london – Stilgherrian

15 June 201106 July 2022

Appearing on LBC 97.3 London tomorrow

In what will be my first “proper” radio gig for ages, I’m joining UK conservative political commentator Iain Dale for the last hour of his evening program tomorrow on LBC 97.3, London’s Biggest Conversation.

That’s Wednesday 9pm London time, or 6am Thursday Sydney time.

17 May 200918 May 2009

Links for 09 May 2009 through 17 May 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 09 May 2009 through 17 May 2009, gathered intermittently and jumbled together at random:

Frame grabbing: The art of drawing great photography from video | Nieman Journalism Lab: As the boundary between video and still camera blurs, photojournalists and other people we’d normally consider “photographers” are using video stills in mainstream media.
How to kill five hours in Parliament House | Crikey Team: The wond’rously snarky Ruth Brown reports on a day in Australia’s Palace of Democracy. Great fun.
Internet Meme Database | Know Your Meme: I haven’t explored it properly, but it does seem someone has decided to catalog all the stupid “memes” that proliferate online. Also, I hate this degradation of Richard Dawkin’s concept of memetics to mean “a joke we pass on”. Fuckwits.
Computing in Melbourne: A Historical Tour: The next one’s on Sunday 31 May 2009, running 9.30am to 5pm, with plenty of tram travel and cafÃ©-snacking along the way.
Google outage lesson: Don’t get stuck in a cloud | Macworld: When I see stories like this, warning of the peril of relying on an external party for your IT needs, I often react by asking whether such an outage would be more or less likely on your own systems, given your own current contingency plans. But this piece also points out the interdependency of so many systems.
Critical Mass, The Road, and a new wave of graphic nuke porn | Slate Magazine: Apparently our thrillers are no longer looking at the “before” and “after” of nuclear war, but more directly at what happens when the bomb drops.
EWN – The Early Warning Network: The Australian Early Warning Network provides free emergency alerts covering everything from tsunamis through to severe weather, via SMS, pagers, phone (text to voice), web, email and their Desktop ALERTâ„¢. (I’m not sure how legit it is to trademark something as obvious as “Desktop ALERT” though.)
Older Australians less likely to participate in the digital economy | ACMA: Nearly three out of four Australians (73%) have a home Internet connection and 87% of the population have used the Internet. In contrast, only 48% of people aged 65 and over have the Internet at home and 44% have never used the internet
Anal Bleachingâ€” NOT just for women | best of craigslist: When I posted this to Twitter, a disturbingly large number of people didn’t seem to realise that it was satire.
1952: London fog clears after days of chaos | BBC ON THIS DAY: Well, the “on this day” bit is for 9 December. Nevertheless, this has the echo of Kevin Rudd’s further delays in actually starting Australia’s response to global warming. In 1952, London's "Great Fog" killed 4000 people. Drastic action was called for. The Clean Air Act was rushed through… in 1956.
25 things about twitter that are pissing me off | The Bloggess: I couldn’t agree with her more. Also, she writes the best blog on the planet.
China's Commercialization of Censorship | Far Eastern Economic Review: China’s government doesn’t have to do all the hard work of censorship itself, it just bullies commercial operators into doing it for them.

27 April 2009

Links for 25 April 2009 through 27 April 2009

Here are the web links I’ve found for 25 April 2009 through 27 April 2009, posted with postingness.

Noteboek | Vimeo: Evelien Lohbeck’s short film creates a notebook computer out of a paper notebook.
Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit (8-Bit Remix)” | DoseNation: Somehow, this hugely-successful rock song still sounds good played on cheesey 8-bit synthesisers.
Towards a Taxonomy of blogs | Creative Economy Online: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons reckons that before we descend into the loggers versus journalists debate then we should define our terms. She proposes a classification of blog types.
Rooftop STUB | Flickr: Will Hughes’ stills photography of Saturday’s party.
What is wrong with Strawberry Amyl Nitrate? | Vimeo: Will Hughes took this video at Saturday’s rooftop party in Surry Hills. It contains rather too much of me, and certainly too much of my tongue.
slow down london: Running from 24 April through to 4 May, this festival about “living life in real time” is striking a chord.
Is Social Media Too Fast? | Convince & Convert: Jason Baer kicks off a discussion about the incredible pace of social media. “This of course requires me to jump from task to message to task to message like a Russian dancing bear on crack,” he says. Perhaps it’s time to choose to slow down? I’ll definitely have more to say about this anon.
“One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is A Girl Who Is Not Probably Groomed On All Parts Of Her Body” – Arthur Kade | Jezebel: There is just so much wrong with this man’s worldview that I don’t know where to begin.
a warning from the newspaper biz | overland literary journal: Can the book industry learn from what’s happening to newspapers? Amongst the great questions asked is: “Will an author’s share of revenue on e-books be a traditional fixed percentage, or a variable, we’re-not-going-to-tell-you-what-we-received-from-your-work-but-here’s-a-quarter-go-buy-yourself-something-nice percentage of advertising revenue that Google might deign to dole out (as it does with ad revenue to site/blog owners)?”

30 January 2009

Links for 29 January 2009 through 30 January 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 29 January 2009 through 30 January 2009, gathered by a poisonous frog:

Study challenges AGs on predator danger | CNET News: A new study from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU) challenges recent assertions by several state attorneys general that young people are at significant risk from online predators on social-networking sites.
Co-generation Cyber-Cafe Internet coffee appliance | Link: The Link Institute today announced a breakthrough in energy saving to combat global warming: the “Cyber-Cafe”. This unit provides web services for a home or small business and uses the waste heat to keep coffee warm.
What is so costly to Telstra about 38GB? | Core Economics: Joshua Gans asks the age-old question: if the first 60GB of a broadband plan costs $130, why does an additional 38GB cost $6000?
ACMA rolls out cybersafety professional development program for educators | ACMA: ACMA’s Cybersafety Outreach — Professional Development for Educators is the national cyber-safety program designed for primary and secondary level educators. It's part of a wider education initiative which will, I contend, be money better spent than on Internet filters.
Going private | Inside Story: The evidence suggests that publicly-listed media companies are digging their own graves. Does this mean a return to the age of moguls, asks Jonathan Este.
Australia’s Holy Man likes a Good War | sydwalker.info: Syd Walker profiles Jim Wallace, head of the Australian Christian Lobby, former head of Australia’s elite SAS Regiment and now stormtrooper in the fight for Internet censorship.
More of London from above, at night | The Big Picture: Boston.com’s The Big Picture is almost always beyond excellent. This set of aerial images of London at night is stunning. Photographer: Jason Hawkes.
The next P-I might be electronic, and on a plastic sheet | Crosscut: The Hearst empire has been experimenting with epaper versions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
http://walterhiggins.net/projects/follower_mosaic.pl: A straightforward tool to create a mosaic of your Twitter followers’ avatar images. Produces HTML for pasting into a blog post or whatever.
Australian Journalists on Twitter | Laurel Papworth – Social Network Strategy: Ms @SilkCharm has been compiling a list as indicated, with a very wide interpretation of “journalist”. Useful.
TinEye Reverse Image Search: “TinEye a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.”
The Phenomenon of Retweeting: A Deep Analysis | Pistachio: A numerical analysis of how people retweet — that is, pass on others’ tweets — on Twitter.

01 February 200811 February 2008

A train ride to London

John Naughton’s diary Memex 1.1 is one of my must-read blogs. While I usually point to his essays, today I find his delightful, personal post about an early-morning train journey into London. A taste: “Park car and wait for idiotic meter to dispense ticket while making loud buzzing noises after swallowing coins to the value of the Gross National Product of Ecuador. Join throng of furtive, hurrying figures, coat-collars turned up against the biting East Anglian wind. I have entered, albeit temporarily, the world of The Commuter.”

21 June 200626 August 2020

Winter Solstice Name Day 25

Photograph of Stilgherrian, taken March 1981 “Oh, no mate, I wasn’t Stilgherrian until after that was taken. For my student card, so that’d be… March, maybe February. Stilgherrian wasn’t until Winter Solstice…”

25 years ago today!

Daggy photo, eh? Am I scared or was I trying for cool and moody, somehow? Scared, I reckon. I was too nerdy to even know how to look moody, let alone actually achieve a significant level of floppy-haired angst. Now Stephen… now he pulls that off so well. But then he lives in Melbourne, it’s “of the place”.

Sydney doesn’t have the sandstone Victorian for a fully grey, Londonesque, Londonangstridden pout, 30% eye shadow and 70% the precisely-edited slow-motion curl of a designer black trench coat. Not with any genuine sense of ennui, anyway.

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