A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
- Miyazaki's Ponyo on the Cliff Coming to Theaters in August
- This movie was the big news in the Studio Ghibli Museum when we were there last week.
Shared Items – March 13, 2009
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
- Christopher Breen on the New Shuffle
- Closing line is totally relevant to a recent discussion on how Apple decides what features to include in its products: “It isn’t meant to be good for everyone, it’s meant to be great for some people. That’s how Apple rolls.”
- Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer
- Am I just a massive nerd or does this actually sound like potentially a lot of fun?
- Official Google Blog: Google Reader starts a conversation
- Comments in Reader have launched. Hurray!
- Hooters Gear :: Kids
- Parenting: You’re doing it wrong.
To London
And now to the subject that brought me here to post. Feel free to ignore the previous post in which I indulge the ubiquitous blogger’s fallacy that everyone, or even anyone, cares about site upgrades.
The big news around these parts is my impending move to London. Behind this news is a host of recent negotiations and manoeuvrings and compromises which find themselves spread across the whole spectrum from boring to confidential, but the result is the important part and the result is that I will not be living in Ireland for very much longer.
From my perspective this is what the Chinese call a crisitunity. It has been thrust upon me to a degree. Left to myself I would have been happy to stay inside rationalizing the familiar. But I’m glad it has come about. Assuming all the difficult details can be worked out, and I have no reason to suppose they can’t, this will be quite an adventure.
London is close to home; I already know people in the office; I have friends in the city and in the rest of the country; it’s easy to get to lots of other places from there; and it’s such a huge city that there’s a lot going on. It does have the disadvantage of it being virtually impossible for me to live as close to the London office as I do now to the Dublin one. Even if I moved into Buckingham Palace I’d be a little farther than I’d like, though maybe then I could get a horse-drawn carriage to work…
Expect irregular, infrequent, and poorly-composed blog posts throughout the transfer and when I’m there. So pretty much what I manage to produce right now.
New Sexiness
I have to confess to being incredibly lazy. I’ve just grabbed the most popular current WordPress theme and applied it to this site. I wouldn’t have even gone to that much trouble except that I was seeing a disconcertingly blank page after upgrading, and didn’t expect to be able to find the old theme without at least a little bit of scrolling and clicking and typing and that sort of thing.
As it happens I quite like this new theme. And I have to say that WordPress is making impressive progress in the direction of usability. I have to respect any piece of software whose developers have put such effort into facilitating my inaction.
Update: There seem to be some problems associated with the upgrade or theme change. I’m seeing ‘Precondition failed’ errors sporadically, and I’m getting reports of pages displaying with no style at all. I’ll look into it when I get the chance. Only clue so far is that highlighting the location bar and hitting enter fixes things, but reloading doesn’t. That indicates that something is trying to play games with the HTTP Referer (sic) header and is dropping the ball.
Update2: It turns out that the mod_security Apache module was enabled and didn’t like the word ‘sex’ in the title of this post. Any time the URL for this post was in the Referer header, that request was considered referer spam and was served a HTTP 412 response. I disabled the offending module with the line SecFilterEngine Off in the site-level .htaccess file.
Shared Items – March 6, 2009
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
- The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
- If you’ve heard of Daniel Gilbert, you’ll want to read this. If you haven’t, you’re missing out, and you should read this to help you catch up.
- Ninja Umbrella
- WANT
Shared Items – February 27, 2009
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
- Site offered discounts on white tanks to proven "wife beaters"
- Texas is an adjective now, right? As in, “this is just so Texas.”
- Little Towns Consumed By Lava Flows and Crumbling Glaciers [Concept Art]
- I’m disappointed to have missed this in Dun Laoghaire.
- “Change – Into A Truck” Art Print by Tim Doyle
Shared Items – February 20, 2009
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
- YouTube – Obama's Elf
- This may be the greatest misheard lyric I’ve ever heard.
A New Project
I have a confession. I’ve been seeing another blog. I didn’t mean to get drawn away, but I can’t help it. It just happened…
Actually, you know what? I’m going to stop the whole seeing someone else/seeing another blog thing right now before it gets tedious.
Here’s what’s up. I’ve decided to take on a new challenge. I got a book earlier this year called, “Dream It. List It. Do It!” It’s a spin-off from the life-list site, 43things.com. In the simplest terms, it’s a long list of things that people want to do in their lives. Some things are small, like “buy a new toothbrush” or “go disco dancing”. Some are big, like “run a marathon”. All in all there are probably around 2,000 – 3,000 of these goals in the book, covering a huge array of things that people want to do.
I’m planning to do them all.
If you’re interested in seeing me make a fool of myself along the way—and honestly who doesn’t love to see someone repeatedly fail?—you can follow along at the project’s dedicated blog, the unwieldily named dreamingitlistingitdoingit.com. I’ll see you there.
Shared Items – February 13, 2009
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
- Quote from John Cole
- I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. …
Shared Items – February 6, 2009
A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:
- DYING
- Prepare to do it.
- ecards for when you care enough to hit send
- I won’t read anything into your not yet responding to my invitation to see He’s Just Not That Into You.
- Eddie Izzard to play in Belfast and Dublin
- December 14 in the O2.
- A Story in Pictures