WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Staying Alive

I spent an hour this morning revisiting Neil Astley's wonderful and adult poetry anthology 'Staying Alive' [US|UK|CA] and once again I am in awe of his selection, accurately subtitled "real poems for unreal times". He's managed to assemble a profound and moving anthology where page after page I am placing markers.

With the skill of a photographer he juxtaposes different sources to gently illustrate the human condition. Today, for example, I was struck by Ted Hughes' 'Full Moon and Little Frieda' romanticising the naievety of childhood immediately followed by Frieda Hughes' 'Birds' criticising the coldness of an adult studying rather than loving a child. I also dipped in to the political and war poems sections and found them illuminating the present; C P Cavafy's 'Waiting for the Barbarians' illustrates the need we have for an enemy to distract us from political realities:

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

So much to gain from stillness with this book, I need more silence and time with it.

posted at 11:33 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Homeopathic Legislation

NYT reports that the US "anti-spam" bill which legalises sending spam and abolishes US state laws that make spam illegal has had its effectiveness even more diluted before being sent for rubber stamping at the White House. It was already as weak as water so presumably this is now a homeopathic bill which is effective because the spin-doctors have said it's against spam rather than because it has clauses that address the problem.

posted at 12:51 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

360 degree lens

On the subject of 'way cool', it seems Sony has come up with a way to make one-click 360° panoramas [via Random Walks] with cunning optics rather than the bulky (but apparently effective) approach of 0-360 and 360One VR.

posted at 9:55 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

15 minutes

Well, it's been a roller-coaster ride at the Minkery the last two days. My comments on Looking Glass got reported in the Seattle PI Microsoft page on Monday and the hit rate on webmink went up to 2 per second - 8650 visitors yielding 13,453 hits. Then on Tuesday the link hit Slashdot, GMSV, Scoble (who didn't think I'd link back), JavaLobby, Dave Winer, Barrapunto (in Spanish) and several others - 14,361 visitors yielding 15,688 hits. It's all subsiding now so I guess that's my 15 minutes of fame over and done with and I can get back to normal life :-) And for those who are curious, advertising on that lot earned less than a meal in the Sun canteen.

Meanwhile, I agree with Scoble and Winer - if you can't point to stuff your competitors do when you think it's cool your 'authentic voice' is either muffled or mistaken.

posted at 9:23 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Uprising!

Seems the oppressed masses are casting off their yokes of oppression. First China, now the UK government and health service - where next?

Why will we see more of this? Well, First Monday has a paper this month concerning Licence fees and GDP per capita [via Boing Boing] which shows that while it takes around a week to earn the money to buy a copy of Windows XP in the west, in China it takes more than 7 months (the paper has a comprehensive table). The only way to respond to this has to be to bring the costs of computing in-house, and that's what China has done.

I am sure we'll see more and more of this - Vietnam (16 months to buy a copy of XP) has already taken the decision to switch to open source, forced there paradoxically by a US trade delegate that made them sign up to enforce intellectual property treaties, and there must be many more dominos like this lined up in Asia. It's not a matter of anti-anyone religion; it's a straight matter of being forced there by the facts, just look at the figures.

posted at 5:47 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Web Services In Action - The RIAA-Free Top 100

I can see that liking music and hating the RIAA is going to involve either sacrifice or compromise. The RIAA Radar site has a list of the top 100 Amazon sellers from non-RIAA members and I found it pretty bleak - of the top 10 only Natalie Merchant is even a possibility and getting Christmas Together by John Denver and the Muppets seems excessive application of principle. Still, the thing is a fascinating example of how to use Amazon's web services interface and will make interesting occasional reading.

posted at 11:57 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |