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Fantastic video of a guy playing on some makeshift drums…
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“All I know is I’m more excited about work than I’ve been in a long time. And from excitement and bold moves, great things often happen.”
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“Internalize these principals and you can reach depths of failure you have possibly never imagined!”
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Great time-lapse video of a couple stripping the wallpaper in a room. Wish we’d thought of this when we completely remodelled our flat!!
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As the page says, a slightly “morbid but peculiar fascination” with doomed engineers/scientists.
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“If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful […] We have to make it gorgeous. We have to make it easy on the eye. We have to make it take your friend’s breath away.”
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Cool tips from the man himself for using Ubuntu on the road. I especially like the way Mark deals with emails with weblinks even when offline — very GTD!
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“Consumers don’t choose Google because of it’s brand or the ‘lifestyle marketing’ built around it and thus I feel Google has very little to loose.”
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Ben’s joined the stopmotion bandwagon — the results are entertaining. Although I wonder why he doesn’t heat up his fajita pan at any point!
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Cool to see Web Directions spreading. I particularly love the new logos
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Common sense tips for not forgetting things. Very GTD-esque, but good to have a reminder!
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“Artists are slowly migrating to distributing their own content via the internet. This seems like a great idea and should scare the RIAA more than any college student downloading a pirated song.”
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Interesting list of Top 100 UK blogs. Quite impressed by how many peeps I know are on it!
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“I wanted to solicit feedback but discourage conversation so, to foster independence of opinion, comments were not immediately published.”
Really interesting experiment from Jeremy. -
Nice review from HASH of Polldaddy — looks potentially quite a nice way of adding the occasional poll to a site!
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“The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.”
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This is a really interesting idea. I imagine you end up having to use light weights, doing lots of reps to tone rather than strengthen/bulk out. Personally I enjoy weight-lifting enough that I don’t need a game to keep me interested — that I need on an exercise bike!
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This is a really nice way of getting the word out about a new service and doing charity some good at the same time. I especially like that they've tied it in with Children in Need
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Jessica’s written a great writeup of their trip to Australia which has given me a huge feeling of homesickness for South Africa and a real desire to get to see Australia sometime.
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Wish I’d made it down for the WSG’s Microformats evening. For those who missed it like me, links here to the presentations and the podcast.
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“Q: But someone could steal a container in a parking lot. A: Of course they could. They could also steal the Mona Lisa if it was left in an unguarded parking lot. So don’t leave a million dollar datacenter in an unguarded parking lot.”
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“If I read just ONE more book about the web that starts with a history of the internet, I will have to take hostages. Seriously.”
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“Your choice of car shouldn’t tell us anything about what sort of neighborhood you’d like to live in or who you will vote for in the next election. The kind of clothing you wear should have no influence at all on the kind of wine you prefer. But it does.”
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Tim's right. This is the big one — the one we should all be worried about.
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This is bollocks. I only ever learnt anything from coursework. I was really good at exams — like 95% average good — and would just swallow a book, write the exam and then lose most of the detail immediately afterwards. Coursework actually taught me something!
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“Gerry Studds, the nation’s first openly gay congressman, pushed the country to another landmark development when he died Saturday: the federal government for the first time will deny death benefits to a congressman’s gay spouse.”
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This seems a great idea — especially when you have organisations working on completely different calendars (e.g. Lotus Notes, Outlook, Google Calendar combo doesn’t mesh well!)
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Hilarious rundown of how to make money out of a startup — quickly! Strongly reminiscent of a bunch of “how to get VC money” panels at SXSWi last year…
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Some good travel tips. Some more obvious than others. The one I’d add would be: “Getting stressed is only going to upset you and potentially spoil someone else’s day. Assume everyone really wants to help. Anyone unlucky enough to be on the front-line probably isn’t responsible!”
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Quite a cool little ski simulator
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Strange, but quite cool web design. Check out the Canadians for Equal Marriage section — provocative stuff
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I like this idea. Similar to the cycling machines you get in some gyms now where you have to pedal harder to make things go faster etc. Gets you caught up in the game, whilst improving your physical (or mental) fitness at the same time.
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Ways to speed up Firefox and help it suck less memory.
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“Very few operators involved, yielding very high service levels. (When there are nearly 1,000,000 people in the world who make their living off eBay, downtime goes well beyond an annoyance.)”
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Some interesting thoughts on mixing Basecamp and GTD principles. Personally it seems a little complicated for me right now — I have a great todo.txt based system already and no real need for web collaboration at the moment — but nevertheless worth a glance
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It is a fantastic little financial plan summary, but what I like most is the concept of Scott Adams winning a Nobel Prize.
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This is a seriously cool (and amazingly reasonably priced!) service. I’ve ordered a print of my dissertation (the spiral bound copy I have isn’t withstanding use very well) — will blog about it if it turns out decent quality.
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This looks like a really cool idea. I’d love to see someone use it “in the wild” though — not sure how well it’d withstand overhead lockers in planes, etc.
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“To a historian, it’s starting to look like type declarations are one of those accidental difficulties that good programming languages can eliminate.”
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Big news. Nice to see it getting off the ground.
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I know that this ISN’T the point of the story and that it is a serious issue, but when this story came up in my BBC daily news email all I could think was “Shucks, they’ve run out of druggies. Oh, wait, wasn’t that the point?”
Heather Gold has written a fantastic piece about what coming out is really about:
“Coming out is not just about the gender of the people you desire. It’s about being your whole self, in public. It’s about honesty. It’s about transparency. It’s about difference and togetherness. It’s about self-acceptance, not waiting for the acceptance of others. It’s about integration. It’s about the whole cookie. I wish it, in all aspects of life, for you.”
This is the most brilliant explanation of why coming out is important I have ever seen. And it’s not just relevant for the LGB community either. It speaks to why it’s important for ALL aspects of diversity to be acknowledged, given head-space, entertained, celebrated. As Stonewall say, “People perform better when they can be themselves”.
I wrote an article a while ago for the FFLAG newsletter. Since I wrote it as a representative of my company and I prefer to keep my work and my blog separate, I won’t re-publish it here, but I’ll re-make the most salient point:
People talk about our society becoming more and more tolerant. Tolerance is not something to aim for, though. It’s the absolute baseline. Being tolerated just means not being killed. It means someone putting up with your existence. Sometimes in a very passive-aggressive way, but in more progressive countries it’s probably more like the way people tolerate visits to the dentist — not the way they’d prefer to spend an afternoon, but something that has to be done.
In my personal opinion what we should be aiming for is so much more than tolerance. It’s about celebrating diversity — the different experiences, histories, cultures, customs, memories, practices, viewpoints, attitudes. Everything from respecting the right of a devout Muslim woman to wear whatever veil she feels appropriate, to that of a gay man to wear leather hotpants and a pink feather boa if that’s what makes him feel comfortable.
As Heather would put it, it’s about the whole cookie.
My week off has largely consisted of sitting on the sofa watching daytime telly. Sad I know, but Elly is back at university now, doing her Part 2.
Today’s Midsomer Murders featured a very young-looking Orlando Bloom. That was scary enough, but in one of the rare moments when I was actually paying attention, the big boss and Troy appeared to be talking about Tolkien/Lord of the Rings! Not sure whether that was sychronicity or a specific dig, but it made me do a complete double-take!
Been a bit of a big week really. Last Wednesday, Elly & I had our 4 year anniversary. Then on Saturday we got married. And today was my 24th birthday.
Strangely, nothing feels particularly different. I suppose that’s a good sign though. Either everything is just the way it ought to be now, or deep inside I’ve always been old & married!
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Ze is hilarious, but I particularly like the shot of Fox News identifying Foley as a Democrat — “he said he was gay — that’s the same thing, right?”. LOL!
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“I must confess that I fail miserably about ten times for every one success. But interestingly, the failures always involved activities that seemed entirely feasible. I was completely qualified for all of the things that failed.”
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“My message is one of the economic benefits of optimism, professionalism and high standards, but it is met most often with a dejected, beaten-down, cynicism.”
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“So, they are using a business model (FREE) and a new user paradigm (online collaboration) to compete. Good move.”
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Fantastic summary of why GTD is fantastic
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Ian’s posted some brilliant photos of the dancing at the wedding on Saturday
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“Meri wins the Bridal Boots award. :-)”
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Lovely message from Mr Hicks and family — thank you Jon
Well, the day is finally upon us. Tomorrow afternoon, Elly & I will be getting married.
I can’t describe how happy I am. Those who’ve known me longer than 4 years will have seen the immense difference Elly has made to my life. Without her I was lost. I struggled to control my manic depression, I drank too much, I got into fights. Although I can hardly claim to be a model citizen now, her calming influence has made me hugely more stable
Which is an overly logical way of talking around the fact that I love her more than life itself. Marrying her tomorrow will be the best thing that has ever happened to me. And I cannot wait to start enjoying the rest of our lives together.
For those interested in the wedding, there’ll be more details (incl photos) over at the wedding site.
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“Researchers found breastfeeding mothers tended to be more intelligent, more highly educated, and likely to provide a more stimulating home environment.”
If you’re smart enough to breastfeed, your kids will be smart. What a shock
Thanks to Elly, Meriblog is also going Pink for October for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. If you’re feeling a little flush, make a donation online.
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“I’m pretty sure Roddenberry didn’t have frequent flier miles in mind when he came up with the Enterprise.”
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Wow. This could be huge — or possibly just disastrous. Interested to find out which
