least willing to let their children marry atheists.”
• “Norah Vincent spent 18 months disguised as a man. She relives the boys nights out, the bad dates – and what happened when she ended up in bed with another woman” Watching straight men and women from a distance is always valuable, and reminds us that no matter how unbalanced the power relationship, men are just as trapped in their roles as women. Maybe more so.
• PortForward.com is an extraordinary site explaining how to use routers and firewalls and stuff It didn’t quite answer my question, but I can’t help but think that I’m in the minority.
• Digital Web Magazine has an article on creating dynamic websites that adjust to widescreen monitors I honestly don’t get this stuff though. I know that PC users have browsers that fill the entire screen and I get that people are used to sites that do that, but still – it’s dumb!
• The Top 10 weirdest keyboards ever is a list of the top ten weirdest keyboards ever. Duh. Some of these keyboards are totally fucking weird, already. And there are eleven really, because they include the ZX Spectrum.

Minor edit in September 2026 to remove some self-deprecating language.

• Have any television or radio presenters died while they were in the middle of a live broadcast? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I want to, so I decided to ask Yahoo Answers. All inspired by Simon asking whther they’d cancel Eurovision if Terry Wogan died unexpectedly.
• OS X Satisfaction Chart is a humourous look at how people get their head arounds the plusses and minuses in translating over to Mac usage Absence of games = big deal, although there is really only one game in existence for any computer and that’s World of Warcraft and Macs have that.
• The new patch for World of Warcraft includes radically better Flightpath functionality Like about three of you will care about this, but it’s really sweet and will save an enormous amount of time – if only because you can now go and make a cup of tea while traversing a continent…
• Hugh’s helpful card for excitable people Jet-lag makes Tom grumpy. Not sleeping makes Tom grumpy. Excitable people make Tom grumpy. You tell ’em Hugh.
• The BBC reports on BT’s attempts to enforce its monthly download limits… “BT is targeting customers who it says are regularly breaking their monthly broadband download limits.”
• A grid explaining the various characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet This is actually sort of beautiful if you’re nerdy – a one page representation of all the noises that people use in speech, quite well typographically laid-out. From Wikipedia…
• “The Pope has a special hat. Rabbis have special hats. Rastafarians have special hats. Why not Pastafarians?” Venganza presents a crochetted hat depicting the Flying Spaghetti Monster in entirely too much detail. Stunning.

• Henry Porter talks in the Guardian about new legislature that would give MPs greater power with less parliamentary oversight “The Prime Minister claims to be defending liberty but a barely noticed Bill will rip the heart out of parliamentary democracy” – the authoritarian streak of the Labour party I voted for is becoming increasingly obvious as time passes…
• I’ve finally watched the damn Will Wright video for Spore and frankly it’s astonishing It’s half an hour long so I suppose it’s forgiveable that I didn’t make the time, but I absolutely totally bloody should have done. Incredible and amazing. I want to get me this game right about now, thanks very much.

• Today’s awesome minimalist meditative game of choice is “Don’t Shoot the Puppy” Hint – the way to win is to very very patiently do absolutely nothing at all. It’s kind of zen.
• Roger Ebert publishes a letter from Kerry Bailey which pretty much summarises my opinions on the Crash Oscar victory Kerry’s a friend who lives in LA. I think both of us felt that Crash was the worst possible film to beat Brokeback Mountain at the Academy Awards. He’s just expressed it better than I have…
• Apple have attacked the proposed French law to force interoperability I don’t know the specifics of the law, but personally I’m in favour of any move towards making it possible for people to buy from one place and play elsewhere. It may not be practical, but it should be a goal…
• The Cisco VPN Client has gone Universal Binary with 4.9.00.0050 Ever since buying my Intel iMac a while back, I’ve been surprised by how many things need to be updated to work properly – and how quickly the binaries are appearing. It’s quite exciting, actually.
• Ben Edwards report on the ETech Warewolf gaming experience… I think ETech’s Warewolfing was some of the best I’ve ever played – even more enjoyable (if less well-played) than the stuff from FOOCamp last year. Brains! BRAINS!
• Wikipedia’s article on Jam is simply fascinating. I particularly like the information on the EU jam directive (Council Directive 79/693/EEC, 24 July 1979) “Fruit” is considered to include many things that are not ordinarily classified as fruits: “tomatoes, the edible parts of rhubarb stalks, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and water-melons”…
• Beebo’s Metalog posts his Technorati 100-like list of the most-linked to weblogs in September 2000 I remember the Beebo lists incredibly well – back when the community probably no more than few thousand weblogs. I’d taken a hit by moving from barbelith to plasticbag.org and no one really cared about what we did. Happy days…
• After a thread on Holocaust Denial appeared on Barbelith, I went and read this fascinating page examining the claims of the revisionists on Wikipedia It’s really good stuff, thorough and interesting. It’s not going to convince anyone determined to believe that there’s a huge Jewish conspiracy at work, of course, but then they have other issues.
• A 2,500 year old sarcophagus has been found in Cyprus, covered with paintings representing scenes from Homer… Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the history you read about in books actually bloody happened to real people. Moreover, how awesome is it that over two millennia since the time of the Greeks we’re still finding more stuff and gaining more insight?!

Today at work, Terry Semel armwrestled Tom Cruise and we watched on a video link in the cafeteria while eating tacos.

• An aircraft carrier entirely made of Lego It’s difficult to know how to react to this, except that it’s pretty beautiful and fascinating. I’m interested to know whether it’s based on any specifications or if it’s more of an interpretative work…
• Old but good and I’ve not linked to it before – the Microsoft iPod box redesign parody… Rumour has it that this was done by Microsoft themselves – probably someone relatively high up in a design department trying to make a point…
• Wired News reports on a French attempt to force Apple to use an interoperable standard for its music store I have to say my personal opinion is that this would be a very good thing. Holding your users to ransom seems to me a terrible idea and the agreement on a DRM solution that is popular and not limited to one supplier a much better one…
• Wired News’s review of V for Vendetta is a pretty fair representation of the film, I think… “But as it bounces between genres — a bit of melodrama, a dash of political intrigue, some half-hearted footage of a fascist dystopia — the film doesn’t seem to know how to look or feel”
• Be smarter at work, slack off suggests CNN money… It’s an interesting theory – that creativity comes from associative thinking and focusing away from your main objectives for a bit. Not sure about the glowing Google representation, but hey…
• Odeo has an old BBC radio report on blogging in which Heather Armstrong and I feature Nice flash interfaces, Odeo – I wonder if they make them available for people to present in post audio on their sites – sort of You Tube-ishly. That would be pretty cool.

• PXN8 – it’s a bit like the pixoh photo editing app I posted about a while back only much much more powerful It’s not as superficially elegant as pixoh, but it’s pretty stunningly hardcore – there’s got to be someone out there who can give these guys a bajillion dollars? Surely?

• Heather Armstrong posts some SXSW photos in which everyone is wasted First time I’ve got to meet Heather and I had a great time. Lots of good parties and mucking around and eating sea bugs and drinking too much. Her panel with Kottke was pretty fun too…
• There’s an interesting petition on public geographic data in Europe that I think most of you should sign Free access to geographic data that the tax-payer has already subsidised heavily would create an amazing amount of creativity, and social and economic value. Web of data benefits from it muchly. Obey!

I’ve been quiet for the last couple of days, so I thought I should just duck online briefly to explain why. My computer’s backlight has failed and as a consequence, I can’t actually see anything on the screen, which makes responding to e-mail or posting to weblogs pretty hard. Also SXSW is a bit of a ride, and frankly I’m a bit overwhelmed and exhausted after nine days of consecutive conference activity. I’ve heard no more about the Barbelith legal threats, for those of you who have asked. Thanks for your concern. As of tomorrow I’m heading off for a few days of vacation to get my head together, and then I’m back in San Francisco at the mothership until the end of the week.

While I’m on the subject, however, I’m going to be in New York on Friday and Saturday night and I have yet to organise anywhere to stay. It’s not a work thing, so I was wondering if anyone had any comfy floor / bedspace? I’m going to be pretty occupied while I’m out there, so I’ll probably not be the best houseguest, but if you don’t ask, etc. etc.

• Stamen design provided a backchannel visualisation for ETech Seeing it near the end of the week basically freaked me out, but now with a bit of perspective this is one classy little app!
• Simon Willison versus living shrimp in a restaurant I’m not sure whether I like the idea of serving living food in restaurants, but I certainly like the idea of Simon freaking out and leaping across the room…