Things I’ve Seen

So, Tim Berners Lee now has a blog

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.
Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline.
… Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space.

So, the other evening I was looking up an article that I remembered reading in bloglines. I initially thought it was on OddThinking, but when I couldn’t find it, I thought maybe it was written by girtby.net. Fortunately, there was a link on OddThinking’s blogroll to girtby, so I followed it.

I’m sure that it was just a typo by OddThinking, but instead of girtby.net I ended up at girtyby.net. If you go to girtyby.net now you’ll find a relatively innocuous search page - but last week it contained some very unworksafe images… which are presumably now cached on my laptop

I mentioned LibriVox audio books a while back, but only in passing. Hugh appears to have hit something of a sweet spot in terms of interest; they’ve been boing-boing’ed twice now, and the blog is running at around 300 hits per day. 9 books have been completed by the volunteers; you will find my not-so-dulcet tones on a couple of them.

Reading and then editing a chapter or two can take a little bit of time, but it’s a lot of fun, and with a large group of volunteers the total output is pretty impressive. So why not head over and have a listen - or better still, do some recording…

Girtby.net appears not to appreciate being accused of nerdiness:

Recently I have heard some complaints from various quarters that girtby.net is too nerdy and incomprehensible to those that actually have a life, or at least interests beyond cataloging UI glitches or some other nonsense.
… I just find it too difficult to write when I’m frustrated and angry, and I’m not exactly Lord Byron at the best of times.

But he has a go, anyway…

What are the rules that allow anyone to commit terrible acts of abuse and torture? Weren’t we supposed to not do that? Wasn’t that one of our rules? What about the rule against invading another country based on a threat that was totally and unforgivably fabricated? Didn’t we used to criticise others for rounding up hundreds into make-it-up-as-you-go show trials? Didn’t we also used to like actually catching and punishing the real criminals? What happened to the rules that stop your country’s leaders from killing thousands of your fellow citizens through corruption, nepotism, negligence or incompetance? Lets not even count the bodies of the foreigners, whom we say we want to protect, but in reality we couldn’t care less about. It’s hard to know even where to start with this stuff. Then there’s out-and-out assault on science, civil liberties, the environment, and lots of other fundamental shit. Is there anything the Bush administration have done that even looks like it might be a good thing in the long term for more than a select bunch of cronies? Who threw the rule book out the window and allowed these fuckers to get away with all this? The people who voted for Bush, didn’t all this madness and death mean anything to them?

More like this, please.

Library Thing is a very cool idea (and very well done). You’ve seen social bookmarking, right? This is social library indexing. You enter the books you own (or, I suppose, like) and it looks them up for you in the Library of Congress (and Amazon). You tag them, then you can start playing around with what other people have entered. Who has the same book? What other books do they have? What other books have people tagged in the same way…

I’ve just entered a single book into our library to get started, but I think I might have a few happy evenings ahead of me playing with this.

This is cool - an open source effort to produce audiobooks of public domain books from the Gutenberg project.

The perfect antidote for motivational corporate emails…

Some amazing photos of Harbin Ice and Snow World 2005.

Just seen at the bottom of Things I’ve Seen:

In the comments, brainsnorkel suggests another blog meme. I like this one…

Total number of books owned:

A quick count suggests that in our house we have between 900 and 1000 books. Of those 100 or so are Jeyanth’s books, and the rest are ‘grown up’.

Last book bought:

“Difficult Gospel” by Mike Higton. I read a draft of this book, and even score a mention in the acknowledgments as someone who “tried to make me write less like a constipated academic, and more like someone who had met ordinary English”. Difficult Gospel is a very approachable introduction to the theology of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Mike opens it with a superb description of William’s ‘one simple question’:

what difference would it have made if I let myself believe that … I was held in a wholly loving gaze? … And what difference would it have made if I had seen each face around me … as individually held in the same overwhelming, loving gaze?

Last book read:

Last book read for the first time: “Seven types of Ambiguity”, by Elliot Perlman. I don’t know if this book is well known outside Australia, but it should be; it’s brilliantly constructed around seven different perspectives moving through the same sequence of events, and manages to be tragedy, social comment, love story and introduction to criticism all in one.

Last book actually read: “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. For the who-knows-how-many-th time. We went to see the movie the other week (which was excellent, at least in part because it didn’t follow the book) and I was inspired to return, as it were, to the source.

Five books that mean a lot to you:

• The Bible.
• Lord of the Rings. I have no idea how many times I’ve read this.
• The New Testament and the People of God, by N.T. Wright.
• Opportunity Knocks, by Ray Farley and Carol Stigger. A collection of twelve stories of people whose lives have been changed by Opportunity International, a microcredit development charity of which I am a huge fan.
• Just Java (I was snowed in one night at Keele University, and picked this up at the bookshop. Learning Java led me into my second, highly enjoyable, career, in software development).

Tag five people to continue this meme:

OK, I need to do six…

• Sureka
• Chris of Brainsnorkel, since he did it to me (done)
• Alan of Cardboard Nu (done)
• Alastair of girtby.net (done)
• Ross of Less Travelled (done but then removed?)
• Mike Higton (done)