Marco-BB5 on BB6

31 May 2005

Marco from BB5 is Digital Spy’s Big Brother columnist. This, his first column, is surprisingly insightful… enough so to make me keep reading. Whether I keep watching the show is another matter. It is still curiously compulsive, I will own…

A Gamers’ Manifesto

30 May 2005

A Gamer’s Manifesto. Entertaining, at times a little OTT and a bit too optimistic, but there some salient points nontheless. Plus: it made me laugh.

Some statistics

29 May 2005

  • 250+ emails
  • 223 unread RSS headlines
  • 148 photographs downloaded
  • far too many decibels coming from the party upstairs
  • 1 fantastic holiday

More soon along these lines.

Leave of absence

21 May 2005

Gosh it’s been mad busy around here. Top tip: never try to move and go on holiday all at once. Didn’t help stress levels. And, of course, work has been crazy-busy – more so than normal. But there’s still fun to be had and I should be back posting here in a week or so (until I lose my broadband), full of beans and with lots of new energy. Lots of ideas, that’s for sure.

Must go now. Seville calls me. Flickr photoset, writing, sketches-maybe, will follow.

I love both of them dearly, I really do, but I also love comics, and so The Amazing Adventures of Lethem & Clay is, all in all, a very beautiful thing. Curse you, Candace Bushnell.

BBC Backstage launches. Lots of RSS feeds (and APIs in the near future) to play with – and, with a few caveats, you’re free to do what you want with all that lovely data. I’ve written a bit more about the scheme over at the other weblog I contribute to. Suffice to say, Ben Hammersley is right – this is seriously exciting stuff. The BBC are on the Cluetrain. Who’s next?

Comprehensive archive (with scans) of 50s and prior romance comics. It’s a genre you may not be very familiar with, but tons were churned out in this era; in some ways, the ads in each issue are even more interesting (from a cultural-history standpoint) than the comics themselves. Warning: they have severely dated. Just in case you hadn’t guessed.

So I recently acquired a new mobile phone (a Samsung D500) and in general I’m very pleased with it. It doesn’t iSync, but it does talk Bluetooth, which is better than nothing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t accept a bulk vCard with more than one name – it only sees the first entry in any vCard. So to back up my phonebook, I have to export each card individually from Address Book, send them all, and accept them individually on the phone.

This sounds like a hassle but it’s really not so bad – I’m only doing it for my whole phonebook once, after all.

However, there’s a problem: though it exports vCards correctly, it displays names as Surname Firstname – this is the order they appear in a standard vCard. My old Sony Ericsson T610 also used the vCard format correctly, but displayed names as Firstname Lastname, which is how I prefer to search. So: there’s got to be an easier way than editing each name on the phone, or completely messing up my Apple Addressbook (which also displays Firstname Lastname).

There is. Enter BBEdit.

Continue reading this post…

Urgh

06 May 2005

So I survived. Just. Got to work at 4pm yesterday; got home at 11am this morning. There was an hour and a half of sleep in between, but you know, that’s not so much. Still, it all went pretty well; the magazine was up about 10am as predicted, and the weblog is chock-full of posts from authors all over the globe. Fun to maintain, too.

Anyhow, I went to bed when I got in and woke up about 5pm today. Which means I need to sort out some dinner before the girl gets home. I’ve got some photos of quite what it looks like to have been working all night having been awake the day before. Not pretty, that’s the answer.

So it’s the evening of the general election, and I’m still at work. Well, to be honest, I only arrived about two hours ago; I’ll be working through the night as a result of our extended print deadline.

What’s more interesting than my working hours, though, is that the New Statesman will be publishing to its general election weblog throughout the night; there’s a wide variety of perspective that it’ll cover, from foreign perspectives to updates from inside the office. Should be quite exciting – subscribe to its RSS feed to stay up-to-date!