Archives for December 2004

Links for 2004-12-31 (December 31, 2004) Meg Pickard's Twelve Days of Christmas Some illustrations that Meg did to Celebrate Christmas in 2003, reborn via Flickr... Are Google Buying Flickr? I'm not terribly interested in the rumour mill surrounding this one, except to say that if...

Links for 2004-12-24 (December 24, 2004) Just a reminder - the awesome Radio 3 site in all its glory Ok, basically there was this tiny layout thing that annoyed me about our work on Radio 3 and it's now been fixed, so I'm just going...

I wish you a Merry Christmas... (December 23, 2004) You know what drives me mad? "Happy Christmas". It's been driving me a bit nuts for a while now. Surely it's "Merry Christmas"? Cos otherwise how can you say, "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"? Google agrees with me:...

On putting 'I'm gay' on a tongue-in-cheek mock-up of a business card (and all the bloody grief it's causing)... (December 22, 2004) So I've been trying to respond to the thread about my apparent obsession with going on about my sexuality (note - they're talking about this) that's manifested over at NSLog(); except now all my comments are getting bounced for 'questionable...

Links for 2004-12-22 (December 22, 2004) Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events Being an episodic and not entirely functional film for children, whose unexpectedly dark, macabre, mournful and witty elements are easily worth the price of admission... PopCultureShock interviews Mark Millar "You create these...

In a happier world, would this be a good business card? (December 21, 2004) Tongue-in-cheek-ish slightly-bored early-evening version of what I would kind of like my business card to be like. Potentially on the finest, richest paper and with slight ridging for the text or something so it looked like the result of some...

Links for 2004-12-21 (December 21, 2004) Specially commissioned Simpsons animation to run against the Queen's speech according to BBC News. The Radio Times' site separately describes it as follows: "The world's most dysfunctional family deliver a counterpoint to the Queen's traditional broadcast, with Marge Simpson...

Weird context shifts caused by IM on hiptops... (December 20, 2004) I'm having a crisis of etiquette caused by what I believe to be bad user interface design. Basically it works like this. I look at my iChat buddy list (to the right) and I see a big list of people...

Links for 2004-12-20 (December 20, 2004) iPod hoodie "A naked iPod? Girlfriend, you’ve got to cover that thing - and we have a super solution! C. Ronson's iPod hoodie has all the features of its life-sized original yet scaled down to keep yr MP3 player...

Links for 2004-12-19 (December 19, 2004) I have a new favourite episode of Futurama: "Less Than Hero" Includes the classic, awesome, beautiful line: "a badger with a troubled past and nothing left to lose"... Flickr Sucks! Highly entertaining riposte to Canadian photo-sharing site Wikipedia's guide...

On breaks, endings, process, divisions and great grand narratives... (December 18, 2004) I can't be the only person who is suffering from an enormous collapse in motivation as we enter the last week before Christmas. I only wish I could say for certain that the timing was the only cause. Anyway, the...

Links for 2004-12-18 (December 18, 2004) BBC press release about Radio stats - mentions our podcasting trial The podcasting trial of 'In Our Time' that Mr Webb's been pointing to over at his site gets a good positive push by esteemed leader, Simon Nelson... Mr...

Links for 2004-12-17 (December 17, 2004) Trusty Sidekicks A new comics-related weblog by the gorgeous and charming Sparky of Ultrasparky.org - replete with nostalgia, full of cool old ads from comic books and dosed up on homo juice. Awesome... BBC relaunches 6music's website So the...

Links for 2004-12-16 (December 16, 2004) Get The Booty Ye Deserve! Watch in shock as the ninja / pirate battle moves into altogether more modern and frankly litigous grounds......

Links for 2004-12-14 (December 14, 2004) UK: 2004 TV shows fail to generate mass audiences Only six programmes in 2004 attract an audience in excess of 15 million viewers. In 2003, 50 programmes got between 17 and 20 million viewers. In 1999, 177 programmes had...

Links for 2004-12-10 (December 10, 2004) My GamerTag stats for Halo 2 I'm Orlando II, by the way. You may have noticed I'm not positng that much at the moment. I've just lost two evenings to 50 games against American teenagers who call people "Faggot"...

Links for 2004-12-09 (December 9, 2004) MusicBrainz come to the BBC's learning lunch After working on a project around programme information for most of the last year, I've started to get really interested in standard identifiers and metadata for all kinds of things. A universal...

Links for 2004-12-08 (December 8, 2004) The Homosexual Agenda "I know that many of you have heard Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others speak of the 'Homosexual Agenda,' but no one has ever seen a copy of it. I have finally obtained a copy directly...

Links for 2004-12-07 (December 7, 2004) MSN Spaces (Microsoft's entry into the weblog / representation of personal identity online sphere) include support for "Music Lists" The idea - that you can make a list of songs and post them up on your site - isn't...

In which Google owns "weblogger"... (December 6, 2004) Hm. I didn't realise that Google now had de facto ownership of the term "weblogger". While trying to play with the new version of Google Groups this afternoon, I was confronted by this infuriating error message:...

An old note from my journalist course days... (December 5, 2004) So years ago I did a journalism course and one of the early lessons in news reporting was just an exercise in trying to collectively define news. It was a pretty heavily-directed effort, and I think it had to be,...

Links for 2004-12-05 (December 5, 2004) I've been playing with and installing MediaWiki And I have to confess - I'm pretty bloody impressed. One of the easiest installations I've ever done for a wiki and very powerful and flexible. This might be the core of...

Now available: Mr Webb's Mind Hacks! (December 4, 2004) My work colleague and R&D partner has a book out (with Tom Stafford)! It's called Mind Hacks and it's from O'Reilly in their Hacks series. So when you've finished fiddling with your Tivo or with Google's API, now you can...

Links for 2004-12-04 (December 4, 2004) Awesome collaborative blast from the past: The ESP Game Every two months or so I lose the URL for this and want to find it again. Two players who have never met try to guess words to describe a...

Links for 2004-12-03 (December 3, 2004) Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year 2004 "Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer" (categories: blog blogging definition dictionary personalpublishing press...

Links for 2004-12-02 (December 2, 2004) The Tiny Random Hat Project Concept in a nutshell: buy drinks with hats, give money to charity, wear tiny hat, get someone to take a photo, look dumb, get dumped by your partner, embrace the fundamental pain of existence....

Links for 2004-12-01 (December 1, 2004) BBC is looking for radio fans If you're willing to help, email julia.rooke@bbc.co.uk and tell her what your favourite radio show is, why you're so obsessed about it or radio in general, what the show means to you, and...