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I’ve updated Wings Open Wide with a few shots from the last film I took with the Lomo. As sometimes happens with film cameras, I’ve had this film loitering around for so long that I had forgotten what was on it. This is both a disadvantage and a huge bonus of shooting on film. It’s a lovely moment of surprise when you open the packet of prints and look into the past. This is doubly true when you use a Lomo—images very rarely turn out the way you expect, but there’s a kind of magic in that.

My friend—Joe Kissell—has just re-launched his Interesting Thing of the Day. It’s got new content and lots of great new features like an Audio Edition; perfect to put on your iPod for the commute in to work. If you haven’t visited before, go and take a look. Joe is smart, funny and writes about an eclectic mix of Interesting Things. What more could you want? If you have been before, go and listen to the new Audio Editions—they are brilliantly done, and if it wasn’t for the American accent, you’d think he worked for the BBC.

He has a great article up today about the foundations of San Francisco, which taught me a lot I didn’t know about the city.

Update (5/6/04): With all the excitement about Joe relaunching, I forgot to mention that I had a very minor input to the site some time ago. After pontificating about conflicts of interests, I felt really guilty when I realised I hadn’t mentioned it. I don’t have any financial interest in it, though—just interest.

There seems to be a rash of social bookmark/link aggregator services being developed lately. I use del.icio.us, as you can see in the Quick links section on the right, but I also recently discovered Spurl.net. Then there’s Furl.net.

All offer slightly different features, differing interfaces and philosophies. Spurl’s philosophy is outlined here, for example.

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Through Green Fairy, I’ve just discovered Wordsmith’s wonderful Word-a-Day site. She mentioned a couple of brilliant words that I hadn’t heard of before. I’m now going to have to find excuses to slip them into casual conversation:

Strikhedonia - The pleasure of being able to say ‘to hell with it’

Sphallolalia - Flirtatious talk that leads nowhere

Sphallolalia–it even sounds seductive.

I love words, and one of my favourite books is a dictionary of words for which no words exist: the excellent Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. All of Douglas Adams’ books make me roar out loud with laughter, but this one is useful and funny. For example, haven’t you always wanted a word for ‘an agonizing situation in which there is only one possible decision but you still can’t take it’ (Abalemma, n.)? It’s one of those books that makes you constantly read bits out to anyone else who happens to be in the room (there ought to be a word for that but there isn’t), so I could quote sections ad nauseam, but I’ll try to restrict myself to just a few favourites:

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I found this great (and funny) phrasing of a moral dilemma today (via jb’s blog). After I’d read it (and laughed my head off), I remembered that I’d seen something similar ages ago, but I still got suckered in.

As Professor Farnsworth says in Futurama–Good news everyone!

According to Ananova, two Bosnian brothers have been found to have 4 working kidneys each:

Josip Galic, 69, from Kucetine in Bosnia said: “I had a car accident and doctors discovered I had four kidneys. That surprised me, but at least it explained why I could drink all my friends under the table, and never had a hangover.”

He added it was a further surprise when his brother found out after a visit to the doctor that he had four kidneys as well.

Handy, no? I mean, I know that one of your kidneys is technically a spare since you can function with only one, but multiple backups are definitely the way to go.

[via 2lmc spool]

After djn1’s comment on yesterday’s entry, and the photo he linked to, I remembered that I had taken a photo of a swan’s feather a couple of years ago. The madly photoshopped results can be seen here.

I love this geeky love poem by KillerHamster which appeared in a comment on Slashdot:

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
chown -R you ~/base

I think it’s a tribute to my geekoid status that I a) understand it, and b) would be really touched if someone sent me a poem like this.

[via BoingBoing]

p. Here’s an interesting experiment; expose a bunch of hip-hop loving 10 and 11 year old American children to Radiohead, and get them to [“draw whatever the music suggests to them(East Bay Express)”:http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2003-09-17/music.html/1/index.html]. Is this a future law suit waiting to happen? Quite possibly, judging by the slightly disturbing results. Daniel’s giant ice cream cone and Maddy’s Aladdin scenes are innocuous enough (though ice cream isn’t the first thing to pop into my head when I listen to Radiohead), but Jeffrey and Adam could be scarred for life.

[via BoingBoing]

p. I’ve finally got around to posting some Lomo photos I took in London over the summer on to [“wings open wide”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/wingsopenwide/index.html]. It’s quite nice to look at them again now that Autumn is drawing in.

p. The Guardian had a feature on the “Wildlife Photographer of the Year(Natural History Museum site for the competition)”:http://www.nhm.ac.uk/wildphoto competition, and there are some incredibly stunning photographs. I think that my favourite is the winner in the ‘Animal Behaviour: Birds’ category—a beautifully delicate but dramatic photo of a barn owl from the perspective of a vole taken by Nick Oliver. I know that I’m a bit biased towards birds, but I also love the “portrait of a blue-footed booby”:http://internt.nhm.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wildwin/2003/ad_picnumb.dsml?catdescrip2=ap&posdescrip2=hc&picnumb=ss08 by Werner Bollmann. I’m just speechless at the wonderful composition and the blend of soft browns and the steely blue of the bird’s beak. This is the kind of thing I aspire to—in my dreams.

p. Update: I’ve fixed the link to the blue-footed booby so that it points to the correct page. Sorry about that. p. Update 2: Gah. There’s something weird about the URL, and I can’t get one to point to the correct page. Follow the link above, and the booby is the last thumbnail on the right.

p. This fantastic “a cappella rendering”:http://virt.vgmix.com/v-starwars.mp3 of the Star Wars theme has just made my day. It’s actually quite inventive, but it was the demented gerbil sound-a-like melody line that really did it for me. All I can say is that if you are feeling a bit tired, stressed and fed up with life in general, a couple of repeats of this track is equivalent to a whole course of Prozac. There aren’t any side-effects either, other than the tune sticking with alarming tenacity to the inside of your brain.

[via “Irate Scotsman”:http://www.scotlandsoftware.com/blog/index.php ]

p. This is an extremely useful map “showing Tube stations”:http://rodcorp.typepad.com/photos/art2003/tubewalklinesfinallmfaint.html that appear to be far apart on the Tube map, but are actually close enough to enable you to walk between them. This is the reason that I usually carry both a Tube map and a London AtoZ when I travel around London.

p. I don’t go up[1] to London very frequently these days, but when I was growing up in Surrey, going to London for the day was a real treat. Travelling on the train to Victoria station was always exciting (imagine that—getting excited about travelling on the train!), and when I saw the huge towers of Battersea Power Station, I knew that we were nearly there. I also loved the Tube with the ghostly sounds of a busker playing the saxophone somewhere down a tunnel, and that gust of Underground smell that would herald an arriving train. Scent is such a slippery evasive thing for the memory, but I know that if I smelt that smell blindfolded, and with no other sensory cues, I would know exactly where I was.

p. I’ve always enjoyed walking around London too (except Oxford Street—that makes me feel like a salmon battling up a waterfall). I have a number of favourite routes that I take down quiet lanes and past interesting sites, but I pride myself on just being able to strike out in the general direction of my destination and pick my way through the back streets until I get to my goal. Of course, I do carry the AtoZ in case my rather fragile sense of direction gives out on me, or the sun—which I use as a compass in towns—disappears behind thick overcast.

p. [via “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net]

fn1. For some reason, London is always ‘up’.

This article really made me laugh—-peering over your fellow Mac user’s shoulder to see what he or she has in their Dock—-it’s so me! I even look at the screenshots in MacUser magazine carefully in case I might be missing something. I’m also glad to see that I’m in good company with my right-side pinned Dock. It’s the only place to have it, dontcha know.

via “Mac Net Journal and 2lmc spool

p. [“John Gruber”:http://www.daringfireball.net/] has written a “brilliantly clear and helpful”:http://www.macworld.com/2003/09/secrets/bbeditversioncontrol/ tutorial for using “CVS(Concurrent Versions System)”:http://www.cvshome.org/ with BBEdit. I had been looking around for a good basic tutorial for a while, but most seemed to concentrate on using CVS from a remote location, rather than locally. It really is handy, especially with HTML files, where there’s a lot of potential to break something quite badly.

p. What I would really like is a similar system for word processing documents. I’m pretty much forced to use Microsoft Word at work for collaborative writing, but the ‘Track Changes’ feature is a bit clunky to use. If heavy editing goes on, the document ends up as a mass of underlined or struck through text in several colours, which gives you a headache even before the editing process does. If I could only persuade all my colleagues to write in LaTeX, I could use BBEdit or Vim and CVS, and I would be a happy little geek bunny. Sigh.

[via “Mac Net Journal”:http://www.whiterabbits.com/MacNetJournal/ ]