Not a lot going on here I am afraid. This is entirely due to the fact that I don’t have internet access at home, and now I do much of my web browsing through FeedDemon it’s a bit tricky doing stuff at work. But will try to make at least a post or two a day from now on.

In response to my legions of demanding readers…

The new job is going pretty well! I work in a team of about 10 people, all of whom are jolly friendly. Essentially the team pimps itself around the Council doing bits of work for other departments. This can range from doing one off pieces of work, such as designing processes and peforming surveys, to managing whole projects. I think most people have several jobs on at once, so it is all very varied.

At the moment I have two things on the go. One is on the Council’s BroadBand project. Confusingly, it’s not that broadband, but rather a way of extending the County Council’s network to satellite offices and schools. A name change is in the pipeline. The other thing is that my boss is managing the project to create an all-in-one Customer Service Centre for the Council. I will be his gimp.

So it’s going well. The office is really relaxed and everyone seems to get on jolly well. They have booked me in for a few courses, which is always nice. And I can access the Palimp without too much difficulty! Hurrah!

Yesterday was the Big Day Out for members of Palimpsest, the arts discussion site I help maintain. It was also my birthday, and what a great way to spend it. Whilst in the pub I discussed blogging for a short while with someone, and they remarked on the fact that (these are my words, not theirs, by the way) that this was a bit of a secondary blog, contentwise, in that I don’t post much original stuff. Most of the time I comment on what other people have written about. So here’s an attempt to actually compose something myself…

We all met up in London, at King’s Cross station. I was there first, as the guy nominally in charge of things, and soon people drifted by. Soon enough there were eleven of us and we headed to our first stop, the British Library.

A word here, perhaps, about the Palimpsesters themselves. I remarked several times on the day that under what other circumstances would this group of people ever meet? Of course, the answer is (probably) none. But what makes Palimpsest stand out as a web site is the politeness and interest that everyone takes in each other. This meant that no matter what someone’s background or age or interests, they were treated with respect and friendliness the whole day. It was like the way we deal with each other online is a genuine reflection of the way we are in real life. It was great.

Anyhow, the British Library was pretty cool. One thing I found remarkable was the ‘King’s Library’ – a glass shaft that goes right through the heart of the building containing what looked like, er, Big Old Books. Must do a bit of digging into what those books are. The exhibitions were great, we saw stuff like the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Canterbury Tales, da Vinci’s notebooks (strangely no da Vinci Code manuscripts were there…) audio recordings of the Beatles and Florence Nightingale. Amazing. I reckon you could spend a week there and not get bored. We only had an hour, but it left us all wanting to return, which was a good thing.

We split up into two factions at this point, some went to a Chinese restaurant they knew well, and the others, including me, went to the pub, The Citie of Yorke. It was packed with guys in pin stripes, who, to be fair, didn’t take any exception to the rather disparate bunch in their midst. A discussion took place about the author Sean Wright (I would link to his site but can’t bear the thought of being responsible for the horror of it – just Google him if you must) and a few of the uninitiated got to browse some of his latest work. I had brought along my one interesting book – The Unfortunates by B.S. (NOT BORIS!) Johnson, the infamous ‘book in a box’. To my shame I was forced to admit that, of course, I am yet to actually read it. But Hey! It looks nice.

The pub session turned into an extended one – about 3 1/2 hours. The beer flowed freely as we talked about books, movies, art, TV and everything in between. Actually no, mostly we talked about how much younger we actually are than we thought we were. If that makes sense. A few photos were taken, more as the beer went down quicker. I think it was during this piss-up that acquaintances became friends.

Still, we had to leave the pub eventually, and when we emerged blinking in the sunlight, we headed to St. Mary at Woolnoth, a church mentioned in the Peter Ackroyd novel Hawksmoor.

It was a beautiful building, and a very calming after the rushing around and busyness of the city. Afterwards we posed for photos outside, and Bakunin_the_Cat provided one of the days funniest moments by performing a most remarkable impression of a corpse in front of the Church.

Next stop was room 43 in the National Gallery, where we met up with the splinter group of Palimpsesters. This provided gil with the opportunity to show round some of his wonderful old books and curiosities. Then we moved onto a local hostelry for more drinks as everyone drifted off home one by one…

It was a great day. I know a few people from Palimpsest read this blog, so thanks for making it such fun. So many people asked me the question over the day of how the site got started, which is easy enough to answer (there wasn’t a site that did what we wanted, so we started our own) and how it got to be so good, which isn’t so easy. After all, we don’t choose who joins up, but somehow all of those who stick around are universally polite and helpful, and attempts are made wherever possible to be sensible and intelligent about things. It’s nice to have somewhere to be able to do that. And it’s even nicer when you can do it in a pub in London on a sunny May afternoon. Long may Palimpsest continue and thrive, and roll on the next Big Day Out.

As a sweetener for members of Palimpsest who made a donation towards the hosting this year, I offered them an @palimpsest email address.

This got me thinking about what other services could be offered to those who might be interested.

How about having a Palimpsest hosted blog?

I have a spare database that isn’t being used, and with WordPress being able to run multiple blogs, it would be easy enough to set up. The one downer is that the URL would be palimpsest.org.uk/blogs/user but as most people read these things through an aggregator (don’t they?) it really wouldn’t matter.

I’ll give it some thought. If anyone has any comments, just let me know.

WordPress 1.5.1 has been released. Better get upgraded…

BlogJetThis! Extension for FireFox 0.4

James Avery has created a FireFox extension that allows you to select text in FireFox and then blog about it using BlogJet. Great work James!

If you visit the above link, you’ll see a few comments from me, who in my usual dunderheaded way, couldn’t seem to get the extension installed right…

And of course I used it to create this post…

From the Guardian Online blog:

In praise of Amiga

Apropos of very little, I had a bit of a retro memory flashback the other day (actually it was when I dug out an old copy of Lemmings) and started thinking about what probably ranks as my favourite computer ever:…

And it’s the good old Amiga 500! I used to have one, and loved it…

Neville Hobson writes:

Three lessons about evangelism:

1. Always consider another’s point of view – and listen to that point of view no matter how anxious you are to get across your own point of view
2. Be passionate but consider how you ‘deploy’ that passion – others may view your evangelism as rigid and self-righteous proselytizing
3. Know that evangelism will fail in the face of a closed mindset

He was recently interviewed on The Red Couch.

US based celebrity blog thing is now up and running, as reported by Dan Gillmor:

The Huffington Post has launched, and it’s part-Drudge (though from a different perspective), part blog of blogs. It’s obviously version 1.0, which means you should give it time to settle down.

The great Harry Shearer will “Eat the Press” — this could be fun.

Overall, the site seems to be aiming at the role of op-ed page of the Net. I’m watching with great interest, and reading some of it, too.

To give more of a flavour, here’s an excerpt from the announcement email:

The Huffington Post is serving up-to-the-minute breaking news and blog posts from hundreds of the most interesting figures in politics, entertainment, business, the arts, and the media.  In addition, Harry Shearer will be moderating a section on the media called “Eat the Press” — where, besides documenting and discussing the absurdities within our news cycle, he will regularly be posting raw satellite feed of our nation’s politicians and broadcasters in their most unguarded moments. 

Already, John Cusack, Ellen DeGeneres, Russell Simmons, Mike Nichols, David Mamet, Michael Isikoff, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Brad Hall, David Corn, and Marshall Herkovitz have posted their unique takes on issues as diverse as gay marriage, the war in Iraq, and what “SpamAlot” and political leaders have in common.

The Huffington Post is also your source for breaking news.  Today, the Post offers an exclusive pre-publication look at the explosive new book, “Secrets of the Kingdom,” by best-selling author Gerald Posner, which reveals the unknown story of how Saudi Arabia’s oil fields are rigged to turn into a radioactive nuclear wasteland in the event of an invasion or internal revolution.

Just gotten round to filling in the FTP details on BlogJet, which means that if I have a photo on my PC, BlogJet will upload it for me in a specified directory on the web server, when I get round to updating the blog. Here’s a quick test:

Look – it’s Gary Megson, the man who failed to keep Forest in the Championship this season. Well, at least BlogJet works.

Doc Searles on blogs

What is a blog? The oft-cited Doc Searles shares his thoughts in a PowerPoint from the “Les Blogs” conference in Paris. Or, if you’d like the html version …

Try slide 17 for the nub of things:

• Blogs are journals
• They are not “sites”
• They are not “content”
• They are not “media”
• They are not here to “deliver an experience”
• They are not an “emergent synchronization mode”
• There’s no argument about “who’s a journalist.” We all are.

Searles’ basic argument is that blogs are individual writings — speech — that turn into conversations through the linking ability of the Web. Treat them like content, he says, and we run the risk of censorship.

This is why news media and blogs struggle to find compatibility. We in this business see such things as content. That’s fine. Call them online columns, which is what most really are when we produce them.

From Scoble:

Google moves its blog to Blogger, adds blogroll

Yeah, TDavid, it is an honor to be blogrolled on Google’s blog. Google recently moved its blog over to Blogger.

So that’s why my previous attempts to subscribe to this have failed recently. Note to self: check this out in the morning.

History of the Graphical User Interface

Ars Technica has a great history of the GUI that just came online. I was one of those “Xerox invented it, Apple stole it, Microsoft stole that” kinds of people. It’s great to realize that, really, everyone stole everything from someone else and none of this is unique.

From Ensight, a blog by a chap named Jeremy Wright. Looks like an article well worth looking up. I’m reading feeds in bed through FeedDemon, so can’t look them up just now. Oh, for a wireless internet connection!

Well, I am leaving Scrutiny after nearly a year and have a new job as a Business Analyst at another authority. Just a week to go – my first day is 16 May.

What’s it all about? Well, project management basically. A real growth area in local authorities in the UK, and one I am keen to learn about. And guess what? To help keep a handle on all the information that will be coming my way, I am going to be blogging about it. Not here, though. One of the joys of WordPress is that I can have multiple blogs running from the same MySQL database. So, I have just started Project: Blog and will be updating it starting from about now.

I guess you can expect maybe a couple of posts a week over there. It should be pretty interesting (if you are interested in project management…) Still, to help differentiate it from this one I really do need to apply a new theme to it…

Does anyone know how I can insert trackbacks to posts I am quoting or writing about whilst within BlogJet?

At the moment I am having to edit posts while online to add them in, which kind of defeats the object of the exercise…

8 Secrets of the New Super Blogs from Vaspers the Grate

8 Secrets of the New Super Blogs:
Blog Revelations from Otherwhere

(1.) Blogs will be interesting…or die.

(2.) Blogs will be unusual, abnormal, unique…or die.

(3.) Blogs will be practical, helpful, valuable…or die.

(4.) Blogs will be creative, innovative, artistic in both literary and graphic stylings…or die.

(5.) Blogs will be authoritative, reputable, credible, reliable…or die.

(6.) Blogs will be imaginative, original, personalized, customized…or die.

(7.) Blogs will be strong, loud, brilliant, brave…or die.

(8.) Blogs will be ethical, moral, legal and legitimate, altruistic…or die.

An article by Dan Gillmor: Operating Systems and Recent History

Early last week, Bill Gates demonstrated Microsoft’s next Windows desktop computer operating system at a conference for manufacturers of computer hardware. Later in the week Apple started selling its latest version of the Macintosh operating system, known as Mac OS X Tiger.

Interesting article on Michael Howard’s signal of his intention to resign as leader of the Tories on the BBC.

The last thing the Tories want is another instant resignation similar to William Hague’s the day after the 2001 election defeat.

And there is no clamour for Mr Howard’s head after what most believe was an effective election campaign.

Mr Hague clearly believed he was also doing the best by the Tories, but that is not how it turned out.

Thanks to the recently introduced election procedures, it tipped the party into a prolonged battle which ended with outside candidate, “quiet man” Iain Duncan Smith winning as a result of the grassroots vote and then suffering an unhappy spell in the leadership.

The Tories are determined not to go down that route again and Mr Howard has given them time to sort out a new leadership election procedure – which will inevitably mean giving MPs the greatest say.

And he has also ensured that should be a swift process to allow his eventual successor time to bed in before the next election in 2009 or 2010.

There will be some in the Tory party who will grumble that he has not given them time to recover from the election defeat before being thrown into another, internal campaign.

And there is no doubt that the contenders will start positioning themselves immediately for the contest which most will hope comes within the next six to 12 months.

But most Conservatives probably believed the best they could hope for from this general election was an honourable second place, and Mr Howard has delivered that.

When I first heard that he was quitting I was under the impression that he was doing it straight away, Major and Hague style. But leaving a break of 6–12 months does make sense.

Blunkett returns in new Cabinet, according to the BBC:

David Blunkett has returned to the Cabinet as work and pensions secretary as Tony Blair reshuffles his top team.

Patricia Hewitt has been appointed health secretary – with John Reid moving to defence and Geoff Hoon becoming Commons leader.

In other changes, Alan Johnson takes the new post of secretary for productivity, energy and industry.

Chancellor Gordon Brown, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Home Secretary Charles Clarke remain in their posts.

David Miliband enters the Cabinet as community and local government secretary.

The shake-up came after Mr Blair won an historic third election – but with a majority cut from 167 in 2001 to 66.

Mr Blair said he had “listened and learned” after the election result.

The prime minister acknowledged the Iraq war had been “deeply divisive”.

But he said he believed people wanted to move on.

Am working on a large list of links of pages I regularly visit. At the moment it is very incomplete, so have temporarily password protected it.