Archives for January 2004

On ballots, blogs and the syndication-impaired... (January 31, 2004) Just a reminder - first things first today is the last day that you can vote for this year's Bloggies. And secondly, I want to put in a bit of a plug for daily dose of imagery in the Best...

In support of Greg Dyke and the BBC... (January 31, 2004) In the Daily Telegraph today is an advert/petition paid for and signed by many thousands of BBC staff asserting the fierce independence of the BBC and talking about Greg Dyke's leadership as Director General (see Guardian article). I don't have...

What I'm faxing to my MP... (January 31, 2004) What follows is a letter that I'm sending through to my MP via FaxYourMP.com. If you feel strongly about this issue too, then I would ask you to consider expressing your sentiments accordingly. The views expressed - of course -...

And this too will pass... (January 28, 2004) What a strange, frustrating day. Loads of reporters lurking around Broadcasting House all day, TVs blaring out from all over the building as they report live the responses to the Hutton Inquiry, e-mails all over the place, anxious preparations for...

On the benefits of competing audio formats... (January 27, 2004) There's a fascinating clump of posts going around the place at the moment about the various DRM-based digital audio solutions that you can buy at the moment. The one that kicked stuff off initially was a post on The Sobleizer...

Dan's iPod Projector... (January 25, 2004) Dan Hill's idea for a profoundly useful iPod accessory - as explained in greater detail in his post iPods and the wireless - is rather cheekily presented below. I want one....

On technology and song lyrics... (January 24, 2004) I love it when technology creeps from innovation to ubiquity. Or - more to the point - I love that very first set of transitions, when you're watching a movie or a TV show and suddenly for the first time...

Save me from the blood mists... (January 24, 2004) I swear, if someone doesn't put a bloody save-state function into a browser with tab-functionality in it soon I'm going to snap and murder everyone around me. Even Safari - probably the most stable browser I've ever used - still...

A million tiny points of light? (January 24, 2004) From an entry on Barlowfriendz about the death of Spalding Grey comes this paragraph: "Among the beliefs that he and I shared was a conviction that making public the intimately personal is a revolutionary act in an atomized society where...

On fires, string quartets and the new politics of online communities... (January 24, 2004) In the Guardian article Four's a crowd, cellist David Waterman talks about how to keep a string quartet together over many years without the interpersonal relationships forcing the group apart. I love articles like this - articles that don't seem...

On Wonkette and the rest of Gawker media... (January 24, 2004) So Nick Denton's Gawker media has released its latest offspring into the world, and so far (particularly after the enormous success of fleshbot) it doesn't look like much of a contender. Wonkette has been described as Gawker for DC (by...

On parody search engines... (January 21, 2004) Compare and contrast: (1) Me making a funny at Google's expense a couple of years ago: Google Pornfinder and (2) The site recently launched to help the world find porn (as reported in this Boing Boing entry): Booble. What next?...

Where all the best people work... (January 20, 2004) From an entertaining post on an interesting Metafilter thread: The BBC is best when it's at its least domestic and condescending: its radio and web output is better than its TV news (BBC World excepted) and the World Service is...

A short video of snow in Norfolk... (January 20, 2004) I've been meaning to get this up online for the last couple of weeks but keep getting distracted. While I was up in Norfolk for Christmas it started snowing insanely hard and I almost accidentally got about fifteen seconds...

On the Bloggies... (January 20, 2004) So the nominations for the the Bloggies are now up and I would encourage everyone to go and explore some of the weblogs that have been short-listed. For good or ill, quite a lot of the old crew have ended...

On adaptive success and theories of homosexuality... (January 19, 2004) The latest issue of New Scientist contains an article - "The In Crowd" - that is both profoundly interesting and yet totally unavailable online. Gradually, I'm delighted to say, this situation is becoming more rare and more of a surprise...

If God is a dancefloor... (January 18, 2004) According to Pink in her song God is a DJ: "If God is a DJ, life is a dance floor, love is the rhythm, you are the music". Which is troubling for me, really, because if life is the dance...

An illustration of spam... (January 16, 2004) Yesterday I received a piece of spam with a title so interesting and dramatic that I felt I had to illustrate it with Photoshop. Presenting: "Unrelenting Massive C*cks Destroy Innocent Pussies!" Addendum: Of course now my site will be blocked...

Are there gay people at ETCON? (January 15, 2004) So first things first, after considerable soul-searching and fiddling around with finances I've found a way to go to Emerging Tech this year to cheer on my BBC other half's paper: Glancing: I'm OK, You're OK. Last year the conference...

A New Font for a New Year... (January 13, 2004) After a highly entertaining half an hour with my work colleagues and fontifier, I now have a full operational font of my handwriting. It looks a little childish and insane, like the kind of thing you'd write threatening letters with,...

Identify the funny cartoon! (January 9, 2004) My new favourite witty cartoon du jour follows. Anyone know anything about who produced it and where it was originally published?...

Using Wikis for content management... (January 9, 2004) So here's a thought partly inspired by an e-mail from a work colleague and partly by Haughey.com. Creating and editing wiki pages is extremely simple and elegant once you get past the first 30 minute learning curve. And essentially you...

Letters, Data and Metadata... (January 7, 2004) Considering how annoying I find The Social Life of Information (again - more on that later), it's surprising how often I feel that I should be posting some of the nuggets contained within it for a larger audience. Anyway, there's...

What I look like at the moment... (January 7, 2004) A very recent picture of me trying to look serious. I shall shortly add this to my ongoing visual Brief History of Tom....

On Bloggies 2004... (January 7, 2004) So the weblog competition that I don't tend to get stroppy about is back and what a relief it is after all that Guardian rigmarole to have a nice award that's nominated and voted for by members of the weblogging...

On Belaugh House circa 1900... (January 7, 2004) Here's something quite special (for me at least). While I was up in Norfolk over Christmas, my mother showed me a picture that had been taken of our home shortly after it had been completed (circa 1900). It may sound...

A year ends, a year begins... (January 7, 2004) Wow. What a long time it has been since I last posted to plasticbag.org. And what have I done in the meantime? I've been back to Norfolk to see my family, experienced the wonders of Christmas, seen Return of the...