Interesting interview with Adams Curry just posted on Naked Conversations:

Interview: Adam Curry

From the BBC:

The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati.
In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March.

It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months.

Blogs, the homepages of the 21st Century, are free and easy to set up and use. They are popular with people who want to share thoughts online.

They allow for the instant publication of ideas and for interactive conversations, through comments, with friends or strangers.

Great quote from William Golding just popped up on ‘Quote of the Day’ on my customised Google homepage:

Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.

A Good Day to Die is Kernick‘s fourth book, and it brings back the anti-hero of the first, disgraced ex-copper Dennis Milne.

(Clicking the book cover takes you to Amazon – the commission helps fund Palimpsest)

Kernick’s books are a real strange mix, and I haven’t come across anything quite like them before. On one level, they are pretty standard thrillers, written with plot and pace in mind and conciously without any kind of literary embellishments.

But there are two things which set these apart from other books in the genre. Firstly, a rich vein of black humour runs throughout the book, and the numerous sarcastic asides do raise a smile on the face of the reader; which is all the more surprising given the second standout feature of Kernick’s work which is the sheer grimness of the subject matter. It really is heard to imagine a light-hearted romp involving murderous paedophile gangs, but that really is what this book is (kind of). So you have this real contradiction between style and content, but somehow it just works. I breezed through it in the space of a few hours reading time, I would say, and it’s a clear improvement on the earlier books and a good, no-nonsense read.

The BBC are running a trial offering some of their radio programmes as downloads, effectively making them podcasts. Might give this a go for some of the more interesting stuff.

Mark Kermode‘s film reviews might well become a regular listen.

Palimpsest has a book group, discussing books read by all the members in a topic on the forum. It has worked really well in the past, but recently has fallen behind a little.

To try and perk things up a bit it was decided that instead of choosing books month-by-month, 6 books should be chosen to cover half a year’s group reading, meaning that everyone knows where they stand. After various discussions and slightly complicated voting systems, the final selection looks like this:

• 1 September 2005: The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Gustave Flaubert
• 1 October 2005: No One Writes to the Colonel, Gabriel García Márquez
• 1 November 2005: The First Men in the Moon/The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells
• 1 December 2005: Dance, Dance, Dance, Haruki Murakami
• 1 January 2006: Virtual Light, William Gibson
• 1 February 2006: The Three-Arched Bridge, Ismail Kadare

Some pretty challenging stuff there!

Go to a personaliseable (!) version of Google at www.google.com/ig. It’s actually pretty good. You have to log in with your Google ID and password, for example your gmail username, and you can set out various bits of info to have on your screen, as well as the Google search box.

The screen is split into 3 columns. On the left I have a list of favourite links, a preview of my Gmail inbox, a ‘Word of the Day’ thing and the latest feed from Slashdot. In the centre I have a few blogs which I like to monitor regularly. The latest 3 posts in each appear here. Any RSS feed can be subscribed to. On the rightermost (!) column I have various news site feeds, including the BBC and Google News.

When I get home I will stick an image of what my screen looks like. It makes for an excellent homepage.

Great quote from H.G. Wells in amner’s review of The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells.

An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

One of the great things about Palimpsest is the way it throws up quality discussions about authors I have never heard of. And it brings together fans of that author that might not otherwise ever get to discuss his (or her) work with a fellow devotee.

This happened most recently with Richard Yates. Follow this link to the thread and enjoy. I am certainly going to invest in some Yates in the near future.

Interesting profile of the Austrailian philosopher Peter Singer in last Saturday’s Guardian Review. I remember reading a book of his for an essay on Practical Ethics for A-Level R.E.

George W Bush and Peter Singer were born on the same day – July 6 1946. But there the similarity ends. Only one is an Australian vegetarian who campaigns against animal cruelty and does not believe in the Judaeo-Christian nostrum of the sanctity of life. Only one supports abortion and infanticide in some cases and backs stem-cell research that uses genetic material from embryos. Only one thinks the world would be better if the US were subject to UN sanctions for emitting more than its fair share of greenhouse gases.

And yet there are parallels. In his 2003 book The President of Good and Evil: Taking George W Bush Seriously, Singer quoted from one of Bush’s speeches: “Some people think it’s inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me.” To which Singer added: “Well, not me either, so that is one view about morality on which the president and I agree.” Both men, in an age of seeming moral relativism and selfishness, insist on the overwhelming importance of moral renewal.

That book nonetheless argued that Bush’s ethics consisted mostly of hypocrisy and intellectual confusion. By contrast, Singer stresses that his moral philosophy is the product of cold logic. Singer concedes his views are often upsetting for Bush supporters. “In a Christian society we have views about the sanctity of life that were formed in a totally different period when we didn’t have to make decisions about embryos or whether you should keep people alive who are irrevocably unconscious. People get stuck with this ethic from the past, which has not been able to adapt itself to other circumstances because it has been encapsulated in a set of religious beliefs.”

Went camping this weekend in Montford Bridge. Here’s a few photos we took. Comments below each one.

Here’s the inside view of the middle living area of our tent.

The outside view of our ridiculously large tent.

This might well be the bridge that gives Montford Bridge its name.

At last! Sean Wright receives the honour of having his own page on Wikipedia!

Very pleasant trip to Cambridge yesterday, ostensibly to attend Bodies in the Bookshop, a Crime Writers’ meet-and-greet thing at Heffers bookshop. Met up with the ever amiable Simon Kernick who joined Al and me in the Eagle afterwards for some pints and banter.

Took a couple of photos while I was wandering about. Enjoy.

Punts, the lot of ’em.

deteculative
Originally uploaded by John Self.

Excellent stuff from the Selfmeister

Click the image to see a bigger, clearer version.

Just realised how rude the title of this post sounds!

Took a couple of photos of our little bungalow, and uploaded them to Flickr.

The Nissen hut thing is meant to be a car port, but at the moment it houses the wheelie bins and bits of crap.

If you look down the left right hand side of this site, you will see I have installed a new Flickr ‘badge’ which looks rather whizzy. Hopefully it will be more interesting by the time I have some more photos uploaded!

Just testing an image to see which is the best size from Flickr to suit this blog template…

Looks like ‘medium’ (500×375) is perfect!

We have invested in a new digital camera, so hopefully a few more photos will be appearing on here and on my criminally underused Flickr page.

It looks like this:

I think he has announced it over on Palimpsest now, so I can let everyone know here that Rick Green has started the first Palimpblog! His posts have already been pretty varied and thoughtful and it will be interesting to see where he takes it.

Rick’s blog.

Since upgrading to Itunes 4.9 I have been attached to the US store and not the UK one and am unable to buy any music. Anyone have this problem? What have I done wrong?!? 🙁