I saw Jakob Nielsen (usability guru) on a programme on BBC4 that I recorded : I hadn't realised that Matt Lucas had a second job.
Fantastic collection of links to sites about abandoned stuff put together by ILuvNUFC. Why I wonder are there so many abandoned asylums in the USA? I've never seen an abandoned ayslum! (Mind you I've never seen an Old Aquarium or a disused Zoo which are the standbys of things like Superman and Scooby Doo)
rational Trig (I have to say I never found Trig irrational : it always made perfect sense to me)
Here's the 3M version of transparent duct tape - don't know if they sell this over here yet though.
World Naked Gardening Day - I couldn't persuade anyone to do it and it was a lovely day too.
Go to BBC Radio2 Listen Again and pick Bob Harris Country and fast forward to about 50 minutes and listen to a great live version of City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie with Emmylou Harris and others.
Shades of the Great Hedge of India (which, if you don't know about, you should read the book about it)
Hear some Basque - very strange, Spanish sounding with some Japanese overtones, and a bit of French in there too.
Iwas trying to use Gizmo, and can't get it to work on the Windows box properly at all - keeps crashing. Works oon the iBook but the sounds quality is very poor.
Why can I never get Trillian to work? Messenger works fine but Trillian won't connect to it (or any of the other services). *sigh*
Had to buy a new monitor for home since that one croaked. Looked at LCDs but they are still to pricey : none of the ones I could afford had digital in for exampel. The CRT was half the price and had a better picture I reckon.
Good lord (via Daily Jive) (This is probably a hoax (see comments), and I must admit that it strains credulity rather, particularly at the end)
Work blind (work is an adjective and blind a noun here, not a verb and adjective as you might have thought)
What is with all this "Web 2.0" bollocks that is burgeoning everywhere at the moment? It is so pretentious and annoying.
Christian Rock exposed "Among the surprises emerging from the research is that teenagers do not come to church because it has hot music"
Was freaked out a bit yesterday : I was unpacking some shopping, in particular a bag of fruit, including bananas, when I felt something sting my wrist, it fell to the floor and looked very like a spider until I realised it was just a bee that had landed on its back. Phew.
Not sure about some aspects of the Guardian re-design. G2 is way too narrow and just looks wrong. Fundamentally of course, I like broadsheets so it is too small for my taste, but at least they didn't go tabloid
I don't get this eBay and Skype thing. Why would I want one-click calling between buyers and sellers? Half the time we're in entirely different timezones!
Now back from Alison Krauss. 2 and a quarter hour set without a break. JD was excellent as expected, and of course everyone else was excellent, but by the end I was rather bored : practically all they did was medium tempo numbers that were all pretty similar. Each one done well, but after a while, you know..... Also the sound balance was, to my ears, terrible. As with almost every concert with acoustic musicians now, there was far too much amplification and the overall sound was mushy. In particular the banjo and dobro just wiped each other out. AK's fiddle was inaudible a lot of the time too. I was expecting the set to be fairly samey since that's how I find the CDs but the sound quality was a let down.
Off to see Alison Krauss & Union Station at the Sage tonight. (Well, I'm really going to see Jerry Douglas, but you know what I mean)
Google fails me : I'm trying to find a picture of the Watt steam engine at Habitation Price near Jacmel in Haiti, but no luck so far.
Voynich (as in Manuscript) was married to the daughter of George Boole ( as in Boolean logic) who was it turns out married to the niece of the person after whom Mt Everest is named.
"never skipped or froze" - shouldn't people reviewing technology at least understand that technology a little? (I still want one of course)
There was a terrible piece in the Guardian the other day about "Fairtrade recipes" : they asked random people (Joan Colins for god sake!!) for their favourite FT recipe, and every single recipe they printed was essentially a standard recipe with the word "Fairtrade" inserted before the one ingredient that they knew might be available as a Fairtrade product. Very weak "journalism".
eBay sent me a link to rather ridiculous certificate (PDF) because I have 100 positive feedbacks. They suggest that I print it out and put it on the wall. How weird is that? It's the sort of thing that shyster lawyers would do.
I agree with this - tagging is definitely unsound, particularly given that most of the people creating the tags can't actually spell properly.
For all the moaning-minnies readers who complain about comments being a pop-up, the Deer Park Beta lets you force all windows into tabs.
Organic HTML (this site doesn't make a very pretty flower, nor does the BBC, try the Guardian which at least has some colour to it)
They have recreated this image of Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg for the new movie about him and the first thing that struck me when I saw it was that Jones/Pallenberg in the new photo are so insipidly pretty and dull. The originals have character in their faces, are even downright ugly by some standards, but they have charisma. (I haven't found a link for the new image yet) Here's Pallenberg today.
Rubberduck is great fun - I have some great techno sounds going on in the background. (Still need to get rebirth though)
Everything sounds like Coldplay now (Does anyone actually like Coldplay? I have yet to meet anyone who thinks they are anything other than dull, but they sell appear to sell shed loads of records. Odd)
Don't USA cars come with locking caps by default? I can't recall the last car I had that didn't have a locking cap.
One good piece of news for the USA : the new Robbie Williams album won't be released over there.
Oh, that was over at Pandora : I stuck in "Bob Wills" in the search and everything they've served up so far is excellent. Try it for a little Western Swing interlude.
I'm listening to Hank WIlliams Jr's song "The F Word". I hadn't heard it before. "In country music you just can't say the F word"
Linkage will be sparse to non-existent for a bit as I am off to a conference in York for a couple of days.
Jane Fonda met Jean Genet at a Black Panther party and he latched onto her as she was the only one who could speak french. The next morning her phone rings at 6 and itsGenet saying he doesn't know where he is and he wants coffee. So she asks him where he is staying and he has no idea, so she asks him to go outside and look at the swimming pool and come back and describe it, which he does. Oh, she says, you're at Donald Sutherland's. I'll be right over.
It's looking very stormy out my front window at the moment. The onset of darkness doesn't help of course. Today I went to the Newcastle Mela and I was disappointed by how dull it was.
Anyone have any any secret sources of Makina records? (That's Spanish techno for the uninformed)
I wonder why on the guestmap, Japan is labelled in Japanese, but no other country is labelled in its own script.
Great piece of guitar playing (Though to be fair I don't think his technique is quite as unusual as they try to make out)
DeMoulin Brothers' Catalogue (via We make money not art) The whole goat thing is so strange "Horse, donkey, tiger or camel body, instead of goat body, extra" Oh, and check out the lovely "Drinking the goat's blood". In fact look at all of them and wonder at the sheer insanity of it all : these are supposed to be funny? I wonder how many people dropped dead when presented with some of these. (Of course, I have never understood what is funny about practical jokes so it may just be me)
I was at the doctor's this morning and the waiting room had all these posters and leaflets about leg ulcers. Now, leg ulcers can be very serious indeed, but why a campaign for them and not for some other problem - has there been a suddne outbreak of leg ulcers that I don't know of?
Looking at the guestmap, some of you need to move to Africa. (And, yes, I am playing with the placing of the link on the page.....)
Those of you using the Atom feed may like to know that it is now generating Atom 1.0 so might break something.....