Water found on Mars
So now it’s more than possible that there was once or is still some kind of limited life on the planet, it’s more than possible that human beings will visit the planet. It’s more than possible that some kind of semi-permanent presence could be made on the planet too. It’s all overwhelmingly exciting.
Moving house is exhausting beyond measure. Won’t someone remind me never to do it again. Last night after work I decamped back around to my old place to help clean with my flatmates. Eight o’clock came and went. As did nine. Then ten and eleven. And finally midnight rolled around. I eventually left the building at 1am and fell into bed sweaty and exhausted. This evening I have to go back again to take final meter readings and hand the keys over. And my new flat looks like someone at a crap factory overloaded the crap storage device and crap went everywhere. I’ve still not even connected my computer to the net. Mind-destroying. Never again.
There’s another metalinker user over at lifeofsmallbeer.co.uk. And it’s been linked over at Nick Denton’s site who e-mailed me and suggested that perhaps Movable Type could integrate it into their next release, which is an interesting idea…
Today is big giant moving day. And so updates will necessarily be sporadic at best…
And the first site (other than me) to start using metalinker is Bottle Rocket Science. Are you trying it out? If so, mail me!
Another Thinkblank conception (this time co-created by Cal and I) was thought of yesterday and launches in a very beta version today. It’s called Metalinker (because now it’s retro cool to use the prefix meta) and if you’re reading this on the front page of my site, you should be seeing its effect all over the place.
Simply speaking, Metalinker is a way of connecting weblog posts about a similar subject together. With the simple addition of a small amount of javascript to your page, your completely normal weblog posts are suddenly annotated – each link has placed after it a simple link to Blogdex’s list of other people who have referenced the same link.
It’s not a complex idea, but it’s quite an elegant one and one we think that gestures towards some of the functionality that a future web might include as standard – a kind of self-referential, reciprocally-linking semantic model that our little toy only skirts around (with all the glamour of an almighty hack). We hope you enjoy it!
I’m catching up a lot with the online zeitgeist today via Daypop and Blogdex, which – if I could still do scrolling marquees I would probably attach a tagline to: EAT THEM AS PART OF YOUR NUTRICIOUS BREAKFAST. Because of this quite a lot of the links that I reference have already been referenced to death. Which is why I’m going to add to the links with commentary and opinion….
Resurfacing Animosity Awaits Bush in Europe
The Washington Post has taken what would appear to be a fairly bland topic – the fact that fractures are becoming clearly visible between Europe and America around the ‘War on Terror’ – and explodes it into an incredibly balanced depiction of the current fundamental differences between the two cultures. As such this article is probably a must read for all English Eurosceptics, American Supremacists and everyone who really doesn’t understand that one of the fundamental political divisions in the world today is between collaborative and nationalist approaches. There’s a discussion on Barbelith about this discussion too.
Filepile password up for auction
Now I’ve wanted access to filepile for what seems like an eternity, but although I was using it back in the longago, I never actually appear to have registered. And of course now you can’t get in for love-nor-money. It says very clearly on the site that it’s not that hard to write (as PHP software goes), but god knows I couldn’t do it. The fascinating thing about this is that people are prepared to fight for access to a service of information, plus that people aren’t prepared to merely share it. This password actually is sellable. I suspect that if it wasn’t for the rabid copyright infringement that the site represents they’d have made it into a pay-for service months ago….
Tonight I am going to The Sweet Suite for the second time. In case you’re unfamiliar with this venue, it was assembled by a coterie of leading London homosexualists including the infamous Mr Big, Boy George and er… We were supposed to get picked up in a big pink limousine outside First Out, but I think my host had to cancel it, which is a shame. Last time I went I became rather over-excited by the range of “Sex and the City” and “Seven Deadly Sin” cocktails and found myself falling over a lot and vomiting much of the following morning. Mr Webb is obsessed with the place. I should be packing.
Space news of the day is that China are planning to mine minerals on the moon – which seems to me to be 1) a complete waste of money and 2) possibly the coolest thing that any country has done in decades. [Update: Turns out it’s not true though.]
Entertaining facts about Telewest: So I’m moving out of my flat in just a couple of days and I’d like to get cable television in the place I am moving to. However I don’t know the postcode of the new place, so I can’t easily type it into the little box on their website that tells you if you can get service. That’s why I decide to type in my current postcode, which is W9 1LE (try it for yourself – this game is quite entertaining). When you type in the postcode the site politely informs you that they don’t handle that postcode, but that ntl do. They even helpfully provide a link through to the page in question where you can type in your postcode again. Except of course NTL deny covering that area too. And they helpfully decide to redirect you… back to Telewest again. The irony has taken my neck in its teeth and is beginning to playfully shake…