Archives for November 2003
On The Guts of a New Machine (Aside) (November 30, 2003) One thing that I noticed for the first time today was the distinct similarity between the navigational style of the iPod and the horizontal-hierarchy menu-driven interface to Tivos. Is there a memetic forebear to both of these that I'm unfamiliar...
On The Guts of a New Machine (Part Two) (November 30, 2003) My second response to a chunk in The New York Times article The Guts of a New Machine concerns the comments of Rob Glaser from RealNetworks. You can read my first response (on rapid design processes) here. Three visions of...
On The Guts of a New Machine (Part One) (November 30, 2003) I've been reading The Guts of a New Machine, the latest (and longest) article on the iPod perpetrated by the New York Times. It's an interesting article that does the journalistic job of covering a variety of angles well while...
On the Guardian weblog competition... (November 28, 2003) I promised myself I wouldn't comment on the Guardian's Weblog Award this year, as my opinions last year caused a good few fights and didn't really seem to do that much good in the end. Some people entered and didn't...
The Great British Christmas Single is reborn... (November 28, 2003) If I confess to a soft-spot for the Darkness, you won't come around my house and stab me in the eyes with the sharpened plectrums of proper rock will you? I mean, obviously they're a bit of a novelty...
The long-term cycles of weblog-writing... (November 28, 2003) Writing for a weblog seems to me to go through cycles. At times, words just flow from your fingertips effortlessly. The quality of those words will generally be rather debatable, but they'll have a fluidity to them and an honesty...
Key moments in Barbelith history... (November 28, 2003) While I'm speaking of Barbelith, I thought I'd mention the latest craze circulating through its dank and musty corridors. Essentially the premise is this - (i) find an old thread with particularly good and entertaining dialogue in it (ii) go...
A penny for your thoughts isn't worth it... (November 28, 2003) Intriguing Barbelith fact: Each post currently costs around 1 pence (UK), or precisely 1.6213519580942878523322524320279 cents (US). If we had more posts, then that cost per post would actually decrease, because - at least at the moment - we're paying a...
On disturbing status messages... (November 26, 2003) Having finally been forced to join tribe.net by a friend, I swiftly started to build up my personal network. That is until I realised that the connections it helped maintain between people were rather more alarming and invasive than I...
On the UK Webloggers Christmas Party... (November 26, 2003) I'm pretty much promoting this one to death at the moment, but just in case someone using RSS feeds to read my site has missed the enormous plug I'm giving this event on my site at the moment, there's a...
On intellectual performance anxiety..? (November 24, 2003) I think the most upsetting part of having a week-long holiday 'to get things done' is that when it's over and you look back at what you've accomplished, you're inevitably disappointed. When you look at sites that you'd planned to...
Off to Norfolk... (November 20, 2003) I'm off to Norfolk for a few days to visit my family and celebrate my little brother's eighteenth birthday. Updates are likely to be vaguely sporadic until Sunday, but hopefully I'll spend some of the time writing up some of...
The Vint and Bob show... (November 19, 2003) I had the opportunity yesterday to go to Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn Meet the BBC at RIBA in London. I took comprehensive notes of the event, if anyone's interested. The part that got me most excited was the work...
Whoa, look at all the cool shit I missed... (November 15, 2003) You know, the reason why you'll be seeing odds and sods turning up in the linklog that have been all around the interhighweb three or four times is that it's very uncommon for me to post something until I've read...
If people don't notice it, it's not architecture... (November 15, 2003) I've just caught up on my Dreamspaces and been confronted with a conundrum. In a piece about brutalist architecture, they featured the Tricorn centre in Portsmouth. Here's a picture of the building in question: Now, this building hasn't had the...
On dimly remembered books from childhood... (November 14, 2003) Did anyone read a book when they were a kid that had two teenagers running through a forest, touching a piece of ball lightning and being transported to Ancient Rome? I remember one bit distinctly - the two boys being...
A window of opportunity... (November 14, 2003) Oh my god! I've got a whole week off. What on earth am I going to do with myself? I mean I've got lots of forms and bills to sort out, and no clean clothes and a flat like a...
More Secret Santa poetry... (November 13, 2003) Weblogger south, Weblogger north! Come hear my tale of Christmas glee... Which this year shall be much in rhyme (I'm sorry and please bear with me...) A mount so high it touches space; Within: a massive darkened cave, Wherein a...
Secret Santa 2003 is launched... (November 12, 2003) So Secret Santa 2003 has launched. For those of you who are newbies, the point remains the same - you give us details of your site and your wishlist and then on December the 10th we send them out to...
More on 15" Powerbook screens... (November 12, 2003) This is probably well known by now, but according to a friend of mine who is still trying to work out whether to get the 12" or 15" Apple Powerbook, he's been advised by a man he talked to at...
On pets... (November 12, 2003) So Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was apparently - woo - a tremendous success in the States and everyone was so happy about it and stuff because - ha ha - funny gay men patronising the dumbass straight men...
The Baghdad Blogger on Newsnight... (November 11, 2003) Watching the Baghdad Blogger on Newsnight this evening has been a vaguely dispiriting experience. It's not entirely clear what his remit was or what the circumstances of the film were, but it looks like he was given a camera and...
Hateful mouth and fingers that express themselves so badly... (November 9, 2003) Some of the things I'm thinking about at the moment - at work and not at work - that I'm having real trouble articulating for some reason but that maybe I can do something with if I set some of...
On the political contextualisation of weblogs... (November 8, 2003) I'm really interested in the attempts to collate and analyse webloggers' responses to The Political Compass, which is doing another one of its periodic rounds across webloggia. I first posted about it a little under two and a half years...
On a frustration with pundits and social networking tools... (November 8, 2003) I have to say, I'm vaguely appalled by the way that some people have become so obsessed by social networking services. Business 2.0 is the most recent drunken advocate to go all giddy about them, describing them as "technology of...
On Jason Salavon's beautiful abstracted nudes... (November 4, 2003) Half-Klimt (one, two, three), half-Rothko (one, two, three) - I know they've been everywhere, but they're so bloody beautiful: Every Playboy Centrefold: The Decades. There's something so elusive and gestural about them - and the traces of writing and iconography...
Established 1999... (November 3, 2003) Omigod. I completely forgot my weblogging birthday on Saturday. This site has now been going for a full four years and two days. Four years and two days of almost daily pre-fabricated, disposable weblogging goodness. That's one thousand four hundred...
The Strange Case of the Karmic Bus Ticket Machines... (November 2, 2003) Central London's bus routes have a new feature - small machines that you must buy your ticket from before they will let you embark. They have two particularly interesting features. Firstly they are the least well-designed / usable ticket machines...
On the BBC's relationship with Government... (November 2, 2003) So there's an article about the BBC's iCan project over at Wired.com: BBC Offers Power to the People. It's an interesting, if slightly frustrating piece, for a whole range of reasons, but there's one misconception that I think needs to...
