Category
Friends
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08.16.07Facebook and the perils of prodigious sociabilityAnother post in the series of musings about Facebook as user experience and social microcosm... The trouble with Facebook is that it's a confused social space. There are too many different facets of personality being exposed through social openness. So much so, in fact, that it gets a bit difficult to manage. For example, at present on Facebook, I have (among others) the following listed as "Friends": My husband Several people I've known since I was 11 College friends I haven't talked to in 15 years My boss A couple of people from university I'd lost touch with Several people I know from t'internet, but haven't met / ...
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07.07.07Girl next doorI've noticed quite a few searches recently on this site by people looking for info about Girl With a One-Track Mind. I *think* this is because Fridaycities recently published an interview with her, illustrated by a photo I took. So, in the interests of disclosure: Girly One-Track is a friend of mine, and in April she asked me to take a series of shots of her which could be used for publicity. I whisked her down to the South Bank (stark architecture, interesting textures, interesting location which establishes her as a confident, modern, urban woman), took about 300 shots and later whittled ...
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01.10.07And speaking of namesI'm on several mailing lists at my company which give details of server maintenance outages and the like. And most of the time, they fly through the inbox and I can happily ignore them. However, yesterday there were a flurry of mails with priceless subject lines: I loved the idea that they needed to take all the little green Irish fellas out of service to give them new green trousers, or because the pot of gold was broken or something. However, I'm sure that our colleagues in the US just thought about it as a server name - because that's what happens, isn't ...
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10.23.06Wax on, wax offI'm a fiddler. It's ok, I've had years of coming to terms with it, and I'm mostly fairly restrained, limiting myself to balls of blu-tack and the occasional corporate tchotchke. At home, I took up knitting, just to have something to do with my hands, and though I was singularly untalented at it, I did manage to make a blanket, which comes in very handy for anyone who's home and ill, languishig on the sofa. But especially, inveterately, I'm a fiddler with candles, as anyone who's ever had the pleasure of sitting with me in an atmospherically-lit pub will be able ...
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08.22.06Out of the blueSo, for years I've heard about coincidences - we all have - from big ones involving Heads of State and/or natural disasters to more personal anecdontes. You know the kind of thing: a relative of my friend blah was travelling on a train through [insert country here] when the train struck a cow on the track and it later transpired that my friend's relative was called Bessie and so was the wife of the farmer who owned the cow. Spooky, eh?! Er, no, not really. So while I can't promise any tales of the paranormal, something happened to me that was definitely ...
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08.14.06Getting down to the neeeeetty greeeeettyOn Friday night a bunch of us piled over to Somerset House to watch a Jack Black double bill as part of the Film Four-sponsored outdoor movie festival.Now, I'm not the most rabid Jack Black fan in the world - truth be told, I can find him pretty annoying, though I liked him in High Fidelity - but the opportunity to sit on cushions in the courtyard of Somerset House with friends, drinking beer and enjoying films on a balmy summer night was too good to pass up. Unfortunately, things didn't pan out like that. There were friends, old and new - ...
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08.07.06Buy this book. NOW.A very good friend of mine, Frank Wynne, has just had his first book published: I was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger who Swindled the Nazis.It's the story of "a paranoid, drug-addicted, alcoholic, hypochondriac painter whose journey from zero to hero earned him $50 million, the acclamation of the world's press and the satisfaction of swindling the Nazis. Half a century after his death, his handiwork is still suspected in at least four Vermeers in major galleries, and the ugly daub sold last year at Sotheby's for $30 million had long been attributed to him. The book takes a ...
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06.12.05Nostalgia, reduxFive years ago, to the day, a (very) small bunch of geeks sidled up to each other outside WHSmith at Kings Cross station, muttering "Got blog?" before repairing to a local hostelry for beer, cosmopolitans, odd conversation about the noise cotton wool makes and other such essential trivia. Over the subsequent months of 2000, the geeks became collectively known as bloggers (although some grumbled about it) and, more specifically, UKBloggers. Aided by a listserv (and later, an alternative one) and a site (now departed), they somehow coordinated themselves and each other sufficiently to enjoy a succession of hazy evenings spent in ...
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02.06.05Happy BlurJust returned from a lovely weekend oop north, celebrating at the wedding of our friends Sally & Michael. A fantastic time altogether - full of friends and laughter, just as these things ought to be. Something I remember very clearly from my own wedding day, eleven months ago, was that the whole day felt like a happy blur, almost dreamlike, and saturated with intense colour, with everything seen through a filter of almost overwhelming happiness and emotion. Vivid. Alive. Fleeting. Intense. I wanted to see if I could echo that in the pictures I took at the evening reception on Saturday. Since ...
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03.30.03Nos VemosSo we had a leaving dinner for Meester Yan the other night.It was a great evening. I haven't smiled so much in months. The best thing was that while leaving dos can be sad and dismal affairs (because you know you'll probably never see the individual concerned again, even if they're just going to a new job down the road) this one wasn't depressing in the slightest. It was a celebration - of old friends, of adventures to come, of long-overdue reunions and of just surviving the week. There'd been a corporate shindig on Wednesday, but on Friday, it was just ...
recent posts
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