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Ooh!

Just seen the second Harry Potter trailer and, bearing in mind that trailers are as informative as the back of a book, this does look rather top indeed. Of course, it could be said that the books are simplistic enough to lend themselves perfectly to movie-dom, but I enjoyed the books so it’s a win win situation. Looking very good indeed.

I couldn’t get the official Potter site to work but dug out the direct link to the low quality quicktime version - just right-click / drag to desktop. If you want to go the official way, it’s here.

Andy Luke’s blog, June 4th.

If I ever had any doubts about the boy Luke’s writing, they’re banished now. Beautiful. Unique.

It’s Kate’s birthday on Thursday and this year she’s reaching the mental age of 12. Please send all tacky e-greetings cards with bad music to this address.

According to the Political Compass I’m closest to Ken Livingstone, Tony Ben and Ghandi. Which is nice!

Economic Left/Right: -5.51
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -7.23

My good friend Mike was showing this weblog and other related stuff to a lecturer friend of his and she said it’s essentially socialism without wanting to call itself socialism, which I disputed because I didn’t want to call it socialism. Maybe she was right. Who knows?

Thoughts on the forthcoming craze for taller towers…

Where I sit in my flat I have a panoramic view of the London skyline looking West. The blue glow of the NatWest tower dominates and the BT tower and CentrePoint and visible on a good day. But there’s bugger all else to see. I think I’m with the pro-tower people. Once a building is over a certain height it makes no difference how tall it goes, but from a few miles away it makes for a stunning vista. I’m very keen on local restrictions (such as the rule preventing St Paul’s being obscured) but away from such areas I think tall, interesting looking buildings are a good idea. Looking at old drawings of London the skyline was impressive because everything was low. You can imagine how stunning the Monument (at Monument, in case you were wondering) must have been in the 17th Century. We need tall, beautiful buildings with public space at the bottom and public access to the top. In my view.

Internet thoughts…

One statement that used to get bandied about a lot about the internet before the dot.com e-commerce wonks convinced everyone otherwise is that “we’re all transmitters now”, alluding to the fact that the technology on my desktop is more powerful than that of a major newspaper 50 years ago. I am, as I type this, making my own media. Only a few people are reading it, but I’m transmitting.

But this statement is more powerful that it appears. Everyone has always been a transmitter. Think about it. When you sit in the pub and find yourself at the middle of a conversation, holding court about a subject for a few minutes before someone else takes over, you’re transmitting. When you say hello to your neighbour and talk about the weather, you’re transmitting. And at the other end of the good vibes spectrum, when you gabber away like some demented baboon into your mobile on the bus, you’re transmitting.

What the internet has done, and which is of much greater import than allow me to transmit my ideas to whoever stumbles across my site, is remind me and you that you and I are transmitters. 24/7. I am not a passive receiver of information. I do not exist to absorb programs and adverts and messages. I think, I create, I transmit. As do you.

Don’t ever forget that.

So, can we have our politics back please?

Forgive me, but I feel somewhat disenfranchised for some reason.

My eye, eight months down the road to recovery

I finally got around to getting some photos done of my eye post operation (read the gorey details here)

This photo has been altered to bring out the details. I don’t look this manky really. Have a good look, then read on…

As you’ll remember, after cutting out the Rodent Ulcer there was a deep hole in my face by my eye. This had to be plugged, but to sew it up and let it heal naturally (as it the normal procedure with these things) would have messed with my eye, probably meaning I’d never be able to blink and would cry constantly.

You’ll notice the area of skin where the hole was is slightly hairy. You’ll also notice a patch of pink scar tissue by my eyebrow. It’s not so obvious now, but the area connecting the scar tissue and the hairy patch is joined.

Put you fingers between your eyebrows above your nose and pinch. There’s a fair bit of skin there. Not on my head there isn’t. The surgeon took a pinch, sliced (with a red-hot scalpel) most of it off, and folded it over the hole attaching it with sutures. He then sealed up my forehead. The scar tissue came from me raising my eyebrows on a daily basis, otherwise it would be unnoticeable.

Simple really!

Just found out there are 558 pages on this site. Not bad for a year and a bit’s work (although a fair chunk of them are Andy’s). Unfortunately this means the limit for the free search engine has been reached and they want $600 dollars a year to do the job properly. Anyone know of a search engine that has a larger capacity?

Also, there are 331,561 words here (not including these ones). That’s a third of a million. I used to publish chunky zines with thirty-odd thousand words (I typed them all so I felt the need the count them) but this is something else entirely, especially when you consider the vast majority of those words are pure content (no big lists here). Eek.

So, to China Town.

Having grown up in Singapore between the ages of 1 and 8 I’m quite comfortable with the Chinese supermarkets, especially See Woo on Lisle Street (by the Prince Charles cinema) which is cramped, busy and full of great things with an amazing basement for woks, crockery, tea pots, etc., all at really cheap prices. Kate, however, was brought up in the West Midlands and feels like she’s suddenly gone to a foreign country, which in effect she has. This weirdness was epitomised by the tannoy announcement which started with a calm, ascending “bong bong bong” before a torrent of loud, aggressive, fast Chinese roared across the shop, followed by the concluding, descending “bong bong bong”. As befits the circumstances, she immediately spotted a bag of nuts, pictured here, and slightly lost it. Rather than collapse into giggles in the shop she met me outside.

They look a little like almonds and when eaten have that texture for a while before you realise there is no taste other than nut shells. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten one whole. Just tried peeling one first. Bit rubbery. Kinda tasty, actually. Quite sharp, for a nut, Reminds me of something but I can’t place it. Bitter aftertaste.

Dried Poo Tai Hai. Not highly recommended and definitely not in large quantities, but worth a flutter, probably best consumed with something else, like a strong drink.

There appears to have been a Stalinist purge at my company. A month back they announced a “strategic review” of the online retail arm which, like most online retail arms, hasn’t exactly made a profit yet. At the same time work starts on the new magazine to be sold / given away in store. This magazine duly arrives looking like something you’d pick up in an airport although with a few decent pieces in there (good intro to Murakami, for example). It took me a while to notice, but there were no mentions of the online wing anywhere in the whole magazine, save a small tag in the branch directory. A few months you couldn’t move for online posters, mouse-mats, pens, notepads, etc, and now it’s just not mentioned. At all.

While kinda spooky (especially because I have a friend at online who is currently fearing for his job) it’s actually quite normal in retail. I’ve toyed with the idea of suggesting some kind of intranet with community weblog-style pages to help disseminate the hoards of information that comes down from head office and provide feedback from the shop floor, but I suspect it won’t be acted on. Mainly this is because it’s a new radical idea that challenges the hierarchy, and retail doesn’t like that kind of thing, but also because it would be a permanent record of the mission plans, marketing visions and other “concrete” things that change by the week. If staff could see the memos about online from a year ago compared with the silence currently, that would not be good. There is no history in retail. There is just the now.

The Music of the Internet converts the four node IP address into music with a fractal composition program. BugPowder.com sounds kinda cool!

My dad’s weblog is back after a period of absence. My weblog is still pretty quiet!