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Friday 2 January 2004 |
Ok, next question: how the hell do you post a picture rather than a link using Radio on a Mac? It won't work in either IE or Safari. WHY does working with Radio on a Mac have to be such a pain (you have to do more intermediate steps that you don't need to do in Windows...)?
Gone is the wysiwig editing unless I use Mozilla (thanks, I don't really want to have yet another browser installed, but looks like I'll have to -- I do not know enough html to make editing via html a fun and happy process. All of which underlines a point I made in a recent Guardian article -- weblogging software programs, ALL of them, remain too difficult for fussy or most people to be able to do much with them outside of the most basic stuff (however, I consider a Mac wysiwig editor to be a pretty basic feature)... No wonder there's such a high drop-out rate with blogs -- it just gets so damn frustrating sometimes dealing with the app, the servers, the hosting, the writing...
OK. I'll stop. No grumpiness on only day 2 of a fresh new year! Or only minimal grumpiness. And anyway, Jaspar just woke up so time to crawl on the floor and endure a puppy attack.
3:18:20 PM #
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Monday 22 December 2003 |
Heh! From John Naughton's blog: MalapropismsQuentin was looking for a B&B near Heathrow airport, and found a web page saying, "The bedrooms are specious...". Hmmm... Wonder if they meant "plausible but false" or "based on pretense; deceptively pleasing"? [Memex 1.1]
9:44:20 AM #
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Rustic found alphabet. 
"Dean Allen at Textism created a found alphabet in a rural setting. The alphabet has a pleasant rustic feel, using mostly earth tones."
Link...While you're there, check out his Daily Oliver, too...
[Boing Boing Blog]
9:31:25 AM #
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International flying at a time of high terrorist alerts. Peace on earth, goodwill towards man.
9:23:40 AM #
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Friday 19 December 2003 |
At this holiday time of year, send some good thoughts in the direction of a small town in Wisconsin today. Yesterday my 95 year old, much-loved grandmother fell and shattered a thigh bone and had to have surgery. She is incredible -- lives alone, in her own little house. She's one of the people I care most about in the world, and I'm hoping she heals quickly. Apparently the surgery went well and her first words as the anaesthesia wore off were: "I have to get back home soon, since the dryer needs fixing." That's my grandma.
Many years ago, after my mom's father had died, and then my dad's mother had died, a romance blossomed between my mom's mom (who just had her surgery) and my dad's dad. They ended up marrying in the 1960s! Making my mom and dad step-brother and step-sister, all my cousins my cousins twice over, my brothers my cousins, and me, my own cousin. Confused?! I know, you practically need a diagram. Grandpa, dad's dad, passed on years ago so it's been grandma on her own for many years now. Well, surrounded by family, including 90-something sister and brother. At my aunt's wedding last May (she, in her 70s, married an 80-something) the mother of the bride -- grandma -- attended, and was first up to start dancing to Johnny Be Good. They don't make 'em like that very often. Here's thinking of you, grandma, and may you be up and about again before long.
10:27:13 AM #
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Got a science-y person in your life? Can't figure out a good gift? If you're willing to spend a bit (ie: the person is family, best friend, or partner) I'd highly recommend a subscription to New Scientist (www.newscientist.com). Sharp, challenging, endlessly interesting, and with good broad appeal to anyone who likes science, technology, and science issues. I finally got a subscription myself and must say it's one of the best purchases I've made this year. It's a weekly so it's always fresh news.
10:13:04 AM #
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Salon reviews the new Patrick McCabe: "Call Me the Breeze" by Patrick McCabe. A brilliant, hallucinatory fable of LSD, pies, "psychobilly" rock, IRA violence and Travis Bickle-style love in the sinister country-and-western Ireland of the '70s. [Salon.com]
10:03:51 AM #
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Thursday 18 December 2003 |
This morning I was up at 7:30 (not an hour favoured by journalists unless you are coming home...) -- in order to go for ice skating lessons at 9 with my pal Mark. This was so much fun! The rink (www.dublincityonice.ie), in Smithfield and a short bicycle ride from my house, is outdoors --perfect, as this morning dawned beautiful, clear and icy cold. I went to the rink last year and also once this year but going for lessons was a treat. Seven of us had the whole rink to ourselves rather than jostling with the crowds and Canadian instructor Lorelei explained how to do something I've wanted to be able to do since I was a kid -- skate backwards! By the end of a glorious hour I could go backwards without constantly whirling my arms like windmills -- what an accomplishment! We are going to go again in the first week of January -- who knows, maybe I'll be doing triple somersaults after the next lesson...
2:52:16 PM #
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It's not because I don't think they're important... Yeah, I know: I haven't linked to or commented upon any of the very recent Irish govt initiatives to provide broadband connectivity to Irish towns and cities, and to open up the ESB network and work with Esat/BT to push down domestic lease line/backhaul pricing. This is all good news but I want some time to read and think through the initiatives. Jamie Smyth in the Irish TImes covered the stories. I'll try to get some links up and some commentary in the next while.
2:23:49 PM #
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Coffee Shop as Office. Legal Grounds coffee shop in Dallas is the primary office for a number of independent workers: This story is a great peek into the lives of a handful of people who regularly spend most of their work days on their laptops in this coffee shop. [via techdirt]... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
2:20:06 PM #
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Wednesday 17 December 2003 |
Games publisher Electronic Arts Canada is running these amazingly geeky billboards that translate as "Now Hiring."
Link
[Boing Boing Blog]
11:03:22 AM #
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Tuesday 16 December 2003 |
A question for anyone using Radio on Safari -- am I right in guessing you can't get the wysiwyg editor to work for posts within Safari?
2:12:43 AM #
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Will the REAL techno-culture blog please stand up? If you visited in the last two days and wondered if this blog had been replaced by a changeling (so to speak), the proper blog is back. The brief outage was due to me not getting the transfer done in all the correct bits, bytes and pieces from the Windows desktop machine to Mac laptop. In the interim some low-level panic stepped in, I admit.
It all had to do with macros and not re-putting in an ftp password and porting across too many root files and other things that make the head swim and go to show that doing anything more than the very basics with a blog is not for the faint-hearted (and I think Radio makes this easier than most). A few techie friends (I'm sure I have a few out there who will admit to being such) will acknowledge that while I am not a dab hand at the technical stuff, I can blunder along without constantly embarrassing myself (I only look like a total fool 90% of the time). But this was way beyond me, once I'd crashed and burned. Lawrence over at Userland Software kindly came to my aid via the discussion boards, so now I can go back to not having a life and posting to the weblog.
Move along, there's nothing left of the acccident to see any more, folks.
Meanwhile, I was looking at the Saturday Guardian arts section which has a review of the current Shakespeare on in Stratford which stars Dame Judi Dench, and a picture of the Dame. What a striking, beautiful, noble face she has as she has aged. How that aging becomes her. And how rare now to see that in an actress (or actor) in this age of botox and the Holy Church of the Nip and Tuck.
We are losing character on stage and on screen... indeed do we even see our stars age any more -- one day they are youthful, then they go into three decades of a holding pattern, then suddenly they seem really worn and aged (think Harrison Ford or Robert Redford). I've always liked Clint Eastwood because the lines just got deeper, he could deprecate his own growing decrepitude (Unforgiven) and the better and better films kept coming out of his head.
1:05:35 AM #
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Friday 12 December 2003 |
Argh. I still haven't had time to either do a clean install of XP (you can imagine how high that is on my To Do list) or figure out why my DSL keeps disconnecting from my desktop PC. A reader sent me a likely reason to check out -- apparently people running DSL on XP have been having problems like this since one of the recent automatic updates (heh -- I mistyped that as 'aromatic updates'; I'll leave you to imagine likely scents!!). He's given me some helpful avenues to pursue and I'll make a bet that that's the problem. However, I don't want to fix it then have to do it all over again after I do the regular clean install. So the hideousness of a clean install must come first.
So the question is: will I get to this before heading for California for the holidays? Snowballs and hot places come to mind. In the meantime, I am trying to migrate Radio over to my Mac to at least make it easier to do blog updates (at the moment, I have to switch cables around and get a dial-up connection to do so, as Radio is on my PC. Ugh) but then I read of -- sigh -- 'issues'... related to Panther compatibility. Tech hell, albeit not one of the nastier circles of same that one can inhabit.
11:02:23 AM #
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