Internet People are Real People

There's a curious feeling in non-geeks that "internet people" (as in, people you're only ever likely to meet in a virtual sense, on forums, in chatrooms, and if you're really tech-savvy, some sort of VOIP) aren't "real people". They know this isn't true of course, they're not quite like the characters you meet in single player games, all scripted dialogue and simple action-response AI. But somehow the impression they're less than real persists, they seem to be 2D in some way.

Thats a rather long-winded introduction to the following links, a pair of my favourite recent discoveries: Merlin Mann - how can you not like a guy called Merlin? - who runs 43Folders.com a blog-cum-productivity advice site; and Jonathan Coulton a ex-coder musician who releases his work under a creative commons license, and whose excellent catalogue includes Code Monkey and the credits song for Valve's Portal, you probably have to play the game - and you really should - to fully appreciate the genius of the song though. So here's the guys, (and this is the link) being entirely too human and interesting for "internet people".

Part 1
Part 2

Billions and Billions

This Oooooooooold, but you gotta love StumbleUpon... no wait, I meant, you gotta love John Stewart's ability to sum up the absurdity of the world. This one is on Us Foreign Policy over the last couple of decades. Reminds me somewhat of a story from my childhood, about a carpenter making a table. When he's finished, he found one leg was a little too short... so he chopped a bit off all the others... only now one of the others was too short, so he chopped a bit more off the longer legs... and so on until he presumably ended up with a coffee table or a crude version of garden decking. For a very small garden.

Reading List

One of the many cool features of GoogleReader is the ability to tag posts as public, and share them with your friends. So eye's right for "Sanity Inside", a list of things I've recently found informative, entertaining or thought provoking.

In other news, I'm crazy busy at work (and more than a little stressed), so despite yet another resolution to post more often (although I expect everyone has long since given up reading my blog if they've not added it to some form of RSS reader), I've had neither the time nor energy to do anything even half worth posting about. I noticed a nice view of the Yorkshire Wheel though an arch in the wall on the way home last night, so maybe I'll take a picture on my way home and post that. Not sure how it'll come out, it'll be an interesting experiment!

Season of Colour

Autumn is the season when, realising the bleak greyness of winter is fast approaching, Nature has a last frantic display of colour. Take away the rapidly shrinking daylight hours and general dampness that's associated with it and autumn is easily my favourite season. I guess that shows me up for the hopeless romantic that I am.

I love the pictures of miles of rolling New England hillsides coloured in pretty much every shade but green, like nature's very own fireworks show. I'm not really a tree-hugging hippy type, but every so often you've got to look around you and be amazed at the the world.

This is a picture I took on the way into town this morning. I've been contemplating snapping the tree on the way in to work all week - at the start of the week the bight morning sun lit it up so that it shone a bright yellow with the York Minster in the background. I've always been late for work, or traffic has been in the shot, etc, so I've not taken it. Unfortunately it's now dropped most of it leaves, and it doesn't quite work, so I've had to made do with the leaves on the ground. Also, I managed to lose the sun for a few minutes when I took this one, so it came out a little greyer than I'd have liked.

Never mind, Nature will be doing these galas of colour this time every year for all eternity. That is of course, providing mankind manage not to stuff things up too much more than we already have.