ArchivesBut now the game moves on. Now I have a friend who's written (built? produced? devised?) an app. Called London Shophound, it's a shopping guide to ...well, work it out. It's for people who, having bought an iPhone, want to use it to buy lots of other things. It was only published (released? uploaded?) a few days ago and already it's bouncing around Google, appearing in Japanese travel listings, putting itself about.
See the difference? The books are on the shelf. The app is out there hustling.
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( 3 / 45 )Every so often, even after all these years, the total wonderousness of the internet hits me all over again. (Should I rephrase that? Am I sounding too much like Stephen Fry?)
It goes like this.
I am moving a much loved piece of vintage furniture and notice part of a label on the inside. The label has a logo and initials which are not familiar to me. Curious, I put the initials and a bit of other info into Google images. This eventually leads me to name and a logo and -yes - it's the same as the one on my furniture.
I Google the name of the firm, which is now defunct, but eventually come up with PDFs of all their catalogues, at a site called the High Wycombe Electronic Furniture Archive, thoughtfully put online by Buckinhamshire New University. Scrolling through the pages of the manufacturer's 1933 catalogue, I find photographs of my furniture. I now know who made it, where and when.
How amazing is that? Without the net the task would have been almost impossible, and it's certainly not something I could have done from start to finish in an hour on a wet Sunday afternoon.
Internet and archivists: a marriage made in heaven - or, in this case, High Wycombe.
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( 3 / 44 )With a much-loved family member currently stranded in Hong Kong, I'm not going to make light of the current 'no-fly' situation. But the sheer scale of this natural event gives pause for thought.
This could go on for weeks,or months - life changing stuff. Aside from the many thousands of stranded and/or disappointed people,we now have the imminent shortage of airfreighted exotic foods and the collapse of all sorts of just-in-time supply chains.
What will we discover about the way we live and work?
Let's hear it for teleconferencing, local foodstuffs, supply lines which are short and secure, and companies who don't shirk responsibilities to customers when the chips are down.
How is a civilisation with the collective attention span of a swarm of gnats going to cope with a news story which just goes on and on and on? What will the politicians do - because you can't negotiate with (or spin) a volcano. Primal forces just don't do deadlines.
This story isn't yet a week old. Watch and learn.
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( 2.9 / 81 )Is there something wrong with my life? I'm sitting in something which calls itself a Skylounge, thirteen floors up, gazing across the cloudscape as the light over Leeds city centre deepens into dusk. There are three women at the table - one white wine, one mojito, one gin and tonic.
Because we're all grown-ups and we're all writers, the talk is not of sex, drugs or even rock'n'roll. Instead the conversation hovers around writing, clients, editorial angst, the unfortunate rise of the reflexive pronoun in customer service dialogues,that sort of thing. Even blogs enter the conversation.
Then the question is raised. Do you use Pingomatic? What?
It sounds as if we've been gatecrashed by a 1960s soap powder ad. For whiter whites and bright brights - use Pingomatic!
Except it's not a soap powder. It's a cute little online tool for promoting a blog - like this one. And two of us didn't know about it... and we felt so excited by the prospect...and how sad is that?
If girlies sit around in smart city bars talking about promoting their web sites, I guess Don Draper isn't ever going to come over to buy us drinks.
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( 3 / 200 )It's one of those Forrest Gump moments. The Christmas cards come down and - after carefully sorting out those which can be recycled (no glitter or metallic printing,if you live in York) - it's time to update the mailing list.
Received wisdom tells us that, left to their own devices, commercial mailing lists deteriorate at about 2% per month. So after a year, about a quarter of your precious list is likely to be out of date. Keeping mailing lists fresh and accurate is something I hassle clients about; hence my somewhat anal approach to my own list husbandry.
So here I am, editing and correcting to record the annual impact of birth, death, marriage, divorce, relocation and co-habitation on my own small circle.
Adding in the births is no problem - though Microsoft often stuggles to keep pace with the imaginative choices made by parents. It's the deletions I find difficult. In a paper address book (remember those?), you could draw a thoughtful line through the details of the departed. But a deletion? That feels more final than a final thing, as Blackadder would say.
There you are. Two references to popular culture in one blog. It must be that new zeitgeist I got for Christmas.
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