Podcasting Fun

My week has some aural hot-spots that I thought I’d share with you, here in order of joy are some silly but articulate podcasts.

Answer me This by Helen and Olly - (website - iTunes) - fresh, funny, witty, teasy, fun. They’re not afraid of swearing (hence the “explicit” tag) but, swearing aside, their content is pretty innocent. Helen Zaltzman and Ollie Mann riff off questions that listeners send in, with occasional interjections from Martin the Soundman, and I find them articulate and entertaining.

Friday Night Comedy - (iTunes) - Either The News Quiz or the Now Show - either way, top class topical comedy from the BBC. If your week doesn’t include this already, then you are several endorphin rushes short of a giggle.

The Bugle by John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman - (website - iTunes) - More riffing from the Zaltzman family, this time it’s brother Andy who discusses this week’s news with comedian John Oliver courtesy of Times Online. You’ve got to admire anyone with two Z’s in their surname. What I want to know is how you can make something this well prepared sound this unrehearsed? It’s impressive. Oh, and funny.

Skeptoid - (website - iTunes) - not comedy as such, but a cheerful debunking of the frankly ridiculous, and there is something about Brian Dunning’s approach which is refreshingly un-dogmatic. As far from Dawkins as you can get and still be on the side of the angles.

Alt.text from Wired.Com - (website - iTunes) - five minutes or so of Lore Sjöberg taking a perverse, diverse, subverse and occasionally obverse look at modern pop culture. Ach, let’s not be clever: it’s a bloke taking the piss out of things. Witty though. And don’t be put off by his photo.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast - (website - iTunes) - the boys have been feeling the strain recently, but they’ve been podcasting weekly for over a year. However, their insights into the lows and lows of being a working troupe of actors are still better value than Wogan on the way into work in the morning.

Should I raise an invoice?

Should I raise an invoice, or do I offer my services?

An organisation called “Madrigal Communications” (which seems to be a bloke and an internet site) has lifted the meat out of one of the posts here in my blog, added one sentence at the top, and three at the bottom which are soliciting business, and put the whole thing up on-line. He did this in November, but the credit’s just turned up here. Oh, and he has miss-spelt “Behn” but there you go. Ironically, he offers proofreading services. At least he doesn’t offer ethical advice.

So, the question is, do I send him an invoice for the time I spent putting the original blog together which was a professional lifetime plus a couple of hours? You could argue “no” because what he has lifted are quotations from Einstein, Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll which are in the public domain. On the other hand, the “Questions” series is the result of a good couple of decades thought, the post he’s lifted them from is about a specific category of questions to be used for a specific kind of analysis, and I make it plain that I ask questions for a living. It seems he doesn’t, though he does write for a living and is trying to get business off the back of my blog post. Or maybe I should be grateful that he credited me at all.

Bugger the internet.

Photo later in the day, I think.

---

I just received a very pleasant and honourable email saying that he’s removed the post from his site. I’ve reminded him that he can wrap his own words around the Kipling questions, and pointed him in the direction of my source material for the Carroll and Aristotle questions. To be honest, if he’s soliciting for business for his writing skills, then it would do no harm to cut out my list of questions and use the space for his own words. I do hope he does. I didn’t create the questions, just the thinking about them expressed in my post.

A five minute trip to retroland

Oh! I’ve just had a bad online experience. Nothing too traumatic, just a website of a sort you really don’t see that much these days - the sort that is so achingly hip it’s impossible to use. It would be sweetly retro if it wasn’t so irritating.

It’s one of those websites that leads the user on a journey. Unfortunately it’s a linear journey and if you want to tread a different path, tough. You are doomed to sit there, clicking “next” and accepting what you’re given.

How can’t we use it? Let me count the ways: Half the navigation just disappears when you move from section to section, so you can’t skip blithely between stationery and gifts, you are forced to click back and return to products first. If you want to give up on the web site and find a store, then you must go to the front page. I’m in a good mood, so I’ll barely mention the category confusion: perish the thought that you’d give stationery as a gift. There’s no royal road to geometry, and no royal road around this website either.

Once you are looking at the stationery, the only way to navigate is using the “next” and “back” buttons on a greyed out disk.

My brain is melting.

It would be infuriating if it wasn’t so odd and - thank goodness - so unusual these days. I can’t even be bothered to be irritated by the vastly inflated billings charged by whoever designed it and built it. Most of these triumphs of design over usability have gone. This is like time-travelling back to all the unusable but gorgeous sites of the late 1990s.

The past is a foreign country - take yourself on a wee five minute trip to retroland.

Cold turkey for Christmas

I’ve decided that the only way to deal with my Internet addiction is to cut off my supply.

I’m going to post my wireless router to the one I IM with the most.

This may seem drastic, but I think it’s the only way. It isn’t quite as drastic as it sounds: when the shakes and the screaming get too bad I can stand outside the Library waiting for it to open, like the folks who wait at the pharmacy counter of Sainsburys for their bright green doses of methadone.

The problem is that my home-time is outa whack, and I lose hours of my life dickering around on the Intenet. Since I seem to find it impossible to cut down, I need to make it impossible to go online. I’ve a huge bunch of studying to do, and clicking the NaBloPoMo Randomiser ain’t gonna get me educated.

So, I’ve decided to pull the plug on the Internet for a month. I’ll probably keep a diary and blog about it afterwards. You do see how much the Internet frames how I react with the world?

So I’ll see you in the New Year.

Popping one’s Google cherry

Google is 9 years old and, yesterday at least, it celebrated with one of its famous Google Doodles.

It has seemed to me for a while that the defining technology of our age is not the computer, not the PC, not even the internet. It seems to me that the defining technology of our age is search.

The history of humankind has been about progress in three basic areas: transport, labour and information. There was little difference between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance in terms of how goods were moved, how things were made and how information was stored and transmitted. Then, in succession, we got the printing press, the steam engine, the railway, the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, the telephone and air transport. Computers, PCs and the internet are just steps on the path to making it possible for anything that is in the public domain to be findable in a fraction of a second at any time. Information is becoming friction-free.

If we are in the Search Age then Google are the acknowledged and demonstrable Kings of Search, and I have been trying to remember for a while when I first used Google; when I popped my Google cherry.

Yahoo was there from 1995 of course, which was roughly when I started using the Internet, but it never really did it for me. However, it is hindsight that makes me scornful of the idea of manually reviewing and categorising websites. MSN was pants from the beginning, with Bill Gates trying to create a parallel internet ignoring the one that was there already. My how we laughed. By 1999, I was recommending Wired Magazine’s Hot Bot to colleagues, and throughout 2000 I was using Alta Vista’s useful little Babelfish translation utility though their search engine was rather too biased towards academic science for me. Sometime in 2000 or so my ex recommended Ask Jeeves as a search aggregator but its failure to fulfil on its promise to answer free text questions irritated me. I was google-whaking by 2002, though. My maiden name was a google-whack for ages.

So as near as I can make out, sometime in the 15 months between the summer of 2000 and the early spring of 2001 I googled for the first time.

It’s a cherry I wish I could remember popping.

How about you?

I just love this, it is inspired genius

Click on the picture, ladles and jellyspoons, click on the picture.

Big Brother or Web 2.0?

I cannot decide if the “Recent Readers” widget to the left of the page is really cool or really intrusive.

It’s a vital debate which interests me - community vs individualism - openness vs privacy. I dislike openly pleading for comments (me! me! my blog! me!) but I am curious to know what the netgeist is on this one, so please comment away.

Freedom of speech - only there to defend those we agree with

I’ve just had a very odd thing happen. I have had comments which I made and which have already been replied to deleted off a political blog for no better reason than I can see than that I disagreed with the person whose blog it is, and could cite sources.

It’s his blog. He can do what he likes with it and with the comments made on it.

Even so, I find it deeply ironic that his tagline is “Winning friends and influencing people for better or for worse”. I cut my cyber-teeth on a site where nothing was ever deleted unless it was illegal, racist or homophobic. Having my words removed is an odd feeling.

So, if you don’t want comments deleted from a political blog which purports to invite civilised debate, then don’t do any of the following:

Don’t point out an uncomfortable interpretation of the bible and say “I have not verified it” - to do so suggests that you don’t have access to the Bible which means you must be - spit the word out - an atheist.

Don’t say “what I meant was that I did not check it out with a Greek scholar” when you are abused for failing to verify it. Don’t cite your mother who did study New Testament Greek as the otherwise unverified source of your comments. Presumably to do so implies you don’t trust your mother, which undermines Americans’ faith in motherhood and apple pie and breaks the commandment to honour your parents. More atheism. Evil evil Aphra.

Don’t challenge an unsubstantiated and frankly incredible statistic posted by your host by looking up relevant statistics in the National Statistics Office of the UK, the CIA, the French Embassy in Washington and British Census data and quoting them with links. To do so undermines an otherwise perfectly good argument which manages to vilify both the French and the Muslims living in France. I’m an enemy of Freedom. Obviously.

Don’t answer a post containing a series of loaded political questions simply and honestly, and above all don’t put in a slightly flippant reference to the 45 minute warning and WMD in the last reply. I am not sure what it means if you do those things, but I do know you won’t be granted the freedom of speech to do so.

Don’t suggest that you find the social darwinianism of the US unpleasant, and that you prefer the shared responsibility of loving your neighbour, paying your taxes and having health-care free at the point of delivery. To do so suggests that you are European, addicted to welfare and therefore plainly a socialist, and - as we all know - there is no evil greater than socialism. Unless it’s to be French. Or a Muslim. Or to oppose the war in Iraq.

Don’t say that America is going to be in the 2nd league in 50 years time. To do so shows you are an obvious enemy of freedom and are casual about the end of American hegemony. (That is one of those words which I can never quite remember what it means, so I guess I must be casual about it).

Don’t blog pseudononymously. To do so indicates that you …. wait for it …. have no sense of pride. Presumably only people who are ASHAMED of something would use a pseudonym.

Oh, incidentally, as well as all the above, I have high-school debating skills, (which may well be true). In case you didn’t know already I had better warn you that he can tell that I am an atheist, a socialist, an international pacifist. Oh, and most of what I say is plainly gobbledygook.

You have been warned.

In some respects it’s impressive that I got so far under his skin, and it does mean that I won’t be wasting my time bothering him any more, which will be good for his temper and for mine.

I am however shocked that someone who claims to invite active debate on their blog will simply delete the posts of those he disagrees with. My few original comments which have been replied to by other commentators are “awaiting moderation”. I am not sure if that means that anyone other than me can see them.

If that is what American Freedom of Speech is, then the good goddess help us all.

How to use a sword to cut the top off a bottle of champagne

Ramblin’ round t’internet the other night I found a website dedicated to “the noble art of sabering champagne”.

It’s all rather fun in a Pirates of the Carribean kinda way, if you like your fun to feature more testosterone than sense. I was amused by following safety tip:

Drape a towel/linen napkin over the bottom portion of the bottle should the bottle explode. The towel will help to contain the glass.

Useful advice, that, doncha think?

(I owe the link to Doug).

“Make this Valentine’s Day Extra Special”

Made I laugh.