plasticbag.org

A quick nod of “yay” to the other Tom at Blue Lines, who has managed that incredibly difficult transition: making a fresh and classy new design while maintaining continuity of look and feel.

Possibly because I work on the Internet arm of an publishing company, I found this article at Wired [“Publishing Without A Net“] to be inordinately interesting. A couple of choice quotes:

“We feel the Internet is still relatively new, and we as a company are being careful as to how we want to deal with it,” said Maurie Perl, senior vice president of corporate communications of Cond» Nast, the parent company of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
“Right now we view it as more of a business opportunity than an editorial opportunity,” she said.

I’ve rebuilt the “Recently” section on the left so that now it reads “Consumption” (which I find more amusing). I’ve also built it as a mini weblog, so that I can type in what I’ve recently been reading / listening to / watching and it appears magically on the page through the medium of server-side includes. So that should mean that it doesn’t get stagnant (hopefully, at least).

Don’t get tense, kids. If you are seeing some strangeness on the page, then it’s just because Meg and I are busy playing “push the envelope” with Blogger.

I give up. The weather is appalling (thunder and lightning – must turn off computer), it’s too late to actually get anything useful done. I’m not going to go to the cinema. So I’m off to see Meg and Luke to slob, watch the finalé of Big Brother and drink myself to death.

Strange messages on beebo.org’s ratings: “In one or two days, this will all be fixed, and better. –M.” Consider breath baited. Sad, but true.

Today was supposed to be my day of film with me watching The Cell, Shaft and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? in one long sitting. Ideally with people, but not necessarily. It’s 5pm and I haven’t got my shoes on yet.

Ha ha. There’s this really funny site all about writing unmaintainable code that I found via In the groove. It’s so funny. I love it. Particularly the bit about using ‘i’ for non-int variables. And that wonderful bit about global names:

“Declare a global array in module A, and a private one of the same name in the header filefor module B, so that it appears that it’s the global array you are using in module B, but it isn’t. Make no reference in the comments to this duplication.”

OK. I admit it. I didn’t understand a single word of the whole site. Not one word. They might just as well have been speaking with a Welsh accent for all the sense it made to me. I just wanted to be a proper geek – just for a moment… <Sigh>.

The post that should have been an e-mail:

I finally found >access afr through weblogs.com. Grant Cook, stand up and be counted!

1. Please no more 1Mb Flash files. Please god. No. They’re lovely, but my connection is a bit … wobbly.
2. Love the site. Start smoking again immediately. Lot’s of people tell you it’s bad for you. They are insane. Ignore them. They drink and take anti-psychotics (when they remember).
3. You need to change your listing on the blogger directory, because at the moment it doesn’t go to the right URL.

[To camera: Do you want to make a post that should really have been an e-mail? Just do it! And then tell me about it.]