Category
Life
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08.21.07Media consumption: little & often or feast & famine?I recently came to the realisation that I'm a media-glutton. I'm impatient at the best of times, and this unfortunate characteristic seems to come into sharp focus when it comes to watching TV series. The way the TV companies want you to watch a normal 24-episode series goes something like this: ...with all episodes being watched at regular intervals, neatly scheduled into a particular programme slot. Real "appointment to view" TV stuff. But unfortunately (for them), my inate media consumption burnrate urge looks more like this ...watching the first few episodes as intended and then gorging myself on the subsequent ones. In fact, ...
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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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08.14.07Confessions of a lifelong badgerWhen we were young, we had a shoebox, filled with badges - cheap trophies and souvenirs of places visited and events participated in, or illustrating a particular epoch or mood. From memory, there was: at least one Blue Peter badge a big one with a picture of a screw on it (the significance of which completely eluded me until I was much older) a yellow Guardian one with the slogan "have breakfast with a friend" one with the Laxey Wheel on it one from the Puffin Club a gorilla one from LondonZoo a brown one from Beamish, with a silhouette of a coal cart on it one from the ...
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07.24.07Night thoughtsAs some of you may know, I had to go into hospital last week - nothing particularly dramatic, and I'm much better now, but serious enough at the time to warrant 24 hours under observation and on IV medication. I've never been in hospital before - though I've obviously visited other people in them, and had the odd outpatients appointment. When I was much, much younger, my somewhat, erm, adventurous approach to play landed me in casualty a few times, but I was always discharged a few hours later, swaddled in bandages or splinted and hopping. So it was with some ...
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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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07.02.07From our own correspondentOne of the essentials of any trip up to Argyll to visit my mum on the Isle of Mull is reading the various local papers - The Oban Times, Round and About Mull and Am Muileach - to find out what people are talking about. Checking in with local news organs in any area gives you a good sense of what's important, and what's preoccupying the locals, plus it can provide handy background/context for conversations, so when people refer to "the new road" or "the knife incident" you know what they're referring to. And one of the highlights of reading The ...
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06.29.07A couple of thingsI'm away for a few days (in Scotland, where the weather is beautiful and I got sunburnt today while pootling about in a boat) but still in touch with the world, and wanted to note: a) The untimely passing of Fopp. I first went to Fopp in Edinburgh in...ooh, must have been 1992 or 93, and continued to pour money into their tills while I worked in Aberdeen during the 90s. Fopp furnished me with most of my Tom Waits collection, actually, now I think about it. It was, for a long time, the perfect shop for a lover of eclectic ...
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06.22.07Feeling Festive?So in 2001, I wrote a post about how you could recreate your very own Glastonbury festival experience in the comfort of your own home. Given that six and a half years have passed, and things have moved on a bit, and in honour of the festival's arrival this weekend, I thought it might be worth looking at updating it again. So, building on the previous post, and without further ado, here's DIY GLASTONBURY 2007 Continue Reading...
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06.01.07Watching the world go byWhen Google launched their new Street View overlay for its mapping service the other day, I thought "how cool!" And spent a happy breakfast-time wandering the streets of San Francisco, picking out the place in Cow Hollow we stayed back in March, the cafe in North Beach that served the city's best latte and the view from Cliff House, which we never quite made it to during our spring visit. It's such an obvious and smart enhancement - forget sightseeing: a panoramic view makes giving directions a doddle, not to mention scoping out new neighbourhoods to see if you could fancy ...
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05.30.07Separated at Borth?If they ever do a biopic of rock-soul crooner & WetWetWet frontman Marti Pellow (he was born in a public loo, if my memories of Smash Hits issues from twenty years ago are reliable), I've just realised who'd be perfect to play him on screen. Continue Reading...
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