This just in from Billy:
Finally, Kiloh discovered that Boris's full name is Boris de Pfeffel Johnson so we came up with an ad campaign based on the Dr. Pepper approach: 'Boris de Pfeffel, what's the worst that could happen?'
Doctor Pfeffel, I like it :-)
I love it that The Lecture List is still running (thank you thank you Chris) and that people are still posting this kind of event: Did we really land on the Moon?
In this talk, using real Apollo video footage and a series of simple demonstrations, we will take a closer look at the science behind "moon hoax" claims, and ask whether we really did land on the Moon.
Well, I don't know about you but I'd sure like to find out :-)
Complete Video of the SIPA-World Leaders Forum with the President of Iran from the Columbia World Leaders Forum
Apparently the campus got pretty heated but ultimately everyone did the right thing...
This just in via twitter+gtalk:
twitter: bbcvideo: Hundreds of people in Peru are reported to be feeling sick after an object from space crashed to Earth. http://tinyurl.com/2kp6er
...I have four fivers in my wallet. When was the last time anyone actually had one--let alone four--fivers in their wallet?!
You know, I was gonna comment on the Skype blog Heartbeat (no, not on the bit where if they had decided to use computers equipped with a proper operating system their crash and subsequent total meltdown wouldn't have happened in the first place) (and no, not on the bit where for the same reason they can't manage a reliable single-customer view grrrr) no, I was going to comment on the email I received earlier today:
As a goodwill gesture to all you faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we're adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge. And even if you didn't miss out on using Skype last week - you can still have a week free on Skype, on the house!
So my first reaction is that
But then I thought to myself, you just nicked the nine quid I had in my account three weeks ago. True, you did explain that you had to, and you did make it theoretically easy for me to protect my dosh while giving me ample and repeated fair warning.
But you know what, if you clean out the balance in your customer's accounts that's all they're gonna see.
Come on, this is sooooo not a modern approach to marketing. Your empty gesture has left me with exactly the same balance I had just before your meltdown--zero.
Niklas Zennström, you're a smart guy, my guess is you can do a lot better (and you can start by giving me my money back)
Do you work in an office? Look around your floor, on any given day, how many of those sharp-suited and VO5-ed younger people are interns. Or roughly, what percentage of your co-workers are contractors, interns, apprentices or full time employees?
This is a poster for a big French building society which is blowing it's trumpet and claiming that its employment practises are going to build a richer, healthier, more stable society.
The claim that they are so proud of is that last year they signed up more long-term interns (under-paid, over-qualified young people who work without job security sometimes in rolling internships that can last years) than they did full-time employees.
Last year the bank took on almost twenty-thousand cubicle-fillers of which only seven-thousand got a full-time contract. And they're proud of this!
Talk about legislation back-firing. The charges sociales imposed by the French government have created a company culture where the long term strategy is to shift all risk on to individual contractors and get rid of all employees.
Can you say sustainable?
Supporters like Loic are pleased as punch about Sarko, but it'll be interesting to see if he can make any kind of difference to this. Being a card-carrying member of La Gauche Antilibérale I am naturally suspicious of big business and my guess is now that they have collectively tasted freedom from any kind of social responsibility it seems unlikely they will return to the old days.
mmm not sure what's going on here... why does the guy who reads the weather on RAI Uno wear a military uniform?
Terrible pictures but astonishing transport system. The docking kiosk allows individual or subscription payments using your oyster card--get out of the metro and hop on one of these:-)
So you know how us whitey westerners travel in the tight confines of buses trains and tubes? You know how the position of a foot or a leg, the degree of but-brush and so on can really make a difference in the personal-space stakes?
Well, I had a first on Wednesday's eurostar, a women drooled on me;-) We were sittin there all prim and propper, each trying to pretend the other didn't exist until I felt her go all loose and flop over...
No biggie of course, it's just I was a little surprised, I've had a jillion guys spilling into my personal space, mostly by accident but also by dogged territorial nastiness, but it's never happened with a woman.
Good to see Serge the Concierge doing his bit to promote the Alex James talk on Thursday.
Remember, get those cheese names to Billy before midnight tomorrow to grab your tickets:-)
You know, Billy and I have been really struggling to keep The Lecture List afloat for some time now, and we're doing it because we believe in it (the problem of course is it's impossible to get funding for a thing with no revenue stream...)
Anyway, people keep signing up and we know a bunch of people use it which is of course great. I mention this because every now and then (like when Billy got very drunk and bought Madona's tights) something fun happens that gives us a wee boost.
One such boost came our way just now when we were shopping for stuff for Clementine's birthday treasure hunt in Ceret and Billy checked his mail in the local internet café. To cut a long ramble short, Alex James told Ohna, Billy's wife that we could have some tickets to a thing he's doing next week and we just got confirmation from the publisher that it was OK to offer the tickets as a competition on the Lecture List.
So there you go, if you want some tickets, get yourself over to the Lecture List and answer the question:-)
Alex James | a bit of a blur is at Blackwells next week. The competition for free tickets is on the home page
Billy claims that Issy-Les-Moulineaux is the star of a famous example in pragmatics.
Of course, in classic Billy form he hasn't actually told me what the example was. Is this a test of my Googling skills?
Her name will forever live on in the halls of justice for her victory in the landmark Supreme Court case Marshall v. Marshall, which struck a blow for the rights of millions of young widows of elderly billionaire husbands.
From Jon Swift: Anna Nicole Smith: America's Princess Di
(Thanks James)
Total fabulousness, now that's what I call a desktop.
(get yours at shilpa-shetty.com)
So Chirac's dream of a 'French perspective' on world news has finally launched. Part of me sniggers but fair enough, why should CNN and BBC24 get all the coverage... For the launch the channel commissioned some animated ads. The concept is the same as the old Guardian ads that used the line "get the whole picture" (remember the one with the skinhead running) but they're quite heavy-handed. The one above is different, the balance of story, visual (you can feel the smile when the kid kicks the ball) and music work well, and the emotional content does resonate (what boy hasn't had a similar day-dream). Is it a French perspective... dunno, I guess the kid is Vietnamese but what is F24 saying exactly, pick your post-colonial nightmare? Still, beautiful little film.
Just got this in the mail--sounds good in a kind of burning-man kind of way...
It's amazing what you find on the shelves at Tesco. For starters, "security protected?" I wonder if the guy putting that sticker on the box saw the movie... And how the hell did they get Tarantino to approve the game (I mean what's the gameplay, sit and watch your mate bleed to death for eight hours?).
There is currently a spider hiding in my keyboard. He's wedged under the white panel the keys stick out of and is moving from beneath key to key. No amount of shaking or blowing seems to be able to convince him my keyboard is not a good home.
In fact, as I type this, if I hit a key he is under he simply scampers over a few and settles in again.
OK... This is slightly freaking me out here...
Always partial to a good shaving story me, well, here's Alex B's first encounter with the MP3Power shaver thingy...
A nice lady at work was sitting across from me this afternoon. In a flurry of note taking, she generated this fabulous post-it portrait. Thanks Katie:-)
Leslie Harpold's advent calendar is up.
It's 11 o'clock.
I just learned a new word:
What an absolutely fantastic word, check out the album cover as well...
Winston Churchill whups Shakespeare two sets to nothing... it must be the BBC's Tardis Tennis
I've been spending quite a lot of time looking at the British Museum website these past couple of months. I've nicked this graphic from Compass, their editor-selected presentation of 5000 significant pieces from the main collection.
Maputo, Mozambique, 2001
I love this thing, it's called Throne of weapons and it's made by "Transforming Arms into Tools", an artists collective from Mozambique. In particular, I love this quite voyeuristic drawing created by the Museum to support the presentation of the artwork. By labelling each item of millitary hardware, this presentation graphic adds an extra dimension to the original. Apologies for gilding this particular lily (as the original is very sensible black and white)...
From the Compass TAE page
The throne is a product of the TAE project - Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) - whereby weapons previously used by combatants on both sides are voluntarily exchanged for agricultural, domestic and construction tools. The project was established in 1995 in Maputo by Bishop Dinis Sengulane of the Christian Council of Mozambique with the support of Christian Aid.
The British Museum website
The Compass section
The Throne of Weapons page
Thank you Nicki for the lovely coffee flask I've got on my desk (brought all the way Nanlong Corporation's factory in Shanghai courtesy of Mr Ikea). At 90p a cup, I'm already saving a fortune ;-)
And in response to gahjr2000's question, yes it does sort of look like a dildo, albeit a somewhat more 'boy-on-boy' size of dildo...
I know I do overdo it on the baby content, but I just this minute received this email:
Morning,
Everything went fine, Isobel Daisy Holmes was born yesterday at 12.09pm, 6lbs 11 ounces.
Mother and daughter doing well, however, invevitably, Father still in shock.
Cheers, Jon
I want one of these
Just read this nice little emotional roller-coaster from Wil Wheaton's blog.
Just had my first roast potato in I don't know how long.
I woke up at four this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. I've got a fairly intrusive cold and managed to leave the house without eating breakfast. Oh, and I managed to forget my wallet.
Ok, I guess I was feeling sorry for myself.
Oh, and I had rhubarb crumble and custard.
And an expresso.
(For those not familiar with the church of Atkins' dictates, all the above are big no-nos...)
So yesterday, as the train was about five minutes out of Basingstoke...
[intercom:] Is there a doctor or a nurse on the train? If there is a doctor or a nurse on the train, could they report to the last carriage immediately?
...and just now, on the platform in Andover...
[intercom:] If there is a young person called Felicity Mason on the train could she please leave the train now. Felicity Mason should leave the train in Andover.
I hope yesterday's heart attack survived and that Felicity was just held up at school.
(15:57, three stations later, another call for Felicity Mason--the guard is going to walk the train--God I have no idea who this person is but i really hope she's all right. I can imagine her Mum waiting in Andover and slowly falling apart as she waits for news...)
Just overheard in Waitrose
Do you have any heart-shaped boxes of chocolates?
All the Valentine's Day stuff is down the end of the store where all the packaged cheese is
So I had to wonder, is this simply a helpful direction or a commentary on the rampant mercantilism of our consumer culture;-)
Well, Nicki got me the box set of Star Trek (The Original Series) for my birthday and it's been sitting on the shelf ever since... Anyway, I'm here on my own and have just watched four episodes in a row :-)
On a side note, the box set (and dig that groovy packaging) has the episodes divided among the disks in a seemingly random order. To complicate matters further, there is no indication of episode order on the disks themselves, the liner notes or anywhere else in the packaging. To get the episode sequence, you have to load each disk and look at it's menu. I'm still trying to work out if this is a very clever editorial layout (similarly significant episodes grouped thematically or something like that) or just a major cock-up in production?
Just dropped my tax return off at Euston Tower. It closes at 20:00 and there were queues of people snaking around the building. Kind of a funny atmosphere, a bit festive, a bit like first day at school...
It's two o'clock and I've been shuffling around the office in my socks. I've stepped into my open-back Birkies a few times and joy oh joy, my legs are not acheing :-)
This is great, I can actually function normally...
So I'm contracting at a place that requires a bit more polish in the old dress code than I'm used to, so I've been dusting off my lovely old leather shoes. I've got a gorgeous pair of French ones that still look great but have a hole in the sole (soul) and getting them fixed requires sending them back to France (the soles are tripple-welt and the taps are forged and seamlessly fitted with steel screws--these are some very serious items of footware).
Anyway, in an effort to make those ones last a few more months, I dusted off a lovely pair i picked up at Church's a few years ago. They were still like new and I seemed to remember that they didn't fit terribly well and never really wore them in. So to cut a long story short, I brazenly wore the damn things last Thursday (the day I became 42 years old) and by the end of the day, both my ankles were raw flesh and my socks were filled with blood (which may have explained why I couldn't keep my mind on the gig I was at that evening).
Since then, I've compounded the problem. I have to wear formal shoes to work, so even with two plasters on each ankle it's agony. My bloody commute includes about 45 minutes of brisk walking and a further 30 of standing still (tube). The picture above was taken a few days into this process, my ankles are swelling up like I'm pregnant and parts of my calf are developing welts, scarring and bruising. I just cannot believe a pair of shoes could do so much damage.
So today i've instituted a one-man dress-down Friday and am walking to the bank in my Birkenstocks:-)
OK, I do seem to be posting a lot of links to Gail's Openbrackets but this one cracked me up...
In fact, I’d say that we spend more time looking for decent porn then we do actually watching it.
— B Jan 5, 4:26pm
I've just discovered that James (Cherkoff) is in Sri Lanka and he's OK. He normally checks in with a nudge to get a move on the day he's back after Christmas, but this year, silence--Turns out Liz and James arrived just as the wave was hitting. They were in a restaurant high up on a hill when it happened.
Nicki's sister lost a relative in Thailand, positive ID from dental records:-(
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I would just like to put my 2¢ into the indeterminate gender thing. I think alternating between 'he' and 'she' more or less at random through a text (I've been reading about babies and this is done A LOT in these texts) is both annoying and unnecessary. I'd be happy for indeterminate to default to feminine. If that doesn't work, we could have a year on and a year off, so 2004 could be "she" and 2005 could be... no, wait that's even more stupid.
Anyway, I'm sure there are good reasons for the practise, I just think the end result isn't working...
The French have a wonderful knack for keeping it simple.
(This is a diagram of the correct stroke sequence required to shave a man's face.
No, really.)
I love this post by Chris, and because I can easily post a link to it, I shall;-)
The stuff that I think several people out there get a kick out of reading on Donkey tends to form in my brain like scum on pot of soaking chickpeas. When I first started posting, the system was so fast that it covered its clunkiness and I merrily skimmed stuff off the top of my brain and dumped it in these pages. Very often, the best stuff wasn't fully formed stories or reports but little quirky fragments and the best way to whack these online was in the form of lists, only for reasons too dull to explain, making html lists on the old Donkey engine sucked.
So to enjoy my mouth's new-found freedom...
Have just struggled through another hummaniteinenglish.com translation. A very interesting piece about the effect on left-wing parties of forgetting one's left wing. I worry a bit, the French is pretty pompous and poorly written (imho) and the guy in charge hasn't got the resources to do a lot of editing...
If there are any lefties out there with good English writing skills, the editor might welcome a volunteer editor/reviewer to hammer the texts back into English:-)
Pantograph is a lovely word:-) Thank you Gail
So the England team's practice sessions are being spied upon by "Zoom lenses hidden in golf carts" and celebrities sunning sans clothes are violated by zoom lenses that "literally reach in and pull the image out".
What ever happened to the good old telephoto lens?
Does it now sound too quaint, too much like talking about a card reader or a Telex machine or some other not-quite-up-to-the-minute technology? I'd settle on "long" lens--as the term refers to the focal length of the device, and a zoom lens could after all, be a 21-55mm (not very useful for pulling out celebrity nipples).
Oh, and in the seventies, there was some talk about the French government making it illegal for French film crews to use zoom lenses and being forced to use "objectifs de longueur focale variable" instead (at which point someone mentioned that it was a couple of French guys, Roger Cuvillier and Richard (Jean) Cornu. that invented it in 1949)</pedantry>
So Billy and I went to this Alexander McQueen bash last Thursday night and drank way too much champagne and then Billy raised his paddle and bought Madonna's tights...
Which kinda meant that we had to talk to the Christies mob who were managing the auction which in turn meant we sorta got to meet the MD of American Express Europe who we asked to support The Lecture List by signing up to one of our fabulous whitelabel lists (which is how the Guardian is going to be getting their content).
So now Billy and I are wondering if anyone's going to ask us to pay for the tights ;-)
Now this is just silly ;-)
Did my first translation for L'Humanité in English last night.
Got a last minute email from the site coordinator in Quebec and had something more or less idiomatic ready in under three hours ;-)
Not sure how I feel about this though as the item in question was an editorial re torture in Iraq, and the tone was horrendously pompous. I tried to tone it down as much as possible, but I'm still in two minds about seeing my name next to it (even though, of course, I am incredibly pompous...).
On the plus side, I've learned a new French word: "la gégène" (the hand-cranked telephone alternator used to make the old telephone bell ring, as used by the French on the toes and testicles of the good people of Algeria). I don't think I'll be teaching this one to Clementine just yet...
The trucking of illegal immigrants into the U.S. leads to prison at a small, liberal arts lock-up. There, we meet Jones, the huge, black king of the penitentiary and his white slave warden, Farrington. Eventually, an escape to Mexico leads to the spiritual anointing of Jones.
In cheap black suits and unpolished DMs sit at a reception desk.
I was there (the BMW service centre in Battersea) from 9:30 til 16:30 and they didn't budge. I hope they get paid enough, though on close inspection they both had screens to play with and spent most of the day drawing funny faces in a photoshop-alike programme. I guess this is why The American Right want prisoners to not have access to television or the internet, I guess a screen is just enough freedom to not go mad?
But anyway, I'm feeling better (but you couldn't tell from that introduction).
Just had a lovely drive (my first sunny day driving through London in a while) from the Dogs Home, past Vauxhall bridge and along the south bank to Waterloo, then through the lovely old Kingsway tunnel which has been open for a while now but I never seem to use...
Did the whole drive chasing a shiny new KTM. Very shit-off-shovel big four-stroke single with a lovely thumpa-thumpa sort of rythm, sort of looks like a wasp -- black and yellow with a waist. He'd get me at the lights and I'd catch him on the straights (just). Anyway, this reprehensible behaviour gave me a nice warm glow inside, so i should get through my all-nighter in one piece :-)
I think i really need a nice long bike trip, maybe Morocco, get some soft-sand practice and some sunshine...
Is filled with darkness right this second.
...the Association of Photographers' rights negotiator and European Pyramide representative and end up without her email address, but with the knowledge that if I want to I can see my chakras spinning :-)
Currently on hold (Billy Joel "Uptown Girl") at the HP online store ("order by phone 0845 270 4215"). I called to ask which models in the Colourjet series are Postscript, networked etc etc.
The guy (an HP employee) replied "what's Postscript?"
This is funny and sad and shocking and made my heart sink in so many ways I can't begin to describe;-) I replied "Postscript is a language used to describe raster images for the purposes of sending them to laser printers. It was written by Adobe and first used in anger by the Hewlett-Packard Development Company in their very qualified laser engines. These were made famous by the first generation of Applewriter printers in the early 1990's"
The guy said "oh." and put me on hold.
90 seconds later a chirpy sales rep comes on (Angela Dickson x2219). After a five minute conversation, she states that she is unable to confirm or deny whether the HP Color LaserJet 3500n printer (Hewlett-Packard part number Q1320A) is or is not a Postscript printer, or indeed if it were a Postcript printer, which version of Postscript it would be.
In the end, she kindly offered to call me back tomorrow (she needed to talk to her manager about this) with a "resolution"
I write because this is like a baker not knowing about flour, a children's television producer not having watched "Sesame Street" or the president not knowing the constitution (ok, maybe not that last one). This is just plain wrong...
As I mentioned before, a nice UPS man took my iBook away to be mended under Apple's iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Programme
It came back all shiny and new less than a week later :-)
It blew up again a week after that :-(
We've just been through the bipolar UPS man circuit again (the circuit, not the UPS man) and are currently hoping if it does go wrong again, it'll happen under the 90 day repair warrantee.
Fingers all very crossed...
Can you imagine what the world would be like if the US was run by Vaclav Havel?
Yes!
The joy of imagination :)
So I have this theory…
Now that the USA is the world's sole superpower, and given that the USA uses up most of the world's resources and spews most of the world's greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, I think it might be time to change the way we elect the person in charge of this mess. In a nutshell, I think the President of the United States should be elected by an electoral college picked from the all the countries in the world.
Essentially, the President is now so powerful, it doesn't make sense for the American people to elect him anymore. In fact, it/05/make sense to pick a candidate from the whole world, not just from native-borne American citizens. Can you imagine what the world would be like if the US was run by Vaclav Havel?
Actually, not exactly--it's just that I can't remember the actual term that describes how the virtual representation of a "folder" behaves like a real-world folder in the way it respects Newtonian physics (i.e. it can't be in two places at once, and if you view it closed, it can't be open the next time you look at it unless you've specifically opened it in the meantime).
Many really smart people have criticised the Aqua Finder for the lack of this behaviour (and many others). I know it pissed me off and it made the whole experience of navigating my content that much less intuitive. Well, as a recent Panther upgrader, I can happily report they've fixed it--sort of.
I had by now totally retrained myself as an Aqua user--no more Apple-N keystrokes etc. So imagine my surprise when switching the toolbar off (Option-Apple-T) actually changes the behaviour of the windows as well as their appearance.
So now that all this is in place, what would make this a nicer place for new users would be an "Emulate OS9 Finder" checkbox in the Appearance control panel. Anyone fancy writing the Applescript to do it?
Nick and I are always being amazed that the moment we have a good idea for something, bang--someone else does it :-)
Congratulations to 37Signals (w.a.n.w, w.a.n.w.) for getting the natural progression from TypePad right.
I guess this means we're going to have to move a little quicker…
Have you heard of The Annoying Thing?
He's a thing on a bike. Well, actually, there's no bike but the sound track makes me scream:-)
Just wanted to let you know that nine (9) letters and five months later, Orange has finally come clean.
They agree that their terms and conditions are unfair--they agree that it is ironic for them to be running an advertising campaign called "Fair"--and in consequence, they agree to fix my bill. They also agreed to review their T&Cs and are having an internal review about customer handling.
I'll package the correspondence up nicely for those letter-writing voyeurs out there when I get a mo.
Just tried to join the Yahoo Group of a project I'm working on.
You know how there are a jillion Yahoo users, well, try finding a username that isn't taken. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous, why can't Yahoo switch to an email-based handle, or allow handle duplicates as long as some combination of other data is unique?
"yahoogroups@safs