Last-Minute Bargains
Quick, before the year ends and I realise that I haven’t finished my 2007 template yet!
2006: The Best of Online
This year I’m adding a few new departments to the usual best ofs. After six instalments I figure it’s about time to add an online category, given how large the net looms in my day-to-day life (and, because you’re reading this, I’m guessing yours as well). So, outside of work and my own contributions to the ethereal swamp, what’s occupied my attention online in 2006?
The trouble with having something good at the top of a blog when you don’t have much time for updating is that whatever you bump it with is going to seem worse. So in that spirit: some worse.
The Not-What-You-Meant-ary
Bill’s Top 10 Yet-To-Be-Employed Forms of -umentary, with further contributions from loyal readers. Whee!
Linkin’
Och, it’s Wikipedia in Scots.
Why email is addictive. And the rest...
War of the WWWs
The chances of anything coming from blogs are a million to one, but still they come...
Crawling
As you can see, things are slowing down here as work ramps up. For the next few months I’ll be immersed in teaching, so I have no idea how much will appear here between now and Christmas. Here’s some other people’s stuff in the meantime.
This all happened because of something that didn’t happen [via Ed].
An economist suggests that creativity comes in two distinct types—quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet. So now you can hope that you’re a slow-burner with your best work ahead, while being plagued by the fear that you were an early-bloomer whose bloom wasn’t up to much.
Oh, and a follow-up to that bus business.
I’ve been immersed in readings for my fast-approaching course all week, but have a few moments to come up for air, so let’s shuffle my smiling visage down the page by linking a few things.
Michael Kelly* has been writing again lately. Best of all, there’s three whole weeks’ worth of it...
Jane must never see this. [Via Mefi, meme-trackers!]
Those crazy kids are exploiting the properties of high-frequency sounds that they can hear but adults no longer can. [Via Ed and Mefi.] I can hear it—h’ray!—which means if I put on Sgt. Pepper’s I should still be able to hear the “Inner Groove”; I figured it would have gone by now. More-finely-tuned tests here.
A behind-the-scenes look at the One Laptop per Child Project. Good debate in the comments, too, and in the comments on a previous thread.
Hieronymus Bosch figurines. I’m tempted by the fish, the egg, and the bird. Why don’t they give these away with cereal? (“New Honey Hieronymuses: they’re a hell of a breakfast!”)
May as Well
The crowd is getting restless, so I’d better write something. (There was that one comment, anyway. And an email. It’s all relative.) I did say there would be more later in the month, and the month won’t get much later than this; but there isn’t really more, yet. I’ve got gigs of photos to sort through and a week of diary entries to finish first. Not to mention the day job.
Read More · 31 May 2006 ·
My brother, in an act of extreme musical criticism, once took his recently purchased seven-inch single of Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” and frisbeed it across the lawn and into our hedge, where presumably it’s still standing after all this time.
Given that he was a big Lego fan, I’m sure he’d rather have used the Hammerhead.
Stupid Comics, as opposed to stupendous ones like Epileptic (which I’ve just finished reading—thanks for the tip, Bill).
Supposing computers are deliberately wasting our time. More from Charlie Brooker, with links to a whole series of extra Guardian columns.
Defrosting the Fridge
The Mathematical Cartoons of Larry Gonick, author of The Cartoon History of the Universe.
Wow. You look away for a few days and one of your blogging compadres gets banged up by the pigs for stubbing out a cigarette. Good to know that the SFPD have been so successful in cleaning up higher forms of crime (as in, “real” and “actual”) that they can finally turn their attention to the small stuff. At last, a crackdown on all those miscreants who refuse to stub out smokes on their bare palms like decent, normal folk.
Best of luck with the court battles, Ed. Fight the power!
Three random links—a pretty thin haul for a fortnight’s surfing, really:
Email from Jane: “Can we paint the hallway this weekend?”
How to fold a shirt [via Crooked Timber].
Fractal Desktops. Alternatively, just stare at the screen after rubbing your eyes too hard.
Photos of tiny people living on the surface of food. Electron microscopy is amazing, isn’t it? [Via the null device.]
Wombat File fans may have been wondering about Bill’s Movable Type woes. Never fear: all is now well, and the Wombat should be up and waddling again in no time. Just had to remove a malignant database that had grown to sixty times the size of its host.
An entertaining web short starring Sam Rockwell as the Bat-Man. [Via Mefi, which I just realised I haven’t even commented at in four months. Does this make me a constructive lurker without a construction?]
Ed hits the com-lit-audioblog jackpot interviewing Dave Barry, who’s sounding pretty chilled about post-columnist life.
Who better to help squeeze your music library onto a 2GB iPod than a logician? [Note to self: ditch the cheap mp3 player from Richer Sounds.]
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