It’s a bad idea to get super glue on your fingers, I discover, even if you don’t get stuck to anything. It messes up your fingerprints and you can’t log in to your phone any more!
If, on the other hand, you’re planning to commit a crime, it’s probably quite a good idea…
Today, as it happens, is our silver wedding anniversary.
It doesn’t feel much like one, because Rose is currently in the suburbs of Detroit helping to look after her parents, and will be getting on an economy transatlantic flight tonight, and I’m about to rent a van and shift some furniture around the M25! The traditional celebrations, you see.
We had a nice trip to Venice for our 20th anniversary, though, and so I told her we’d adopt a more decimal approach and do something nice for the 30th!
Rose probably won’t see this, since she reads neither my blog, nor Twitter, nor Facebook, but I think she knows I’m rather fond of her anyway! If the next quarter-century is as good as the last one, I’ll be a very lucky chap.
Christmas is a good time for looking back… Blog archives can help you do that…
🙂
A bit of movie trivia for you, linking two of the greatest films ever made…
Here’s Maria von Trapp with the children in The Sound of Music. All sing along: “The first three notes just happen to be…”
Now, you see that picturesque castle in the background? That’s Hohenwerfen Castle which, in a rather different climate (when you’d need more than old curtains to keep you warm), was the setting for Schloss Adler in Where Eagles Dare.
So now you know, and you can probably irritate your friends and family by pointing it out just as they’re really getting into the story…
This rather pretty sheep was wearing her new Christmas jewellery to breakfast.
This bold new installation at Wimpole Hall asks difficult — some would say provocative — questions about the role of traditional art forms in a modern world.
Echoing the delayed gratification of the wrapped Christmas gift, the artist seems to imply that the projection of the sculptor’s immediate intent onto the viewer’s consciousness is, in itself, best understood as an ephemeral dualism.
The exhibition runs throughout the winter, and there is no charge for admission.
I should read Terence Eden’s blog more regularly. There’s some good stuff on there.
What would you do if you turned up at a car hire company and realised you’d forgotten your UK driving licence, for example? He found a solution.
I sent an emoji today. Not quite my first, because various systems have been converting my colon-dash-parentheses into smiley or sad faces for some time, but I think it was the first time I’ve deliberately sent one knowing the recipient would see it as a picture.
In this case, it was a ‘thumbs up’, which I sent to John Naughton in reply to an incoming query, because I had my hands rather full at the time, and I could at least do that with a couple of taps on my watch. I guess they’re useful for that level of communication when you don’t have access to, say, a keyboard.
In general, though, I’m rather confused by this apparent belief that a return to hieroglyphics is a good idea, and that people are willing to send messages expressing emotions when they often have little idea of what the receiving party will actually see – this may be rather different from what you thought you sent. At least we didn’t have that problem with the clip-art of the 90s… and it still went out of fashion.
This is the way our communication technologies progress: first, we neglect spelling and grammar. Then punctuation goes by the board. Now we can abandon words altogether, and start using other people’s primitive pictures. Soon, I imagine, the internet will give us a way to say “Ug” while hitting each other with jawbones.
Still, for better or worse, Apple and others feel the need to issue complete operating system updates where new and improved emoji are the main feature. Did you know, for example, there is now an official unicode character for a man-with-slightly-dark-skin-getting-a-face-massage? It’s hard, looking back, to conceive that Proust, Hemingway and Dickens were all able to communicate so effectively when their character set didn’t include any face-massage symbols at all!
Still, if you want to know everything there is to know about the wonders of this new alphabet, then Emojipedia is a good place to start. And because they are actually official unicode characters, you can even use them in, say, URLs. This is completely valid, though your browser might not yet think so.
http://emojipedia.org/emoji/💆/
Try giving that address to somebody over the phone! Ah, but I guess the youth of today are unlikely to do that, because using a phone would also involve using words…
One of those ‘in case you’re Googling for it’ posts! This will probably be of little interest to anyone who doesn’t own both an iOS device and a BMW, but might be useful if you own both.
Also available on Vimeo if preferred.
A quick recommendation of the dBpoweramp software, if, like me, you should find yourself ripping large numbers of CDs.
My latest little screencast shows some of the things you might not have discovered in the Preview app on the Mac.
Also available on Vimeo here.
Jenna Wortham writes in the NYT Magazine about how being connected to everybody doesn’t necessarily make us more broadminded.
Excerpts:
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that Donald Trump could be elected president, but I was. I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, two of the most liberal places in the country. But even online, I wasn’t seeing many signs of support for him. How did that blindness occur? Social media is my portal into the rest of the world — my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels. And it completely failed me.
In hindsight, that failure makes sense. I’ve spent nearly 10 years coaching Facebook — and Instagram and Twitter — on what kinds of news and photos I don’t want to see, and they all behaved accordingly. Each time I liked an article, or clicked on a link, or hid another, the algorithms that curate my streams took notice and showed me only what they thought I wanted to see. That meant I didn’t realize that most of my family members, who live in rural Virginia, were voicing their support for Trump online, and I didn’t see any of the pro-Trump memes that were in heavy circulation before the election. I never saw a Trump hat or a sign or a shirt in my feeds, and the only Election Day selfies I saw were of people declaring their support for Hillary Clinton.
…
In April, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, addressed a room of developers about the importance of his social network. Facebook, he said, has the power to bring people together who might otherwise never have the chance to meet. “The internet has enabled all of us to access and share more ideas and information than ever before,” he said. “We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we are all better off for it.”
But that’s not what has happened.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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