A Donkey on the Edge

Thank you Chris for pointing me to this piece on featuritis :-)

Give users what they actually want, not what they say they want. And whatever you do, don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!

Annie Lennox is on right now…

At last, I’ve been promoted to “official photographer”

and of course, you can too

I’m always amazed when the European Parliament sees sense and does the right thing :-)

Several blasts in London this morning.

• Roads jammed up—made it to work driving (partly) on the pavement
• Closest ‘blast’ (still unknown if bomb) a few streets away in Russell Square
• No news—home secretary due to anounce at 12:15
• Phone lines are jammed—can’t get through on mobile or land-line

It’s a little scary not knowing exactly what’s going on, but Nicki and Clementine are fine.

This is one of those

…and then a guy in a Porsche with his radio hit his horn
and told us the news…

moments.

[11:55] Everyone leaves their desk and heads downstairs to hear the PM on TV

[13:11] Charlotte just wrote in from the US. Glad to confirm friends and family still OK

[13:21] Orange still have nothing on either their UK or global sites

[15:44] Co-workers are being told leave early. Overland train services are mostly working, but no buses or tubes are operating

[16:31] Letter from Mike comes in:

Just wanted to send out a quick email to say that the plan for tomorrow night remains the same, I’ll be buggered if I am going to let today’s incidents get in the way of us all having a bloody good time! The buses will all be working by tomorrow, and I believe much of the tube system. When the tfl site is back up, I’ll look into bus details for getting to the venue and send them out for y’all.

I hope you are all in agreement, and look forward to sharing a beverage or three with you tomorrow.

Hear hear :-)

[Friday morning] Well, the front of the house is still there, so clearly the bomb on the bus was a false alarm. Still, no harm in being jumpy. I guess we’ll be keeping an eye out for abandoned parcels in the tube again. I think once the IRA stopped blowing stuff up we Londoners may have gotten a little lax in that department…

[19:13] Arrive home in West Hampstead just as a rather young-looking Metropolitan Police officer is wrapping copious amounts of “police no entry” tape across my street, effectively barring entry to my house. I drive straight across the (very empty) road and into my front garden. Turns out there’s a lone bus parked right across from my flat and the bus driver is being told to “keep walking quickly” down West End Lane.

It does seem very unlikely, but it looks like we might actually have a legitimate bomb-scare in our front yard.

(Clemmie is asleep out of range in the back room and Nicki and Dug are going to have a drink next door)

(although by some perverse arrangement of cat-like personality features, Nicki is insisting on looking out the front)

(more later…)

(This post isn’t written yet but in the spirit of release early-and-often…)

• Audience-generated content
• Mobile video and photography enables new type of coverage experienbce
• Change too fast for bloggers
• One of the most mind-bending images to come out of yesterday’s media coverage (tube, bus, terrorist, bombs etc in case you were on Mars yesterday) was taken by Alexander Chadwick

Quote from bbc guy:

It certainly showed the power of what our users can do when they are close to a terrible event like this
Pete Clifton, BBC News Interactive

The picture I’m refering to is captionned “Passengers evacuate an underground train at Kings Cross (Photo: Alexander Chadwick)”

BBC has a nice little slide show, but as ever, the best interesting, raw, curious (what’s with all the intense Joan Crawford headhsots), moving, spontaneous, uneven and constantly growing media is on Flickr (I was watching the “The 7/7 Community (formerly London Bomb Blasts)” group pool but there are many others)

http://www.flickr.com/groups/bomb/pool/show/

More on this when I can take a few minutes off work…

-Dug

Listening to Missy’s The Cookbook and damn. I keep rewinding a track called Can’t stop

damn…

Just got this in the mail from Sarah

I have been asked to pass this on, and perhaps you can do the same.

Following the disaster in London …

East Anglian Ambulance Service have launched a national “In case of Emergency ( ICE ) ” campaign with the support of Falklands war hero Simon Weston.

The idea is that you store the word ” I C E ” in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted “In Case of Emergency”.

In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It’s so simple that everyone can do it. Please do.

Please will you also email this to everybody in your address book, it won’t take too many ‘forwards’ before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life, or put a loved one’s mind at rest.

For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

Just came across this fantastic open letter to the bombers over at LNRE

And that’s because we’re better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we’re going to go about our lives. We’re going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we’re going to work. And we’re going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

I realise I’ve been doing a lot of quoting these days, but I love this comment by Hugh Macleod over at gapingvoid.com

Getting too metaphorical about one’s product kills companies.

(This is in context of Dell loosing it, btw)

Not marketing-related, but the quote has the same rythm as another favourite of mine

even anarchists spend all their days in meetings

Name that picture:-)

So I’m looking for satellite imagery of the island of Marawah around 100 kilometres to the west of the city of Abu Dhabi, just to the north of the Khor al Bazm. I end up with a traditional satellite image courtesy of Googlemaps:

So far so handy. I can zoom in on the island, not quite close enough to make out any real detail, but close enough to show geophysical features that when overlain onto the map of settlements makes some sort of sense (dwellings near a river, an old track linking two places an so on). Pretty neat, so I start looking at Abu Dhabi and the desert to the south. What I’m finding amazing is the level of detail you can get on some of these scan areas:

I don’t know if this is an American base, but that big grey thing on the runway sure looks like a B52 (note the empty parking spot between the other planes). The little, white, rectangular hut on the right looks a lot like the hardened hangars you operate out of in the FA/18-Hornet flight sim.

Of course, with no idea of the time the photograph was taken, there is very little ‘intelligence’ value in this kind of image. Still, it’s kinda odd being able to look at these images. Try scrolling your viewport over to North Korea—if they new the level of detail (hydro-electrics and other industrial facilities are all sharp as a pin on the close-up) being shown on Google, the NK censorship guys would have a fit!

Oh and you know, I’ve been fantasising abot the day when asynchronous javascript would let me load an image in anticipation of it being requested by the user. I could just drool at that scroll action all day…

So I was trying to score some new Birkenstocks at lunchtime today and ended up eating a small Ceasar salad at the bar of the Covent Garden Hotel which seemed like the best way to avoid eating Another Bloody Sandwich.

Decided to wash the salad down with a rather tasty and very refreshing martini (gin, three olives).

And to complete the impromptu drift into another life, had a natter with none other than John Stoddart who was having a mineral water while waiting to meet a picture agency chap up the other end of the bar…

This one gets so far up my nose I could sneeze.

Set to forward all incoming requests irregardless of type.

Irregardless is a new word which is not only not a word (ok Billy, steady…) but manages to contain its very own double-negative.

So guys, just for the record. Irregardless is not a word it is a concatenation of two perfectly serviceable English words; irrespective and regardless so would you please stop using it!

(and if, as I suspect it may, find a home in the O.E.D. I wonder how its definition might end up reading)

20 July 2005—As ever, Billy has the answer

PS Here’s the Merriam-Webster entry for ‘irregardless’:

Main Entry: ir·re·gard·less
Pronunciation: “ir-i-'gärd-l&s
Function: adverb
Etymology: probably blend of irrespective and regardless
nonstandard : REGARDLESS
usage Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that “there is no such word.” There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.

PPS I wouldn’t use ‘irregardless’ myself as I think simpler is always better (e.g. I use American English ‘orient’ more often than British English ‘orientate’) but I don’t think double negatives are necessarily bad. ‘Negative concord’ is what linguists call two or more negatives making a negative. It’s not part of Standard English or lots of Southern English dialects but they are part of lots of dialects of English (including Scottish ones), not to mention French of course, n’est-ce pas?

PPPS Actually, I don’t think I’d use ‘regardless’ either. What’s wrong with ‘nevermind’?

B-)

“Pan Asian Diner and Takeaway”—the subtitle on the menu doesn’t say it all.

I know this because I live next to a pan-asian diner and takeaway and it’s exactly as you’d expect: a place serving up a wide range of sweet, spicy and sour from Australia to Vietnam. The batters are light and crispy, the flesh tender and aromatic, the atmosphere is functional but friendly, the service adequate and prompt and of course the bill is reasonable.

What Chu Chi’s menu might more accurately read is “a small, licenced, pan-asian restaurant with a modern decor”. It lists wok, curries, steamer and noodles with choices like flash-fried peanut beef (£6.95), Vietnamese bass (£8.95) and your usual favourites green thai curry (£6.25), beef ho-fun (£6.75) and pad thai (£6.25). Lunchtime bento boxes are £9.50 which seems like good value given the venue’s trendy location.

I readily confess to not being an expert in the world of pan-asian, but I couldn’t help noticing that a trendy dim sum place and the “Thai Metro” are just a few doors up Charlotte Street. Clearly someone thinks this type of cooking is a sure-thing with the punters.

Well, I wont be back. Nothing wrong with the decor, the service or the menu, but my bento box was uninspiring. The “Nippon” advertises teriyaki beef and prawn tempura. What you get is a scrawny little prawn covered in chewy batter and a floppy slice of resistant cow flesh and seaweed placed in the two cavities of a plastic bento box (you could tell it was plastic as it had at some point in the past come a little too close to a heating lamp). The other cavities contained white rice and cabbage.

Of the whole box, the kanar (cabbage-like green leaf and soy beans) with soy sauce and chilli slices was by far the most satisfying.

Right, well I suppose I should go try the other two on the street for consistency’s sake.

Chu Chi
Pan Asian Diner and Takeaway
14 Charlotte Street
London W1
Tel: 0207 436 7460
Fax: 0207 436 7461

Lunch: “Nippon” bento box set price lunch and a cup of tea. Total bill inc. service charge £12.38

I think by luck I posted some of the first pictures of Warren Street tube to Flickr. I was getting my hair cut on Googe street when I heard the news on the radio.

If nothing else, the horrible picture of my blisters is no longer my most viewed image…

Update 19:56 on Thursday, the above picture has been viewed 8251 times. How does that work? 8251 times!

10131 views!

Sitting here chopping some complex css and Eminem’s Mockingbird comes on and I start blubbering like a baby. This happens every time I hear the song (i.e. it’s nothing to do with css…) I wonder what’s making me so emotional?

(Pupuce, plus que tout au monde, je tiens à ton bonheur, que tu soit libre, enapoui et heureuse.)

Maddox adds to the debate on the rise of Citizen’s Media

If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide.

(While you’re there, check out his ‘hate mail’ section)

From the Flickr news page entry dated 31st July, 2005

Now you can block obnoxious, unfriendly, annoying, suspicious, smelly, confusing, politically questionable, disconcerting, pernicious, creepy, putrid, dismaying ex-boyfriends, people who want to be your boyfriend who you don’t want as a boyfriend, hamsters, people who dislike Mogwai, that girl who laughed at your hair extensions, insurance salesmen, your ex-husband’s second wife, your ex-wife’s second husband, turtles, astronauts, nose-pickers, people with ugly anime characters as their buddy icon or just about any people you would like to block.

Sometimes life is complicated.

Yes indeed it is. While there’s no denying the Flickreens have some awesome copywriting skills, could this have something to do with Yahoo’s legal department?