Oblomovka

2004-09-09»

So a lot of people (including myself, late at night, staring at my ceiling) ask me - when are you going to finish off the Life Hacks site? After all, most of them don't say, isn't it a bit ironic that the guy who lectured people about how to be organised can't even get around to putting up his notes?

My line here is what I've always said: Life Hacks was about the techniques of super-organised geeks, by someone who is spectacularly not one of them. But, you know, that's not as helpful as a bunch of Perl scripts to tidy your bedroom, is it? So it's really nice to be now point people to Merlin Mann's new site, 43 Folders, which is clearly written by somebody is one of those geeks, and is really accomplished at describing and illustrating how he drives his life. It's a bit of a relief to discover that it runs along the same lines as the Life Hacks talk indicated - text files, little scripts, Getting Things Done, index cards, all that jazz. And a bit humbling too, given that he's uncovering stuff I never found out, even when I tortured people with hot tongs to find out their secrets.

So, hopefully I'll be able to copy and paste enough cool tricks to get the fuller notes to Lifehacks up soon. In my continuing chasing of my own tail, I've now developed an unhealthy interest in the other side of the geek organisation equation: What motivates geeks? And given that, how can you trick yourself into doing stuff that you'd otherwise run screaming from, like paying bills on time and going to bed at a sane hour?

(Looks at clock.)

A-ha.

2004-08-30»

[ Ada and I come in from a walk. ]

Q: What's that?

Me: It's a horse chestnut. There's a chestnut tree in the park. We could play conkers!

Q: [ Narrowing eyes ] Is this more of your weird monkey language?

Me: In the Autumn, you take one of these horse chestnuts, drill a hole in it, put a piece of string through the hole, and play conkers. You flick the chestnut at the other persons' chestnut. The chestnut that doesn't break into pieces wins, and goes on to battle other chestnuts. Conkers! You want to play conkers, Ada?

Q: So, here's the thing, Danny. We have Nintendo here. Nintendo and automatic weapons.

2004-08-16»

When they launched with that funky Flash chat thing, I admit I didn't really get Flickr. I instinctively kept my big fat ignorant gob shut, though, because they were obviously fixing things and adding other, cleverer things almost every day. In other words, they were doing a beta like a beta oughta be.

I've stumbled back to them in the last couple of weeks, initially because I got really into browsing their tag system. I now have an RSS feed of cute in my Bloglines feed, which has been a non-stop kawaii mix of puppies, babies and hamsters). Then I got dragged into using their picture uploading bookmarklet, which rocked. And now I've just found their flickr-<blog interface, which is similarly goodly.

I'm still a bit edgy about handing over all my photos to someone else's server, but as far as being a scheme to easily make the photos I want public, it's shaping up really well.

2004-08-12»

From this week's Popbitch

Tatu are no more but their infamous svengali Ivan Shapovalov hasn't abandoned his devotion to underage girls.

Ivan's new act is called Nato (nATo - like tATu) - a 16 year old Albanian singer who looks no more than 12. And instead of a schoolgirl outfit Nato dresses in a burkha - all you can see on her super-cool promo posters are eyes and microphone.

Leggy Starlitz lives!