29 September 1999

Never-ever has an unusual theme to its design.

Odd, I saw http://www.sexy.co.uk/ on a T-shirt, but when you go there...."This domain is parked awaiting hosting instructions "

I just got "The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice " by Robin Williams. It looks very good - I learned stuff just flipping through it. I am looking at possible texts for a course on Communicating with Users so I also got "The Non-designer's Web Book" . If you have any suggestions please do tell me (web sites as well). Thanks to Jen for the original pointer to the book.

Two strange sites via calamondin - WhyGodWhy and Learn Your fate. (whose images are either by Edward Gorey or a someone trying to draw like him). (Synchronicity - Edward Gorey's name appeared on Jen's future of books discussion.)

British Board of Film Classification's site. Quite nice actually. And you can search.

TakeItOffline looks like another useful private discussion service, à la LUSENET (via tbtf)

28 September 1999

I like this remote control webcam in the Ginza. (via gmtplus9, um, I think anyway)

Nice looking pages for the Japan Foundation London.

I just found this piece I wrote whilst invigilating an exam. It begins:

"Unlike the banana, the corbelled roof of Theoretical Science appeared to be wearing some kind of tie that reached to her feet. Beside and opposite her, Practical Science was wearing a toga. Practical Civics, carrying a pot and above the organ, seemed pensive in the extreme. Why were they there?"

And so it goes on, finishing with:

"Taking time to shift and unshift the pearls roped on the string of time. The rope breaks and the pearls scatter. You'd need Practical Civics to get them back."

If you understand this please let me know. Should I type the whole thing in or not? Your call....

Giant collection of computer songs and parodies.

If this wasn't real, you would think Hollywood was involved :

"Bobby Campbell, musician and journalist,died tragically at the age of 55.

But much greater than our collective loss was that of his young triplet sons, Roderick, Fergus and Diarmid, who only days before had celebrated their 13th birthdays in the company of their devoted dad, who had brought the boys up single-handedly since the earlier death from cancer of his wife Honorah in 1990."

"What I have learned has been loaned to me", the late Tom Anderson, Shetland Fiddler

Listen to Aly Bain playing the Spey in Spate and Pottinger's. I've had his first (1984) solo album on in the car almost continuously the last few days. Not a single, even slightly iffy track on it. You can hear them enjoying themselves. And of course it has the Queen of boom-ching piano - Violet Tulloch on it. (A great dearth of links here - there jsut don;t seem to be any good ones)

Why you'll see copies of the Statue of Liberty in Japan. Via the very excellent gmtplus9, which also lead me to this photograph.

Benicetobears now points to Diaryland. *sigh* I liked the old benicetobears.

Fantastic - STAND do it again. (Thanks to gorjuss for that one)

I like this rant about "improvisational food" - Liz, it's called a Mongolian BBQ, but what you say is true, and they can be pretty dreadful if you are a vegetarian BTW is "bf", boyfriend or bestfriend? Who knows, and it doesn't matter really.

Something, somewhere is broken on the net today.

I am so glad to see that Jen didn't like Seinfeld - I thought I was the only person on the planet who thought it was unfunny. She also has some good points to make on the ongoing, crosss log, books discussion. Join her discussion forum about the topic. Drew points me to this /. discussion on the topic of printed media.

I like the Katz piece in today's Slashdot. Can you be a luddite and a technophile? I think I am.

Collaborative texts Odd.

27 September 1999

You might have some fun with Thought Treasure.

Q: Can beds speak? A: No.
Q: Is soda a drink? A: Yes.
Q: Do people have fingernails? A: Yes.
Q: How long does a play last? A: About two hours.
Q: What is yellow hair called? A: Blond hair.

Brain Actuated Technologies. Does this stuff work?

Want to appear in Who's Who? Well, you can always try getting in...

Muz Murray's Homepage - he started Gandalf's Garden which I mentioned th eother day.

Satchidananda Ashram home page. A bit pink.

The story of Alice and Bob - if you have ever read a security paper then you'll appreciate this.

I need a search engine for the weblog.

Shoplifting Lit - good article. People shoplift some unlikely books!

Diaryland looks fun if that's what you want to do. Sadly, I will always type it dairyland so it is probably useless for me. Pity about the stupid questions you have to answer to register - I mean what has my income got to do with anything? It's not as if there is any left for me to spend on stuff I see in adverts anyway! And cookies too, *sigh*.

Peter accuses us of being book sniffing weirdos, and thinks that smell has nothing to do with the purpose of books. I disagree - having the book being a nice physical object to all the senses makes it much easier to use and relaxes the user so that they absorb the information it provides more easily. We could test this experimentally by getting a nice edition of a book (good paper, good smell, decent typeface, usable binding) and then a horrible edition (a bad double-sided photocopy on cheap paper, triple stapled too far in from the margin) and then seeing how people respond. Or we could just have a nice smelling book and a nasty smelling one. The response to smell is very powerful and very subliminal - look at all the work on scents for shops etc. - don't you put good coffee on and bake bread when you are trying to sell your house to someone?

The Macmillan Personal Bookshelf looks like an interesting idea if I have understood it properly. (You have to have cookies enabled for the site and they treat e-mail addresses as case sensitive - not a good start.)

"Webmasters are always looking for new and better ways to maximize their script"

I found this in the blurb for one of the Macmillan e-books. What does it mean?

Collection of Theravada Buddhist texts. Simple, but quite nicely done.

26 September 1999

Here on Sunday too. Nothing to say at the moment though.

25 September 1999

There is a fantastic, clear full moon here tonight.

Memepool pointed me to Black on White, which may or may not be useful. It's a resources for writers and I've subscribed to the mailing list which might just prove to be a mistake.., Anyhow, I'll report back on this one if it is good (and if it is not good).

RIP Moondog

(I couldn't find a sensible link, only record descriptions. There must be a proper Moondog webpage somewhere - this slow, home browsing is a real pain - but so far, nothing, rien, nada. The link I finally found is from a page with lots of interesting music information.)

Hmmm, Dan says that "mathmos" is UK slang for nerd?!?!? The mathmos was the sea in Barbarella that bubbled her and the angel up as they were so good. (Take the IMDB link for Barbarella as read, I'm doing this at home in emacs on a 36k line on an old, slow Mac with only 12M of memory, which crashes when I try to look at eatonweb)

Graphotism - graffiti and hip-hop merchandising. I saw the magazine in Forbidden Planet this morning. (Can't find a URL for Forbidden Planet at the moment)

24 September 1999

Got to go....

BACK, as they say on IRC. I went to the new Waterstones in Picadilly both last night (at 10.30PM) and this morning. It claims to be the biggest bookshop in Europe, but actually it doesn't feels as though it has got many books in at at all. Strange. Nice shop though. Next door is the Japan Centre Bookshop and I got sucked through of the door of that as I walked passed. Got some nice katakana and hiragana posters.

22 September 1999

No updates for a couple of days as I am off to London for the UKUUG AGM.

Jen castigate's (well not really) me for not appreciating the Levenger site I linked to yesterday. OK, it's an upmarket office supply company :-) (And Jen, wrist rests are not that great an idea, hope the water is back RSN.)

A page of Japlish. This site has some great stuff on it, but the mocking tone adopted really upsets me. A lot of Japlish is hugely creative and communicates well too. Here is another page with products on it - including sock glue. (via Memepool)

I've subscribed to the cybermind mailing list - it's very weird and not at all what I thought it was going to be. I don't know if I'll stay on it or not.

Three nicely designed sites (from Paola) : Harry And David, and the produce looks great too. Leonardo da Vinci site. The Conran Design Group - this one is a tad pretentious for my taste, and it tells me that I should800x600, have Flash 3 and javascript. Well, I think they should sit on the floor, use Linux and eat peas.

Stuck for a name? Try this random name generator. (Thanks Frank)

21 September 1999

Hosshinji Soto Zen monastery.

"Hosshinji's gate is open to all people,regardless of creed or sect, who seek the Dharma (the natural principles of all things)"

Read the daily schedule for sesshin. It sounds a bit like when your kids are babies...

Deep joy. The bag museum. (front page is shocked - I don't know what it does as I'm not) Lots of pictures of bags.

Obligatory JPage: Tokyou Wank. Cute puppy picture, animated gif, and if you follow the links you get loads more cute puppies. Why it is called "wank", I don't know.

New from Lileks: Dogs in the papers of the 50s & 60s. Excellent as usual. I hadn't read the piece about his dad's Texaco station either.

Yeah, a one hit wonder search - Google+inexperience Would you believe that shirty+shorty has 3 hits! One of which is the Biggest Viewable Online Text Dictionary on the Web (letter s). Which leads to a set of images of Sydney's sewers. Some of these pictures are simply fantastic. Go and look at them.

that shaped rock and roll.

Puzzled? Ask the Old Hippy. Or just read some hippy profiles.

Basement full of books is a good idea (via YAWL) Mind you, I haven't heard of 99% of the authors which may explain why they have books left over to sell...

New Web Informant - about search engines. It points me to EDGARspace and the SpaceKit Viewer.

The Levenger site strikes me as amazingly pretentious. They basically seem to be an office furniture supplier!

Get your Lorem Ipsum text for free. (and other stuff too)

The home of the RV industry on the Internet. RVs are great, though not in a country like Britain where the roads are just alittle too narrow for them! (That being said I drove a relatively small RV along a back road in California and we certainly filled that right up. It was somewhere near Cholame where James Dean was killed.)

The new (-ish) Rushkoff book sounds interesting. Most of his stuff is very readable, though I don't always agree with him.

RobotWisdom flags up this list of the most overrated people of the 20th Century. Hmmm, I have to disagree with some placings - for instance Jackson Pollock is not overrated, his work is fantastic. Princess Diana should be number 1 - Hilary Clinton may be overrated in the US, but nobody gives a stuff for her anywhere else in the world, and then there are all the other people the vast majority of the people in the world have never heard of at all...

20 September 1999

I need one of these.

For seemingly no reason, netscape suddenly inverse sorted all my bookmarrks. I cant find any way of undoing it either.

"When it's cherry blossom time in Orange, New Jersey, we'll make a peach of a pair." Check out this great sequence of images of the cherry trees of Washington coming in to bloom this year.

I was looking for stuff on active objects (Warning: geek stuff) and found this link to the Garden Gate. There I found Rot Web for all you compost makers. I used to know the man who had the British record for the highest temperature in his compost heap. He played the Northumbrian bagpipes too. He was a great fan of Russian comfrey and my comfrey patchhas grown from a shoot he gave me. The Henry Doubleday Research Association is the organisation if you are interested in this kind of stuff - I used to be the North East of England contact point for them.

The weather is even worse now! But the Mac monitor has warmed up my room.

Nothing like having a balanced view on the issue of homosexuality. Nothing like it at all in fact.

Rare and Used books from the sixties. They are offering a complete set of Gandalf's Garden for £65. I have a nearly complete set in my attic - just missing issue 1 which was never available outside London AFAIK. So if you've got a copy of issue 1 that you don't want... I have quite a few copies of OZ and IT as well, though my copy of Schoolkids' OZ was stolen from me. (You can see GG on microfilm at Bloomsburg University if you want to go along there.)

Didn't sleep well last night - John Fahey sprang into my mind for some reason. Which made me think of "Beautiful Linda Getchell", which in turn made me think of someone I used to know called Linda Snell who was beautiful, or at least I thought so. She probably still is - that was more than 25 years ago. She had nothing to do with the Archers.

A good set of pages on critiquing libertarianism. Has some links that are of general usefulness to people who like to argue as well. (Thanks Sam)

Anita points me to RealAroma.

Dan points out that I was spelling Ziegfeld incorrectly. Still no dedicated page though, just lots of references. Here's a picture of his "attractive, blond daughter".

Don't know how to grimace? Your worries are at an end. (Via the Learning for Beginners page which has much more entertaining stuff)

The weather is attrocious today and its cold, and my daughter has gone off to some school camp thing for three days. Typical The heating has not been turned on yet either - I've powered up my Mac instead.

This site has to be the worst designed site you have ever seen. (Warning: Lots of big graphics) Thanks Frank, who also brought listology to my attention. There are some, shall we say, eclectic lists. yet another frank-en-site is the Faq-O-Matic - an excellent idea.

I see that Anil Dash has fallen into the trap of thinking that I am female. Not that I mind or am offended - it has been happening to me most of my life. Lindsay is a common first name for men in Scotland (growing up I knew several males called Lindsay, but no females at all). "Lindsay" is in fact a surname in my ancestry as is "Forsyth" which is my middle name - I have a name made up of three surnames. Now, "Anil", I have no idea about - I couldn't even guess... (More incestuous linkage and Open Conversation (Oooh, I think I'll trade mark that) between webloggers) I am glad to see that Anil loves grocery stores. I do too, and when I am in other countries I always go to supermarkets just to see what they are like.

I just hooked up the SurfMenu bookmarklet from PeterMe - good stuff.

It's my mother's birthday today.

17 September 1999

Nice looking pages for a project in Computer Assisted Learning of Chinese. The dragon is lovely.

Following Jack's lead I tried searching for "rivets" using aolsearch and lo and behold this site comes up before anything to do with metal widgety things. The second site (Brainard Rivets) has nice picture sof rivets, though none of them are bifurcated sadly. Ooh, I searched for catless and discovered that the Risks pages and my Zircon IRC client page are marked "Editor's Pick".

Beware of the Line of Sollog. (And if you live in Zion, Rome or Washington DC then I would move if I were you.)

Continuing in my series of questions about idiosyncratic idioms. Do you have something special you say when the sun shines when it is raining? If so tell me - in my family we say that "the fairies are baking".

I can hear a brass band playing somewhere in town. It seems unlikely that this is to do with fresher's week, but who knows?

Electric current passing through chocolate syrup. I know webloggers are supposed to make interesting and/or witty observations about links but this time I am silent.

I like the smell of bergamot. So does Penny. She also likes neroli.

Yesterday I tried to find a Flo Ziegfield page and failed.

Milspec swimming shorts? Oh, you sad, sad people.

Talking about libertarians makes me think of Useless Knowledge. Take their test - much more fun.

Try this politcal allegiance quiz. Icome out a "left-liberal" which sounds really wishy, washy. (Be warned that site is run by libertarians so has an agenda - I really cannot stand libertarianism)

I just finished reading "Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan and Other Societies". by Joy Hendry. She looks at how many things are wrapped in Japan - presents, people, events, language. Well worth reading if you are interested in Japan, but it is hugely expensive for a slim volume so get it from a library!

Well, I have updated my weblog program so that it automatically creates day name tags - each day has a name of the format ddmmmyyyy, where mmm is the three letter version of the name all in lowercase. (This avoids day/month ordering confusion). I suppose item tags would be useful too at times. I'll have to think about it. I may need to put a little bullet in front of the date so that there is a handy point from whence a bookmark can be taken - I've now done that. You can use the gold torus to get a stable link to the day's burblings. Hmm, I've tried using the "id" attribute on the P tags but netscape at least doesn't pick them as hyperlinkable. Have I misunderstood the purpose of id?

Cardhouse suggests pepper rings and pineapple as a pizza topping. PINEAPPLE SHOULD NEVER APPEAR ON A PIZZA! NEVER. Don't get me wrong, I love pineapple. In it's place. Which is not on a pizza.

<PEEVE>
When did the vile usage "Legos" become current? The items in question are either Lego bricks or just Lego!!
</PEEVE>

Since everyone else is linking to Anil Dash I suppose I have too as well, I do like the fact that he has a way of getting to explicit items in his log - I'll have to add some name tags automatically. I have actually been trying really hard not to reuse other people's links, but I think that Spantz (via Whim & Vinegar) is too good not to pass on. For more stuff like that check out kitsch.co.uk - I especially like the Andy Warhol hot-water bottles.. The book discussion threads on and on through several logs, and Dan brings me to a new book by Henry Petroski which has to go on the "toread" list.

16 September 1999

Enjoy a Roaring 1920's Concert Extravaganza - RA works really well for scracthy old recordings. Or try the Vaudeville version. Pity about the vile layout though. Vintage Recordings seem to be the source of much of the sound (watch out, the Java applet on this site hangs my browser!)

I assume these are transcripts of a broadcasts, but having them all in uppercase is weird.

I've spent all day upgrading to Redhat-6.0 and trying to get IBM's speech recognition to work. But no joy. And I feel really ill today.

Nice Lorenz Attractor applet.

A dull day on the web it seems. There is a new Cryptogram though and it is, as usual, excellent reading.