Posts from September 27, 2006

When you turn to the light and start to fully embrace the River of News, the sickening realisation slowly dawns that you might actually have been mistaken and partial feeds may just have some redeeming features while full feeds are indeed the work of the devil.

Full feeds potentially interrupt the flow of the river. The title alone isn't enough to determine whether the article merits further consideration. Expanding the article should give you just enough to determine whether you want to read the full text.

This effect is spoiled by the lengthy verbosity of the full text feed for articles you are not interested in whatsoever.

The ideal compromise would be a 2 line precis of the article but Peter Scott is the only blogger in the universe who is thoughtful enough to do this.

BBC2 Friday night. A repeat but memorable for some great footage, interviews and these two quotes from Mark E. Smith

John Walters wrote me a letter and said, you know, 'you are the worst group I've ever seen in the [laughs] in the history of mankind' [laughs]. He was good like that, John Walters was. You ever meet him? No, he was f**king fantastic. He said, 'you were the worst, tuneless, rubbish I've ever heard', you know, 'even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees'. This is what he wrote 'you're even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees. I didn't believe it was possible.' You know what I mean? [laughs] He was a gem, what a gem. He said, 'please do a session' [laughs].

All the group stayed up to watch the Old Grey Whistle Test. Not that I would, personally but you couldn't see the group, that was the funniest bit. They stayed up to watch it with all their parents [cackles]. And all you could see was like Michael Clark baring his arse on the f**king screen, you know. F**king great. It was dead funny.

Google recently announced some enhancements to the Notebook and I must admit that, while the concept left me cold initially, I am now starting to make more use of this software.

While I use Blinklist for shared (more permanent) bookmarks, I tend to use Google Notebook for snippets, jottings, interesting links and, err, notes that I may need to access from both home and work (in fact potentially from any computer).

For example, yesterday I had a query about my online tax return and was forced to call the pension administrator followed by the Inland Revenue and jotted down answers to my questions.

Previously, I might have emailed myself the notes from work to home so I then could write a followup letter. This would mean the information was accessible from work (Sent) and home (Inbox) but having it available on a Google server is preferable and less typing.

I used to keep draft blog postings in WordPress but didn't like the drafts cluttering up the dashboard so now these random thoughts also get stored in Google Notebook.

Obviously, all of my notebooks are private but there is some interesting information out there lurking in shared notebooks that isn't accessible from conventional sources.