The Middle Years (2006-2009)

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” - E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

So, in media res: a set of links on finding things, or having people do your sifting for you… Redesigning the Google front page. I search for everything via the taskbar anyway… An interview with Bill Emmott, editor of the Economist. Lloyd Shepherd, Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited, on the difference between 50 users vs 1 editor (via Kottke) How to redirect links that come in from Digg. For those of you S’poreans who don’t like the idea of being Tomorrowed. And know how to use Apache. Not about media, but: pigeons as air pollution detectors. Brokeback to the Future. Another one of those spoof trailers. (Via plasticbag.org - yeah my links sources this week aren’t too obscure)

A quote from Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian: I was on a long-distance flight the other day, and I was flicking through the stuff that they had to listen to, and I put on ABBA, which I hadn’t heard in a while. ABBA always amazes me. I was actually trying to break it down, because I know all this stuff now. I can hear every instrument, and I can almost see it in three dimensions and feel the way they’ve done it. But at the same time, you just shut your eyes and it’s an amazing sound. (Link)

Also, that article on indexing had a picture of a second-hand bookstore that warms the cockles of my OCD heart. Oh, except I sort my books by height and then publisher.

When I edited Let’s Go: Britain and Ireland - I can’t believe that was 8 years ago, it feels like yesterday sometimes - I spent a lot of time doing up the index properly. It was tedious at times, but most people who use travel guides don’t read ’em back-to-front. So it caught my eye to read this discussion of indexing the BBC website by Helen Lippell, Information Architect at the BBC. I liked the “primary persona” her team created to imagine who would use the A-Z of the Beeb site:

Finally, the last two categories I had a part in the nominations of… Best Group Weblog WorldChanging girlspoke Gothamist Blogcritics Lifehacker All the finalists here ended up being blogging “big names”, but girlspoke was one of my favourite discoveries of the whole nominations process. Full disclosure compels me to say I write for Blogcritics sometimes. Not that my vote made a difference here, though.

Happy Lunar New Year to those of you that celebrate the occasion! More links to keep dsng.net fresh while I’m otherwise occupied during the holidays. Here’s the second part of my Bloggies nominations.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was one of the panelists for the 2006 Bloggies, and the finalists are out. So here was what I voted for in the categories I was given - I’ve italicised those that actually actually became finalists. Consider this the first in a series of mega-linksfests, starting with my votes in four categories:

Meanwhile, I watched Eros, a series of three short films that supposedly touch on the titular theme. The Hand, the first film, is a magnificent Wong Kar Wai piece. Wong sets it in the Hong Kong of the 1960s that he mined so well in In the Mood for Love and 2046, with that same romantic sense of a time long gone and the passing of time. Wong squeezes so much desire out of the small gestures and quivers of the tailor Xiaozhang (Chang Chen) and the prostitute (Gong Li) who he expertly tailors clothes for and who he clearly loves throughout her life. And while this was the one film without nudity, it was the one that carried the strongest of erotic charges. Let’s just say the title was quite telling. And let’s just say no one expresses the frisson of repressed desire cinematically quite like Wong Kar Wai.

Man… Gmail finally gives in and adds a damn delete button to the interface. It’s funny how a delete button gets described as a great new feature. The fact that there’s a Greasemonkey script dedicated solely to adding a delete button shows how much people were annoyed by this. And it’s nice to know they can’t shoehorn everyone into their way of working. Now if only they would add a sort function and improve their spam filters.

Iraqi Invasion: a Text Misadventure. Mmm, text-based adventure games. Memories of geekdom come flooding back. (Via Tym) Chuck Norris Facts, if you haven’t gotten the e-mail yet. “Chuck Norris is 1/8th Cherokee. This has nothing to do with ancestry, the man ate a fucking Indian.” Overheard in Singapore. Me and Mr Brown have been talking about doing this for ages, but I’m pleased to be beaten to the punch. A recipe for Guinness ice cream.

Yesterday was apparently the most depressing day of the year, according to some random research. The formula looks dubious, but it was the day (Pinchy - for want of a proper name) the lobster died. Dad remarked in the car this morning sadly about how the poor lobster survived goodness knows what to make it to our doorstep but hardly lasted a day.

Some minor tweaking of the sidebar has been done over the last few days: have added links to my RSS feed, my MSN address (delete the obvious part to get the real address), to my various profiles on Friendster, Facebook, etc., and to my livejournal (which really mostly just repeats the personal parts of dsng.net, but feel free to add me to your friends list). So, yes, some unity in my online personae.

My poor lobster got featured in a seafood forum. It’s not food! Still doing fine. The brother thinks it’s a freshwater lobster i.e. a crayfish, something like a blue yabby. Dad gave him a little piece of bread to eat this morning. Yes, I know it is highly unlikely that in its natural environment it would consume flour and yeast products.

Okay, not quite on the scale of the poor London whale, but today Rerun (the family Cairn terrier) starts barking outside, so Dad goes out to take a look at the source of the commotion. And what do you know - at our doorstep is what seems to be a tiny little lobster or crawfish of some sort. Which is strange, because we live in Kembangan, which is quite a distance from the shoreline. Any ideas how he got here? Mum’s bet is that he was being shipped to the seafood restaurants around here and he made a brave escape and found the house with a marine-conservation enthusiast.

“All good people read good books” - Tanita Tikaram, “Twist in My Sobriety” Just read Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, his collection of short stories on the impact of the Kobe quake. (I’m not sure how much this counts in the odd coincidences department, but I finished the book on 17 January, the anniversary of the quake.)

Meanwhile, it’s a bit odd to read about Cyclone Daryl, the first time I’ve heard of a tropical storm sharing my name, mainly because of the sentences that just refer to it as “Daryl” - for example, “Daryl was skirting the WA coast at 25kph, the bureau said.”

The London whale blog. I think it’s funny that it’s by a PR firm - good PR, clearly, since the Beeb interviewed them, but on the other hand, it’s also a proud announcement of the fact that “hey, we spent our whole day goofing off watching cetaceans”. I suppose it gives some porpoise to their life. Design Observer on civilian typography: “In the end, efficiency can only take you so far. Without a cell phone, or in a flood, or barred from public transportation, the thing that separates human beings from the animal kingdom is our ability to communicate verbally. If we can’t do that, we do it graphically. When all else fails, the pen isn’t just mightier than the sword: it is the sword.” My university tries to go sustainable. Laudable. Hmm - does one say “my university”? It has been a while since I graduated, but “my former university” sounds like there’s a present university to reference. Speaking of sustainability, Syriana buys emission-reduction credits. I want a copy of Delicious Library (from Binary Bonsai) Was sent this cool Honda ad done by Wieden + Kennedy according to Adrants.

Singapore Jakarta Bloomington, Ind. Indianapolis, Ind. Chicago Detroit Bonn Cologne London Montreal (Via Megnut.) Not a lot of cities, but a hell of a lot of distance, both physical and emotional.

Well, Joni once sang that in France they kiss on Main Street. (From Flickr.) A Banksy piece. (Via Bldgblog, via Enjoy Surveillance.)