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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.

For four days, I’ve had a wracking cough. This has meant that I haven’t got much sleep, and I’m constantly irritated by a dreadful, incessant tickling in my bronchi. I feel like my lungs are trying to escape. In an attempt to distract myself from these annoyances, I was trying to think about the kind of simple, pleasurable things I enjoy.

I remembered a cold winter walk I went on a little while ago. As I walked by the river, I found a big, white swan’s feather. It was a body feather, and had the contradictory properties of strength, suppleness and softness. As I walked along, I slowly drew the feather between my closed index and middle fingers, pulling it gently against the direction of its natural curve and enjoying the soft snick sound it made as it slipped free of my fingers. I repeated the action over and over again, until it became like a sensual mantra, and was very soothing. I wish I had a swan’s feather now.

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]

I usually recommend albums when I like almost all of the tracks on the album, but this is a bit different. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t dislike any of the tracks (I find Sinéad’s voice so extraordinary that she could make a nursery rhyme interesting). ‘Mandinka’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Just Like U Said It Would B’ are all great tracks, though the heavy 80s synth sounds are a bit dated in places. But I love this album for one track—’Troy’.

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I’ve never had much interest in Usenet-type newsgroups, but when I found that perl.org had some great beginners’ Perl lists (perl.beginners, perl.beginners.cgi, and perl.macosx¹), I wanted to find a good newsreader. I tried Thoth, MT-Newswatcher and the beta of Unison, but all the GUI-ness seemed a bit over the top for reading text-based news (I’m not interested in downloading binaries over Usenet). I also wanted something cheap or free, as I’m saving my money to get a licence for Omniweb 5 when it comes out of beta.

Then I found tin—a command line newsreader. There don’t seem to be any binaries, so I compiled from source (you need the Developer Tools on one of the Jaguar/Panther install CDs for that). Amazingly, all went well, and I’m really impressed by tin. It’s really easy to set up multiple NNTP servers and groups to read, and navigation using the keyboard is quick and easy. There’s even a nice coloured mode, where different parts of quoted messages, headers and so on get coloured to make the display clearer. Marking, saving and filtering articles is also very straightforward.

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If I’d had this CSS debugging bookmarklet when I was designing this site, I might have ended up with a few less bruises after banging my head on the table in frustration. It outlines each div and labels it with a colour and a label to indicate its class or id. It’s really handy, and would also be a useful learning tool when examining other people’s sites—in conjunction with the source—to see how they achieve their look.

[via 2lmc spool]

Last night, we saw Touching the Void—Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’ attempt on the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. I’m sitting now, with my hands on the keyboard, wondering if it’s possible to compress down and reduce the story and the impression it had on me into words. I don’t think it is, but I’ll do my best.

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Are you an outliner anorak? Have you ever burned to know the history of the disclosure triangle (aka flippy triangle)? If so, then this is the answer to your prayers. It’s deliciously geeky.

[via Mac Net Journal]

I’ve been trying out the new version of Omniweb: Omniweb 5. The beta was released today, and I must say that I’m pretty impressed with it on the whole. I’m a big fan of Safari, so a paid-for browser would have to be pretty special to replace it in my affections. However, Omniweb has two features that might just allow it to supplant Safari for me.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about stories recently. I’ve just finished Lyra’s Oxford, which—despite the fact that it’s very short—is an archetypal story. I mentally differentiate between a story and other kinds of fiction which also have a plot and characters, but I can’t precisely put my finger on what defines a story.

A story doesn’t have to be written, of course; some of the best stories I have heard have been spoken or sung—in the best tradition of the story-tellers who would travel from village to village, entertaining people around their fires at night. One of the best modern story-tellers I know of is Laurie Anderson. I’ve seen her perform a few times, and both the songs and her explanations of them are invariably spell-binding. In fact, I have a story of my own to tell about Laurie’s story-telling skills.

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