Categories
Culture

Train songs

Larry has posted a whole compilation of train-themed soul music over at Funky16Corners, which seemed like as good a reason as any to post this video:

Trains are a big presence in American music, of course: blues, jazz, rock and roll all have their great train songs. I don’t think they’ve ever had quite the same associations in Europe, perhaps because our countries are just physically too small. There’s never been a great British road movie, either.

Still, there’s a different kind of romance to European train travel; the idea of buying a ticket in Paris and waking up the next morning in Vienna, or Milan, or Barcelona. Between school and university I went travelling around Europe by train with friends. That was before the Channel Tunnel, so it was a long first day: London-Dover, then the ferry, then a train to Paris, then walking across Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon to get a train heading south. But the next morning, I took one look out of the window and could see we were in Italy; the buildings, the whole look of the landscape, had changed.

Going by easyJet just isn’t the same.

WordPress 2.2 upgrade hitches

Apologies for the slight messiness: I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.2—don’t know why, really, it’s not like there are any compelling new features—and at least one of my normal plugins is broken. I should have a work-around up soon.

EDIT: OK, I think everything’s just about working now. If anything seems broken, give me a shout.

Further comment: One of the claims for WP2.2 is that “We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.” Who knows, perhaps this is brilliant, sometimes. But it didn’t work for me today.

And another comment: One of the changes is that instead of having a built-in preview in the posting window that has to be reloaded every time you save a change, it pops up a preview in a new window when you ask it to. Which is probably a good decision, since it should make writing faster, but it’s a pity it makes a new window each time instead of reloading the previous preview window with the new version. if I don’t carefully close each popped-up preview after looking at it, I end up with a whole row of tabs, each a preview of the post.

Categories
Culture Other

because it amuses me

mixtape

The Cassette Generator, via things magazine, which/who I was surprised to realise I hadn’t already added to my blogroll.

Categories
Culture

The Campaign for Better Smilies

Smilies used to really irritate me. But I’ve been persuaded. So much online communication now is chit-chat, banter and small talk. And informal conversation is driven as much by tone of voice as by actual words. A real example. Someone leaves a nice comment on this blog, and I don’t really have anything to say in reply but want to acknowledge the comment. This seems too curt:

Thanks.

This seems too effusive:

Thanks!

So what I often use is this:

Thanks :)

Which seems a genuinely useful thing to be able to do. It’s just a bit friendlier. But you’ll notice WordPress hasn’t converted that into a smiley, because I have in fact turned smilies off. They’re just too ugly. These are the ones that ship with WordPress:

All wordpress smilies

They’re not the most horrible smilies ever, but I didn’t spend hours tweaking and fine-tuning the design of the site just to clutter it up with yellow cartoon faces. What I like about the classic emoticon is that it’s visually unobtrusive but clear. It is in fact like punctuation, which I think is the state all smilies should aspire to. But emoticons are limited. I know that people have expended endless ingenuity in coming up with ways to convey everything from ‘laughing hard while covering mouth with hands’ to ‘silent resignation’, but they tend to be large, ambiguous and, of course, obviously cobbled together out of other symbols. What I want is for fonts come with a range of emoticons designed to match the font. The most important one is a smile; the other ones I’ve found most useful in internet forums are ‘confused’ ‘roll eyes’ and ‘grin’, but they might as well include the other obvious ones: ‘angry’, ‘sad’ and ‘winking’ at least.

They don’t even have to be designed to look like faces; conceptually these similar to the exclamation mark and the question mark, and a similarly arbitrary symbol would be fine. But since emoticons and smilies are currently in widespread use, they seem like a good starting point. Perhaps something like this:

smilies.gif

I am, obviously, not a type designer, but you can see what I’m trying to do. The more complex symbols, like confused or roll-eyes, would need a bit more ingenuity, but humans are nothing if not ingenious.

Can you tell I’m short of inspiration for napowrimo? And, btw, if WordPress is going to insert curly quotes, I wish it would bloody well get them right. The automatic formatting seem to be screwed up in several ways since the release of WP2.1, and it’s really irritating. [angry smiley could go here]

Categories
Other

just a thought

Sometimes, when I’m struggling to get something to work, or find a piece of information, or something just seems a lot less simple than it ought to be, I have to remind myself just what a young medium the internet is, and how far we’ve gone already.

screenshot of Pine email software

Categories
Other

The less obvious reason to hate MySpace

The most obvious reason is, of course, that it’s so ugly. Let me rephrase that: it’s sooo ugly. Seriously, is you leave the average MySpace page open on your computer and go away for a long weekend, don’t be surprised if if you come back and find that it has physically sucked all the beauty out of the room around it, and your Koryo dynasty maebyong vase has turned into a World’s Greatest Dad coffee mug.

I don’t mind the people who customise their MySpace pages to make them ugly; I’m a fan of the internet’s role as a venue for unbridled creativity, and good taste is just another bridle for people to cast aside like a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste. Customizing MySpace pages is a vibrant contemporary folk art and adds to the joiety of nations. In fact, the internet is rapidly becoming the world’s largest repository of outsider art, and we should celebrate that. I don’t actually want to look at your eye-melting MySpace page, read your horribly sincere poetry or look at your drawings of scantily clad Dark Elves, any more than you want to read my ill-informed pontification about art, religion and cricket, but the internet is comfortably big enough for all of us.

myspace screenshot

I think it’s good people can choose to make their MySpaces ugly. What’s less forgiveable is that there’s no apparent scope for making them attractive. The default appearance is crappy and the customisation possibilities are intentionally crippled in a way that makes it as hard as possible to create the effect you want. But despite everything I’ve just said, the ugliness isn’t what prompted me to write this post. Nor is it the fact that the site is slow and buggy, or that it keeps logging you out, and when you need to log in, you get redirected to another page entirely which takes forever to load.

No, what really irritates me is this. On MySpace, you can edit your profile to choose what information to display: not just the usual stuff like age, webpage and interests, either. It has dedicated options for your marital status, religion, home town, level of education, whether you smoke, even your income, and for any of them, if you choose not to answer it simply omits that piece of information. The absolute bare minimum of information is: your marital status and your star sign. Your star sign!

I mean, really, what the fuck is that about? I can choose to assert my freedom from superstition by proudly identifying myself as an atheist, but the site is still going to make sure people know what cosmic influence I was born under according to a demonstrably false system invented over 3000 years ago by people who didn’t even know what stars and planets were? According to a calendar which isn’t in time with the stars and planets any more anyway?

As you may be able to tell, this makes me geniunely and disproportionately angry. The idea that a lot of people actually take this stuff seriously is enough to make me start physically twitching with my irritation. Though that may also be the five cups of coffee.