Meg is having trouble getting up the energy to post to her site during the Christmas break. I know how she feels. The only difference between our feelings on the issue is that much of my inability to post is directly related to having to wrestle with my brother’s PC rather than my own gorgeous Mac, plus the whole “dial-up keeps dropping” catastrophe.
Found via the Underground: Band w/trem release an MP3 called Barbelith.
So I’m currently excited about two bits of press I’ve done recently – one for The Big Issue and one for The Bookseller. The former was orchestrated by a friend of mine, who basically wrote a kind of basic primer for weblogs and decided to cite me quite heavily, despite my extensive attempts to actually provide him with some actual stories. The latter is a much more serious work related piece on how print publishing companies can repurpose content for the web. Again, I must confess, it was partially orchestrated by a friend of mine. Neither of them are out yet, but I’m both excited and slightly disturbed by the prospect of their arrival. I think I’m still trying to work out my relationship to the press. When Derek gets mentioned in Wired I get these little pangs like I’m under-achieving on the web. But being trained as a journalist I know how easy it is to misconstrue, misinterpret or misquote. Anxiety strikes.
Seti@home reaches the next stage of the search for extra-terrestrial life.
So I’m back in Norfolk finally. Yesterday was bloody exhausting. We went for our work Christmas lunch around one, spent £40 each at Belgo Centraal which I now owe my boss (didn’t have any money as such). Then there was the obligatory drink at Bradley’s Spanish Bar, followed by about an hour of mooching, half an hour of tube travel, forty-five minutes of mooching, a two and a half hour train journey, to be picked up at the station by my mother and brother, before another half-hour drive home. And when I got here, I couldn’t sleep. It was too damn quiet.
Inquiring minds really need to know more: Jessica Abbot?
David Gentle rises to the challenge!
Cool! Turns out that link I couldn’t get access to yesterday was a weird embittered attack on blogdom. Not necessarily a bad thing of course. Anything that stirs up the dark pits of our collective trans-conscious is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. What’s most amusing to me is that the part that links to me comes in the sentence: “Only if I had the masochistic urge to receive 60,000 acid emails from disgruntled, sharp-tongued (fingered) bloggers would I have the gall to conclude from my brief blogging experience that to blog is to engage in the pursuit of what one extremely popular blogger calls PIPA: Personally Identified Public Anonymity.” Which is bizarre as far as I’m concerned, because I’ve only ever been involved in three major scraps via plasticbag.org in the whole fourteen months that I’ve been running the thing.
Let’s play a game. Rise the challenge. SLAG ME OFF PUBLICLY and I’ll write a VERY STERN post about you in return. There you go – can’t say fairer than that.
So I saw Nick today for lunch and I brought him a copy of the Matrix on DVD as a combined Christmas and Birthday present, which was slightly embarrassing as then he decided that in order to get me a Christmas present by tomorrow evening, we’d have to go then and there, at which point he reappears with ANOTHER copy of the Matrix on DVD (I know it was a different one, because it was still in the plastic) which of course rather delights me, but at the same time seems rather like an excuse for two people to buy themselves something they have been wanting for ages and pretend it has something to do with Christmas.