Archive for October 2008

Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd!

In Odd, language on 31 October 2008 tagged language, news, signs with Comments Off

 

When offi­cials asked for the Welsh trans­la­tion of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfor­tu­nately, the e-mail response to Swansea coun­cil said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”. So that was what went up under the Eng­lish ver­sion which barred lor­ries from a road near a super­mar­ket. [Full story]

Cloud computing: it’s about, uh, things

In Quotes on 27 October 2008 with Comments Off

“The way people work and the way people com­mu­nic­ate, open­ness and velo­city and nimble­ness and focus are much more valu­able and I think that’s a very big shift.”

— Sam Schil­lace runs Google Docs and talks rub­bish.

Travels with Barack

In Websites on 25 October 2008 with Comments Off

Travels with Barack
“Four years ago Time pho­to­grapher Cal­lie Shell met Barack Obama back­stage when she was cov­er­ing pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate John Kerry. She sent her editor more pho­to­graphs of Obama than Kerry. When asked why, she said, “I do not know. I just have a feel­ing about him. I think he will be import­ant down the road.” Her first photo essay on Obama was two and half years ago. She has stuck with him ever since.”

As photo gal­ler­ies go, this is strangely poing­ant. There may just be more human than machine in Obama. Whether that’s a good thing in a Pres­id­ent, I can only hope.

Ain’t that the truth

In Quotes on 25 October 2008 tagged Quote with Comments Off

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. 

— Anais Nin

WaldFlöte

In Things, Websites on 22 October 2008 with Comments Off

Every second Tues­day, Al deserts me and goes of to play with wires and things — or some­thing. I sort of glaze over when the only way things can be explained involves dia­grams — at Dork­bot Alba. For what seems like the last hun­dred years, they’ve been work­ing on a pro­ject that, to be hon­est, made the tooth­brush robot things (no, really) seem sane. Still, against all odds, it actu­ally seems to be fin­ished, and is turn­ing them into inter­net super­stars (Make: blog, Hacked Gad­gets). You can’t impress me by show­ing me 100 solen­oids and try­ing to explain how they work, but you can totally impress me by hav­ing the same solen­oids ref­er­enced by Make!

Of course, much of the inter­net super­star­dom is just because they’re piggy­back­ing on the suc­cess of another Edinburgh-based inter­net super­star and doing duets with him.

The peti­tion for the cre­ation of a Christ­mas mega­mix began, ooh, at least five minutes ago.

(Should you be inter­est­ing in play­ing about with wires and mul­ti­meters, would like to desert your girlfriend/boyfriend/flatmate/mundane exist­ence every second Tues­day, and live within trav­el­ling dis­tance of Edin­burgh, you too could join Dork­bot Alba! More inform­a­tion is avail­able here.)

Domainr

In Websites on 21 October 2008 with Comments Off

Domainr sug­gests web addresses using domains from around the world, so that you can have a “witty” URL along the lines of del.icio.us and blo.gs. Dev­ast­at­ingly, rt.fm is taken, but thanks to Nigeria it’s pos­sible to have end­less geeky fun with Å‹ (.ng).