Technology fetishism
The innanet connection was down this morning. It put something of a dampner on the morning’s blog/check news/check email/check blog comments activity I’ve become used to. Having had either cable or ADSL for some years now, it’s always a rude shock when this happens, a bit like getting no signal on the television. And it’s ... [More]
So I was waiting for a train, while reading the geek history “On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore” (which — in my humble geeky opinion — really is excellent). The station host lady looked at it, and (given its lovely hardback binding and olde booke looke when it’s out of its ... [More]
Are email and PDF putting couriers out of business? When I first worked in the city in the early-90s, there were heaps of bike couriers around the place. You’d see them speeding around the streets, grabbing hold of trams and trucks to go up hills, zooming through lights, dodging pedestrians and cars alike. Back then ... [More]
Cam of TPN is off to America to make his fortune, and his latest podcast is a “Goodbye Australia” edition. But what I found really interesting about it is him talking about the (metaphorical) journey — how he’s got into this position, and how successful people work: meeting people, making contacts, helping those contacts when ... [More]
The great thing about having a long-running blog is I can type almost any word into “Search the diary” box over on the right hand margin, and find posts about it, sparking memories aplenty — sometimes even memories that are amusing or thought-provoking. Some enjoyable posts I re-discovered yesterday: 28 Dec 2004: What’s changed (Since ... [More]
The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson — Technology has made it cheaper to produce and store and sell many things. So niché products that never would have been viable before are now big business. That’s the premise. If that’s all you want to know, you don’t really need to read this book. At a pinch, ... [More]
My three main Inboxes are getting out of control. While I manage to reply in a reasonable manner to most of the email I get that’s directed to me personally, I tend to get very slack at filing things away or deleting them, perhaps partly because I think at some stage I’ll need to find ... [More]
I had a dream the other night that I was in a code review with some of the guys. For non-geeks amongst you, one of the key things about programming is to write your code in such a way that anybody else who reads it can understand how it works… and indeed so that you ... [More]
Been too damn busy to think of very much intelligent to blog about. I did post a long meandering review of my new mobile phone over at geekrant though. Oh, and I can tell you about this fabulous email I got the other week: Subject: Your Food Pyramid/Trapezoid presented at food and nutrition seminar Hello ... [More]
The Rugby State of Origin game was last night. You can tell the tourists are in town, from the number of cars with interstate numberplates rolling unwittingly down Swanston Street Walk, and the confused questions on the tram about using the ticket machines, and getting to St Kilda Beach. Oh yeah, I just got a ... [More]
There appear to be some people manually leaving comment spam here. It’s written to look relevant to the post it’s on, and includes a link to one of a series of near-identical web-sites obviously set-up just to get attention from search engines, eg a “Splog.” Now hear this: If your comment leaves a URL that ... [More]
It must be a logistical nightmare to change the frequency of a well-established radio station. 3AW changed this morning, from where they’d been (more or less) since 1935. They say they’re doing it so they can provide better reception across Melbourne. I did actually tune-in to 3AW this morning for the changeover. It consisted of ... [More]
Some random things that make my life easier: The dishwasher. Run it every few days (when full). Cool. RSS. Lets me catch up on news and blogs in seconds flat. The 8:06 and 8:17 expresses. Bentleigh to Parliament in 17 minutes. If there’s a faster way into the city in peak hour (barring helicopter) I’d ... [More]
Bloglines users: the problem preventing you reading from Bloglines has been fixed. (Mea culpa, it was my fault.) For those who asked how I did the desk animation, here’s an explanation.
A little project originally I started about two years ago — to move my entire online diary (which goes back to 1994) into WordPress — has finally been completed. I’ll spare you the boredom of the details of trying to write programs to convert the old handwritten HTML into something I could import, and instead ... [More]
Stuff from the past week: My arch nemesis, Big Ears/Darrin, often hangs out with his mates having a coffee outside the Collins Street (Paris End) McDonalds on weekdays about 9:30am. I wonder if I can bribe the McPeople there to do the same thing to him as he did to me? After much hunting, last ... [More]