Little problems like this just disappear when you let the free market (or, better yet, Wikipedia and a public library) take over.
Open-Lecture.net has a list of public lectures in the UK. There’s not masses of stuff on there, but it’s good that there’s another site providing this kind of thing.
Business Logs is saying that you can’t provide a real Web 2.0 service unless you have blog comments on. Oh, fuck-de-doh. Skepticism about comments seems to be getting shorter and shorter shrift these days.
The Stalwart has a good post on creativity and economics.
What is it with these bureaucrats? I’m just trying to figure out my status with tax and NI. I call up the R&C bureaucrats to ask for some confidential advice and they now demand my National Insurance number before talking to me. What the fuck? These bastards are interminable. They speak this silly language about “benefits”. The Mafia couldn’t dream of operating like Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. People willingly phone them up and pay them. HMR&C is the only mafia with an 0845 number and call waiting music.
Valleywag is reporting on the new MySpace advertising practices. If you want a summary, it’s this: squeeze them for all they’ve got by being as annoying as possible.
I have started offering a premium rate service. If you want to chat with me and ask my advice you can call me (in the US) on 1-888-MY-ETHER (or 1-888-693-8437) and then dial ext. 01664975. It costs $2.50 every ten minutes and I am happy to talk about philosophy, OPML, OS X tech support and anything else I’m likely to know about. You can see more information here: Ether
Slight re-design
I’ve redesigned the blog. Click through and have a look.
What? Not much has changed, right?
Wrong! I’ve got rid of most of the tables and replaced them with CSS. The only thing that is still tabled is the calendar.
I’ve put up a new header graphic featuring a photo of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts (now that I’m working for Grazr, I’ve almost learnt how to spell Massachusetts).
What else has changed? Well, I got rid of the half-working JavaScript on the right and have replaced it with some pretty little icons (from the Silk collection).
What do these icons do? Well, the email one (still the same) lets you send me an email. I’ve switched to a little speaker icon for my audio comment link. Just click that and you can record me an MP3.
The third button allows you to send me money. I’ll leave it up to you how you want to use this. Donations or just paying off guilty debts or giving me a nice big bribe not to slag off your Web 2.0 company. “;->”
Then there’s the usual XML icon but next to that is a little ‘XML Add’ icon. Click that and you’ll get a popup window with a list of feed readers. This looks a bit horrid, but I’ll prettify it soon and make a public version and API available.
Everything else remains much the same.
Now that my template is CSS-based, I’ll be able to make my blog look a lot smarter.
