In the Center of NGC 6559

" Explanation: Bright gas and dark dust permeate the space between stars in the center of a nebula known as NGC 6559. The gas, primarily hydrogen, is responsible for the diffuse red glow of the emission nebula. As energetic light from neighboring stars ionizes interstellar hydrogen, protons and electrons recombine to emit light of very specific colors, including the red hue observed. Small dust particles reflect blue starlight efficiently and so creates the blue reflection nebulosity seen near two of the bright stars. Dust also absorbs visible light, causing the dark clouds and filaments visible. NGC 6559 lies about 5000 light-years away toward the constellation of Sagittarius."

Imagine if we lived much closer to this, and we saw this view when we looked up at night (assuming there was no light pollution). I'd be quite sure, that either we'd be completely nuts about gods, or we'd be flying about in space ships by now.

Simple uploading of videos with Radio

I need a more contemporaneous method of blogging. A good camera, with a good keyboard and inbuilt connection to my mobile internet network. Sure, then I'd need a Photoshop-like red eye fixer, crop, adjust balance and so on, spell checker, search past entries... Lot's of nick nack functions.

But a nice camera, good keyboard, Radio Userland, Photoshop, and a browser with a decent screen, and I'd ditch my PC.

I need something that I can snatch 10 minutes with a pint of best, to blog up some pix of the kids as they climb slides, and balance on obstacle courses. Current mobile phones with cameras, are max'd at 1 megapixels. Don't know yet, about the quality of video, but, surely that would be a shortcut or a do-a-way-with for a qwerty keyboard? Thus, I could video comments rather than write them up, add in a txt msg/description 4 the video, and open a window (in Radio on the home PC) containing an outline of all such txt msgs at home for me to touch up later.

Sounds about right? Anybody think of another way to blog kids when one's out and about?

Cinema, school fair, pub food

Some drawings and an old picture

Little in Japan tonight

"Once more, NTT DoCoMo (we’re beginning to think they should be called DroolSoMo) will be releasing a phone to the Japanese market which makes us half consider dropping our American citizenship—this one holds the record as being the smallest Internet-enabled cell phone in the world (probably for like, 15 minutes). The Premini is 9cm by 4cm by 2cm, which is almost exactly like talking into a short stack of credit cards. And for once a manufacturer actually took into account the size of the keys in proportion to the human finger, and addressed the ergonomics issue with a tactile feedback model they call Slopekey. And what’s more, they must have read our earlier post, and gave us all a print-your-own paper model of the thing! Could it get any better?"
[Via JapanToday]

Stylesheets in RSS?

Extending Radio's aggregator posting method

AOL to Buy Advertising.com, an Online Direct Marketer

Aggressive marketing? That's a new term to me. "Spam is here to stay. If you look under the hood, everyone is doing deals that are related to spammers."

I hope the cluetrainers will one day put a bullet in these heads. Think of the wasted money that we, as consumers, pay. Are we really so gullible? Do we really buy pills to increase our willies?

"50% of my advertising works, I just don't know which 50%." I think it's much lower than 50% these days.

Metafilter: South Korean government bans Kim Sun-Il execution video.

" South Korean government bans Kim Sun-Il execution video. Activates government emergency internet monitoring system. Orders web sites and ISPs to comply. "Web sites that fail to follow through the instructions will be subject to shut-down or police investigation".
Several South Korean web sites have already been shut down, while other sites, such as Yahoo! Korea, are assisting the government by blocking and censoring their user's email. Meanwhile, a general strike, massive antiwar protests, and a refusal by airline unions may prevent the deployment and supply of 3,000 South Korean soldiers to Iraq, as well as the rule of the current South Korean government.
Numerous U.S. websites are being blocked, and one of the sites, Ogrish.com, is under attack from hackers for carrying the execution video. (warning: tragic and traumatic. Windows Media.)"

There's some awful videos at Ogrish. Saddam hench men cutting tongues out, fingers off. Decapitations. I wish I hadn't gone there. I really wish I wasn't such a sicko rubber necker. Those videos are going to have flashback qualities for days to come. I really could do without that.

Bit torrent downloading

Been hanging around suprnova.org yesterday, downloading a gig anf a half of music in the background. All of my other torrent sites have gone since I was last there, probably a month or two. So, how come the largest suprnova is still alive. Surely, it's under a tonne of pressure?

Remember to use some protection while you're out there. Otherwise, you'll have Sony or RIAA looking down your ports.

BBC to launch Arabic channel

The BBC is in talks about launching a 24-hour news channel broadcasting in Arabic across the UK, Europe and the Arab world.

Funded by the UK Gov.

The BBC ran an Arabic channel in the mid-1990s, which was funded by Orbit Communications, an arm of the Saudi Arabian royal family.
It broadcast for eight hours a day between June 1994 and April 1996, and was closed down when Orbit withdrew its support over editorial disagreements.
Many of the channel's journalists were employed by al-Jazeera when it launched soon afterwards.

Educate, educate, educate! It doesn't matter if there's to be a problem with credibility or bias. Just better to fill the vacuum with something!

Saudi exodus grows

"Last week's murder of a US engineer turns the trickle of westerners quitting the kingdom into a flood."

Wouldn't you? I certainly would be on the first plane. If you've ever read about the very strange world that is Saudi, you'd know the country's about to fall apart.

Shots of cruise ship orgy shock Cyprus

"Travel: Undercover police operation exposes a group of up to 100 tourists, including Britons, conducting a mass orgy aboard a cruise ship off the island."

Joel on Software: How Microsoft Lost the API War

BBC: New generation embraces mobiles

"There are lessons here for manufacturers concentrating on making phones as smart and function-filled as possible.
These include increasing the amount of space for storing texts, giving more indication of where calls are coming from and a better way of ordering all the information people are increasingly storing on phones."

Photohop goes RDF with IPTC

eBay item 6302772552 (Ends 23-Jun-04 20:00:00 BST) - Retro BLUETOOTH Phone Handset (Unique) work with mobile

How to save Esme's ephemera and memories

The scrapbooking phenomenon: blogging + permanence?.

My daughter spends much of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her hobby is scrapbooking, a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. <snip> There must be a combination of the electronic and the real in there somewhere. I'd certainly like to find it. My daughter's only 5 and ¾ so much of her 'journals' consist of scraps of paper, glued to toilet rolls, with glitter placed inside shoeboxes. At least this is this week's project.

Weblogs, Ho! Mostly dead or unused

"List of sites hosted on this server"

I've been nosing around this site of 3,000+ Manila weblogs. Seems there's been much fuss about nothing. To me 90% are long dead. Many never went past the "It Worked" page — the first page that's seen when the site is created. Many more never went further than the year 2000. Only 4 or so of the 50 or so that I looked at were still alive, and out of them 3 were annoncements that the owners or community had moved to blogspot or liveJournal due mainly to the outage.

Dave Winer says that 40 or so had posted their URL to reclaim their site. So, I wonder how many are actually wanting to pay? Somewhere between 300 - 30 will be viable, of which 10% will want to pay = 30 - 3 Of which 10% would move their Manila site. So, tops, I reckon, 3 - 0.3 will move hosters.

There's four other hosters: ideaForest.net, editThisPage, Weblogger, and me.

Not, a big businesses. Hence, a lot of fuss about nothing.

weblogs.com and 'outing' the crazies

As a server owner, who has deleted abandoned blogs, who sometimes sits up all night fixing bugs, who knows the 24/7/365 worries of maintaining a server, I sympathise with Dave Winer's need to not have the stress. As a user of his tools, and sometimes early adopter of his inventions I admire him. I'm not a minion, however, I have picked fights over some blind alleys he's lead me up, while I really wanted to stop and fix bugs.

As a community owner (I know I don't own people, but I own the servers) I understand the pressures that can be put on one from jerks, who have no right to stick their oar in, moreover, to threaten or abuse. And it is true, I did once receive a death threat by email — a casual, overstated angry comment probably, but it had a major effect on me.

But, what I saw in those comments on Dave's site requesting the URLs of sites that wanted to be 'saved' (these have now disappeared) was shocking, mindless, vicious abuse of Dave. It reminded me of the children in IRC rooms who send screaming messages that block out everybody else. It was appalling. Frightening, that someone, who I've watched for so long could attract such vitriol.

I wrote about it. I was worried that I too could be put under such stress. When you do things for free, people get real angry with you. Raise your head up too high, and the tall poppy choppers come for you (but also on the internet they come for your children, with axes and knives). The internet it seemed could attract madness like a lightening pole, and that's what I want to stop, I believe all good people would want to stop.

I've seen it before in newsgoups in Usenet. A person I knew, though he put up a brave fight, and though, yes, he was a trolling nerd, called in the police and moved his real address, such was the threats and anger.

So, I volunteered to chip in, something has to be done about this I thought. This sort of abuse cannot be ignored. Good people have to stand up and say they are disgusted, appalled. Dave Winer named three names, only one of which I could find easily at the time.

After reading her posts, I figured that Sessum was a she, and that was waaaay important to her arguments. After reading her self description I saw that she was indeed in therapy. "Well like most of the US," I thought. Her blog was thought out, considered, and though it's biased from a female perspective, even though weblogs.com's outage or shut down was nothing to do with sexism, there seems nothing violent. Lots of rage, or more correctly, anger directed at Dave. Was she a vitriolic poster in those comments?

But Sessum pointed to others, I guess for back up: fem2fem, as Dave: mano2mano. Still, I look for those crazies from the comments on Dave's site. Yet, all I find is well written feminist arguments about power relationships, which are easy to write, once you know the rules. Hell, I use the same, but from a working class down trodden male like me shaking his fist at the class system of England, same thing, different characters. Rehearse it often enough, it comes across as a seemingly powerful division. When you're a toff in private scoool you can be troubled by it; as when you're a man, hassled by oppressed 'hysterical women.' Obviously, you see it as their problem.

All this sexism role playing , in my opinion is off topic. It's the anonymous abusers in those comments on Dave's site I want to name, shame and ridicule. If anyone of these angry yet considered public bloggers would stand up and say, yes it was I, or it was this person, or those commentors were very, very wrong, then perhaps, I, and the rest of the blogosphere could move on, noting who condemns this behaviour and those that condone it.

Esme's tooth is out

You pays your money, you takes your choice

EditHere.Com offers Manila hosting, with a 180-day free trial, $35 per year after that.

After seeing this last night, I thought long and hard, about my pricing levels, as they are over double Thomas's. Nah, my price is reasonable and fair. My service and suport levels are extremely high. My additional features are exceptionally wicked. My up coming features are drop dead gorgeous. My experience is long and deep in Radio as well as Manila. It is, then, top line. And for that you get what you pay for. I will however, do a special offer of 10% discount, and offer 30 days free trial to ex weblogs.com sites. I'll write more about this later.

Police Called in as Bb Descends into Violence

Watching the highlights of Big Brother last night, what, crappy, but engaging TeeVee!

Awwwww, Man! That Marco would get up anybody's nose. And to have done a nur-nur-nu-nur-nur, while dancing like that, I too, would have gone nuts. That was provocative, just like Jason said. But he could have been better humoured. Or, kept out of the way. Big Brother, because of poor and dull viewer figures last year, have really put in an odd and incendiary crew of people this year.

Thankfully, it all seems to have calmed down now. I hope they bring Emma back. I like her grittiness.

Blair says Saddam 'let' al-Qaida operate in Iraq

No 10 said it was not claiming a direct link but a spokeswoman said: "The prime minister has always said Saddam created a permissive environment for terrorism and we know that the people affiliated to al-Qaida operated in Iraq during the regime.

And what now? Though there is no 'permission' to operate in Iraq, they certainly are, and very angrily too. For al-Qaida is it more or less powerful in Iraq after the invasion? Obviously the situation is much, much worse. Breeding more internal 'insurgents' and more who are looking to hit the head of the beast (US and UK).

Lockergnome: Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer

IE is too old, too insecure, too slow, too behind in standards, too inextensible. While Firefox, which I've been running now for over a year in one form or another, is wicked, man. Fast, powerful, a pleasure to use. If you're not running Firefox, and still in IE land, likely your IT manager at work says that's the way it is (so sorry ;-) or your a newbie to the net.

On that note, Thunderbird the email reader is pretty nice too. Though missing text search through a folder of messages.
[Update:] 02/07/04 Doh, Thunderbird has the BEST text searching, really fast, very configurable. Just not where I expected to see it: Tools menu ==> Search messages. Brilliant!

In comments about weblogs.com

In the comments in Dave Winer's post re: weblogs.com he says:

"Groundrules: Personal comments, ad hominems, will be deleted. And no negotiating or whining."

Pity he hasn't deleted a lot of the abusive messages posted there. Because I'm having second thoughts about my offer:

1. there's many, many more than thought, perhaps with high traffic, maybe loads of pictures or other server loads
2. whilst some are thankful, others are downright abusive
3. why the hell should I do something for free, when most of these people could afford to pay?

Of course, not all will come here. It's probable that the abuse is just one twisted soul. But, are these all freeloaders? Will I be expected to support them and host them in perpetuity? What would happen if I make a business decision, "the free ain't paying, the payers are taking too much of their burden, please download your site and move else where?" Would I be subject to the same abuse and outcry?

No, sorry, if you come here you'll need to pay our standard rate for Manila hosting and our relationship should be one of business, not charity:

£49.50 ($90.56) a year in one lump sum.

Or, £4.13 ($7.56) a month for 12 months.

You'll get the service then, that you'd expect and I wouldn't feel ripped off.

You should also buy a domain name off a reputable supplier like register.com, that's where I buy mine. You can then take charge of where that name points to, and even wildcard it so you can have more sites here like www.mysite.com, fred.mysite.com, apples.mysite.com and so on.

If you're serious about your weblogs.com site, then you should be serious about hosting it. A domain name of your own is vital!

Harvard man loses 3,000 weblogs | The Register

Dave Winer popularized Netscape's RDF syndication format, which has since splintered into nine incompatible formats.

This is just troll bait.

I'm unsubscribing to the register. The news there has gone tabloid.  Obliviously they're after traffic for ads. Wankers.

weblogs.com

A long time ago, a weblog at http://heroes.editThisPage.com was thrown off--for too much traffic. Well, it was doing 30,000 to 60,000 hits a day! My mate ran the site and still to this day moans about being thrown off. I roll my eyes and tell him it was free! For about two years he had free hosting! Sheesh!

Dave Winer was helpful, downright damned helpful. We had plenty of warning, he even put a redirect in, that we never asked for.

Pretty quickly the site was up and serving. It was a natural home for him since I was already hosting the blogs that were a spin off from this site. Soon they'll be four years old.

So, I hereby offer the same for orphaned weblogs.com sites. I just hope that they too don't clock up 6,000 page builds an hour at peak times.

My own service manila site may give you a clue as to the service levels, and the extra features that are available, like thumbnails, spawning of further blogs under your domain name, your own inbuilt aggregator, enhanced surveys and a bunch of other bits and macros that aren't available anywhere else.

Adverts in feeds

Advertising in feeds? Letmesee, who does that already?

Oh yes, real people talking to other real people. Like Scoble and Microsoft, Winer and RSS and numerous others who are their own brand.

If some real person who physically made chocolate bars built a weblog, and it was interesting enough, I'd subscribe. So long as it wasn't ALL about chocolate, I'd need to see their soul too.

Nike's blog is same old same old. No character nor personality — fake.

If NYTimes wanted adverts in feeds, get the manager of the ad sales dept to blog about: ads, selling space, wrong copy, sunny days...

If Nokia wanted to advertise in feeds, get the clam shell designer to blog about: other clam shells, dropping phones down toilets, tricks and tips, trout fishing, being told "if you don't stop smoking you'll die..."

Advertising is necessary for companies to tell prospects they exist. But, with TV ads, junk snail mail, spam, enclosures in free ad packed newspapers it's just too much. Sure, repeat seven times and I'll trust you, but it's so hard to get under my nose seven times without pissing me off. At the crunch moment in the action thriller... adverts! I scoop up pizza and beers leaflets from my letters. Tune filters in my email app, turn page after page, looking for local news in the free press. Ads, piss me royally. They phone me just when I sat down with a nice cup of tea. They get in my way, begging for purchases. Too many, too often, too soulless. Tax them, delete them, cut them down, stop them.

Word of mouth has always been a better, more sure fire way of getting me to buy. Why? Because I ask for information. I have a problem, the geezer down the pub has a solution. I just wish he made the mobile phone too.

You want my attention? Give me some soul, some reality, some honesty.

I work, therefore I am

In a telling metaphor, the former head of brand communications at Orange described her attitude to the brand as a "love affair."

Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.

Another trip to Church Stretton on a Sunday

Thomas and Percy with tiger