Category
Society & Media
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10.17.07Things I don’t want to see you doing on the tubeClipping your nails (biting is just about bearable, but any activity which results in bits which were previously attached to your body suddenly arcing through the air towards me is a no-no) Picking your nose (especially if you subsequently eat/flick/wipe your boogers - see (1), above) Scratching your noggin (most especially when it causes a scurfy blizzard to erupt, which then settles in drifts on my clothing and alights on my nose and eyelashes) Picking your feet (including and especially if they're on the seat next to you and/or you're wearing flip-flops. There is never a right time to debride yourself in public.) Scratching ...
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10.15.07A World In Your EarSo, I didn't really get podcasts when they first became popular a few years back. This is probably mostly to do with the fact that, since my commute was a) above ground and b) short, I was more than happy to just listen to the radio on the way to and from work, which seemed to coincide perfectly with BBC Radio Four's morning slot (9am - things like Andrew Marr's Start the Week plus The Long View, Midweek, Desert Island Discs and Thursday's Boffinmungous (oh, alright, In Our Time, presented by Melvyn Bragg, and then on the way home at ...
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10.04.07The real thingI was passing through the middle of town earlier, on my way from a conference (of which more later) back to the office, and I saw a stall beside the road selling knock-off designer bags - you know the kind of thing. Fake Lulus and baguettes and Hermés galore, all yours for the bargain price of some insubstantial figure, and guaranteed not to fall apart at the seams in the first few hours, at least. But also festooning the rails at one corner of the stall was a cluster of those Anya Hindmarch "I'm not a plastic bag" shopping tote bags. Now, ...
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09.19.07Permission and passionOne of the things that's fascinating about the web is the way that users adopt and own brands, and the ways in which that fervent passion colours their usage of a product. Usually, it's great when people are passionate, loyal users of a web service. You can count on them to visit, provide feedback, and keep the faith when you go through hard times and change things - they've got a lot of forgiveness for your brand and service. New and casual users are trickier - they demand more in the way of stability and performance, weirdly (you'd expect it ...
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09.18.07Facebook questionsI've noticed a growing number of people arriving on this site after searching for Facebook-related queries on search engines. I think it's in the interests of public service to try and provide answers to some of those queries. The search strings remain unedited. The answers may not actually be correct. But this is the internet, after all - you get what you pay for, and why let a bit of uninformed opinion get in the way of making a blog post? When someone pokes you on Facebook does it mean they fancy you?Yes. Poking someone is an online-tribal way of flirting. ...
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09.06.07The Writing on the Wall, reduxThis story from the BBC reveals that a teenage burglar wrote his own name on the wall of a property he was ransacking: Apart from writing his own name in black marker pen at the Toc H centre in Adlington, Cheshire, Addison also left his gang's name on the wall - The Adlington Massiv!. The teenager vandalised a Garden Birds of Britain poster by adding "R Gay". He then left a final message to the campsite owners - "thanks for the stay". Police found him after entering his name in a computer system. Inspector Gareth Woods, of Cheshire Police, said: "This crime is up there ...
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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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08.07.07Gonna look you up on Facebook (and poke you)*When I was at college, in Canada, I had a facebook. In fact, everyone at the college did. It was a physical thing - a slim volume handed out at the beginning of the year, containing photos and pertinent information about each student and faculty member. The photos we'd had taken in a classroom a couple of days after we arrived young, blinking and mostly jetlagged onto the campus on the western edge of Canada, photos which had been used already on student IDs and bus cards, were reprinted in the book along with the scantest of details - each person's ...
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07.22.07Overheard in a Soho coffee shop, soonA few months ago, I made a televisual gold programme name generator which TV commissioning Editors (especially those from BBC3/Channel five/Sky three/ITV3) could use to create titles for their summer season of programming. Now that the all-important autumn season is swift approaching, it's time to plunge once again into the bottom of the programming barrel and see which tired old formats can be recycled with a new twist for the gaping sofa-dwelling hoardes. After whole nanoseconds of analysis, I've discovered that the secret to this type of television planning is as follows:a) find an established programme conceptb) keep the basic format, but ...
recent posts
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- The Polite Amount
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