The next man on the moon will be Chinese

As discovered by the author of the channel4news Twitter stream this afternoon:

On the plus side, they actually got recommendations.

Major advice to take home from this: if you ever plan on sending sexually explicit texts to anyone, make sure they aren’t in your phonebook as “Twinkletoes” or “Twister” or anything else likely to be next to “Twitter”.

(Also, the channel4news Twitter is interesting and entertaining, as is their FactCheck sister service, and such lols as the above in no way detract from that.)

Causing a significant level of confusion in my mind over the past few days has been this bafflingly over-photoshopped poster for the London Red Bull Air Race:

(Bigger version on Flickr)

Now: what the holy hell were they thinking when they signed off on that? This is an event they’re selling to Londoners, right? Londoners who presumably know that Canary Wharf really, really isn’t in between St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge. And who also know that The Dome doesn’t sit on that side of Canary Wharf even if St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge aren’t anywhere in the vicinity (as you can see in this picture, which is suspiciously similar to their source image for Canary Wharf, given that it’s the first image on a Google search for “canary wharf dome“.)

And this isn’t even taking into account the weird thing that the plane appears to be doing, where its tail and even its wings are clearly behind and to the right of the inflatable marker thingy, but its smoke trail has mysteriously passed around the marker to the left side…

I don’t get why they decided that they needed the sheer visual impact of setting their race in a twisted other-universe London with its crazed Escher-nightmare geography and baffling aerodynamic physics. Unless they’re planning something really special for the event, involving twelve-dimensional hyperspace and a carefully placed black hole, I don’t think that poster really sells it to me.

Update: Hello, StumbleUponers! Thanks for stumbling by.

It was fun watching the various Twitter search tools burst into life tonight as people tuned into Bonekickers, the BBC’s new archaeologists-solve-mysteries drama. It’s worth saying that, because this was the only thing that can possibly connect the words “fun watching” and “Bonekickers” - which couldn’t have been worse if it had been translated from the markings on original Templar Knight bog roll. By Dan fucking Brown.

Here is a timeline of my brain bursting while watching it:
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As Chris has already written about, Saturday saw the return of Open Tech, the British geek conference, after an absence of three years. I went along, hungover like a bastard, and a good time was had by all.

Some quick highlights:

Danny O’Brien (excellent as always) somehow turning the Open Rights Group talk into a revivalist meeting, as Bill Thompson led a movement of those not yet saved to come forward and be baptised (and hand over a tenner). Also, the first half of the talk was conducted entirely in Foundation references, the second half entirely in Doctor Who references. It was all very enjoyable, and a delight to see how well the completely spontaneous idea (ahem) that Open Tech 2005 came up with has progressed. If you care about any of the issues ORG fights on - privacy, e-Voting, freedom of information, copyright reform, and host of others - you should probably go and join them now.

The MySociety guys giving the lowdown on WhatDoTheyKnow?, another great, simple political application that makes submitting FoI requests easy, and automatically publishes any response. It’s a great site, and along with all the other MySociety stuff (the video on TheyWorkForYou, the travel time maps) gives you hope that maybe this world isn’t entirely doomed after all.

The same goes for the guys behind the Power Of Information project, who are actually doing cool things within government to free up data and give it to people to use - it’ll be fascinating to see how ShowUsABetterWay works out, because it’s a potentially brilliant scheme.

The guys from guardian.co.uk, who explained the thinking behind the architecture for the Guardian’s web refit. I’ll not go into detail right now (it’s too late to try channeling Martin Belam) but I was pleased in an entirely egotistical way that a lot of their thoughts were similar to thoughts I’d had. Hurrah. They, of course, have the advantage of actually having done them, rather than just vaguely thinking about them.

Overall, there wasn’t quite the same sense of excitement as there was at previous iterations of the event - no “wow” factor stuff like TheyWorkForYou being unveiled, or Audioscrobbler being explained and me totally failing to get it, and a lot less of the useless-but-fun tech hacking that it had in its NotCon days - but instead there was a sense that things were maturing and actually getting stuff done. Which is good, I think,

People I saw but didn’t have anything sufficiently interesting to say to that would have justified me talking to them: Ben Goldacre, Danny O’Brien, Toms Steinberg and Loosemore, Simon Willison, Rufus Pollack and an awful lot of familiar faces whose names I couldn’t quite place. People I was going to talk to but then couldn’t find: Becky Hogge, who now runs ORG and I went to university with. People who I realise I never actually introduced myself to although I was technically in a conversation with even though I wasn’t saying much: Tom Reynolds. Puzzling conversations about Charlie Stross books with someone who clearly thought I was someone else: 1.

So there’s been this internet brouhaha for the past few days, which isn’t of any real direct interest to you unless you have a reluctant but obsessive fondness for Blog Drama!!! (to which I plead guilty). But I think it does illuminate - or at least confuse in an interesting way - a lot of the problems that people are having adjusting to the still-newish world of mass online publishing, so I’m going to try teasing my thoughts out, as much to legitimise the many hours I wasted reading all the threads on this over the past couple of days as anything else. It’s a hugely overlong brain-dump, more about organising my own thoughts - obviously, I’d appreciate any comments you may have.

In brief, Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs in the world, and a longstanding voice arguing for openness, honesty and user engagement in the public sphere, at some point decided to delete all their old posts that had linked to or mentioned Violet Blue, a generally tedious sexblogger of whom they had previously been rather fond. As is the way with the internet, somebody eventually noticed, it came to the attention of both Violet Blue herself, and tech gossip blog Valleywag. Things spiralled from there - a huge blog that regularly rails against censorship and secrecy had been caught ‘censoring’ their own site, and despite frequent enquiries from other bloggers and the media, they weren’t saying why. Rex from Fimoculous compared it to the deletion of post which had linked to him, which he speculated was because the BB crew found out he’d written a post slightly critical of them. It made the front page of the LA Times website. A MetaFilter discussion began, and quickly achieved some sort of insane critical mass.
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So - Praxis, god damn his withered soul, has infected me with the memespack:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.“

It’s been going around.

So, I have consulted the oracle (I remember at NotCon four years ago, listening to Richard Jones explaining Audioscrobbler. “Ha,” I mocked, completely missing the point, “so it notes down what you listen to, and after a while, it’s able to tell you what music you like. What’s the point of that?” Quite a lot of point, it turns out.) and had a think, and here’s my seven:
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The other night I had a dream about the property market. This was distressing enough: if I’d ever thought about dividing the human race into two groups, one of which has dreams about the property market and the other of which doesn’t (which I never have thought about), I’m pretty sure that I’d have put myself solidly in the middle of the non-property-market dreaming group. So finding myself actually having a dream about the property market was confusing, to say the least.

In the dream, I was attempting, with at least one other person - it’s unclear who, or how many - to buy a house. This was proving difficult, the property market being both overpriced and dangerously volatile right now. However, we were very pleased with ourselves, because we thought we’d found a solution. You see, in the dream, Asus had just released a very small, stripped-down budget range of houses. Eee houses. But the majority of the dream was taken up with a highly repetitive series of frustrations, as every vendor we tried had sold out of the houses due to stocking problems.

I awoke from the dream with an insatiable desire to live in a tiny cuboid house that measured about 12 feet by 16 feet, was pearly white in colour, and ran on open source principles but required several days of tweaking to get the plumbing working properly. Not that my flat’s actually hugely different to that description, but there was something about the dream-house that nagged, and wouldn’t let go.

I am not mad.

Possibly of interest to people who care about such things: this blog post, in which Neil Gaiman is asked if he’ll be writing for Doctor Who under Steven Moffat’s glorious new showrunnerdom, and he really rather pointedly fails to say “no”, and instead talks about how nice the menu is at a Chinese restaurant in Soho.

‘Lo Neil,
As a great fan of Doctor Who, I’ve been dancing around the room after hearing that Steven Moffat is taking over as Chief Writer and Executive Producer of the series in 2009. […]

Anyway- my real question is whether or not we’ll finally see a Neil Gaiman DW episode? We’re all quietly hoping the idea came up during your dinner back in March in Bar Shu… I know you’re a very busy person, but it would be the perfect combination for so many fans!
Rachel

I think it’s great news — what Russell Davies did over the last few years was remarkable: as a writer and as a show-runner he brought Doctor Who back, sure-footed and smart and with a heart. […]

I’m really excited about Steven Moffat taking over — always assuming that it’s not just a publicity stunt on his part to try and get “Blink” a Hugo, as a countermeasure to Mr Cornell’s car-crash-to-get-the-sympathy-vote.

And it was a terrific dinner: they do fantastic dry-fried green beans at Bar Shu (it doesn’t sound like it would be fantastic from the menu, but it is).

Yeah, I know, it’s not much, but such fragile insinuations and half-percieved hints are what fandom thrives upon, no? And you must admit, it would be rather wonderful. I mean, he’s already getting his hand in at writing in the Doctor’s dialogue style:

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

“To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…. More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there…”

Now, if they could just ply Warren Ellis with enough Red Bull and cigarettes that he agrees to do their bidding as well…

UPDATE: The first hints of a rumour have now been upgraded to a full category five rumour swirling just off the coast of certainty land, as somebody who actually knows about such things says that sources within the BBC confirm the existence of the rumour, and more importantly he actually asks Neil Gaiman, who trumps his previous non-denial by going all Urquhart and saying “You may very well think that, but I could not possibly comment.”

Just to mention it because Chris and I found this particular joy of the internet last night (while pondering the wisdom of my ill-formed plan to host a “come as Jonathan Meades” party) - the YouTube user MeadesShrine has a vast array of clips and full shows from the back catalogue of the perfect man himself. There was a plan for a DVD set from the Beeb, but it seems to have been shelved temporarily, for reasons that pass human understanding. As MeadesShrine says on their user page:

until the dvds arrive, lets congregate and genuflect here for a while.
“re-availablization” will be our clumsy watchword.

I’ll also take this opportunity to re-note my observation, for those who don’t follow my Twittering, that - while I have respect for Hugo Weaving - Meades should have played Agent Smith in The Matrix. A man delivering lengthy monologues in patrician tones about the state of the world while wearing a dark suit and sunglasses? Meades all over.

Quick query - does anybody know if there’s something funny about wifi in Ireland? Just come back from holiday there, and I wasn’t able to pick up a single wireless connection on my Eee the entire time. Nothing broken about the computer, as far as I can tell - it’s finding wireless connections without any trouble now I’m back in the UK - but I tried in numerous venues that claimed to have freely accessible wifi, and it didn’t spot a single connection. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t connect - it just didn’t see any signals at all. So, er… do the Irish use some kind of quirky wifi that might explain this? Or is my computer just xenophobic?

Tedious travelogues and many pictures of interesting rocks from my trip to follow shortly.

One thing I’ve been meaning to blog about but haven’t got round to is my lovely new toy, an Asus EeePC. I bought one partly on a shiny-craving whim, partly because I wanted a genuinely portable computer, and partly because I think the anti-feature-bloat approach that they took with it is something that should be generally encouraged. So I encouraged it, with money.

It’s a really neat little machine, and I’m very, very fond of it - I’ve been using it almost to the complete exclusion of my trusty old ThinkPad, largely from the sheer pleasure of having something that starts up in 25 seconds, shuts down in 12, and doesn’t interrupt what I’m doing every half an hour to nag me about some software update or another.

It does take a little getting used to, however - the keyboard is fine, although I’m still not as quick on it as I am on a regular sized one, and I wonder how well someone who doesn’t have my tiny, childlike fingers would cope. The small screen is also a little odd at first, but by and large works with most things that you need it to - you just need to get used to CTRL-plussing and -minusing a bit more than normal to optimize the font size for the screen. The one site I regularly use that was causing me grief, however, was Google Reader.

The problem essentially is that the main menu (the bit in the upper left with the Home, All Items, etc options) takes up a fixed amount of real-estate, which squeezes the list of your subscriptions - the actual meat and potatoes of the reader - into whatever space is left. Which on the Eee, is precious little. In fact, it only manages to fit in two lines, making it all but useless for looking over your feeds to see what’s new:

Even doing the old CTRL-minus to reduce the text size doesn’t help much - by the time you’ve got a usable number of lines, the text is all but illegible:

The solution, after a bit of monkeying about, turns out to be twofold. Most obviously, F11 gets rid of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, giving you a fair bit more to play with. The extra help comes from using Greasemonkey, by way of grabbing Lifehacker’s Better GReader extension. This lets you fiddle about with the look of Google Reader - the option you want to use is the Minimalistic skin, which lets you get rid of the top bar on Google Reader by simply tapping W. The combination of these two gives you plenty of real estate to browse your feeds in, even with the normal chunky text size:

You can, of course, give yourself even more to play with by reducing the text size a bit - it’s still legible with one, or even two, reductions. Not a terribly complex or hard-to-figure out fix, but I couldn’t see it noted down anywhere on a cursory google, so I thought I’d put it here in case anybody else was gnashing their teeth over the issue…

In a continuation of my new resolution to do more with this little lump of internet, in a more Sore Eyesish quoty-blogging style, I was very fond of this from my favourite smart-writing-about-music blog, clapclap.org:

It’s unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to “good music” are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra’s image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are really fucking loud.

The New Yorker piece he’s spinning off from is also well worth a read. Alex Ross does seem to be widely acknowledged as basically the best thing ever, and I should probably set aside a significant portion of my life to read his book and his blog and everything. But I probably won’t get the time. Ah well.