News of the day is that Davo has redesigned his site, bringing it firmly into century 21.16 with a stunning bold, bright design oozing with thrilling CSS glamour. And in the About section of the site, you are treated to a wonderful quote from me describing my daily use of Brainsluice to get those stubborn stains out of my subconscious. I think he’s nicked my drained brain link though. Little scamp. I’ll give him what-for…
Tiny online weblogging exit poll of these sites – plasticbag.org, TajMahal, Life as it happens, qwertyuiop, LinkMachineGo, Interconnected, wherever you are, pixeldiva, NickJordan.co.uk, parallax view, extenuating circumstances – reveals the centre-left political dispositions of our fair community: Labour – 7, Lib Dem – 3, SNP – 1, Conservative – 0. If you would like to add your vote (anonymously of course) to this exit poll, drop me a note with your site URL and the way you voted. [mail me]
Meet the author Quite how you people get through your sorry lives without my continual presence has always astonished me. Well, if you’re finding it difficult, there will be yet another blogmeet this coming Tuesday in Central London. Come along. Buy me drinks. [details]
Today on Barbelith: “Pearl Harbor’s Fatal Flaw” – A look at the presentation of the human cause in the war movie, following the release of Pearl Harbor. By Tom Armitage.
So the first e-mail was of course tremendously exciting and yet absurdly ill-timed. My renewal notice for barbelith.com arrived this morning, making it nearly two years since I coughed up $70 in a bedsit in Hampstead. Of course that also means that I have thirty days to find $70. Speaking of the barbelith.com, my first excess bandwidth e-mail came through today – which I believe is only going to charge me $4 for May. But I would place money on that number rising over the coming months. And the alternative? Upgrade to high volume or quick serve accounts at a price of up to $250 a month.
I bought 24 Years of Hunger in 1991 because it was in Q magazine’s top 50 albums of the year. I loved it at the time, and unlike a lot of the music that I listened to when I was nineteen, I still listen to it today. In fact I put it on this evening and suddenly remembered how much I liked it. The reviews at Amazon are kind of sweet as well: “Poor Eg, poor Alice – they created a total masterpiece and nobody’s ever heard of either them or it. Wonderful for driving in the dead of night.” Does anyone else own it?
People who diet are profoundly stupid, says BBC. Ok, that’s unfair. What the BBC actually says is that Thinking ‘drains the brain’ – essentially of glucose, and extraordinarily quickly. Traditionally, it has been thought that as long as you have food in your system then the energy supplies to your brain will remain essentially consistent. But this article suggests that when under particular mental stress, individuals can literally use up all the glucose incredibly quickly.
This may explain geek fetish foods high in caffeine and sugar. I know that I can go on mad obsessive intellectual kicks when interested and doped up on regular doses of Coca-Cola – although it hasn’t done my teeth much good. And of course the corrollary of all this (and it is specifically stated) is that: “thinking became slower when blood sugar levels were down” – meaning people on diets are just not the sharpest tools in the box.
Today has so far been foul. I don’t know what the hell I ate but it certainly hasn’t agreed with me. I feel continually betrayed by my biology – it’s like a web-server that hasn’t been keeping up with its security patches. Something always seems to go wrong with it. Maybe it’s more like a PC. I mean, it always gets the job done, and it’s always something small, but it’s always bloody happening. And as usual I just work through it.
Today on Barbelith: “Harry Potter and Capitalism” – being a series of novels in which Harry and Hogwarts are deeply implicated in a capitalist organization of the world.
Happy Birthday to PGP: “Phil Zimmermann became the world’s first cyberspace hero 10 years ago this week. In a public move, which transformed the way Internet users viewed privacy and made him the target of a federal criminal probe, Zimmermann released Pretty Good Privacy on June 5, 1991.”