The Comet Effect

Sixapart announce Comet, which sounds like the reasonably predicatable fusion of Moveable Type blogging and Livejournal that’s been been on the cards since they bought LJ. There’s some talk of better media integration than current blogging tools provide, and it’s certainly something I’ll watch with interest, but I do wonder what the point is.

Having come back to “proper” blogging after a few years of LJ-only stuff, I’ve found that I like the difference that the community-free aspect of blogging provides. I’m aware that this blog has a small audience, but I’m not aware of who they are, and I know that they’re coming here because (I assume) they like the content they find here, rather than because they’re part of a community. I write what I want here, rather than worrying about spoiling someone’s community experience.

Another one for the write-more-later file, I think…

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Really quite fed up of this.

Just as I recovered from the weekend, I came down with a cold, but obviously, I haven’t done anything sensible like stay home. It is now almost week since I last went to the gym, and since at the moment, a brisk walk puts my heart rate through the roof and leaves me sweating in that unpleasantly diseased and clammy way, I don’t think I’ll be going tonight, either. I forsee sleeping in my future. It’s what I hate most about being unwell. All the pointless sleeping.

I’m idly wondering about paying for myself to go to ETech and SXSW Interative next year, because I’ve given up all hope of ever having a job that will pay for me to go to them, and I really want to go. Don’t suppose anyone else has got a job that would pay for me to go, if I sorted out flights and accomadation myself?

And on the geek project front, I’ve finally noticed Upcoming.org, which neatly spikes my big plan for the winter, by having got there first, and got almost everything right. I see that hirez has beaten me there, but is anyone else using it yet?

Now, more of that annoying sleeping I was talking about…

Beaten to it

But I supposed I can feel slightly relieved. I’ve mentioned The Programming Project That Will Not Die a couple of times, I think, but I’ve just found a site that does almost exactly what TPPTWND was planned to do. It’s Upcoming.org.

I still think that TPPTWND I’ve still got the project to complete, but I’m going to scale it back like a bastard now, and focus in some of the other interesting bits about the site, rather than building it as a huge social app for now.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Personal productivity

I’m slowly trying to teach myself to be organised and productive. To those of you who have seen the state of my room, and are now laughing like drains, I can only say a) I said slowly, b) that’s mostly personal detritus, and c) it’s on my to-do list, it’d just not a very high priority.

However, I’ve just turned up 43 Folders, which might be useful.

Following on from this: Workhappy merits looking at later, as does the blog Technology and the Social, I’ve been meaning to link kottke.org up for a bit, despite the fact that you’re all reading it already, and I should spend a bit of time with Lifehacker, and or a purely personal basis I want to take time to read DIY photography on the cheap.

But first, I should probably tidy my room.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Baaa!

LJ Interests meme results

  1. blues:
    I should probably be more specific: delta blues. Dirty, scratchy vinyl sounds behind a miserable bastard with a guitar and a spare rythmn. Music made more as much out of myth as notes. No show, no flash, but something honest and human. Dark bars and cold booze on hot nights.
  2. early punk:
    I feel the need to qualify that so that people don’t think I like Blink 182, or something horrifying. Musically, a lot of it is fucking awful anyway, but I’m a sucker for a DIY ethic, unless it is in some way connected to shelves.
  3. futurism:
    I think anyone without a certain amount of interest in this is missing the point. We’re going to be living there tomorrow, so we ought to be fucking well trying to guess what it’s going to be like, if only so we have a better chance to get it right.
  4. high weirdness:
    Well, come on, if you’re going to enjoy weirdness, it might as well be the really fucked up shit.
  5. lafitte’s:
    Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop is the best bar in New Orleans, and on that basis, a serious contender for being the best bar in the world. If it has survived the hurricane, I will be both shocked and delighted, but I really don’t expect that it has.
  6. new orleans:
    The only American city I’ve been to that I can say I really enjoyed just for itself, despite the place doing it’s level best to kill me with heat at the time. I can only imagine how much I’d have liked it if I’d gone at a sensible time of year, and I can only hope that they rebuild it exactly as it was.
  7. photography:
    As I keep telling everyone, I have no interest in this whatsoever.
  8. queen & country:
    Greg Rucka’s fucking brilliant series of comics and novels about life working at the sharp end of MI6. Forget the Bond movies. This is a series about damaged headcases, and the way the job chews them up and spits them out.
  9. stories:
    They’re what make us human. If you cannot tell me a story, I have no wish to know you.
  10. this too shall pass:
    I have this tattooed on me, because I think it’s a sufficiently important sentiment to merit making sure I can’t forget it.

Quick Link Roundup

PHP streams – a few things I didn’t know about working with files in PHP.

5 mistakes band/label websites make – I think we’re slowly educating people away from them, but still, a handy reference for when I’m dealing with particularly stupid artists/managers.

Google blog search may balkanise the web. I don’t think it will, but it’s two topics I want to come back to at some point – balkanisation/taste-tribes and the value of blog-searching.

Web 2.0, from Abstracted Dynamics. A lengthy and well thought out piece on what this Web 2.0 business that everyone’s talking about actually is.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Communication and Conviction

I’ve been thinking a lot about soap boxes, and getting one’s message across, and basically how people can tell others the things they care about and generally get heard. And then I read Desolation Jones #3, and it got me to thinking. This essay is very much only a start, but I wanted to just set down where my head is at with regard to what I do all day right now, in the hope of building on it. It’s a bit scattershot, but it’s there to clarify a few things for me. Next time, I’ll try and get stuck into techniques for on-line discourse, or something…

This entry was originally published at my workblog.