Sunday Roast: thy beard is an offence against decency
Posted by: Cas on: March 30, 2008
Other than declaring my coolness to the world, how has this week been in the land of Meadow Towers? Uneventful. My shiny new pills that the doctor promises me will set things back on an even keel are currently taking their revenge with some interesting and not-to-be-shared-on-the-blog side effects. These will settle down soon and then the benefits will be reaped (woot!) but right now the cure is worse than the disease!
Still, all will be well and Stargate SG1 season 10 has finally arrived, so at least I have something nice to watch whilst I am feeling a bit manky.
It used to be “only in America”. Now, we can add only in Hawaii to the list – a man takes a horse to hospital to visit a patient
There is an interesting piece in the Comment is free section of the Guardian this week about the right to online privacy and the implications of recent proposed changes to the law
After sitting watching iTunes move libraries around last night, I can’t say I’m quite as enamoured with the progress bar as this chap, but they do have a certain charm I will agree. Especially at work – when our client database is having a hissy fit as it does lots of the time, I have to sit and mollycoddle it. It’s quite nice, sitting there whilst it thinks through the error of its ways, having a legitimate reason to do nothing. Not that I do nothing at work you understand!
Ah, the humble postcard. We all know I love them, right?
Something to remember. It wasn’t Power Rangers with me, but the Clash and “London Calling”. Great track in any other situation.
I wish I could ice cakes (that’s frost to you Americans) as well as this: Sushi Cupcakes (via Abi)
We live in an increasingly distributed and digital world and sometimes a physical notebook just can’t hack it. Why not take EverNote for a spin (I have some invites if desired).
The screencast totally hooked my attention and Matthew kindly got me an invite. Then I logged in and found I needed Leopard (10.5) to use the handy desktop programme and I went all 
Still, the web-clipping is really rather snazzy and I love its OCR capabilities. I took it for a spin yesterday on some pics I had snapped in the bookshop of titles I didn’t want to forget and it worked just as advertised on all bar one, but that was because my cameraphone quality is pants, rather than EverNotes fault.
There is a new Archaeology magazine out there, Past Horizons, that interests me more for the way it presents the magazine in digital format than anything else. The snazzy interface, from digipage.co.uk, is slick and made me raise an eyebrow momentarily. But then I’m easily impressed. It will be interesting to see how it develops and what others think of the interface (I expect my initial “ooh, snazzy” feelings will soon fall by the wayside of more mundane usability issues).
Torchwood is to do a one-off radio play. Well, it can’t be worse than most of season two now, can it? Roll on season three and the rumoured “reset” is all I can wish for. You know a TV show is bad when I’m predicting whole chunks of dialogue and plot twists five minutes before they happen!
Want some free SF? You can’t go wrong with Hugo nominated stories from Ken Macleod and Greg Egan
Windows user and fed up of me yammering about the wonders of the distraction-free environment WriteRoom gives me? Try Dark Room 
Read my nemesis on the subject of the relationship of Archaeology to the Indiana Jones films. So perhaps nemesis is putting it a bit strong as Holtorf does make some interesting points amidst the waffle. As an aside though, I do find it mildly entertaining that someone so vocal at one point on the subject of hyperlinks uses them so sparcely within the body of the text… OK, enough. Read, enjoy (or not) and discuss. I clearly have some thesis-related issues to deal with in private…
Downing Street is (apparently) on both Flickr and Twitter. The whole thing is making me sit back and have a little think on the pros and cons. Why NOT have the people who run our country try to reach out? At the same time, it does feel a little bit like they are trying to do what the cool kids are doing. Which brings me to my first slight niggle. How are they choosing who to follow? Nils is being followed. As it should be, he is a very worthwhile chap, but he isn’t UK based. Surely it would be better to follow your own electorate first? And who is it who is actually making the decision on who to follow or not? Who is reading the tweets at the end of the day? I have this absurd image in my head of Gordon Brown sitting there, glued to his BlackBerry, as the tweets pour in, going “Oh, look, shiny17 has just fed her cat! Good for her!” or “Look everyone at this great YouTube clip that JohnSmith just posted”. Then there is the thought he’s following Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton on Twitter…
Ah, isn’t modern politics great?
Only one trailer this week, and I wish it was a better one for you Abi…
The Love Guru. I will say right here and now, as forcefully as I can I HAVE NO DESIRE TO SEE THIS FILM. I was cringing the entire way through the trail. So why link to it at all? Because there is a priceless Justin Timberlake bit at the end. They are announcing who is staring, going “Mike Myers… Jessica Alba… Justin Timberlake…” and… Both Moose and myself dissolved in to helpless cackling. Well worth the watching till the end!
6 Responses to "Sunday Roast: thy beard is an offence against decency"
March 31, 2008 at 1:20 am
Wait a second, isn’t Hawaii part of America as well? I know my geographical knowledge is a little off, but I’m sure that’s right.
The thing about politicians Twittering or even blogging for that matter is that on the long run, it makes them transparent, accountable, human even. I’d like to vote someone that actually is “with the people” rather than those being apart from.
Of course, the thing with politicians getting the hang of all the little tech fads we have now is that they do suffer from the same problem as every newbie to tech suffers from. Complete noobness. So yes, they are bound to make mistakes a lot of us have moved away from. But eventually, they are going to learn that you don’t have to follow anyone and everyone. They are going to learn that like politics, sometimes whatever is online isn’t really true.
The thing is, when politicians these days learn how to game information on the net as well as they do in real life, then I start wonder if that’s really a good thing.
March 31, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Nils – I’ll agree the blog/comment format perhaps isn’t the best when there are lots of things you want to talk on, but I’ve never been a slave to “On Topic”. If you want to talk about more than one thing, feel free!
And I will agree with you that the topic of privacy is as important as it is tricky. I am not even totally sure where my thoughts lie on it – I have been trying to work out how to reply to your comment all day and have been finding it really hard!
At the end I think I am going to have to use the answer I gave to my mum when we were having a long and passionate debate on CCTV, dna profiling, fingerprinting, civil liberties and the like:
I don’t have the answers. I don’t know if there are answers. I think we have the responsibility to keep talking and posing the difficult questions and I think we have to be so very careful we don’t take it for granted and end up sleepwalking into a situation we can’t get out of. To totally nab the end of the article:
if we rest on our laurels and do not fight for online confidentiality, we may soon find that our right to privacy is eroded without our consent: once that is gone, it is unlikely we will ever win it back
March 31, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Edrei: yes, yes Hawaii is part of the States. I wasn’t feeling very inspired on Sunday and was hoping no one would notice the less-than-accurate link! Ah well, too late
I like transparency and accountability in my politicians as well. I think going onto Twitter is a brave step and am willing to forgive some newbie stumbling. But I do have my reservations, not least that Twitter isn’t actually all that transparent! Anyone can start an account and claim to be DowningStreet.
They are at seemingly at least open to suggestions, and I shall most likely be making a few as all this talking about it is making some interesting neurons spark in my brain.
Am I following DowningStreet? For yes, now. I am intrigued to see where they go with this as I really am not sold that Twitter is the best tool for what they are trying to do. For example most of their Tweets so far have been press releases already published on their website. Surely an RSS feed direct from the page would be better and less likely to be lost in the noise of someone’s twitter stream?
April 4, 2008 at 6:24 pm
I feel famous! Also, we differentiate between frosting and icing. Frosting is fluffy and soft while icing begins runny and hardens to a shine.
Re: Digipage. The simple fact that I can’t send someone a link kills it for me, especially for a publication like a magazine. You’re right, the snaz will give way to incredible usability issues. Just click on the bookmarks link on the left of http://clients.digipage.co.uk/?id=pasthorizons1 for an frustrating experience that breaks the generally accepted rules of a lightbox.
April 4, 2008 at 7:45 pm
You should feel famous Abi! If nothing else, you’re the reason I do my damnedest to make sure there is at least one movie trailer per roast.
I hadn’t even played with it to that depth, I will admit. Already on a second glance the snaz has died for me too. You can send a link to someone, but only via email. No handy bookmarking for a roast or del.icio.us
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Welcome to Bright Meadow 2.
My usual blog is over at brightmeadow.co.uk - I resort to this one on the rare occasions that my server has hiccups for more than a couple of days.
If you want to read more about me, I suggest reading the about page.
March 30, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Great Roast, as ever. The problem with Roasts, of course, is that you could comment on so much, and since this isn’t a threaded forum, I’ll just pick one topic that I was especially grabbed by: the privacy article, since it’s both a difficult as an important issue.
First off, I was happy to see the clear distinction made between sharing information on the web (profiles) which can then find its way to other places whether you intended to or not, and the silent tracking of one’s browsing history and attaching consequences to that.
The first, I still firmly believe, goes with the territory. Online interaction is little different from interacting in the public space: what you do there is there for others to capture and distribute, and you carry a responsibility for that.
The second is more cause for concern. While I do have Google Web History turned on, and while I’d even share it, I’m having a hard time with the examples mentioned in the article. However, even if I stored or shared BDSM porn (and who says I don’t), and even if that was considered inappropriate by the executive powers, I still have to see a court that would actually convict me over it.
That said, it’s good that we, who use the web to its fullest, keep this in mind and that we discuss it. As it is, our (and it is indeed ours) web history is already being recorded, as is the data trail we leave behind when we use a credit card or make a mobile call. But using that info for commercial purposes, or attaching legal consequences to it (before any crime is even committed), is something we need to stay aware and wary of.
Or, to speak with Clique 44’s tagline: “Shit’s private”.