Really quite a good quickstart – cleared up a few things for me, at any rate.

Phil's photos from the other night – them as dressed up and made an effort will probably find better shots of themselves in there than anything I've managed to get, but at least *someone* managed to get some good photos. There's even one or two of me here that I like. Cheers, Phil.

Nice to know that I live in the the most-watched part of the most-watched city on the planet. I feel so safe. Oh, wait, that's not safety, is it?

The best cocktail guide in the world is now available in searchable on-line form. Result!

"Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only those facts that suit it…"

And this, right here, is why I will not buy a kindle, or purchase ebooks in a DRMed format. I would be incandescent if something like that happened to music I own, but the thought of it happening to a *book* I owned would give me an aneurysm. I mean, it's a *book*.

I await this with some interest. The words "dynamic superhero" to describe Holmes aren't totally out of keeping with the character, assuming it's handled right, and I loved Moffat's Jekyll, and well, it's Sherlock fucking Holmes.

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey was my collaborator on Rust, the Eagle award nominated webcomic I wrote some time around 2000. Rust was never finished, and he has since gone on to much bigger and better things, which is fitting, because he possesses far more talent and discipline than I do. He remains one of the only people I know with an genuine interest in webcomics as *web* comics, works that truly use the full toolset afforded by the possibilities of the web, instead of just treating the web as the distribution medium for a print comic – his webcomics are genuine hyperfictions that could not exist offline. He has produced a new webcomic here, and it is as good as ever. Go. Look. Learn.

I know some people who are ambivalent about the space program. This concerns me slightly, as they give the outward signs of being normal human beings, and then they indicate that their brains are a bit strange by holding views like that. Well, here is a link explaining why basically, without the space program, we'd be living in a very different world.

By the time this is posted, I am sure you'll all have seen this link everywhere on the internet today. Don't care. Go look at these photos again. They're a record of the single grandest achievement in the history of our species. I take the piss out of people who keep asking "where's my flying car?", but secretly, I won't consider it the future until I go on holiday to a moon base.

Whenever anyone asks me why I hate meetings and powerpoint, I am just going to point them at this. If the purpose of a presentation in a meeting is to get decisions made, then the decisions made as a result are likely to be flawed. The information should be circulated in a sensible manner pre-meeting.

Yes. Clever stuff. Worth the read. Ties up with some back-of-the-mind thoughts I'm having at the moment.

This should be up on the a screen in every meeting room, ever.

Trent Reznor nails the future of not just the music business, but more or less any creative economy. Barring, of course, the disruptive new technology that will be invented next month that will render his notions moot. But y'know, it's a good summary of what everyone should have been doing for the last few years.

OK, I need to read this in more depth when I get home tonight. I'd missed this before, and it looking like it could do some seriously interesting stuff.

A photographer friend of mine is most of the way through a project to take photos in all 50 states of the US, and is trying to raise the cash to finish the job. If you've got a few quid to spare, please consider pitching it her way – she's bloody good, and I want to see the results of the complete project.

Some really interesting picks here. I think I'm going to have to make efforts to acquire a few of the works mentioned in here that I've never read.

Advice about dealing with Photographers given to officers by the Met. Sensible, clear, know your rights stuff. If an officer talking to you does *not* know your rights, then you might try giving them this, because after all, it's their boss telling them what they're allowed to do.

Look, I know I go on a lot about IE, and most of you are sick of it, but the gods honest truth is that using IE actively stifles innovation on the internet, because we have to spend so much time working out how to support it that we don't have the time or budget to get on with anything really interesting. Until Microsoft either take the web seriously enough to implement some proper fucking standards, then using IE is actively hindering the rest of us getting on with inventing the future. Even if you don't care about viruses, please stop it, or urge the people who are making you use it to stop it – I will happily provide supporting documents to counter *any* or their arguments about "business" or "security" reasons.

"Still working on the omelet. There have been stumbling blocks. I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese. I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back. Tried eating them with the lights off. It did not help. Malraux suggested paprika."

Iphone app for mac users – get growl notifications from your mac forwarded to your iphone as push notifications. I can see a number of uses for this one…

"The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story."

Clients at work routinely ask up to "just you what you did for [otherclient] – just reuse the code, so it won't take you very long", and then look at us like we're trying to con them when we explain that no, we can't do that. And this is kind of why – we learn and reuse relevent bits, but each client gets a custom codebase, because we build the best tools we can for each one. So they're not interoperable.