I’m not sure why, but the Sunday Roast has become almost a repository for all my research links lately. I think it’s time I resurrected my del.icio.us account! (Or tried Magnolia again – so pretty). For now though I’m just going to throw those weird social computing/archaeology/wiki/you-WHAT-now?! links that have caught my research eye into the mix with the rest. I will try and flag them up so those of you on the lookout for fun over brain stretching can give them a wide birth, but they are worth a read even if you’re not feeding your research beast like me.

And mine isn’t even an official research beast! Damn Neko and her suggestion that I just do some reading on the side…

Anyway, this is a “Monday Meal” for reasons already enumerated (and check out the comments on that post, btw, for a great tangent into English literature versus language). If you’re curious, the exam went ok(ish). I had to write a letter to my brother about being a governess. Well, I like writing, I have a brother, and I’ve read Jane Eyre a time or ten, so that bit went fine! The analysing of what I’d done was a bit ropier, but then it always is. I got quite attached to my little governess. She had a back story and everything in my head so I could write a convincing letter.

Just a pity we weren’t getting points for originality 😉

News Stuff

Anyone who has had the stupidity to ask “how is it going at work Cas?” lately has already been on the receiving end of my IT rant. Let it just be said that I’m not surprised at the findings of this report.

Skoda have been running an awesome advert lately for the Skoda Fabia where they create the car out of cake… BBC News has a great breakdown of it.

What happens when a mother joins Facebook (thank the lord I’m safe from THAT horror – it was bad enough when my brother commented on Bright Meadow!)

Now I’m a tech-savvy kinda gal. I know enough tricks to get XP to sit up and beg. I can code a semi-decent website out of the ether. I’ve even been known to wrangle the odd bit of Python into a half useable wiki. But show me a VCR and I just can’t get it. No matter how many times she shows me, Moose still always ends up programming it. Digital cameras used to be the same, but I’ve got my head around them now. Not much gets past me in the digital world (at least once I’ve had half an hour to sit down with it and break it in peace and quiet) so I’m in two minds about this NYT piece. So they stress that there are ways to make gadgets ‘women friendly’ other than making them pink but… why do gadgets HAVE to be women friendly? Surely if you make a gadget easy to use it appeals to BOTH genders equally?

For those of you who need two platforms, the new release of Parallels is sounding even better.

Not to be outdone by the Germans who are content with pushing people down the autobahn whilst safe inside a car (google some combination of Smart Car and Autobahn for the story), the Americans have to push a man in a wheelchair.

There’s been a Cabinet Office report that calls for the opening up of public data. Yay and all that jazz, though bad choice of post codes as an example. Post codes are NOT public data. They are proprietary property of Royal Mail and boy do they make you pay for them!

From around the Web

I think it was Rich on Facebook who clued me into this one – the London Book Project is a great idea for spreading good literature by leaving copies of books on the Tube and seeing who picks them up. It’s enough to make me want to go to London to see if I get a book! It reminds me of the backpacking hostels I’ve stayed in over the years that had bookshelves filled with books previous backpackers had left behind. The books were there for you to read whilst you were in the hostel or to take away with you on your travels if you so wished, but the unstated understanding always was that if you had a book you’d finished, you left it at a hostel for someone else to enjoy. You passed it on. A great philosophy 🙂

It turns out, Farenheit 451 is not about censorship after all, but about how television is killing books. OK, so Ray Bradbury is the author so we should listen to what he says, but is it also up to us the reader to bring our own meanings to books? Isn’t that why Shakespeare has survived so long, because we keep bringing new interpretations to the text?

But yeah, I found that interesting.

Got a large wall you want covering in a huge poster, but can’t print bigger than A4? Worry not! The Rasterbator is here! (And try typing THAT one ten times fast whilst drunk 😉 )

A brilliant video explaining RSS in plain english (via Nils)

I think I’ve asked for these before, but nothing happened, so I’m asking again: can I have these Tetris fridge magnets please?

Doing some background reading on Wikipedia, I came across a few interesting pages (and can I take this opportunity again to state how much I *loathe* MediaWiki and all it’s demon spawn?):
Wikipedia: Statistics
Active Wikipeidans

Photosynth has crossed my radar a few times lately – the first time in a room of some very excited Archaeologists, bless their little cotton socks, it was like Christmas had come early – and now they are collaborating with the BBC. If you haven’t heard of Photosynth, it’s a tool to create three dimensional representations from flat photographs and… OK, so that doesn’t sound very sexy, but TRUST ME, it will get your geek on.

What are YOU doing in December? (I might be pretending I’m still an Archaeologist 😉 )

Movie Goodness!

I Am Legend – I read the book a month or so back. Short, but full of spine tingling terror, and I suspect on future readings it will be even better/worse. This could make a bloody good movie, though I’m dreading a ‘Hollywood’ ending.

And that’s me done for this week. I’m off to bask in the nostalgic goodness that is the original series of Battlestar Galactica (oh that hair!) and to quietly wig out at my email inbox once again. Yes, the time has come for Cas to possibly accept if you talk long enough, people will listen, but… I’m a blogger! We observe and comment! We don’t do!

OK, so this isn’t the Sunday Roast, but I figured I’d at least let give you an explanation this time as to why you’re not getting what you’re all starting to rely on.

I have an exam tomorrow that I have to do some frantic last minute revision for. Yes, I could have done revision and/or written the Roast during the day, but, well, I woke up late and then went into town for coffee.

Much more fun than revision and, if I’m being truly honest here, much more fun than writing the Roast!

I shan’t keep you hanging in there too long though. You have my word that when I get home from the exam tomorrow I shall knuckle on down and write you that Roast. And now, I am off to do what I should have been doing for the last few weeks, which is revise English Language like crazy. To think, I paid and volunteered for this torture!

It seems that a few of you are a little narked that I didn’t Roast anything last Sunday. My explanation is that I got taken away for the day to paddle on the beach and look at some old cars. I had a lovely time playing with my SLR, wasting rolls of film, getting hypothermia, and not blogging for the day.

Whilst I did neglect y’all shamelessly, on the plus side, you get a bumper Roast to make up for it this week 😀

Things in the News:

Forgive me if I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but Keele university is joining the crowd of those cracking down on Facebook. Perhaps because I can’t access Facebook at work (SurfControl considers it “dating” *rolleyes*) I’m not all together surprised. I will ask what are “legitimate ways to express dissatisfaction”? There are plenty of times when you just need to vent steam without lodging a formal complaint. Hell, the number of times we sat in the courtyard and spouted off about our lecturers at Uni! How does Facebook differ? (I know the answer: permanency, I’m just posing a hypothetical).

On a related note, I read something this past week about the differing natures of web control between East and West. Something along the lines of the difference between restricting personal opinions, who-can-say-what-and-where, copyrighted data etc, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. Sadly Google still can’t read my brain to find me what I want when my query is so ill defined.

*edit*

Oh, web serendipity, how I love thee! Found it. Read, think about, discuss at your leisure 🙂

Privacy on the Net is a big thing for a lot of people. Personally I’m making peace with the whole thing – yes, people could gather one hell of a lot about me online, but why the frell would they actually want to!? – but whether such a pragmatic approach is wise is another matter. Until the day I decide to take up the fight for myself, at least the EU is stepping up.

In keeping with my Facebook exploration, is it possible to be too old for networking?

One smart chap in the States has invented a way of tracking graffiti. And here was me thinking it could be done with some pins in a map.

There’s been a teeny bit of broo-ha-ha this week over Google’s new Street View and the identifiable pictures of people that are cropping up. Privacy concerns and all that. Go else where for reasoned debate on this subject – I’m linking to this NYT story for the sole reason of the quote they use in the second paragraph:

“If the government was doing this, people would be outraged”

I’m sorry honey, but what makes you think the government AREN’T doing this? Who do you think owns/controls the satellites that Google gets its images FROM?

Web-Bits:

Liverpool museum a while back launched an exhibition partly using Flickr pictures to build an idea of how Liverpool was/is. Now Tate Britain is joining in on the act and you can still take part.

This has GOT to be breaking the law, or at least a few health & safety guidelines.

You know it’s been a bad week at work when your minions are emailing you things for the roast – We Has Tribbles and Also Troubles (thanks illyna – *hugs* sweetie 🙂 )

You know Wikipedia has hit the mainstream when government websites are linking to it (click on the links to the Gunning Fog and Flesch-Kincaid tests). Where do I start to say what is wrong with this? It’s a government website linking to information that anyone can edit and alter. Yes, wisdom of the group etc. You can argue that the information is self correcting. Any gross errors will be found and corrected. But Wikipedia has no authority other than that we grant it. It is wonderful to get background on an idea, but it is not the final answer, or at least it never should be and to point to it from a government page that is meant itself to be a resource? It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Wikipedia and the web.

Feel free to argue with me on this point of course – it’s why I love the field. We’re making the rules up as we go along. (And thanks to Moose for finding it in the first place and pointing it out to me).

My Head Hurts.

Is the web for you about information or relationships? I suggest you also read the comments on Liz’s excellent post.

Which in turn brings me to something Neko said to me a few weeks back as we basked in the sun (I paraphrase):

They’re not exactly comments on your blog, are they? I mean, often it’s a whole new conversation. That’s what I like about it and what I think it’s all about – getting people talking.

To say I could have kissed her then and there is an understatement. She gets it. I made the decision early on to always respond to comments here on Bright Meadow – as well as just being polite, it means I’m not just talking to the dog. I keep forgetting that this isn’t, actually, the norm. I’ve commented on more than a few blogs lately where my comment was just ignored: one case in particular springs to mind because it was the first time I’d dared to comment on this blog. I’m a reluctant commenter at the best of times and to be ignored so totally, not just by the blog owner but by the other commenters… Well, it crystalised two things for me: 1) I won’t be commenting there again and 2) how lucky I am here at Bright Meadow. Y’all seem to get it as well. *hugs* to the lot of you, and now go spread the word.

Movies to (possibly) see:

The Kingdom – my personal distaste of violence and war aside, this looks like it could be worth a watch. Or it could be one huge diatribe why America is great, how the entire Middle East is one terrorist breeding ground, and how the good old USA needs to go stomping over the place armed with rocket launchers. Or am I just being cynical?

Fido – zombies as slaves…

Rise: Blood Hunter – nothing like a good vampire flick to make a girl excited.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets – so the first movie was more than a little pants, but Nic Cage… The first two thirds of the trail are boring as hell, what with all the exposition and the golden writing, but it’s worth it for the few seconds of live action you get. Funny.

And that’s me finished for the day. To look at this post you wouldn’t think it’s taken me near four hours to write, but it has, so you’d better bloody enjoy it! 😉