All Stories
R1150GS
Picked up the new GS last night. It’s heartstoppingly beautiful, somewhere between Mad Max and Julianne Moore (ok, so that makes no sense, it looks great ok?). Pointless fact of the day for the bikers out there—it...
Copyright
Thank you to the ever in-touch Zeldman for pointing to the Creative Commons project. This is a great idea which hopes to build the public domain while making as many patent and copyright lawyers unemployed. In a n...
From mail servers to civil liberties
From a list I’m on—the post started with commentary on scripting the EIMS mail server and finished with this. Quite encouraging I thought…
More joy of internet
I’m curious at what point exactly when reading an otherwise perfectly sensible text (brief Tesla biog) one notices something a little unusual…
A bot or not
Just ordered a gorgeous specimen book from Fountain and got a lovely message back in the post, whereupon I replied for no reason convinced that a truly great e commerce brain was at work whereupon I realised it wa...
US hegemony?
Logged on to amazon.fr to buy CU-1 some French DVDs. Go to “children’s DVDs” and review listing: 95% of the items on offer are American. What ever happened to the French protecting their language?
Tired;-)
Mmmmm… alarm set for 05:00—at desk 05:31 after pouring cold water into coffee instead of kettle grrrr…
Reflexology
Oh, and last week I stepped on a plug which was laying prongs-up. For you Americans out there, a British plug has a brass slab about the girth of a pencil as an earth lead. So as I say, I stepped on one of these t...
Copyright vs community
Went to see Richard Stallman do his talk “Copyright vs community” at the LSE last night. Andrew’s co-worker Anthony spotted the gig and sorted tickets (thank you Anthony).
Re the Gulf Porsche 917 and shooting at Le Mans in 1969
This from Jed, my Dad, who directed television commercials all his life, and who had the opportunity of being part of American advertising’s class of 1959, the folk who brought you Avis trying harder and Volkswage...
Halelujah!
Chris’ iBook has arrived:-) I now look forward to lengthy exposés about a Unix hacker’s life on a Macintosh. Oh, and for those that know Chris, don’t y’all think we should put him forward for a “switch” advert. I ...
Jeep saga
So last night, two guys show up with our new Jeep. All a bit unceremonious. I was particularly unimpressed with the fire extinguisher dumped in the boot—a token gesture that doesn’t quite match up with the “fire e...
Feedback
Well, to paraphrase the old Honda ad, you meet the nicest people at Zeldman—ever since J published my article on CSS grid layouts my mailbox has been full of friendly notes congratulating or even thanking me:-) It...
Chrimble’s iBook
Is due to arrive today. Which is good, always nice to have high-tech Unix geeks enjoying the benefits of superior hardware;-)
Blue and orange Gulf-strip 917
Yes, I was a teenager in the 70s, and yes, I was a motor racing fan growing up in France, so the Le Mans 24H race was a fairly big deal. Anyway, this might explain my feeling of joy as I came across this fan site ...
ambient sound branding
Ok, you know that sound that goes with the pentium 4 or intel or whatever, you know the one. Well, I thought aural branding was supposed to work by creating a familiar feeling, a bit like smell (ahh, I know this p...
Dug finds religion
And decides to join Brigham Young University, though I haven’t seen Austrian soil since new year’s eve 1970 (I still remember walking through people’s legs in this major apres-ski party).
Damn it, I know I entered an —
Bloggers out there who struggle with <textarea>-based editing tools might want to check this out. It’s a little script that converts your standard ascii into marked-up entities:-)
Head over heels in a large plastic ball
Last night, Piers (Piers and Cally had come over for dinner) suggested I try this. As I seem to remember thinking it was a good idea at the time, I can only assume the wine at dinner was good…
Donkey in the press
Those readers with web-designey bent might wish to have a look at a list apart this week as <shamelessplug>your’s truly has written an article about grid systems</shamelessplug> which is either the mos...
Perl
Have just read that ram speeds are increasing more slowly than processor, bus and disk speeds. The implication is that apps built to use ram (like Perl) will begin to loose favour.
Atom40 make stone tables (really)
Wow, a press ad and a web site and it took a good 30 minutes to figure out what it was about.
Digerati
Absent-mindedly pick up the Nov02 issue of wallpaper that Nicki left on my desk and start to flick…a piece about Stavanger, the town in Norway my gran came from, oh look, an interesting looking ad…it says to go to...
It’s a modern miracle
Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a ‘server’ and a ‘workstation’? You know, you need to buy a machine and are flicking through those little Dabsdirect catalogues that seem to multiply on you do...
Poppies (Monday isn’t Sunday)
I had a discussion with my Dad when I was down in Devon a couple of weeks ago. He was questioning why I don’t wear a poppy at this time of year.
Almond magnums
dear all, it has been mighty quiet of late on Donkey. If I carry on like this I’ll end up on deadsites.com, a combination of total IT meltdown (no workstation, no powerbook), freakout over building works (my dodgy...
Cooked a couple malards
For tea yesterday. Roasted them whole on a bed of garlic, chilli, parsley and plums. Added liberal quantities of delicious French organic butter, olive oil, salt and pepper.
Going on holiday frees your mind
To think about the really important things like why, in American Pie II is the band-camp so close to the beach house?
OSX
So I’m sitting at a table at the Welcome Break just up the M1 working on the actionscript Andy sent me last night and I go to paste it back into his file when tarnations, I realise I’ve only pulled the .swf off th...