Gary Gale

The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream:

• Hamburg airport + Lufthansa plane + storm = a flight I'd really prefer not to be on.
• Dennys publicise their Twitter stream only to discover that it's not actually theirs and Dennys Hsieh in Taiwan gets a lot more attention than he bargained for.
• Geek Joke of the Week: My cat is escaped.
• Pacifica, Stayathomia, Socalistan ... Facebook social network connections mapped.
• John McKerrell's rather wonderful mapme.at gets place based locating.

Yes I know it's short for Dungeness Crab (Steamed) but that's not what it says on the receipt is it?

I feel sorry for the sole pan fried Monk as well ...

If you haven't played with Wordle yet, I strongly suggest you point your browser of choice there right now and see what gorgeous visualisations of tags it comes up with. This is my delicious tag cloud ...

... this is the tag cloud for this blog ...

... and this is the tag cloud for the blog I write for work.

All of which were produced using the default settings, with no tweaking, shows just how varied my personal approach to tagging is and how strongly tied to usage my tags are.

Today's social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.

• Got a colleague who keeps wandering away from their desk and leaving their mobile phone behind, which then keeps on ringing? Maybe they need one of these signs left on their desk. Maybe.
• Fancy a challenge? How many times a day do you type the incorrect command at the shell? Once, twice, three times a day? More? Maybe you should give Suicide Linux a try; it helpfully turns any mistyped command into rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.
• The WordPress Flickr Manager is a wonderful plugin which integrates your Flickr photostream into blog posts. Alas it doesn't work with WordPress 2.9. Until now.
• Posting the same article to multiple blogs severely impacts your search engine ranking results. How did I not know this? It's stopped at least one person from using the Posterous autopost function.
• Sometimes, just sometimes, sub-editors trim just a little bit too much from an article prior to publishing.
• We're used to online slippy maps being able to zoom in and out; but zooming in and out of paper maps? That's something else indeed.
• What's happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; but sometimes it stays on FourSquare as well.
• Photo of the year so far; the Space Shuttle Endeavour, caught in silhouette from the International Space Station. That phrase alone sounds like it's been lifted wholesale from an Arthur. C. Clarke novel.
• ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ pǝǝu noʎ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos ʇsnɾ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos

"And here we are, half past two in the morning. I can't get no sleep"

A slight mangling of the lyrics to the Faithless classic, Insomnia, as Maxi Jazz lamented about being wide awake at 3.30 AM whereas I am most definitely awake an hour earlier. And not for the first time either.

This is what happens when I wake up and thoughts for my next location talk starts fizzing in my mind, unbidden. Sometimes the only solution is to get up, set them down on paper and head back to bed.

"I'm wide awake in my kitchen, it's black and I'm lonely, oh, if I could only get some sleep, creaky noises make my skin creep, I need to get some sleep, I can't get no sleep ..."

The view from my window has changed a lot of recent. Through my office window there's been St. Giles and Covent Garden in the snow ...

... and Hanger One on Moffett Field, one of the world's largest free-standing structures.

Through my hotel window I've seen the Chrysler Building in New York at sunrise ...

...  and Silicon Valley on a cold, foggy and damp morning ...

But of all the view I've seen through my window, I think I prefer this one most of all, because it's home.