A beautifully put together and well-argued article from Craig Mod about the future of books. I particularly like his methodology of splitting text into ‘Formless’ and ‘Definite’ categorisations, and I think he’s right about the relative value of printed materials for those categories.
Have a read, it’s thought-provoking stuff.
[video]
An Unlikely Twitter Synchronicity between Mr Samuel JOHNSON and Ms Kirstie ALLSOP ‘Pon the subject of the BRIT awards.
So in the whirl of getting ready for our big move to Scotland and the excitement of finding a new flat (omg, it’s huge), we somehow didn’t notice until the other day that we really only have one weekend left in London. Nearly six years for me and three for Valerie will be over pretty soon. All of a sudden things we’ve been meaning to do for years have become things we’ll probably do on a future trip to London, rather than when we actually live here. We haven’t left yet, but the days are literally numbered.
So, now we’re in limbo, the house is full of boxes and pretty soon we’ll be waking up to a medieval castle in the distance and clean, cold, drinkable water in the tap. Blogging has been and will remain pretty light here while I work hard to make the move a success (my new office in Edinburgh is lovely and I’m getting very familiar with the East Coast mainline as I begin to work with Scottish clients) and we both get our little shoebox of a house packed away, but after that you may see a fair few posts as I reacquaint myself with the city of my birth.
I can’t wait for the move, but I’ll admit to a few melancholic moments as I’ve gazed at London’s skyline from various high places these last few weeks. It’s a big, dirty, noisy, smelly expensive madhouse of a place, but it’s been an education.
Old school Irn Bru cans rule.
“Tomorrow, it’s Prague - and if it’s possible to have too much pork or too much beer, this is where that would happen. As you’ll see, I hope, it’s spectacularly beautiful there and the food, while a bit on the heavy side, is, in fact, delicious. But if ever a place had me craving a salad, this was it. If you commit a homicide as a vegan, they should sentence you to the Czech Republic. That would teach you the error of your ways. Death by sausage.” — Anthony Bourdain
“I am a coder, and I learned my chops on systems of type X, ergo any new coders and tinkerers of the futures can and should discover their passion for code the same way. Change is bad because I can’t contemplate the possibility that anything but the systems and standards I grew up with will produce coders. And therefore everything must remain the same and all devices and systems must be identically open so that one day, somewhere, a new coder may be born. Because any encounter with a closed or proprietary system will break their little hearts and doom software development for ever.”
John Scalzi on the latest AmazonFail -
A very succint and useful analysis of the spat between MacMillan and Amazon over the weekend. I’ve bought books and countless other products from Amazon for years - indeed, they were my first and only online shopping experience for most of last decade.
Now, however, I’ll be getting my games, music and DVDs from Play.Com and my books from Waterstone’s, when I don’t just go out and buy them from my local bookshop.
Xkcd today is wonderful, but heartbreaking.
Hell Yeah Friday Night Shopping.