Hey, new Black Dog Blog theme created for me by Mark Ty-Wharton! Thanks Mark. :)
It's a lot less claustrophobic than the last theme I'd been using – although it uses the same gorgeous header graphic, created by alice-grafixx.de.
I'm going to have lots of fun tweaking this one.
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In today's "won't you walk into my parlour" news...
Cat Party to recruit mice, Nazi party to admit Jews, Roma, disabled people, and: BNP to consider non-white members.
Vatican to host Galileo exhibit. Sounds fabtastic. I'd like to see it.
Nice try, kid, but no cigar. Of course, he will have learned much from this preliminary attempt.
Israel taking a leaf out of the Bush administration's books. I'll be interested to see if Obama takes action on this kind of thing. America's about the only country to whom they're remotely likely to listen, and at least the "We Take the Book of Revelation Literally, Roll On Battle of Megiddo" loon squad are no longer in power.
Seal pups: look cute, but don't approach or you could cause them to starve.
Beautiful microscopy photos of blood cells and nerves.
Adults with autism 'cast adrift' in England
This, er, wow. So what are Auschwitz's five favourite singers and which Heroes character would Auschwitz be? Now we can find out. Er.
RIVAL CHILD OVERACHIEVER! It is so cute pathetic that at age 27 I still feel threatened by this kind of brat... oh man... issues. ;D
These poor kids, on the other hand, are lucky if they can learn at all.
Finally, I have to post this for you lot for the name alone. North Korea's Hotel of DOOM.
(Not to be confused with Latveria's Doctor of Doom or Disneyland's Tower of Terror, of course.)
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Good stories with rich worldbuilding always make me happy, but it doesn't have to be speculative fiction.
Here's an example of online storytelling that is wonderful (and has a powerful message or three).
Smokescreen is a free-to-play online game, made by some folks called Six to Start along with Channel 4. It has a very clever plot. And, as of the latest episode, it even has a resident music video (which is part of one of the episode's puzzles).
It's lovingly put together with the kind of attention to detail that pours out of the Grand Theft Autos and the Oddworlds of this gaming world.
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Why do I do these things. http://tubphilosopher.com/
Just redirects to my home for now. I'll make a proper landing page for it shortly.
The joke is about Diogenes of Sinope famously living in a tub. Partly about that.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
charlycrash, ankewehner, voodoo_vibe, crypto-monster-thingy for you!(Everyone else may look at it through this link instead if you like.)
Here, have an "accessibility fail" image macro. Perfect for sending to your DDA-flouting website friends, or any other (real life) instances of accessibility fail.
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Mmmmmmm, I'm sleepy. And very very hungry recently.
I'd better not tell the blood donation people that tonight!
(P.S. no, you cheeky bastards, I'm not pregnant. A pretty important matter of anatomy would get in the way of that.)
So at work I'm kinda beta-testing this thing called the Tagging Tool (well, Topic Link Tool now, because technically it's taxonomy rather than tags after all, but old names stick hard), which is pretty fantastic in an interlinking, contexty, information architecturey, web 3.0 sort of way, and now stuck in my head are butchered Offspring lyrics:
I'm seeing this tool and she just might be out of her mind
Well she's got taggage and it's all the contextual kind
We talk granularity, and all that kinda bull
About linking horizontally so our content's findable
And I say yeah, yeah
My topics are linking, it's good for IA
Yeah, yeah
My badges are win and my website is oh so Web Three...
When I'm allowed to talk about it on Yammer I'm so posting that.
For great justice, in accordance with the prophecy, due to the coriolis effect and in order to let METAL be popular. Infopunxx out.
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The Fresh From extension hasn't been posting my Twitter digests as it should, so I've given up puzzling at it and activated Twitter Tools instead. It's less hand-crafted, but at least it's something. Entries will be appearing daily that contain my Twitter posts for the day, excepting most replies (which wouldn't make sense out of context). Do let me know your thoughts.
I've realised that most of my blog posts of late have themselves been trivial and ephemeral enough to be tweeted instead. Huh.
A friend on t'interwebs is starting an online men's 'magazine', kind of like Zoo or Nuts but the content will be written for intelligent men and the sexualised images will be healthy (so, er, not at all like Zoo and Nuts, then). When I have more details I will be appealing to some of you directly to see if you'd like to contribute.
I'm a little twitchy myself about my work appearing near any kind of sexualised content, even content that's not disgusting or exploitative and in a publication that's guaranteed gay- and trans-friendly... but he's a good chap, so I might write something about, eh, something.
Meanwhile, because this didn't cross-post, I must introduce to you the ACTUAL LITERAL BEST THING EVER. (Explanations on linked photo pages.) view1 view2 view3
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Droople Droople Droople? Drupe Drupe Drupe! *waves flag*
I'm back from DrupalCamp UK, where I was helping out – partly because I'm interested in Drupal (it and I will do Great Things together, yes, my pretty), partly because it was held at my workplace and partly because I know Ian and some of the other GeekUprs who organised it. It was nothing to do with the pizzas (70 of them. Seriously. Between just over 80 attendees), although those were nice, and provided an... interesting challenge trying to get enough people who would take the leftovers home.
Really, really good weekend. I have a stressball in the shape of the Drupal droplet and a USB stick with DAMP on it. Those plus a couple of stickers are about it for schwag, although there was also a prize draw giveaway thing for lots of books. (All fully compliant with BBC competition guidelines, of course.) I've also been lionised and ego-stroked by slightly drunk developers, which my psyche apparently interprets as a Good Thing. In fact I'm evidently so awesome that everyone's desperate for me to help out at the next northern Droople event. Provisionally yes, depending how I feel tomorrow morning and what becomes of the one or two blister startups on my feet.
So, I've learned a lot from the (parts of) talks I saw, even when some things were over my head, met lots of neat people whose names I of course instantly forgot, and generally Organised Things. This meant everything from chucking a napkin in the direction of a spilled pint, through whisking round with spray cleaner on the morning of Day Two, via making sure windows and doors were open to counteract the broken air con and roomsful of sweaty geeks, to telling people which talk was happening where and what they were likely to be about. Also seen some coooool modules and stuff in action, such as Administration Menu.
I'm all fired up about making Profusion work niceynicey on Drupe now. If only there were a halfway house between Drupal and a messageboard system (that ISN'T a phpBB clone *blech*), that would really be ideal. Either that or we could stand to reimagine our play-by-message-board dynamic, and, well, Change is Scary.
Forays into Twitter don't seem to have harmed my usual pointless verbosity.
And now I'm tired. And it's a normal work week starting tomorrow!
*droops*
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Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend after all; I'd forgotten until this morning (yay Outlook reminders!) that I'd agreed to help out with DrupalCampUK.
That also answers any questions I might've had about what to do this evening. That's right: get my V6 on and then see if I can get NodeProfile to do what I need it to... namely provide 'child profiles' for main profiles, call them 'character' and 'author' if you will, effectively allowing the author to post in-character. (You see? Everything I do, I do it for you...)
Am now itching for one of these. And a netbook to use it on. I do rather like being technology-lite, being naturally inclined to hold out until direct neural interfaces are available, but the drawbacks of being disconnected from the mothercloudwebnet in the meantime are starting to outweigh the benefits of not being mugged.
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Man, wouldn't it be cool to run Profusion on this?
Prolly have to be a local install, though, if we're being paranoid about putting things on US servers generally and Google's specifically...
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runs the gamut from
"How could hell be worse than going around with that on you for the rest of your life?"
all the way to
"Hey, that would be quite nice if it wasn't carved into someone's flesh."
Enjoy.
View the original post at HellHound.net
On Wednesday, Peter Hearty of Platitude of the Day wrote a reaction to some of the usual waah by Andrew Brown. (On which note, Brown's selective quoting is shown up by one commenter.)
My own take can be found in the comments to Hearty's post. Since I posted, though, the conversation has continued, covering the wider issue of public atheism, public atheists and the whole idea of debating with POF. The later comments are a good read, quite representative of the frustrations of the thoughtful British atheist. Or I think so.
I like the POTD commenters. Like Hearty, basically all of them are reasoned, intelligent and generally quite witty.
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(My, what a tabloidy-sounding title.
(Firstly, the Outlook-centricness of this post is sadly unavoidable. That's just what they have at my workplace. For Thunderbird and Gmail, where we talk about coloured 'follow up' flags, feel free to substitute tags.)
James Cridland has collated some useful tips from BBCers on how to deal with email. Worth a read if you're in any busy organisation and get flooded by work (and not-so-work) emails.
Follow-ups since James posted:
JF (person who originally asked for tips):
Thanks very much to all of you. Really helpful thoughts - for what it's worth, my top tips are below. I'd like to collate all these into some tips to share with colleagues - James, hopefully I can use your blog entry as a starting point for this. It will be interesting to see what else you get.But first, how many people would love to be able to search your mail archive as easily as Gmail, or the internet more generally? It's amazing what I can find in my personal Gmail archive from six or seven years ago at a touch of a button. And it would save SO MUCH TIME at work, as well - say, looking for people who seemed good but weren't available last time I wanted to arrange an interview on a certain topic. Of course the Outlook search takes so long to find something, that I find I rarely bother, and never try using a second keyword when you don't find the item you were seeking first time around.
I've been lobbying various people for a Google Desktop, or Xobni (inbox search software) implementation for ages, but it all falls on deaf ears. Too expensive, too uncollegiate, and so on. But imagine what a treasure trove of useful ideas and information our inbox archives are! I know some people are allowed Google Desktop, restricted not to share outside the BBC, but someone, presumably at [the BBC's contract IT provider], has kiboshed any future users of this. Any ideas? I've even considered a petition...Anyway, ever since realising a few months ago that I was spending half my life scrolling through my inbox trying to figure out what to do next, and constantly updating several handwritten to-do lists, I've developed a system that seems to work as a dynamic, constantly updated to-do list.
I use the principle of Delete it, Deal with it, or Delegate it. Sadly I don't really have anyone to delegate to, so I have to delete or deal with things. This is really nerdy I know, but every message on its way in that can't be knocked no the head immediately gets a coloured flag:
Red: urgent to do
Blue: less urgent to do
Yellow: something to hold until the issue is dealt with
Green: Generic stuff it's handy to be able to access in a second
Orange: ideas to present at meetings or to others
Purple: ideas to pursue if I ever get any timeThe best thing about this is that you can sort by coloured flag, so you can see what needs doing in a second. You can email yourself, instead of keeping to-do lists, and if something becomes urgent, change the colour from blue to red.
You can also, on the flag button when an email is open, tell Outlook to give you a reminder at a certain date and time, so it handles deadlines nicely as well. Given all that, I still never seem to get below 200 items in the inbox, and that's not including all those yellow-flagged items which get stuck in a pending folder to go through whenever I get time.
I know it sounds complicated, but I reckon I manage to get a lot, lot more done that I used to. I don't seem to send many more emails (still around 1500 a month, unbelievably, or one every six minutes...), but this has helped focus my time immensely.
JF in reply to HB:
Sorry, one more thing - does anyone have any tips for part time people dealing with email? A lot of my colleagues are only in the office two or three days a week, so find an absolute barrage of material when they arrive back from a few days away - more than can realistically be dealt with, especially as they may have to be on air or producing a programme within half an hour.HB in reply to JF:
Part-timers? First off, they should ask to be removed from all the distribution lists they can.Some intelligent filters can help - for example, delete anything with *junk* or JUNK: in the title and anything marked as Low importance (look for "marked as importance" in Outlook's rule building wizard). Use colour rules too, to colour red anything with High importance or a deadline attached. (As a company we should encourage good email practice on the part of the sender, which would help with the previous two points.)
They should compose an intelligent Out of Office saying "I'm part time. Please re-address anything important to..." My Out of Office gives two different addresses: one in the internal address book for internal people and an external-facing address for others.
AW in reply to HB:
Personally, I want to be on MORE distribution lists. Quite useful sources of information most of the time!HB in reply to AW:
Agreed - but I work here five days a week (and enjoy the general hum and occasional great idea from [our high-traffic internal mailing list] rather than find it annoying). If I only worked two or three days, I'd be drowning.JF in reply to HB:
Really useful tips there H. Email etiquette is so important though - it's almost a separate topic. How many times have you sent an email to someone that was then forwarded to a group of 20, which would have been drafted more thoughtfully or slightly differently if the wider audience was the original intention? There's no malice intended I think, it's just one of those habits people have.DH in reply to JF:
I don't know. Two of the things that make e-mail so powerful are the ease with which you can forward e-mails and the fact that it is so simple to send to multiple people. I can see that etiquette around forwarding needs to cover confidentiality, and possible offence, but if you start making rules about things not being drafted well, in a format that is mostly about speed and convenience, I think you're getting into baby and bathwater scenarios.
Finally, Jason in a comment to James's post adds: "Best tip I've heard is to set a rule to delete anything you're only CCed on. If it's important, then they should have sent it directly to you."
Use that last one if it works for you. Myself, I'm not CCed on things all that often, and when I am it tends to be things that are relevant to me (such as people discussing things they're going to ask me to fix when they decide on them).
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This post marks the official beginning of the campaign to have "naglfar" declared the correct collective noun for thumbnail images.
Each web image gallery now comprises one naglfar, or several naglfars, of thumbnails.
So mutt it be.
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'Ill' worker fired over Facebook
The death of 100% (mostly-stupid article about something that truly annoys me)
Appeal for chocolate volunteers gets - surprise! - 1,500 replies
If I have this right, the choice was between compulsory school ethics lessons (the current policy) and the option not to attend ethics lessons and to take religious lessons (already exist as voluntary, occur out of school hours, poorly attended) instead. I find the idea of opting out of normal life and taking a closed scripture study group instead slightly disturbing.
So, Berlin, even though it was actually rejected by default because none of you turned up to vote, have a sanity cookie on me.
Rare albino buffalo seen in Kenya
h4x! A /b/ user explains (and claims credit for) their flooding of the Time Magazine 100 poll.
Oh for a personal army of these guys. In before not.
Twitter your prayer says Cardinal
Post your tweet ideas in the comments. 140 characters or less, must begin @our-father (or @anubis, @suitov, @narasimha or other deity of your choice. Can't speak for the others, but I don't monitor my Twitter account).
Currently enjoying this Easter-themed radio interview [MP3] from Landover Baptist Church. PTL!
edit: Saw this advert on TV and liked it (what, an arrangement of This Little Light of Mine that I didn't hate?!), and the Vimeo page adds something special to it.
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Anyway, I have (re)discovered that the secret to not being a massive failure at rejigging tables and stuff into CSS is to do a bit whenever I have a little time, and leave it working and looking just a little bit nicer each time. This works better than looking at the template file as a whole and thinking "Yelp! Yelp yelp yelp! I'll never do all this!"
Also, am in process of drawing Weft in a pink rabbit costume (thus) because of this.
- Mood:annoyed at time wasted on TRs
If you're a Wikipedia editor (or a member of other Wikimedia projects) and have a preference on GFDL vs Creative Commons as applied to Wikimedia content, please go and vote on their proposed licensing change. (Note that you'll need to accept cookies, and it may take a little while to redirect you to the secure vote.)
Personally I'm strongly in favour, both being very keen on Creative Commons and instinctively disliking and distrusting the use of the GFDL for anything other than its original intended application (software documentation). I have never understood how to use a GFDL-licensed photo, for example, and many such exist on Wikimedia Commons. (I take the only honourable course, which is not to use them.)
Note that the Creative Commons licence in question is CC-BY-SA, so still a copyleft ('viral') licence. They have good pages explaining everything, which I recommend you read before voting.
I have conflicting feelings on copyleft licences. For example, I've been cautious and banned the use of anything virally licensed at Pro, other than usage that unequivocally comes under fair dealing law in the UK, because we can't and won't comply with the requirement that we release all our stuff under the same licence. Our copyright, simplistically worded as it is (which is actually for legal protection, because I'm not a lawyer and you can get into all sorts of not-so-hilarious scrapes if you try to write like one), isn't compatible with copyleft.
But aside from the occasional headache copyleft stuff causes me, I'm keen on the principle of anyone licensing their things as freely as they feel is appropriate and I don't consider the licence restrictions unfair. People don't have to let you use their stuff at all and if they let you do so with provisos, that's generous. You don't like, don't use!
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