Ask Nicely

INFORMATION REVOLUTION

Dear Ask.

Thanks for the invitation to your marketing party, dressed in it's 'hey! it's 1992 again!' lofi graphics. I worked out the invite was from you by the red blob on the poster - what is that, a bloody thumbprint? Cool!

Anyway, I just wanted to check what time your information revolution party kicks off. Your timekeeping seems a bit off. I merely mention this because I have been on the '15 year old internet' that you describe for... well, I've been on the *web* since 1994. And I started using the *internet* in about 1990. You do understand the difference, don't you?

I used to use your service. Then Google pissed all over it, and took a photo of it passed out at another party with a magic marker moustache - I think that that crazy Yahoo! might have drawn that one on. I used Bloglines too, until you bought it, and left it to rot. Guess whose RSS reader I use now? Hint: It starts in Google.

Your astroturfing campaign carries the unmistakable taint of last ditch desperation. You'll never make friends at a party if you're that fake.

So. Not. Cool.

In which the Internets perfom a miracle

We've established, previously, that my Dad's 80th birthday featured, among other things, bouzouki music. Alas, it didn't feature quite the right bouzouki music, as I couldn't track down a copy of the right Manos Hadjidakis album in time.

Mildly Diverting: Lilacs out of the Dead Land

So - the internets have performed a miracle. A completely anonymous person posted a link in a comment on the original post about the album. It led to a download of the mp3s of the album, and just in time for Mothering Sunday.

Whoever you are, anonymous donor of Greek music, thank you so very much!

Runescape and Christianopedia

Two things of interest on listen again - Thinking Allowed on 'Runescape', and the Today programme discussing percieved Bias in Wikipedia

Thinking Allowed

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again

Incidentally - Radio4 website, your URLs are horrible. Particularly those for the Today archive. zwednesday_20070307.shtml ? I know exactly where that Z came from. They're bored of seeing hundreds of files starting wednesday in their (manually maintained) file structure. Dear Today website: I know that you're in the process of redesigning at the moment. Can I suggest that you put the date first, so your files all go in nice chronological order? The day of the week makes your historical URLS unguessable without cross-referencing a calendar unless you're the kind of idiot savant who can be told any day in history and instinctively know what day of the week it was.

Can I suggest:

/radio/programmes/today/20070307/

As possibly the best place for that day's archive? You can put more than one page in that folder, too!

Metaverse Creeps Closer

GDC07 Clip: The PS3's Home - Kotaku

I've been curling my lip about the PS3. Too expensive, full of Blu-Ray (Sony's second stab at Betamax video...) and just... meh.

But now I have seen this video.

I got the feeling, back in the autumn, that Second Life was on to something. That there really was potential in this whole 3d inhabited space, but that somehow Second Life was... incunabular. Not quite there yet. Like the web back in 95, it was clunky, and counterintuitive, and full of really bad folk design.

So it looks like the PS3's Home is now the AOL to Second Life's open server. It'll be the service that takes these worlds mainstream, but possibly ultimately dies as it's (I'm guessing) a walled garden.

But this will be huge. Really, really huge.

I wonder if you need to pay for each bit of downloaded content, or if there will be creation facilities? Hmn...

Yakkety Sax

There's pretty much nothing that isn't funnier when set to the Benny Hill music.

(Actually, this one is the best.)

YouTube - Le Grand Content

A rather cute film, though surely it's 'inspired' by Indexed.

Anyway, loving this pithy little comeback from the comments.

YouTube - Le Grand Content: "11thsockpuppet (1 day ago)
I agree that the text really really sucked ass. Out of the millions stream of conciousness angst-laden monologues I've ever heard this was the most uninspired. Great graphics though... (apart from the faulty rotation of the cylinders)
(Reply)
StuPadazzo (23 hours ago)
Yet another angst-laden, uninspired review that we've all heard millions of times. Great grammar though... (apart from the faulty rotation of used teenaged euphemisms)."

YouTube - BBC Newsnight talks about Wii and PS3

Caught Charlie Brooker's inspired rant about Video Games on 'Screenwipe' last night. He reserved a particularly fine chunk of bile for this little section on Newsnight Review dealing with the Wii and the PS3.

I suppose it's what you should expect from a high minded cultural review show. Not quite as laughable as the Today show talking about the bootleg scene this morning (nice one, chaps, only 5 years after 2manydjs successfully cleared and released an album, and a couple of years after the trend died...)

Gah. Mainstream news sources feel increacingly irrelevant to me today.

YouTube - BBC Newsnight talks about Wii and PS3

Visible Bits

computer memory quicktime viz - data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics

This is really interesting - a core dump, tinkered with just enough to make quicktime read it as if it were a video file. There's a surprising ammount of order in it, and bits of the soundtrack are positively Shoenberg.

Here's a direct link to one of the videos.

Vital defensive skills for the gent about town

JNC, Barton-Wright, Self Defence with a cane part 1: "Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (PartI)"

This is very possibly my new favourite thing on the internet, ever.

Save the Borough Market Area Petition

I like trains. However, I like Borough Market, Georgian architecture and nice democratic planning appeal systems much better.

I think that the character of the Borough area has changed hugely since the orginal plans were drawn up in the late 80s. It's one of the nicest bits of London, and it would be a huge shame to damage the renaissance of a previously neglected bit of London by running a ruddy great viaduct through the middle of it.

Do please check out the Save Borough Market Area Campaign, and consider signing the Save the Borough Market Area Petition.

Playing with Panoramas

The London Development Agency, in Soutwark; stitched from about 40 photographs using Hugin.

¿Hacia dónde va la blogosfera?

La Petite Claudine: ¿Hacia dónde va la blogosfera?

New favourite words. No idea what it means.

I spent a lot of time this weekend saying 'Zapotera' in my head, in the voice of Bruce Willis' girlfriend in Pulp Fiction. It's the way she makes the 'ty-eh' noise with the sides of her tongue, in a slightly lispy-my-tongue-is-too-big way. I have no idea why this is stuck in my head, but it is.

Even humming the theme music from Terry and June isn't going to shift this earworm.

Writerly Bliss

Scotsman.com Living - Books - Having a crack at comedy:

"Doctor Who might seem an easy, obvious source of material, but few comics at the Fringe this year who go down the Tardis route are as big an aficionado as Kennedy or, like her, are seriously intending to submit a script to the BBC for the next series.

She's hugely impressed by David Tennant's take on the Time Lord. 'I look at him and I think: 'You've got yards of that, haven't you? You could be terrifying children for ever!' It's those eyes of his. Also the fact he has no chin. How does he eat without a bottom jaw? Bless him.'

It feels like a long time since I was re-reading those articles about the unremitting bleakness of AL Kennedy because now she's speculating on what it might be like to kiss Tennant."

I can't imagine anything stranger nor more fantastic that a Doctor Who episode scripted by AL Kennedy. Please, please make this come true.

George

But now I come to think of it, possibly Chopin lived with someone called George Sand, who was a woman, like George Eliot. (Unless George Eliot confusingly lived with a man called George Sand?)

A dear old friend of mine, it transpires, has a very similar problem with sorting out all of those creative Georges from a certain period of history. I laughed like a drain when I read this, as it's an almost perfect summary of the problems I have with getting that lot straight.

In fact, much of that romantic period creative output is, in my head, an odd mishmash of biopics and half remembered odds and sods, that have elided into something resembling a cross between a Hammer Horror picture, Poldark and a Caspar David Friederich painting; possibly with a rather overblown soundtrack. It will help if you think of this as rather like the early oevre of Ken Russel. Yes, you can leave the oiled men wrestling and the snake godesses in there; my head is an overexcitable place.

I should add that mine has dashes of extra confusion about all those whoopsy poets, fragments of bad historical fiction, and the occasional dash of Gertrude Stein in there too, who it took me a while to realise was in fact, early 20thC and hence of interest.

I suppose the best way to describe it would be sublime?

History is not my strong point.

SQUEEE!

Your order #203-8168722-0295902 (received 31-May-2006)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ordered Title Price Dispatched Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.co.uk items (Sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L.):

1 World of Warcraft: The Bur... £15.99 1 £15.99

Shipped via Royal Mail (estimated arrival date: 17-January-2007).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subtotal: £13.61
Delivery Charge: £1.69
Total tax: £2.68
Total: £17.98

This completes your order.

I am somewhat over-excited. However... 17th? Arg! A whole 24 hours delay! But I want to make a Blood Elf and get a Cockatrice and go to Outland and see all the new things and get to level 70 and get jewels and epics and oh oh oh oh /hyperventilates/ *bang*.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Yoz Grahame Speaks Clever

New Media Knowledge - Brief exposure: Yoz Grahame: "What do you think is the next big thing in digital media?
Social software that also works as a platform, so that the community can evolve it without waiting for the owners. The primary reason why Second Life is doing so well is that every day there are hundreds of new features, all of which have been created by residents using the built-in programming language. This is not a new concept; MOO has worked this way since 1990."

Which is, after all, essentially what the web was, too.

A Change of Personality (again)

Myers-Briggs typology is interesting. It's a crude measure, at best, and part of me really thinks that it's little more than your standard mediaeval world system worked over in new clothes, and hence not much improved over astrology.

Every time I take a test, I come out as a slightly different personality type. Back in 2003 I was an ISTJ, then swung to ISTP a year or so later. It turns out the tests typically have a very low test-retest repeatability, which makes me even more suspicious of the system...

I've now gone ultra fluffy, and have tested as INFP.

Introverted	Intuitive	Feeling	Perceiving
Strength of the preferences %
44	25	12	22

Wow - so not like me. I must be having a lame pathetic day. However, it seems slighty more like my work style - I was given a Myers Briggs derived test at work recently, and came out triple-high showoff and handwaver, which was entertaining - in fact, good at everything except acting on stuff. Perhaps the triple high accounts for everything except the introvert, explaining the changeable results for the three tests.

On the other hand, it could just be a faulty, crude tool for understanding a person?

New Years Day Easter Egg

How exciting! I've found my very own easter egg in a piece of software!

Librarian that I am, I'm busy cataloguing my library by scanning the barcodes in Delicious Library. Hey, don't knock it, it's fun.

I got to the more obscure end of my bookcases - in this case, Star Wars X-Wing for the IBM PC, an old Lucas Arts Game. The barcode refused to scan, so I entered the barcode number manually - 0 23272 20512 6 - and the computerised voice read out the title.

After a longish pause, a breathy male voice cut in with 'I am your father!'.

My god, what an obscure joke to embed deep in the code... but I now love the software even more.

Ligua Franca

Loic Lemeur wrongly assumed that conference attendees would not object to Le Web 3 morphing into a platform for French pre-election chest-beating (with keynotes delivered in French, natch);

I slightly worry about an industry that turns out in force to a french organised conference in france, and expects english to be spoken. It seems just the tiniest bit arrogant.

Unfed

So I'm trying to embed a list of things I find on YouTube in the sidebar over yonder.

YouTube doesn't seem to publish any feeds.

No RSS. No Atom.

Eh?

Madness.