Month: December 2006

Oooh, nice. A Dashboard calculator that works like calculators should, rather than emulating a twenty year-old electronic calculator or pissing around keeping nutty HP-loving reverse-Polish holdouts happy: PEMDAS. That it’s beautiful to look at is merely the icing on the cake – this has instantly displaced the Calculator widget from my Dashboard.

For reasons too subtle (read: ‘dull’) to go into, I’m reading last week’s Observer magazine. Page 81, if you must know, featuring Lucy Siegle‘s ‘Ethical Living’ column. Which is rather interesting about eggs: when I’m finally back in the UK, I really must get more serious about recognising all the various food labeling schemes. The same author’s feature on fish (ibid, page 24) makes much of the Marine Stewardship Coucil’s branding, of which I’ll confess to never having heard.

Back to page 81, however, where I find the ‘Green Gauge’ (ho ho) column, listing things going up vs. things going down. Hey, it’s a Sunday colour sup, they’re still allowed such clichés.

Listed as ‘going down’:

The term ‘experimental’ when applied to ‘reactor’ – as in the new $12.8bn international thermonuclear experimental reactor to be built in southern France – is always disconcerting.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s not a fission reactor taking big n’ heavy Uranium and firing neutrons at it to make other shit that’s horribly hot, it’s a deuterium-tritium fusion device. And ITER (Wikipedia) is no longer an acronym, precisely to avoid this sort of knee-jerk stupidity… though one could say that as PR people, the physicists should stick to physics.

Sure, there are problems with fusion in general, and with ITER in particular, but saying ‘it’s nuclear therefore I’m against it’ – aren’t we past that sort of naïvely-simplistic nonsense?

I forgot to mention the other day – Flossie texted to say that David Tennant was at her workplace, as the Doctor. Which was, we concluded, more impressive than somebody who might have been Matt Lucas sitting on the wall outside her house the same evening. That turned out to be just a props guy – Lucas was sitting across the road.

Apparently all BBC TV shows are being made in South Wales, presumably as a cost-cutting measure.

Modern Life is Rubbish has a lovely post on the fonts used by Web 2.0-ish companies. A ground-up rebuild of The Daily Grind is long overdue, but one thing that’s rather likely to stay is the use of a serif face for my blatherings. All that stuff about sans-serifs being more legible on screens is as out-of-date as that nonsense about using two spaces after full stops.

For those of you not on Macs, by the way: the body face here is Baskerville, which arrives with Mac OS X and is much under-used. Besides, I love the story of its origin. However, I’ve never quite got the sizes right, with my blockquotes in particular being somewhat hard to read. When time permits, I shall enjoy a merry weekend playing with the glorious new CSSEdit 2.

Wikipedia lists six expansions of the acronym ‘KBS,’ tragically none of which are the one I seek. Anyone happen to know the etymology?

Just curious.

Previously, on The Blogosphere: at Les Blogs 2 last year, Ben called Mena‘s speech ‘bullshit,’ so she called him an ‘asshole’. This year, at the successor conference Le Web, French presidential hopefuls showed up and lots of people got annoyed, including Sam. But Loic (who works for Mena, and organised Le Web) called Sam an ‘asshole’, then Michael fired Sam. And now, The Blogosphere continues…

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OK, I’ve officially gone from eye-rolling ‘oh-for-heaven’s-sake’ to ‘fetch-me-the-popcorn-this-is-unreal.’ I feel bad for Sam, whose posts at Techcrunch UK read as being quite measured to this non-attender, and I’m appalled that Loic’s contentious comment on Sam’s post has apparently been removed.

Perhaps most significantly, I’m seriously reconsidering my use of Six Apart‘s products. This isn’t a new thought, in that I’ve been watching WordPress with envy for a while, wondering when some of the gloss of TypePad and Vox would pay off for Movable Type, stuggling against the strategy that has me moving to TypePad. But I’ve not seriously considered shifting allegiance, until now. Six Apart is a small organisation, and how its key staff comport themselves in public says a lot about the goals and aspirations of the company. There’s no benefit to me in using tools that are being developed by people who get it so wrong.

This isn’t the first video to show each note being played in a separate video clip, I’m sure — but it’s very nicely put together. 1.7 million views, too. Wow.

Woohoo! My PowerBook G4 has an 80Gb drive, which was as big as they came when it was new, and still as big as they came until earlier this year. But my PowerBook is three years old, sheesh – paging Gordon Moore, your Law may need tweaking!

I was beginning to wonder if the next MacBook Pro would feature 80Gb iPod drives in a RAID 0 array, but now it looks like sanity will return and save me from daily sweeps for free disk space.

I’m quite serious, by the way: one of the things that’s kept me from considering a replacement laptop is that even 160Gb isn’t enough for a full install of the dev tools, iLife, Final Cut Studio, a decent iTunes library, a series of Studio 60, and 300,000 documents I’ve accumulated over the last fifteen years. Well, it isn’t if you want space for media, anyway.

It’s a little hard to work out exactly what happened amidst the piles of debris, slowly-settling dust, and general confusion, but it looks like Paris-based web conference Les Blogs 3 Le Web has been hijacked by French Presidential hopefuls. Which is… er… weird. But hey, if David Cameron (…’s handlers) runs a video blog, I guess there must be some sort of reflected-glory thing involved and oh I can’t be bothered working it out, actually. There’s a view of the festering corpse of whatever pre-event excitement had been generated at Tom Morris’ blog. Euan’s take is interesting, however, in part because it’s remarkably considered given the general amount of flack that appears to be obscuring matters in Paris.

One odd theme that strikes me from the fall-out: there seem to be plenty of ‘new media’ types who still want to know if ‘old media’ (which now means TV and radio along with print, do keep up) is ‘dead.’ They may have an agenda there (cough), but if they do, then it’s just as simplistic as old media’s often-patronising perspective on the web.

Bits of TV are dead, sure. Some of those bits may not have noticed yet, but they’re dead all the same. Bits most certainly have plenty of life left in them, as the bloggers would notice if they stopped watching Battlestar Galactica for a minute. But none of this is really very interesting, because it falls under the heading gets tagged as ‘bleedin’ obvious’ and ‘divisive.’

What’s interesting, surely, is how ideas are relayed to, and between, audiences. Television was one early transmission protocol, that has serious technical limitations (one-way real-time communication, huge latency on the return path), but also unparalleled reach. Plus, you know, pretty moving pictures. But structurally, it’s really no different to newspapers and magazines (discuss, 20 marks); there are many other forms of transmission, other interaction models, with which we’re finally able to play. And hey, guess what? We really don’t know much about them, because committees and presentations and working groups and colloquia and symposiums and coffee mornings don’t scale to thousands of people, so we’ve just never done this sort of thing before and gosh that’s really exciting and gee, who knew thousands of people sharing pictures with each other would be, like, fun, and hey, what about a bunch of us get together and write an encyclopedia, and… and so on.

Our challenge is to work out which approaches are useful, productive (and/or entertaining), and can be explained to people in words of less than four syllables. Which was, I thought, rather what Le Web 3 was going to be about. It’s certainly why, once upon a time, I rather fancied being there.

…Aer Lingus gave to me:

• Six stags hung-over
• Five minutes’ delay
• Four bawling babes
• Three snoring gents
• Two mad women
• …and a flight attendant who could not smile

It’s a damned sight more pleasant than Ryanair, though.