Saturday  the Thirteenth of July, 2002

30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog; solid guidance on improving the accessibility of any Web site - some obvious, some obscure, but generally very insightful. Some very human angles on the importance of cross-browser readability, too.
"Dylan says he used to think there was nothing funnier than a really angry man, but he's not sure he believes that any more. In fact, it never was the anger that was funny, rather the impatience that went with it. Now he thinks it's grief that's funny. It hasn't been looked at enough, he says. Grief and tragedy. And the more compounded the tragedy, the funnier it is. The more ridiculous. Dylan is on one of his kamikaze flights to the paradise of perdition."
An oddly-transcribed "interview" with Dylan Moran, which is mainly him arguing with director Conor McPherson while a journalist writes it all down. It's good, though.

Gimmickry: Jump to a Random Archive Link


 Friday  the Twelfth

Informational parasitism. A friend got some holiday photos back this morning, and one of them was a weirdly unrecognisable blue-negative of some smiling people, a warning sticker saying - oddly - to look at the back of the picture. Turning it over, there was a car advert printed on the back.

This only a few days after the film trailer that was actually a car advert, and in an age where spam and junk mail tries harder and harder to pretend to be something else, to steal enough of your time and attention to plant its message, however blatant or subtle. Why, Mr Kowalski, it was you all along! The pollution of meaning, the inflation of scepticism in all the wrong places. I must finish my Clone on the subject before it becomes laughably outdated, punchline and all.

This message has not been a car advert.


I wonder which will happen first - ringtones becoming as leadenly passé as musical doorbells, or birdsong adopting a bleepy version of the Mission Impossible theme. I think I know.
Whelk is here. Eighty-four of the finest Upsideclowns, in black ink on genuine blades of wood-pulp. The Internet would be much better in paperback form, if only they could print it all quickly enough.


 Thursday  the Eleventh

Blogchalking - an admirable if misguided attempt to get a locational meta-tag adopted by force of numbers, and to encourage raw, easily-parseable data for future spiders to trawl. Although you can easily find location-mentioning blogs with a simple "blog (placename)" search, it'd be handy to have something with a guaranteed context, something marked with a unique nonsense-word. Could be worse.

Strange how it completely fails to mention the relevance of quote-marks and wildcards when searching, though. But to add some more data to the world - blogchalk: English, United Kingdom, Lewes.


I'm not sure if there's still a gold bus trundling around Brighton, or whether it's led all the other buses off to conquer an alien world by now.


 Wednesday  the Tenth

They were very harsh about bad HTML, in the 19th century.


 Tuesday  the Ninth

Dodos weren't all killed and eaten by swarthy Portuguese sailors (a Channel Four documentary takes half an hour to tell me) - their meat was actually quite tough and vile, and the dodo's ultimate doom was down to introduced species raiding their nests.

Three hundred years later, and David Bellamy wants to kill hedgehogs because they're eating rare birds' eggs, somewhere. Not only have we moved beyond natural selection; we're now responsible for making sure that everyone else plays fair.


"48. Easily assembles into a directional antenna for extending the range of your wireless LAN." - 101 Uses for a Corby Trouser Press.
Feh; point-missing Guardian comment on Rik Mayall's anti-Euro Hitler japery - it's offensive where The Producers and Fawlty Towers aren't, because Mayall's saying that "this thing we don't like is as bad as what Hitler was doing".
Hm, that hive-mind-artistry goat seems to be evolving into a xenomorph at the moment. Great Britain's slowly reverse-eroding, while the letter and anything crystallise with a particular sharpness. Animation soon.

As Above

Brain children. Those that overlap the Internet.

Online cliques. Trespassers may be welcome.

In the bookpile. About to read, or currently reading, or meaning to take back to the library.

Incidental music. Ohrwurmen or otherwise.

Other weblogs. The ones I make a point of returning to a lot.

Supporting cast. That have Web pages. In alphabetical order.

Weeks beginning. All having ended.
2002: 08.07 01.07 24.06 17.06 10.06 03.06 27.05 20.05 13.05 06.05 29.04 22.04 15.04 08.04 01.04 25.03 18.03 11.03 04.03 25.02 18.02 11.02 04.02 28.01 21.01 14.01 07.01

2001: 31.12 24.12 17.12 10.12 03.12 26.11 19.11 12.11 05.11 29.10 22.10 15.10 08.10 01.10 24.09 17.09 10.09 03.09 27.08 20.08 13.08 06.08 30.07 23.07 16.07 09.07 02.07 25.06 18.06 11.06 04.06 28.05 21.05 14.05 07.05 30.04 23.04 16.04 09.04 02.04 26.03 19.03 12.03 05.03 26.02 19.02 12.02 05.02 29.01 22.01 15.01 08.01 01.01

2000: 25.12 18.12 11.12 04.12 27.11 20.11


Archive search. You never know.