February 2010
50 posts
Trip to Edinburgh with The Girlfriend
Her: I've heard a lot more bagpipes than I thought I would...maybe they're not just a stereotype.
Me: We're on The Royal Mile. It's like walking through the Cavern Quarter in Liverpool and saying "wow, they really *do* love The Beatles here".
(As well as showing what a sheer hoot I am to travel with, I thought this said something interesting about how difficult it is to ever get a true impression of somewhere as a tourist...)
Office "hilarity"
Developer 1: Can you write PHP?
Developer 2: Write it? I can't even SPELL IT!
(Not my office, I hasten to add. We're awesome)
OH: "WebObjects is Apple's best kept secret".
Tumblr Dashboard API →
First person to make Dashboard Radio gets a hug.
“The company’s site location track record was so good that as of 1997 it had...”
– Reading about Starbucks’ 1992 IPO
“Didn’t the rise of non-music programming on MTV predate the streaming video era...”
– tomewing in reply to this post of mine.
Correct - didn’t mean to imply that internet streaming video was the only thing that decreased the scarcity of music video that MTV thrived on. Growth of cable/satellite TV, and consequently music channels other than MTV, was of course first :-)
“Cue the explosion of the Internet and how it’s been effecting music ever since....”
– Analyzing The End Of Music Television (via gcn)
The way I view it is simple supply and demand. Great supply of music videos (YouTube etc.) meant MTV no longer had a quasi-monopoly over a scarce good. They had to create another in-demand scarce good, and so started to produce their own content...
“In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to...”
– Nassim Taleb (via soupsoup)
If you’ve not read Taleb’s Black Swan, you must.
“Geo apps are currently wooing early adopters with badges, games, and the idea...”
– Some thoughts on the “geo stack” from Chris Dixon
“Researching my film In The Loop, a comedy about a British prime minister and a...”
– Armando Iannucci in The Independant (via Error Gorilla & shadowfirebird)
Bloody hell.
“Word is a big brute of a program. Sometimes using Word is like going out for...”
– Origins of Bean (an open source, lightweight, text editor for Mac that I’ve just started using).
The above quote also applies to Open Office, which up until recently was my standard word processor.
“The article pretty much ran the Q&A as-is, except that my use of the word...”
– No Pain, No Pain: The “Couch to 5K” and Humane Design
Also interesting: “My philosophy in designing C25K overlaps neatly with my philosophy of software design”…
“Oh, and she wears sparkly black leggings and a neon green shirt patterned with...”
– I’m bored of Teh Internetz going mad over programmer Barbie, but this made me laugh.
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"The cat eats banana happily".
I’m learning basic Python, and wrote a script to create random sentences. This is the first phrase it came up with.
Kinda like “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, doncha think?
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SXSW: Can You Copyright a Tweet? →
An interesting panel, but I would have called it “y’all can’t copyright no tweets!” after Flava Flav’s shout in favour of illegal beat sampling on Public Enemy’s “Caught, Can I Get A Witness”.
“Whenever I see a brilliant kid decide to join Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or...”
– Chris Dixon
VentureBeat: "Weopia makes virtual dating more... →
“Each person creates an avatar, and the two avatars go on a date together in the virtual world Weopia has created”.
Online dating’s a surprisingly interesting sector commercially, and I’m sure there’s lots of innovation to be made over fairly Web 1.0 sites like Match.com. But snogging in Second Life really isn’t it.
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Does Tumblr's "photo reply" feature show it's...
In the “lightweight blogging platforms for ver kids” market…
“Gordon Brown is reportedly weaning himself off his four-KitKats-a-day habit and...”
– BBC News
I love little snippets like this that show the human side of politicians. Even our Prime Minister has no will power when it comes to chocolate biscuits.
“The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a...”
– Peter-Paul Koch on Cult of Mac
I love the iPhone, but I agree there is more to the (mobile) web than that single device.
“The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change...”
– Jacob Bronowski
(via azspot)
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My Tumblr is now on Twitter... →
Ever the social meeja geek, I thought I’d set up a new Twitter account to auto-tweet my Tumblr posts, so as not to annoy/spam existing Twitter followers with a linkfest.
Self-indulgent, I know, but I like playing with this stuff. It’s there if you want it!
“Apparently one of the byproducts of the military operations ordered by [her...”
– Liverpool Daily Post covering a Cherie Blair fundraising event for the Labour party in Liverpool.
Also interesing to hear about her debates with Dubya Bush and how she was “being a Scouser” by stepping outside Number 10 in her pyjamas.
“Frankly, I could care less about having my real life become a video game. (Is...”
– NYTimes.com
This line about the reward systems in Foursquare made me laugh :-)
Game mechanics →
Today in interesting Wikipedia articles…
“The intelligence community is developing a system called A-Space, a sort of...”
– “Facebook for spies”? Way to dumb down, The Economist
“The huge loss is one of the biggest black holes ever seen in a private...”
– EMI crashes £1.5bn into the red
“Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning....”
– Guy Kawasaki
“A lack of features is a feature in and of itself.”
– Andrew Parker
Solid Advice
acehotel:
From Lucien, 6, in the mezzanine drawers at Ace Hotel Portland.
My (already pretty good) life would genuinely be made even better by following this advice. I defy anyone to disagree.
“Whenever a new and disruptive technology appears, there is initially a backlash...”
– The Economist on social networking in the workplace
“…any theoretical economic argument that can be stated in a sentence is as likely...”
– James Kwak (via azspot)
“After years of defending Microsoft against the Apple fanatics I decided to go to...”
– Microsoft refugee Don Dodge discovers Macs
The article goes on to say “the fact that he hadn’t seen the other side of the road as a Microsoft employee is a symptom of a larger problem at the Redmond company”.
Surely being aware of your competitors’ products is far from...
Unsexy & Profitable: Making $$ Without Hype →
This sounds like a cool SXSW panel - it’s a topic I’ve been quite interested in recently.
“As a writer and editor I care about connotative differences between words like...”
– Jonathon Morgan’s bio
Whether you like the above or not, it’s nice to read an “about me” page that isn’t simply a chronological list of “jobs I’ve done”.
“More and more, I’ve heard entrepreneurs say something like ‘I don’t want...”
– Being friendly has become a competitive advantage in VC (via mikehudack)
“TechChuff made nearly £10 in revenue last year from selling some back-links to a...”
– Crunchbase isn’t normally known for its hilarious profiles.
Buster Benson's Rules →
Click through to msg’s post for the story behind these, but basically:
You must not dilly-dally
You must be your word.
You must have good intentions.
You must admit to being the maker of meaning.
You must not feel sorry for yourself.
You must have a vision that you are striving for.
You must tie creativity and experimentation with survival.
You must be the change you want to...
