My Twitter timeline:
The Myth of Promoted Tweets
Published 14th February 2012
Three posts about UKTV being crap in a row, there
Published 26th October 2011
I really don’t want to turn this into a BITCH-O-BLOG. But sometimes it’s tricky, when UKTV are present in the same universe as you.
Have a look this post on Ganymede & Titan – a Red Dwarf fansite I co-run. (One of our more positive reviews: “A website run by a group of friends that don’t just make ‘fan’ a dirty word, they soil it like a pair of decade old underpants.”) To cut a short story shorter, UKTV have been pointing people towards our site thinking we’re Grant Naylor Productions – something that is “fairly obvious” we are not.
Letter Sweep
Published 1st May 2011
Oooh, this is a fun idea from Tim Bray – type each first letter of the alphabet into your URL bar, and see what the browser’s guess is for where you want to visit. Let’s see what well-rounded portrait this gives of me, shall we?
Raking Over Old Tweets From 2008 From Someone Who Doesn’t Even Exist Now
Published 12th March 2010
Last year, a Ruby programmer called why the lucky stiff disappeared. Not being part of the Ruby community, the whole story still fascinated me; see the posts Eulogy to _why and The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff for two opposing views on the subject.
The other day, I decided to see whether there had been any sign of him. Short answer: no. Long answer: no, there hasn’t. But in my travels, I noticed this tweet from him, which a lot of people seem to like:
“when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.”
It’s such a deliciously seductive idea. And yet it’s so fundamentally wrong.
More Than Meets the Eye
Published 26th February 2010
I never watched Transformers as a kid. As a now-28-year-old male geek, this is tantamount to sacrilege, but it’s true. I’d avidly watch Wacaday, and then lose interest in Transformers shortly after the opening theme tune. The only eight year old boy in the world who found giant robots and battles boring. And as for the toys, I was too busy playing offices to notice.
Amplify: Brand “Thinking”
Published 15th January 2010
As some of you may know, I used to write for a site called Noise to Signal. It covered everything, really – telly, films, gaming, you name it – hopefully with at least a vague modicum of intelligence.
Yesterday, I received the following little email. Because I’m nice, the name is redacted – but company is very much not.
Moderation For ‘Em
Published 9th January 2010
Of all the things that I like to pretend I’m knowledgeable about, there is at least one thing I can claim I have direct experience of – forum moderation. I’ve been dealing with occasionally hair-rasing moderation on NOTBBC since 2003, and moderating Ganymede & Titan’s forum since 2007. (There’s also been a fair amount of comment moderation, but that can be a slightly different art, depending on the site – when comments are attached to an article, I think it’s reasonable to have a slightly firmer hand.)
What is the vilest piece of emotional blackmail on the Internet?
Published 4th January 2010
I have no idea, but this must come close.
Recently I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. Not because of worries over privacy – although maybe I should be more worried about that – but due to the weird joint problem of using it too much, and not enough. Too much, as in spending every waking hour when I should be working playing Scrabble… and not enough, in that I did precisely nothing else with it.
So, I decide to deactivate my account. (You should, of course, be able to directly delete it without waiting, but that’s a rant for another day – and I probably would have chosen a simple deactivation this time round anyway.) And what greets me?