How I'm Starting To Feel About Facebook
Holidays are Good
I'm back from my hols. We stayed in a lovely place:
And walked to some lovely places:
And now I'm back in London, with my batteries recharged and ready to go.
Looks like Autumn
I think the days of driving home in the daylight are done for this year.
Changing Season
Still in the Torrent
A Gentleman's Duel
[via James]
Why Your Coffee Sucks - And How To Make It Better
Your coffee sucks, apparently, and indeed, much of the coffee we consume does suck.
Some years ago, while I was working on a now-defunct magazine for the hotel and restaurant industry (called, prosaically, Hotel & Restaurant) I was treated to a presentation on how to prepare good coffee from a coffee distributor.
That meeting changed my attitude to coffee, which I'd only just started drinking in granule form. I quickly switched to "real" ground coffee, drunk quickly after grinding, and treated as a perishable foodstuff.
Now I have a hankering for more, better, newer coffee. There's some great starting points in the comments of that post.
Blast from the Past in my RSS
I was rather surprised to see the above picture on the Adam Smith Institute blog… It's my old school, Dollar Academy. The fact that the kid on the left looks much like I did back then doesn't help.
Ironically, the post is about the status of English private schools. And Dollar is very much in Scotland.
Ironically, the post is about the status of English private schools. And Dollar is very much in Scotland.
Ladies Love Leather (Apparently)
Now, I love a woman in a leather dress as much as the next straight man. So, the news that the above Marks & Spencer dress is flying off the shelves (it's out of stock only a week after it was launched) should be enough to put a smile on my face for weeks, or at least, for the rest of the autumn season.
The Daily Mail is busy singing its praises, and it was noticed by some bloggers weeks ago (and some commenters).
And yet...
Well, for one thing, I really do fail to understand the "hit dress" idea. Every woman I know has a quiet horror of turning up at a "do" in the same dress as another woman. Surely the very notion of "hit dress" should be a big, flashing neon sign warning women away?
And, is it me, or does that dress looks a bit, well, cheap? Somehow, both the M&S image on the left, and the Daily Mail one on the right make a genuine leather dress look like pleather. And that can't be good.
Fleeing to the Country
This, or something very much like it, is my dream for the near future:
We are moving out of our two-bedroom flat and into a proper house with an upstairs, a garden and sheds. More than that, we are leaping from the edgy Islington/Holloway borders (within shouting distance of the Arsenal stadium and the prison) to a Surrey village with a lively parish council. I'm excited, but I'm also terrified we're making a huge mistake.
Blogathon: the Movie
Today was the RBI Charity Blogathon. Here's a quick bit of movie I grabbed on my phone towards the end of the day:
Horror of My Youth
A while ago, I replaced my few remaining tapes with iTunes downloads to tidy up my music collection a little.
Maybe I shoudl have listened to the tapes before I did so, because I ended up paying for this:
And it's rubbish.
What was I thinking when I was a kid?
Steel and Eye
Reading Break
The UK's First Log Built House?
Another one from the "press releases for my old job, but I'm still interested" file:
Look at that - lovely log cabin under construction. Canada? The US? Switzerland, maybe?
Uh, no. It's Norfolk.
Mike Balls of the Log House Company is building log houses in the UK, and this one is going up for a Norfolk family. The timber's locally sourced and it is, they claim, the UK's first log-built house.
I've not idea if you could get a mortgage on it, or what it would be like to live in, but my, it looks lovely, doesn't it?
The Ideal Christmas Gift
I've heard a lot about this video, but only just got around to watching it:
It was worth the wait…
links for 2007-09-14
- A Wordpress vrs Blogger fight like you've never seen it before…
Saying Goodbye to a Ragged Era
Tonight saw the end of an era. Despite the damage I've done to my back, I dragged myself along to the Shaftesbury Christian Centre in Deptford, for the last ever church management meeting there.
The church isn't closing, mind, it's merging with another local chuch, The Bear, but tonight's meeting marked the beginning of the end for a particular thread in its history. You see, unlike most churches, it wasn't founded for worship in the conventional sense. No, it was founded in 1844 as a mission - a Ragged School to educate, feed and clothe the poor of Deptford, in a era long before there was state support of any kind for them.
Over 162 years ago, eight men came together to establish the work on the site. Tonight, seven men and women formally wound up the management of it and passed it onto a different body.
While it's sad to see the church in its current form pass away, perhaps the time is right. The church had long passed its original purpose with the advent of state schools and social security and, in many ways, the Bear has taken on many of the social outreach roles the Shaftesbury used to fulfil.
There's only three more services planned for the current building on Frankham street, before the merger is complete and the site is redeveloped sometime next year.
Vox Hunt: Music - Ticket Stub
Show us a ticket stub from a great concert you saw.
Hah! Bet you're jealous now! How many people can say that they have seen Spinal Tap live?
Vox Hunt: Music - I Last Listened To...
Show us the last album you listened to.
According to iTunes, it was this:
I'm faintly disappointed it wasn't something more amusing or embarrassing.
links for 2007-09-12
- Some thoughts on what advertising needs to do to survive.
Lunch and papers in Halesworth
Everyone's a critic...
Serious Business Journalism (Again)
Nothing but serious business blogs for us, oh yes.
Work in Progress: Types of Blog Post
I'm in the process of working up some documentation for a blog-related event we're having here at RBI later this month. The documents are going to end up as something of a beginner's guide to blogging for trade journalists, and will be going up onto the internal wiki tomorrow, in the hope that some of my colleagues will help develop them further.
But, in the meantime, I've thrown the first of them - Types of Blog Posts - up after the cut for you folks to look at, think about and roundly abuse, if you see fit.
Obviously, I'll be pathetically grateful for any comments or advice…