The Daily Grind

Rather amusing rant from Brooker appropriately titled ‘I hate Macs,’ at the Guardian. Followed by hundreds of screenfuls of mostly kneejerk protests, in all directions. [sigh]. Come on people, it’s humour!

For what it’s worth, though, I think The Doctor uses Linux, on (most likely) some old bastard of a HP PA-RISC workstation with a boatload of emacs macros. With a custom controller made mostly of string and gaffer tape.

(Oh, and: the new UK PC/Mac ads: isn’t there some UK law against ‘knocking copy’ – that is, advertising negatives about competitors rather than positives about your own product. Isn’t it really dodgy? What gives?)

If you read stories in the press on Monday about a disturbance in a Dublin pub caused by a rowdy Welsh girl cheering her team in the Wales/Ireland Six Nations opener… that’ll be Flossie.

Any references to English casualties… that’d be me.

ulp<

(If anyone reading this happens to be in Dublin on Sunday: we’ll be in the Waterloo on Baggot Street. Come and join us. Particularly if you can out-shout a Valleys girl, and help hide a random Englishman. Kick-off at 3pm.)

Tomorrow, we’re filming a sports challenge programme that British readers of a certain age will recognise as a close relation to ‘Superstars.’ Only without Brian Jacks. Nor, indeed, anybody else. Or so we thought at 10am this morning.

“I’ve a bit of a problem,” said the poor sports science chap who had set things up for us. “I’ve one athlete called to Stuttgart at zero notice, one with a groin strain injury, one taken to her bed with flu, one with a spot exam dropped on her, and one who appears to have dropped off the face of the Earth.”

That left one. This wasn’t looking good.

Several hundred phone calls ensue. Predominantly lovely people field our desperate plea, sympathise, and do what they can. They make us feel pathetic and whiney, and profoundly grateful. But they don’t find us people for tomorrow.

A crisis meeting is held, at which we conclude – after much angst – that a preferable option to punting the filming on is to revert to the original idea for the programme, shoot with our presenters only, and plan to patch the show up with another item if we have to. Fine.

And then… then the original chap calls back. He’s spent the day miserable as sin because (a.) he started by spending an hour being attacked by his dentist, and (b.) he thinks he’d screwed everything up. Then at the last minute he miraculously pulls three more athletes out of the bag. Hurray! The shoot is on.

So: back to plan A. I sit down with the script, to start reading it through and making changes, as I’d intended to do at 10am. Only, it’s 7pm.

Some days are like that.

Oh, how I love this: a spoof of geek video blogger Robert Scoble, in the manner of Fake Steve. Scoble’s overlong, unedited, wobblycam videos have been ripe for parody since before he left Microsoft – it’s not that they’re entirely bad, it’s more that Scoble appears to willfully, even gleefully, ignore a century of cinematography knowledge. He’d post a whole lot less if he edited out the dull bits, and as Kevin Marks said, “editing shows respect for your audience.” It’s plain rude not to.

So, anyway, the Scoobie blog runs thus:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among the A-list blogs. Very few of them linked to my exclusive four-hour video tour of Intel’s new chip plant, preferring instead to briefly mention that Intel has invented a new type of chip.

Admittedly my video wasn’t very interesting at first, but if you look closely at the 2:13 mark, you can see a man in one of those bunny suits (think Intel ads rather than Donnie Darko!!!) walk past the window carrying some kind of high-tech tool. It’s not that clear because I dripped sweat on the lens again, but it’s there.

Further down the page:

This is just the highlights – the full video is 49:43 long and I’ll put it up shortly. You can’t really make out what anyone’s saying but I’m very excited!!!

Quite. And again, a story ripped almost verbatim from Gruber.

There’s a new bit of web tech that’s cropping up in more and more places, and it’s driving me up the bleedin’ wall. ‘Snap Preview Anywhere‘ pops up a preview of a linked page when you hover your pointer over the link text. Which is great, right?

Er… no. The preview’s too small to see anything much, and there’s no hover delay beyond loading time, so in densely-linked text these previews pop up like whack-a-mole puppets. The most stupid bit, to my mind, is that they usually pop up above the link text, obliterating the thing I’m trying to read. Plus, they somehow knacker the text that appears in the bottom bar of my browser, telling me to where the link points. Gaaaah!

Some people appear to like these things, and there are some ringing endorsements from influential people listed at the link above. To my mind, however, this is the sort of crap that should be done as a browser plug-in, not as a site-wide JavaScript doohicky. It’s interface, not content.

Anyway – if they’re pissing you off as much as they are me, go to Snap’s FAQ here, scroll down to the second question, and click the link to set a cookie. Annoying that you have to hold a cookie to opt out, but there we go.

Please, site owners – just pack it in. It’s not big, and it’s not clever.

(link via John Gruber, bless his minimalist grey background patterns)

[update: There’s an options linky in the corner of each pop-up, and from there you can turn the damned things off. I know this, because the above method doesn’t appear to have worked for me. Neither, for that matter, does the option thingy. I think because my browser is paranoid about cookies from servers that aren’t delivering the main page, which is usually a good thing.]

Footage of an amazing but decidedly ill-looking weird shark thing (technical terms): at CNN.

Looks like my initial reaction to Twitter of ‘huh? Why is that a good thing?’ might have had some merit to it after all, and not been as sadly behind-the-times as I’d modestly assumed.

Come to think of it, though, I avoided it because the first three times I came across it, I thought it worked primarily through SMS. And my UK mobile is mostly roaming in Ireland right now, so receiving texts costs me. Blech. Also because I currently have 5000+ unread posts in NetNewsWire: how am I supposed to cope with more missives from people I barely know? Huh? Huh? Stop the madness!

They’re back. For a gig. Outside LA. On the same bill as Bjork and the Arctic Monkeys.

Yay?

Yay!

A List Apart has their style guidelines posted; so does the Guardian. Wikipedia entry on this sort of thing; and their own style guide. Now can anyone tell me why I’m suddenly interested in this sort of thing? I’ve completely forgotten myself.

Quernstone.com may be long overdue an overhaul, but for the most part it does the job. Unlike the site of the number-two broadcaster in the UK, ITV. My friend Wendy and her posse were on Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway the other week, which I sadly missed by dint of being busy. And TV-less. And… in a foreign country.

They pitched for funding to take their (very likely excellent, knowing them) science shows into schools that normally can’t afford their (woefully under-priced. No, really, I’m serious) services. They didn’t get it, I gather because Duncan Bannatyne failed to appreciate that the usual business rule-of-thumb doesn’t work: ‘Who benefits? That’s your funding source’ is perfectly reasonable, unless the immediate beneficiary is a bored 12 year-old with a pocket containing 86p, a half-sucked Cola Bottle, three elastic bands, and an iPod nano. The eventual beneficiary is… theoretically… ‘society,’ which unfortunately is also rather hard to tap for a shilling. Unless you’re a wide-reaching organisation with, you know, tax-raising powers. Like a government. Or the BBC. Hence the potential significance of a Public Sector Publisher (see previous post), but I digress.

The point is: can I find out what happened to Wendy & co from the series’ execrable ITV website? Can I monkeys. The only real content there appears to be video that’s embedded as something whacko, and is throwing a 404 anyway. Pfah!

But hey – feel free to lob money at Wendy’s company Science Made Simple anyway. They’re good people.