Lindsay Marshall's Weblog Edition 3

Bifurcated Rivets

18 June 1999

I'm very impressed with IBM's Visual Age for Linux system. It is fast and seems easy to use.

I really like fountain pens. My first was a Platignum which I had at school and then I didn't have one for years until I was given a Parker as a present. It is great to write with, even though it is not one of the super-flashy ones. I didn't know that Platignum invented the retractable ballpoint pen. There are two parkerpen domains registered but no website at them, lots of pen collector websites though.

I like these Airtoons. (via Surfdiary)

This really offends me for some reason (from Losers)

Losers dot org is a compendium of awful webpages. Terribly cruel but in many cases well deserved. (I might be in there for all I know yet)

Star Park? One of the better parodies I think.

Enter the Vogon poetry contest?

Emu oil? "Every medicine cabinet should contain a bottle of emu oil" I think not, thank you.

I like this manifesto for lterisers' rights.

Seems to be a sort of weblog here.

Interactive food finder - as a vegetarian a find the idea of interactive food a little daunting...

The Douglas Coupland website - not quite sure what to make of it at all.

The Carpet Rug Institute site has a very 1950s feel to it.

Another great set of pages from Lileks about the nameless women who submitted recipes to a magazine and had their picture printed. (via Cardhouse)

New RISKS Digest.

17 June 1999

Tudor Banana article - at last. (Thanks to Dan Hon's Daily Doozer)

Project Orbikron is very strange indeed - Reality Management services no less. I have yet to work out what it is about.

Nice little article about searching. (via windowseat)

Strange Qt movie of a monkey.

The Banana Slug String Band describe themselves as "lovable" and offer a "fun-filled learning experience". Oh dear. The page has tiresome animations and javascript banners too. I was looking for more on the Tudor banana find when I found this site but no luck so far.

Animated knot tying.

New CRYPTO-GRAM.

Hair Part Theory? They dont seem to mention people with no parting. It all ties in somehow with True Mirror which is a mirror that shows you what you really look like and not a "mirror image". There is more on Hair Part Theory too.

RIP Screaming Lord Sutch. (The link is to the Monster raving Loony Party page which has not yet been updated to reflect SLS's death)

16 June 1999

I see in today's Guardian that they have found a banana in a Tudor rubbish pile. This is the earliest recorded banana in Britain. I don't have a URL for the report at the moment.

New information navigation system at Navihedron. It seems to use shockwave and Java so I cant look at it on my Linux box...nor will it work on my Mac. Oh well, it might have been interesting. Update: I've got it working on the Mac now, oh no, it's just broken again. Oh well.

This field guide to the nomenclature of philosophy looks useful.

The Index of Famous Monkeys. What can I say? There are indices of cats, dogs and critters as well.

"The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace" by Margaret Wertheim sounds as though it might be interesting. It's about the history of human conceptions of space.

Cult Studs journal from Teesside University. A tad pretentious in that inimitable cult studs way: "Deconstructing the Semiotics of the Virtual Community" kind of thing. One of the book reviews is of a book called "Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and the Post-Human".

I need coffee. Coffee magazine.

New York Graffiti pictures.

A great site about glue. (thank you Surfdiary)

Dairy whip is tax deductible for NZ prostitutes...

Everything you wanted to know about stuff in archaeological dung finds.

I had never heard of Restless Leg Syndrome -sounds most unpleasant, my sympathies if you are a sufferer.

I'm not a CSICOP fan, but here is a good article about snuff films.

Some very old, and very wrong addresses for me at the Lycos People finder.

All I can say about this is Wow! And the free fonts look pretty nifty as well. (via LemonYellow)

Bottle cap art. Not sure it's art - more like craft, though they are claiming it as "outsider art" or "folk art|&quot.

From the mighty cardhouse comes a link to a collection of old bubblegum wrappers.

A French/English dictionary project, which I just used to find the French for stuff. Fats and useful (not bulbous, nor tapered (Captain beefheart afficionado joke))

New RISKS Digest.

15 June 1999

Don't forget the Chank Store when you are looking for typefaces. Lots of high quality free stuff.

Hmm, I'm trying a new heading gif using the Sparkly typeface from FontDiner. I was trying for a coppery, metallic finish but haven't managed it yet. Update: I have gone back to the original header for the moment as the new one was too fragile for the page. (The transparency is wrong too) I shall try some of the new Chank fonts (see above) which are more solid.

/. reports the story about the Catholic church looking for a patron saint for the Internet. There is a Dictionary of Patron Saints on the web where there is an Isidore of Seville entry. His day is April 4th and he looks pissed off. /. spell his name incorrectly as Isisdore which generates 8 hits on Google - I bet this number goes up in the next day or two. (" Isidore Seville" generates 904 hits currently)

Jaxx's night club must be rather unusual as it claims "JAXX is the hottest club in the Mid-Atlantic". Watch out for icebergs. Do the band always finish with Nearer my God to thee? Oh and it's not just a night club it's "a multi-faceted entertainment facility".

"Children's books we'd like to see" - another one via Surfdiary

If this colour mixing site worked then it might be useful. Sadly it uses Java which doesn't work. (via Surfdiary)

This firecracker label site has some lovely images. (via Cardhouse)

This Universal Picture Language (via Camworld) seems wrong-headed from day one. They suggest that the house icon is universal - but what about people who live in teepees or yurts? Maybe they have never seen a house like that!

14 June 1999

Good Dan Gilmour piece on creating web-based documents.

A good New York Post article about ignorance and students. This reflects my experience with classes very accurately :

"...the two great problems with students now entering college. The first is familiar enough: They don't know what they should know. The second is more subtle yet even more worrisome: They assume they know much more than they actually do know."

The street performer protocol - looking at the problems of digital copyright.

This is a great cartoon.

This usability checklist is useful.

The great thing about living in Northern Climes is the long evenings - I went out cycling with my son at 9 on Saturday night and we had a great time.

The Emperors of Chocolate looks like it would be an interesting read. The trivia page is certainly interesting.

11 June 1999

A very good magic site with real audio of how to do sleights and of people performing tricks.

This site looks Japanese but may not be. This is one of the strangest sites I have ever seen. (via Perfect)

Today I read about Chibi Marukochan, described as a Japanese Bart Simpson. This is a haiku page which looks rather nice. Sadly my Japanese is minimal and I can only read small parts of it and understand even less. Japanese website design is really interesting. Look at the difference between Nintendo Japan's site and Nintendo USA. And also look at Sega Japan, Sega USA and Sega Europe.

Sanity Test - I am 61.8181818181818% insane.

10 June 1999

The end of the Internet....

I want this wooden bike. (via RobotWisdom)

Good article about why the "bounty hunter" model for open source devlopment won't work. There are many problems with the open source model - I really must write something about them. (Which is not to say that I am advocating any other way of doing things of course!)(via Freshmeat)

9 June 1999

Page about contortionism,

This device has to be on of the weirdest things I have ever come across. There are some exceedingly strange things here, e.g. this one. "When you call 177 using a telephone attached to the set, nails hanging from the ceiling fall into the water filled bowl along with the tone. In an unfortunate case, nails may hurt fish."

A great piece of archaeology - this is the sort of painstaking research work that I love to hear about. (from robotwisdom)

More new elements.

7 June 1999

Fascinating article about Speech Codes at the University of Wisconsin.

The 24 hour museum service is rather useful for finding UK Museum information. I just looked and I found out that I've missed the Jackson Pollock retrospective which I thought ran until July. I am now definitely hacked off.

Smithsonian protoype internet exhibition. Java sadly.

Now if this bloke were doing it for Edinburgh I could help him!

Visit the Bunker.

I'm not sure what this June 18th thing is about at all. I must have been sleeping or something - after all X-day has been and gone.

Possible new element - called "ununquadrium". (from robotwisdom)

The domainsurfer is great fun for finding what domain names are out there.

This Mob-speak glossary might come in handy...

The Word Fugitives page at Atlantic Monthly site is great. It covers words that don't exist but ought to.

Oh, I bought the new WIRED. I haven't even opened it yet. I really have to stop doing this.

I saw the Rugrats movie at the weekend with my kids. It was OK, but not as good as the shorts. I also saw a trailer for the King and I which has had some of the worst press reviews I have ever seen. Did you notice that none, and I mean none, of the bare chests that are on show have nipples? Not a single one. Weird.

Even though I have stoppped updating the Obituary pages I think I will mention a few deaths here from time to time: Christopher Cockerell, inventor of the hovercraft, Charles Pierce, drag artist, Peter Brough, the BBC's radio ventriloquist, and Mel Tormé, the velvet fog himself.

Hmmm, been marking exam papers at home so no weblog for a few days. Our#garden is particularly nice at the moment - I should start a gardencam so that I can watch the grass grow and the cat chasing frogs.