Archive for September, 2003

The Swedes appa­rantly cut the cable. Can’t work — any­one for beer?

Most of the city is with­out power. Funny how it’s totally impos­si­ble to work… Mobile (bat­tery pow­ered) devices rock, though.

Love Shop, yay!

Down­load .pdf

George Hotelling off 90% Crud is test­ing whether you really “own” music pur­chased at iTunes or not by sell­ing a tune on eBay. Beside being an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment and mas­sively blogged, it made me won­der if the pre­vi­ous owner part of buy­ing sec­ond hand will play a role in the future. Just like it’s cool to be able to say “this Cadil­lac was owned by The King him­self, you know”, will I some­day be able to brag about “own­ing Eminem’s copy of ‘Hit me baby one more time’” ?

What’s going on here? This pre­vi­ous post’s com­ments now, as you can see for your­self, includes what seems to be the usual email porn spam. Of course of less value as MT strips the html (orig­i­nal com­ment includes links). Has some­one real­ized the value of hid­ing their dirty spam in the blo­gos­phere because of the good search engine rank­ing? Or is it just plain teen fun; adding obscene mes­sages to ran­dom people’s blogs? Once in a while I have to erase such bril­liant stuff as “Die!” and “Fuck you” from the com­ments around my blog, so actu­ally I thought it was just a prank, but it keeps turn­ing up…

Update: As read at Dan Gillmor’s eJour­nal I’m not alone…
Update II: Not alone at all — but Kalsey’s got some ideas on how to pre­vent it.

The famous Vol­ume­One just launched a new issue. I see trucks, snakes, spi­ders and skulls. I hear elec­tric gui­tars. See, this would have made a good ‘remain­dered links’ side­blog post…

From the Medi­a­monks inter­view at Lounge72:

The main Medi­a­Monks ser­vice is that we take care of stuff.
When a client wants stuff to get done we will sit down with the client to dis­cuss the stuff in ques­tion. After that meet­ing we will do a quick inter­nal check to see if the stuff can be done inhouse or if we need some spe­cial­ist stuff-doers to get involved and then we will actu­ally sit down and do the stuff. We call this process the Medi­a­Monks cycle of“stuff doing”. Our main skills are in con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing a solu­tion which deliv­ers the biggest pay­off for the client. We never think within our own skillset or skew what a client needs to what we like doing. We always look at the bot­tom line and go from there.

Excel­lent plan. A bit of hon­esty and respon­si­bil­ity gets you a long way…

Mus­ing’s now got a ran­dom Bushism from the list from Slate on the side­bar. Asked by goer how he did it (copy-paste to a flat file) he answered: “My motto is, ‘Low-tech solu­tions for a low-tech pres­i­dency’.” Very well put, indeed… My own side­bar, by the way, des­per­ately needs that ‘remain­dered links’ thingie. I’ll look at it as soon as I get the time — it’s a nice concept.

I do this prac­ti­cally every­day: I turn on my IM client, get some work done, chat to a few peo­ple, then decide to go for a cof­fee — and for­get all about chang­ing the sta­tus on the IM client. Or I receive a phone call, pick up the hand­set and walk off, either meet­ing the per­son who called or just decid­ing I might as well stretch my legs while this per­son deliv­ers some blah blah. Either way, it would be really nice if the absence of my cell phone some­how trig­gered the the Away sta­tus as I always remem­ber to bring my phone when leav­ing my desk. Does any­one know of a nifty prox­im­ity Blue­tooth ser­vice capa­ble of doing this?