Steaming Crab Dung?
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 ...
Visualising Tag Clouds
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.
Contextual Location (and Echoecho Redux)
I recently wrote about echoecho, an SMS based location sharing service and rather dismissed it as another PlayTxt or DodgeBall, both of which are now shuttered, and argued that EchoEcho fails my Theory of Stuff.
Nick Bicanic, the CEO of Purpose Wireless, the company behind echoecho was good enough to look me up and drop me a long email commenting on my blog post and -- very politely -- pointed out that I might want to revisit my opinion of the service. An edited version of that email to me formed the basis of his latest blog post on the topic of location as a context.
Deliciousness: ringing phones, suicide linux, Flickr plugins, editing, zoomable maps and upsidedownness
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
I Can't Get No Sleep
"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 Use Case for "where's my train?"
As Paul Clarke has pointed out on his blog, not once, but twice, "I assert that train operators know where their assets are: it would be irresponsible if they didn't. And that this information is held within their internal systems".
Here's a good use case for his proposed solution ... wheresmytrain ...
A Posterous Wish List
I've been using Posterous for a while now, a quick trawl back through the archives shows the first post I wrote via the service was in August 2009, and I've been using it ever since. It's fiendishly simple and works like this :-
- I write a blog post in my email client and send it to post@posterous.com.
- Posterous expands any links that it can, such as links to my Flickr account, and embeds the graphic inline in the text.
- Posterous autoposts any embedded photos to my Flickr account.
- Posterous looks for any tags in the subject line and autoposts to my Delicous account.
- Posterous date and timestamps the post and puts it up on my Posterous blog at https://vicchi.posterous.com/.
- Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at /.
Through the Window Redux
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.
Location is a Key Context, But Most People Don't Know This
Like a lot of people, I get most of the information I use, both personally and professionally, from the web; from RSS feeds, from keyword search alerts and from Twitter. The genesis of my recent Theory of Stuff slowly accumulated out of this mishmash of feeds, alerts and status updates.
Firstly I read about EchoEcho, a new location based service which promises all manner of good stuff by showing you where your friends are regardless of which location based service they currently use. Let's leave aside for one moment that the service independence of this app seems to be based around the concept of getting all your friends to use EchoEcho and then consistently getting them to report their location. Let's look at something far more fundamental than that, the strong sense of location deja vu harking back over two years ago.
Haven't we been here before?
Deliciousness: typography, bad days, Victoria & Albert geo, inappropriateness for children and Dave
I have been remiss; it's been over 3 months since my last Deliciousness. This needs to be remedied.
- I don't usually take note of typography and font related stuff that much (leaving that to Tom Coates who oozes typography enthusiasm and love) but this post, on revisiting the font stack your blog or web site is essential reading.
- I didn't have a good day earlier this week. Someone else felt the same way.
- The Victoria & Albert Museum in Londonreleased an "Finding Places" API which allows you to discover places in their collections database.
- Difficult to tell whether this is real or not, but Inappropriate Stuff for Kids is possessed of a heavy mix of LOL/OMG/WTF-ness.
- Dave is popular; 9/10 real women prefer him. Lucky Dave.
- "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame". In all the furore surrounding the iPad, it's easy to overlook the less than stellar reception the first iPod had.
We should do this again. Soon.
