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Writing: 2008

  1. Physicalising ebooks

    How can we best represent the heft of real books in ebook readers?

  2. What on Earth is going on at ‘Today’?

    Fury at ‘Today’s slot on the Pope saying how homosexuals are killing the human race.

  3. Pelinore from ‘Imagine’ magazine

    I scanned in all the pages I have from the early 1980s ‘Imagine’ magazine describing the Dungeons & Dragons campaign world of Pelinore.

  4. Google Reader vs Bloglines Beta

    I’ve recently switched to Google Reader after years of Bloglines. Here are the differences that matter to me.

  5. Would you let your daughter work in an open plan?

    An article from the ‘Observer’ in 1968 about Boots’ new open plan office.

  6. Annoyingly slippery

    Some tips and gotchas for Movable Type 4.2.

  7. Webloggery organisation

    I’ve re-written the site’s back end, using less PHP and more Movable Type.

  8. DBD::mysql on Leopard with _mysql_init errors

    I had problems getting the perl DBD::mysql module working. Here’s how I made it happy.

  9. Wholly deserved demise

    John Sergeant quitting ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ is the main news in the UK today. Save us.

  10. Field Trip 1993

    I’ve posted up the hour long video of the field trip round Europe I went on at university in 1993.

  11. The locals slag you off

    Pumping my tweets in Facebook was good at first but then just wrong.

  12. Haddock Blogs feeds are back

    The Haddock Blogs RSS feeds disappeared for a bit. They’re back now.

  13. Ghostly fingers of APIs

    I created a graphic showing all the bits of my online life that update each other.

  14. A format only robots could love

    I’m adding an archive of comments posted on other websites to my site, and thinking more about how personal aggregation of online activity should work.

  15. Stopping Movable Type from truncating long templates

    If Movable Type is cutting your templates off when you save them, here’s how to fix it.

  16. Showing them one tiny corner

    More on the stock market graphs, and working out how to improve them.

  17. Making websites

    Looking back at the web work I’ve done over the past year.

  18. Graphs that lie

    Annoyed by stock market graphs whose y-axes don’t start at zero, and correcting them.

  19. PhilipGyford.com

    I’ve set up a new website for me as an actor.

  20. Byliner is closing

    After more than eight years it’s time to shut Byliner.com down.

  21. Head of the tiny pack

    On the death of David Foster Wallace.

  22. Way too jaded

    My thoughts on dConstruct 2008, whose talks left me underwhelmed.

  23. The first life logger

    Gerolamo Cardano may have been the world’s first life logger or quantified self or whatever.

  24. View past days on Haddock Blogs

    Haddock Blogs was broken for a bit, but as compensation you can now browse to older days of posts.

  25. Top Tunes of 2007, part 2 and 3

    The second and third (and final) parts of my favourite music of the year.

  26. Movable Type 4.2

    Upgrading to the latest version of MT isn’t advised until fixes are released.

  27. Top Tunes of 2007, part 1

    The first part of my favourite tunes of 2007. Unsurprisingly.

  28. Opacity: 1 ! important;

    Bloglines recently changed the look of their Beta design. Here’s how to make it look better using Firefox.

  29. Rush hour on the Barley Highway

    Last year I bought a fixed-gear bike. Here’s what I think of it. But I’m also wondering why Parisians have a much more relaxed cycling culture.

  30. Love and hate

    My time at LISPA is over and while it’s been good, it’s too soon to know just how I’ve changed.

  31. Now and Then

    How we went about creating my final project, a short piece of theatre about the start and end of a relationship.

  32. The director’s vision

    I was in three people’s final projects: a brief clown, father of a girl who grows wings, and the element Polonium killing Marie Curie.

  33. Fight Test

    I’ve finished the stage combat course I started last year, and passed the Fight Performance Test.

  34. Telling each other what to do

    The final phase of the course, our final personal projects, a transition into the real world.

  35. Me at Interesting 2008

    Two little videos of parts of a five minute talk on masks I gave at Interesting 2008 last weekend.

  36. Occasionally going “SSSHHHH!”

    Our best-of-year performances are over. A very trying but thankfully satisfying process.

  37. Enjoying enjoying

    It’s the final term of college, nothing but Creation, and… I’m enjoying it!

  38. Stop and go “Huh?”

    An idea by Russell Davies, and the hostile reactions to it, reminded me of how contextless so much writing is online.

  39. Risking execution

    Reading Terry Eagleton writing about the history of publishing anonymously, and failing to see modern day publishers, online or off, risking execution to safeguard a writer’s anonymity.

  40. More Twitter angst

    My tweets are now public again, the lesser of two evils I think.

  41. Different types of funny

    The end of our penultimate term, with our performance full of clowns.

  42. Meagre ambitions

    Three things I haven’t even attempted at college recently, and doubts about what I’m doing all this for.

  43. UTF8, MySQL, Perl and PHP

    A summary of the problems I had with keeping things UTF8 when re-writing Haddock Blogs, and the solutions I settled on.

  44. Haddock Blogs changes

    A summary of the recent changes to the Haddock Blogs site and feeds.

  45. I’m not bugging your phone

    I’ve made my Twitters private and this has meant that some people I know can no longer read them. Sorry.

  46. Creating narrative as a team

    Clowning is going well, in contrast to the Creation of the first couple of weeks of term, when we returned to the Heart of Darkness.

  47. A mental “yes”

    We’ve started the term of clowns, beginning with trying to find our own individual clowns.

  48. Bottom of a locked filing cabinet

    More fun with BT Yahoo! attempts at helping people who can’t send email through their service.

  49. Beware of the Leopard

    The struggle we went through trying to resolve an issue with BT (and their associated brands) and their SMTP server settings.

  50. Brits on a train

    The presentations at the end of the second term of the second year were fun, and we did some more work on our gory, grotesque commuter piece.

  51. Hanging on to the reins

    We spent a few weeks doing chorus work at the end of this term, but after all that I’m still clueless as to what makes a good chorus piece.

  52. Stuck in a stable space

    For Voice class this term we had to write a song. Here’s how the process went for me.

  53. Completely different things

    This week I’m described in the press as a “web designer and programmer” and a “British actor”.

  54. Our quest to understand how things move

    We’ve had to memorise text for the first time… choosing a piece of a great speech and some words that open up big and small spaces.

  55. Has become untethered

    Two quotes from the LRB and NYRB on religion / secularism and US politics.

  56. People instead of puppets

    The grotesque, over the top caricatures of posh people and celebrities, which didn’t do a lot for me.

  57. Félix Fénéon’s worthy material

    Félix Fénéon’s ‘Novels in Three Lines’ as great Twitter fodder, plus some other related eye-openers.

  58. Without worrying about acting

    This week we’ve been behaving like children, starting Butoh classes, and I’ve been failing at handstands (still).

  59. Personal University

    The Personal MBA reading list has got me all excited.