And it’s that time again. Technically it is Sunday lunchtime, but because I’m still sitting here in my PJ’s, drinking a fruit smoothie and feeling ever so slightly rough around the edges thanks to Neko & Co, I’m going to persist in thinking it is ‘morning’ till I’ve had my shower, made myself respectable, and taken myself off the Apple Store to see if they can work out why my trusty iPod is loosing ten minutes each day. Now loosing ten minutes a day on your iPod really shouldn’t be such a major thing, but it is bugging me because my iPod is my alarm clock. Not for me being woken each morning by the harsh, clarion call of synthetic bells jangling discordantly in my eardrums. Oh no. Instead I come to consciousness gently, to the strains of some favourite mellow music. So when my iPod is loosing time each day, this causes me a problem, because I rely on the iPod to wake me up each morning. Plus I really don’t want to have to buy a new one.

Other than that, I have one more thing to get out of my system and then we can continue - I met William Gibson’s UK publicist-type-person! < moment of sheer cyberpunk geek-out pleasure / >

OK, I’m good to go now. Enjoy
The world this week
The cash machine was invented by a Scots man, as all the great inventions were.

I’ve been taking Echinacea for several years now, as have other people I know, and we can all say anecdotally that we’ve had fewer and less severe colds, but now it’s been scientifically proven.

Clearly my penguin obsession has filtered through to y’all, because five separate people took it upon themselves to tell me about the discovery of a giant penguin. This is just the first evidence that once penguins ruled the world and should be taken as a warning that they will soon be trying again…

It’s not often that a book review in the NYT catches my interest, and it’s even less often that a non-fiction book reviewed in the NYT catches my interest, but The Cult of the Amateur has peaked my interest. The purported premise - that the rise of the amateur in Web 2.0 is dangerous - intrigues me because it chimes with some things I’m thinking of at the moment. I’d be interested to read this if only to see what his arguments actually are (and yes I know I’ve used ‘interest’ far too many times in this paragraph, but it’s a Sunday and my creative writing skills are still fast asleep in bed).

The poor NFL is withdrawing from Europe because no one is watching or even interested. Funny that. We have these two sports called Football (soccer if you’re American) and Rugby. The first requires skill. The later is American Football for grownups - it also requires skills and, unlike the wimpy American game, they don’t wear more padding than the average soldier on deployment in Afghanistan.

Bytes and Pieces
Emil has, as always, good tips on how to check if your site is ‘accessible’.

So I’m a huge fan of the Die Hard movies - can’t get enough of ‘em, and seeing a trailer for Die Hard 4.0 at the cinema is often more exciting than the film I’ve gone to watch - but I never figured on the collateral damage in the movies before.

It’s great to see that Nils has we and truly got his blogging mojo back - his comparison of the different social networking sites had me giggling like a nutter (or GLAN’ing to make Neko happy).

Some people, it turns out, are incapable of getting places on time. Me, I’m not one of them. I think mainly because of my insanely organised mother, I have to be early everywhere. Yes, I can think of a few instances later where I’ve been a few minutes late but that was always due to circumstances beyond my control. This WikiHow article claims to have some useful pointers for the chronically late among you. It might be so, but I have an issue with point two and its reliance on time pieces. I don’t wear a watch and I haven’t for many years. I don’t have multiple clocks around the house or on my desk at work - the only clocks I look at with anything approaching regularity are the one on my mobile phone and the one on my computer taskbar. But, and I stress this, I rarely look at them. Tasks take as long as they take and I don’t rule my life by minutes/hours. Yes, there are certain things that have to be done at certain times (meetings to get to, tv shows to watch, buses to catch) but once I know the fixed points in my day I’m good to go. I don’t really have much of a point to make, but I do recommend trying to go without a watch for a few days. Once you get used to it, it is very liberating.

I don’t want an iPhone, I want a Helio Ocean - if, you know, I had to go for a multi-function device. As it is, I’m fine with using my phone just for calls and texts and only checking email etc when I’m at a computer. Call me old fashioned that way.

Here’s a nice article on Creative Commons and publishing (book publishing for the premise of the article, but the points are pertinent for other fields).

There aren’t the words to describe how glad I am that strange things happen to people other than me. It makes me think the fates aren’t just picking on little old me.

Filmy Goodness
I recommend you go to One Race Films and look at the video for Babylon AD (alas I can’t link direct). Yes, I’m a bit of a Vin Diesel fan.

And now it’s time I got dressed and headed to the Apple Store. Wish me and my poor aged iPod luck!