September 2008
22 posts
4 tags
“My idea of a proper role of a journalist is not to be part of the contest.”
– The End of Facts, Slate.com
Catching up with some older election coverage, came across this excellent quote from Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org
5 tags
In response to Jeremy Keith on Pownce:
Here’s a textbook example of why the password anti-pattern is so
dodgy. Because we’ve all been taught that it’s okay to hand over
passwords for third-party sites, a service called MyNameIsE feels
that is perfectly acceptable to use that sensitive information to post
a Twitter message from your account!
If you’re one of...
4 tags
Hey San Francisco!
All my belongings arrived from the UK, so I’m having a quiet unboxing party at My Flat this evening.
Come by, eat some pizza, drink some beer, play Xbox, write your book, socialize, nosily rifle through my belongings and keep me company whilst I unpack and work out how much money I’m going to spend on shelving this month.
(There are bean bags now. You can...
3 tags
4 tags
“What’s wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of...”
– BBC News
Uganda is seeking to ban miniskirts for a variety of highly quotable reasons, all attributable to Ethids and Integrity minister Nsaba Buturo.
5 tags
Song of the Day →
‘Electric Dirt’, a Foals vs. The Chain Gang remix of Foal’s Electric Bloom. Hot.
2 tags
3 tags
Song of the day (1/3) →
Los Campesinos! ‘We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed’.
Los Camp are awesome and you should totally hunt out everything from ‘Hold on now, youngster…’. This is from the next album.
3 tags
Song of the Day 2/3 →
‘Magic’ by Ladywake.
Twisted mix of 80s electro synth and… actually that’s sort of it. Like Duran Duran crashed into Ladytron at speed.
5 tags
Song of the Day (3/3) →
Franz Ferdinand - ‘Do You Want To (Metronomy Remix)’
File under ‘songs I got bored of but am now totally aroused by thanks to total remix transformations’.
More synths. They’re ‘in’, apparently.
6 tags
Cyril Doussin posted on Pownce:
I am increasingly frustrated by Twitter’s 140 character limit. It
rarely let’s me fully express what I’d like to say. Not that I want to
write Bible-like comments, but a couple more sentences would be
great sometimes.
So it’s probably time to start using Pownce more frequently, for
these personal, not blog article worthy,...
4 tags
http://last.fm/music/The+Knife/_/Like+A+Pen →
First track played at me from Underpangs’ (David Singleton) Loved Tracks on Last.FM. This radio station is vital to my musical survival in San Francisco.
I guess they will need to support OEmbed too…
5 tags
http://cats.iamnear.net/ →
IAmNear is awesome already (at least, in the UK); the ‘nearest ATM’ app is really very useful in central London.
By moving into kittens, I can see they’re making a bold move to become our default demo service. Competition is clearly heating up now that we’re live…
4 tags
Trying to get a handle on one of the reasons for my mood having dipped this week.
I’m feeling isolated, which is nuts because I’m surrounded by people. Except, I feel diluted. It’s not that anyone around me is a bad person - I’m yet to meet a bad person in San Francisco at all - it’s just that I have no close friend here. I very much dislike spending evenings on my...
3 tags
I’ve taken to using Bazaar for most of my code. Local check ins for when I’m away from a net connection, and then a repository on my remote machine. In fact, though I’ve been rather lax in getting my most recent web server set up, it will, eventually, be running with each hosted web site deployed as a check out of the central repository.
…Which is not rocket science, of course,...
2 tags
So today people at Yahoo are playing with Yammer — the ‘Twitter clone for business groups’ that won the TechCrunch50 yesterday.
It seems somewhat useful, in that it’s stimulating discussion between people in the company who wouldn’t normally interact, but by the same note, it’s a third party service so no-one should be trusting them to keep confidential information safe.
...
3 tags
!Pownce Feature Request: Hype Machine music player integration for URLs please.
4 tags
One especially aggrevating passage in Sarah Palin’s RNC speech last week was this:
‘Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America… he’s [Obama] worried that someone won’t read them their rights?’
So. Various constituional ammendments in the Bill of Rights support the presumption of innocence. It’s a vital cornerstone of a just and free...
3 tags
Thanks to !FatBusinessman, you can in fact still disable the ‘Browse By Genre’ list and ‘Link to iTunes Store’ arrows in iTunes 8, there’s just no UI for it in the Preferences any more.
Open up Terminal and run the following:
$ defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE
$ defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
Restart iTunes...
4 tags
Awesome piece of music of the day: The Hill, The...
3 tags
I’ve lived in my new apartment for 7 days so far. I just put in an order for a dining table and six chairs to go with it. Not sure they’re going to match quite right, but the table shape is worth it and could always be stained later.
More importantly, this means that all the major pieces of furniture required for this place are covered. A sofa will arrive in about a month, a bed...
4 tags
“‘Its an odd thing being in two different parts of Middle America for a...”
– Jon Snow, September 4th 2008
Jon Snow — British newscaster and all-round eccentric national treasure — writes daily news summary emails for Channel 4. He’s currently in St Paul covering the RNC and in his coverage of Sarah Palin’s speech from yesterday included this rather striking...