Hi. I still use LJ, follow my friends and similar, but I've moved my main host to Dreamwidth now, and am crossposting everything to here, but asking people to comment there.

Mat Bowles.

It's still fully interoperative, the OpenID comment functions there are good and improving, and I can follow everything from both sites easily.

K, in no particular order...

• Scotland's interesting message to alien life


• Miss Freddie is talking about dice and music:

Been reading about indeterminacy (think John Cage), and I just had a thought. Dice Music. Assign each note to number on a D12(?). Roll. A lot. Assign lengths of notes, dynamics, other markings, to different dice. Even assign the choosing of instruments to the dice. Brass, Woodwind, Strings, Voices? Then Trumpets, Trombones etc...

What sort of dice can you get? D20s, D6... what else?

Interesting comments thread there, with some daft suggestions as to where to go next.

• wpts has launched a Does my web site suck checklist, the bulk of which I agree with wholeheartedly (and some of you will have read the draft of my forthcoming rant about flash sites and navigation already - Vincent agrees)


• dm_of_the_rings has the most recent episode upDwarven Diplomacy. If Gimli is to be comic relief, at least he can be cool comic relief. And yes, that feed address is just for the comic, the full feed is 20sidedtale, but I'm a little feeded out at the moment so I used my mighty Wordpress fu to just syndicate that category.
• On the other hand, just reading the comic feed means missing out on stuff like this review of the Fate Diablo II clone:

Fate is one game where I think the “clone” moniker is deserved. Fate is more or less a straight-up Diablo clone. It duplicates the mechanics and play style of Diablo II right down to having the same windows with the same information that are opened with the same hotkeys.

On the subject of Diablo: play_diablo, set up by theweaselking, I have every intention of joining in properly once I've gotten myself a decent connection speed.

• davidnm has decided to abandone pretence of being a serious scientists, and explains how we could be descended from alien colonists:

It goes like this. Suppose you want to colonise a planet, but you want to avoid either the War of the Worlds scenario (bumped off by native life) or the 'terraforming by accident' scenario (your intestinal flora or whatever outcompete everything else on the planet). Basically, you need to make your proposed colonists fit in with the local environment.

So, you find some local dominant species to use as a template.

OK, he's not being serious, but still...

• Some official communities are starting to show ads. I have nothing further to add to that statement, but isn't it great that they started doing so just before the annual State of the Goat on news?


• Was going to write this up properly but I doubt I'll ever get around to it so, lj_nifty: Using Firefox 2 to quickly add RSS feeds to your LJ account:

Firefox 2 has a nifty feature for easily subscribing to RSS feeds

Since discovering this feature hack, I've added over 50 new feeds to various filters. Hence me being a little feeded out; I keep meaning to cut down but, y'know, they're all so cool. I'm not sure if non-paid users can use it to discover new feeds, but if not, or if you want something set up, it's so easy to do I'm happy to oblige.

Phew, that was a longer one; question: Would people prefer I cut this sort of thing, or is having all the links there easily more preferable?

I've mentioned Vincent Flanders' wpts a few times before, but todays is particularly apposite given recent news and interest, plus more than a few of you reading this. Web Pages That Suck -- Examples of Bad Web Design:

As far as MMN goes, you're looking at a very expensive cut of meat -- she's got the money for the best Mystery Meat money can buy. She should have an obvious link to a site that would answer your questions because there are lots of folks like you who want just the facts.

The site in question? J. K. Rowling.

Because, as sites go, playing hangman to find out the answer to a news announcement? That's just crazy talk.

Meh, last day at work, last few hours in the office, I'm still trying to clear and sort my desk, it's more than a little weird...

K, I'm reading a comment notification from bagrec. We're talking about how we cut our hair. The things people listed in "Iain Dale's top blogs" talk about. Google gives me a sponsored link. It's entitled "Tony Benn". Y'know, of course I'm going to click that.

I get here. Y'know every so often I do a rant about bad web design? I've never before been prompted to submit to wpts. I have now. For an interesting experiment, once you've got past the splash page (yup, a splash page on a site updated yesterday - bad designer, no biscuit), look at the link descriptions, and increase the font size. You may not need to, as odds are it's already too big. I tend to browse with defaults for verdana at 15pt. Does the page even look readable to you?

(to increase font size, Fx users can use ctrl+mouseroller. I have no idea what IE users need to do. Opera/Safari users are smart enough to know the answer anyway, right?)

Y'know, I think there's some good content on that site. Someone has obviously put some effort into it. I, um, am giving up finding it. I mean, Benn's cool, and I agree with the quote on the splash page completely, but, well, that site isn't.

No, thought not. If, however, you are a fan, offer to redesign their website for them?
Courtesy of wpts
Web Pages That Suck we give you Whitesnake.Com.

Be warned if you're on dial up and haven't got flashblock installed though.

In other, more serious news, boingboing_feed, it's looking like media bias in the Katerina coverage is sinking to a new level; white people taking stuff from grocery stores are "finding food", black people are of course "looting". If in a disaster area and you can't get out, the only source of sustenance you can find is in an abandoned store. Is that really looting?

And draxarpoints out that I linked to the wrong story, above link fixed, the other one indicates that the evacuation plan itself may have been racist and was most certainly neglect to the poor. If true, I don't know which disgusts me more :-(