beatnic - just wondering

Yesterday about thirty Intranetters (thanks to Andrew for pointing me towards the yahoo group) got together in central London.

It was a really good event - a kind of intranets anonymous. Big thanks to Simon Hill and Rod McLean for their warts’n'all stand-up routines. It certainly seemed quite a cathartic experience for all involved. Intranutters.

This morning a text message arrived from Twitter. I’m tracking the word “intranet” - more on subject-tracking in twitter here. It was none other than Richard Hare, yesterday’s whistle-blower and one of our hosts.

We touched on Sharepoint and accessibility, or rather the lack of it. Maybe we should set up the SHarepoint Accessibility Group - a self-help sub-group of Intranetters.

Some questions from the event…

1. If you could build an intranet from scratch, what would you start with? And what would you tell people it was for?
2. What are the best prizes to offer if you’re running a competition on your global intranet?
3. Management won’t allow blogging because it might encourage cyberbullying. Where do you start?
4. Is there a precedent in UK law (or any other country for that matter) where a company has been taken to court for an intranet not meeting DDA accessibility requirements?

Just wondering…

Have you noticed that on the radio very few, if any, presenters and guests say “goodbye” at the end of an interview or phone call?

More often than not they say “thank you” instead.

I was just wondering if this is conscious and deliberate.

Do you stand on the right on the escalator in John Lewis or your local shopping mall?

Did “Please stand on the right” originate on the London Underground? Like Pavlov’s dog, we’ve been gradually conditioned to do this. And why is it the opposite to our roads in the UK, where we drive on the left?

One thing’s for sure wherever you are. If you’re not standing on the right there will always be someone in a rush trying to get by.

Do you have a lift at work? Does it have a male or female voice? Who decided that?

Does a lift in Belfast have a different accent to a lift in Manchester, Falmouth or Glasgow?

Should the automated announcements on trains change accent depending on which part of the country you’re in?

Goal
Reality
Options
What next?

Why
Am
I
Talking?

If you’ll pardon the pun.

I’ve just been sent this info about an event taking place in July. I’ve added in the link showing where the venue is on Google maps.

Title: Gas Organ exhibition
Venue: The Sassoon Gallery
Location: Blenheim Grove, Peckham Rye, London SE15
Date: 16th - 18th July
Time: Midday - 9pm
Cost: Free

On three sultry nights in July, the sepulchral vault of Peckham’s underground venue The Sassoon Gallery will reverberate to the eerily melancholic strains of the infamous Gas Organ.

The Brain-child of founding collaborators Lou Smith and Rufus Burdett, the Gas Organ is a fabulous musical instrument, able to play itself, or be controlled or played remotely.

Constructed from freely available plumbing, electrical and laboratory components, the Gas Organ is a fusion of Art, Science and Engineering, beautiful in its clinical appearance and mesmerising in its auditory effect. Witnesses of the event have their credulity challenged as they view the ephemeral chaotic turbulence of a flame producing such incredible range and depth of sound; how can a science lab experiment evoke such an emotional response as this? I am watching this, but I don’t believe it.

Weblink: www.experiment1.co.uk

I will definitely be checking it out.

Listening to Xfm on my phone on the bus on the way home from work on Thursday night and an ad came on that went something like this:

Imagine a world where we all watched one TV channel.

Imagine a world where we all read just one newspaper.

Imagine a world where we all used just one search engine.

Now I don’t know about you, but right now I’m thinking about one search engine, and it’s probably the same one you’re thinking of too.

So the ad continues…

Ask.com… the other search engine.

At this stage I’m momentarily thinking I’d heard “arse dot come” - seriously, that’s what it sounds like.

But I’m also still thinking about one search engine, and it’s not ask.com.

I’d be very interested to know how the agency involved persuaded a company to accept that they’re second best, that they’re other.

Why do we run in an anticlockwise direction on a running track?

Has it always been anticlockwise?

Is it clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere? [No, actually scrap that]

Does it mean top athletes’ descendants will have shorter left legs than right? [Actually scrap that one too]

A good excuse for a musical reference, but this isn’t to do with choosing between the Beatles and Radiohead.

I was just wondering what kind of Christmas tree we should be buying this year.

With all the recent mention of carbon footprints, are we doing more for the environment buying the traditional Norwegian Spruce or is it time to opt for the articial variety?

We’ve already made the decision. This year we’ve gone for a 6′6” Killington from Homebase. It’s got real pine cones on it and it’s not bad for an imitation.

I guess we can find other ways to reproduce the smell of pine. And at least the “non-drop” bit is true at last.

What I will miss is the annual outing to buy the tree. From now on it’s the annual putting-together of the tree, quite an ingenious contraption it is too.

I’m putting my green money on the fake paying for itself over the years both financially and environmentally.

I’ll dig around to find out the true cost of norwegian wood versus fake plastic trees and will report back with any findings.

It would also be interesting to know what all our evergreen politicians are going for.

Why are funeral parlours so often on street corners?

My folks were discussing this recently and have a theory about access/parking of hearses, which used to be horse-drawn.

Enough to drive you round the bend ;)

… before wifi is a prerequisite to saying yes to babysitting?

…are more and more people saying things like “Is it just myself or…”?

And am I the only one feeling somewhat irrationally unnerved by this grammatical incorrectness?

What if the text messages you receive on your phone appeared in bubbles above your head?

[Thanks Lydia]

It’s 14:00 GMT and I haven’t been able to access google or gmail for the last 15 minutes.

Every other website I access regularly is working fine.

I can’t remember, but I don’t think this has happened to me before.

I wonder how widespread it is?

So does that mean when it snows when it’s sunny you get a snowbow?

They were in a primary school classroom our team painted today.

It may be old school, but I prefer to hold the door open for someone and follow rather than going first and letting it close in their face.

So when it comes to revolving doors that you have to push to get through…

Should I go first (against my old school ways) and push or let the other person go first and therefore have to do the pushing?

Just wondering…

Was this intentional?

Does it bring in more business than if they’d placed their logo somewhere else?

Just wondering… does anyone anywhere know of a webserver-based RSS aggregator that will run on an intranet?

Commercial, open-source, it doesn’t matter at the moment, I’m just interested to know what’s available.

It would help people share both internal and external feeds (subscription lists).

I’ve searched high and low but so far to no avail.

I wrote to the folk at Bloglines, but they said they had no plans on this front.

A search for a definition of the currently much- (some say over-) used word mashup takes you to this wikipedia disambiguation page (i.e. it has more than one meaning) which then leads to the following:

Mashup (music) redirects you to this definition:

Bastard pop is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.

Mashup (web application hybrid) is defined as:

A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) and JavaScript includes.

The etymology of this term almost certainly derives from its similar use in pop music.

Many people are experimenting with mashups using eBay, Amazon, Google, and Yahoos APIs.

Fraud has hit the headlines again in the last couple of days after recent statistics revealed it cost the UK £16bn last year.

I’ve just been the victim of fraud after my bank card and PIN for the current account I’m opening were intercepted before they reached me.

Those responsible managed to withdraw several hundred notes before I happened to go online and notice.

I phoned the bank and had the card stopped immediately. They’re putting their crack investigation unit on the case, no doubt at vast expense. I wish them luck in catching the perpetrators.

So what I’m wondering is why don’t all banks foot the bill for sending all cards recorded delivery?

Surely it would cost a lot less than the amount spent investigating this type of fraud.

And as a customer I’d feel safer in the knowledge I had one less thing to worry about.

When it’s of an illustration according to Flickr.

Monkstyle.net who’s been posting illustrations to Flickr says:

I noticed a while ago that when I searched for photos using tags on flickr, that my photos weren’t showing. After checking through the Flickr faqs I discovered that this is because I have been marked as ‘NIPSA’ [Not in Public Site Areas] which means that my account is more or less hidden to people searching flickr for photos.

Flickr told him:

Flickr is a photo-sharing website, so uploading non-photos will flag your account as NIPSA.

So if you take a photo of your illustration and upload that will you be NIPSAd?

Anyway, it tarnishes Flickr’s warm and friendly user experience in my opinion.

Via Boing Boing

Can you think of an example of something that exists in one size and one size only and is manufactured for one purpose?

I can’t. Yet.

Some suggestions talking to colleagues (and my uber-pedantic reasons why they don’t count):

Red Nose - they make them for cars too
Earrings - I reckon they do different sizes
Make Poverty History rubber wristband - I had a fabric one earlier in the year

Any more for any more?

Why do some magazine publishers bring out the January 2006 issue in November 2005?

So far, after a little searching, I’ve found this explanation from someone called Andy Walton in December 2000:

I see it as yet another form of the “the other guy does it, so I have to” marketing phenomenon. If you’re at a newsstand on November 25, why buy the outdated Nov. 23 Time when you can get the forward-looking Dec. 1 issue of Newsweek? Why buy the October Vogue when you can get the December Glamour at the same time at the same price?

Totally plausible, it would be good to hear what the publishers themselves have to say.

When and where did it start? Who followed who?

And does that mean that to “catch up” some publishers had to bring out two or three editions at once, or just skipped a couple hoping no-one would notice?