My friends! My followers! Bow to Daniel Otis of Moosoft, for he has created one of the greatest Greasemonkey scripts the world has ever seen. Behold: Myspace custom style remover. Similarly, bow down to Ken Mickles, who has produced the Myspace Tag Remover. Together, these scripts represent the fight back by technologists against the hordes and hordes of stupid people on MySpace (see forthcoming blog post). There’s such a great feeling when you load up some MySpace profile that’s filled with crap only to see it all just disappear like Michael Jackson’s career.
n+1 magazine: “A real debate could be had about all these things. Instead we get the “reading crisis.” Under conditions of the reading crisis, everything a writer does, no matter how self-serving and reprehensible, becomes a blow in the service of literature. ” (permalink from 3quarksdaily)
NSLog is asking about school subjects. Best? Law and RE (Religious Education). Worst? Geography (the teacher was a bitch). Biggest waste of time? “Advanced Subsidiary Vocational Certificate of Education in Information and Communications Technology”. The teacher was (a) totally incompetent and (b) bordering on insanity. I unofficially and quietly dropped that class, since after a few weeks I would have preferred to have put my testicles in a vice than risk brain damage spending even another minute in the company of this crazy timewaster. The subject itself was a total insult to every other equivalent qualification, since it was teaching 16-18 year olds how to use the basic features of PowerPoint.
Jason Kottke has some fantastic links in his 2005 roundup.
I’m pennyless, but if you aren’t, give some money to Creative Commons so they can carry on their excellent work. Here’s why. Go on. Do it, now!
The Global Language Monitor have a list of words/phrases that are the “most confusing yet frequently cited”. They are, from ten to one, data migration, viral marketing, best-of-breed, emoticon, WORM, robust, plasma (as in TV), megapixel, voice-over-IP/VoIP, HyperText Transfer Protocol/HTTP. Robust and best-of-breed are pretty much meaningless, and the rest aren’t confusing. Voice over IP is compared with voice over POTS or voice over radio. HTTP is referenced frequently because it forms the basis of every single web address, because if it wasn’t the basis of every single web address, it wouldn’t be a web address - it would be a gopher address or a newsgroup or some other protocol. Some of these you have to be as thick as two short planks not to understand. Rant mode off.
I’ve just tried to set up a podcast using feed2podcast.com (via). Didn’t work at all. Shame. I’ve been looking for a service like that.
My Yahoo! account has changed from tom_morris20022003 to tom.morris. Much cleaner. Don’t know why I didn’t register that initially. Now to change everything else. I wonder if I can get Flickr changed over.
I’ve put my question out to the universe regarding Yahoo! and Flickr account linkage.
There are rumblings from Dave. And they are exciting rumblings. A news reader, eh? I’m looking forward to it
Dave’s WordPress Blog has more on his new aggregator: “In the four years since Radio 8, there have been lots of aggregators, but honestly, not so many new ideas”. Having spent probably a few days out of this year playing around with aggregators, I can honestly say that most of them suck to high heaven.
Technology Through Different Eyes on ID: “I thought this battle had been fought and won in the US. Clearly we are regressing as a nation into some bizarre form of theocracy.”
Robert Scoble on Dave Winer’s new aggregator: “This is cool because his style of “river of news” aggregators is far more appropriate than the “folder by folder” or “3-pane” approach that I’m using currently. Why? The folder-by-folder approach requires you to be pretty anal about reading all your feeds and makes you mentally tired if you fall behind. Sorta like email. It’s to the point sometimes that I dread opening up Outlook.” I dread opening Outlook but for a different reason…
Mark’s Blog: “Google have released their Zeitgeist for 2005. It’s quite interesting that the top news search was Janet Jackson, when you consider some of the things that have happened this year”. There’s quite a simple explanation: nudity. I mean, wardrobe malfunction has a page on Wikipedia. And I’ve seen a photoshop where someone’s stitched Star Jones’ head on top of Janet’s body mid-malfunction. That meme ain’t disappearing anytime soon. Not even the destruction of New Orleans can stop the Nipplegate addicts.
iPod, iPod: Let’s Create a Panic!
Usually a reasonably good news source, Podcasting News is delivering absolute crapola today - they’ve mixed a tale of skullduggery at the retail distribution level with another pointless report from the British press reporting on how “Coroner Dr Nigel Chapman said thousands of people who unwrapped iPods, MP3 players and Walkmans for Christmas faced similar hazards” to that which took the life of one Matthew Johnson.
Beyond the tragic tale of Mr Johnson’s lorry-based demise, how exactly does this further the cause of public health in a way more urgent than, say, sending medical supplies to sub-Saharan Africa does? Well, the answer, of course, is that it doesn’t, and it’s a dumb story.
Portable audio devices, with headphones, have only been around since 1960, when Sony introduced a portable transistor radio. Of course, the technology has got better with cassettes, CD and MP3. But 1960 was 45 years ago, remember. It’s not like people haven’t had time to realise that headphones interfere with your ability to interact with the outside world.
That combined with the fact that the production of the headline “Are Christmas iPods Putting Millions in Danger?” on the basis of one incident and a health warning which is self-evident for anybody with more than two brain cells is irresponsible.
