Palaces are for royalty. We’re just people with a bank account.
Grace Kelly to Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief (1955)
All posts by Kevin
Mobile madness
Apparently, the UK has more mobile phones than people these days.
On one hand, that’s not surprising when you consider that Vodafone, O2, Orange, and T-mobile all have shops within 200 meters of one another on my local high street. Strangely however, the biggest of them, Vodafone, hardly ever has any customers in it.
People must be buying their phones some other way.
Popular self-help books
Today’s silly news that the A to Z is one of Londoners’ best loved books
reminded me that one of the most consistently best-selling books in the UK is the Department of Transport’s Highway Code.
Amazing
We had spinach for dinner this evening (among other things), and not for the first time I found myself wondering: Why does cooked spinach leave a film that you can feel on your teeth?
Well it seems it’s all down to those annoying oxalate crystals.
Isn’t the Internet simply amazing?
Blue Jean Chef
My sister, aka the Blue Jean Chef, has a new web site designed by yours truly.
It’s the first time I’ve used the new-ish open source blogging tool (aka Content Management System) called WordPress, and I have to admit that I was impressed. I found it easy to setup, and there are lots of plugins freely available to customise it to your needs.
It’s so good in fact that I’m seriously tempted to switch from MovableType to WordPress myself.
My del.icio.us links
I’m experimenting with del.icio.us, a “social bookmarks manager”.
So here are links to some of the web pages that I found interesting recently (the annotations are mine):
- Adam Polselli’s 2005 Color Forecast What colours will we see on the web in 2005?
- Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Art failure Max Hastings on how droit de suite will hurt "dealers and auctioneers, who make up one of the shadiest and least lovable groups in our society".
- Another record year Norman Lebrecht thinks the classical recording industry is dead, but will the demise of the profit motive really be so bad for music?
UK front pages
You may be familiar with BBC New Online’s UK Front pages web page. Or then again, you may not.
In any case, I’ve grown tired of clicking on each newspaper’s link sequentially so I’ve created my own page that displays all of the available front pages at once.
You can access it at http://www.kevinlaurence.net/ukpapers.php.
Note however, that the images come from the BBC’s web site and are therefore ultimately beyond my control. For example, the front pages were available for 1 January 2005, but not 2 January 2005. Could this be the result of someone at the BBC not working on Sundays? Use at your own risk.
Update (2 Oct 2005): The BBC ceased providing images of the UK’s newspaper front pages in early August 2005, so my “summary” page no longer works. A similar service is currently available at www.newseum.org, but few British newspapers are included in its database.
Crossword puzzles
On the last day of 2004 BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour featured an interesting report on the history of crossword puzzles (RealPlayer required). Did you know that the first crossword appeared in 1913? Or that the first collection of puzzles gave Simon & Schuster its start?
With bells on
My five-month old daughter has just been given a great pair of Lamaze Foot Finder socks. As well as being very colourful, the two insects on the tips of the toes contain rattles. They’re supposed to stimulate development, and they were an immediate success with our little girl.
I wonder if this is a sign of things to come, however? Little Miss Matched is apparently a big hit with 8 to 12 year olds in the US!
Making the news
Here’s an interesting story: Bloug Entry (Dec 02, 2004: Using Search Log Analysis to Predict the Future).
It seems the Financial Times analyses it web site search statistics to identify unpublished stories that interest its readers, and the editorial staff then consider running stories on those subjects.
This approach to news-making obviously has significant implications for the traditional definition of “news worthy”, and gives new meaning to the suggestion that the media simply “give people what they want to hear”.
Well, I thought it was interesting!