Back at the end of February, when San Francisco was allowing same-sex couples to marry, I bookmarked a link that I wanted to comment on. I never did get to comment, but the pictures remain moving enough in their own right: http://www.ephemera.org/justly/
I mentioned the other day that I had a new picture to upload at The Mirror Project and then forgot to link to that picture – so this post corrects that!
Last Saturday, PY and I went to St Albans to meet some friends. While we were there we went to the Roman theatre of Verulamium (which, I am reliably told was found in 1847).
Built in about 140AD it is the only example of its kind in Britain, being a theatre with a stage rather than an Amphitheatre. Initially, the arena would have been used for anything from religious processions and dancing, to wrestling, armed combat and wild beast shows. From about 180AD the stage came into greater use and the auditorium extended. By about 300AD, after some redevelopment work, the Theatre could seat 2000 spectators. [Source]
The sign amused me – I got to imagining lots of chariots rushing past with urgent messages from the Emperor at some distant end of the road until I was reminded it was a thoroughly modern sign aimed at us!
2004: Web Mail
I don’t use branded webmail systems a great deal. All my mail is handled by my hosting provider, which provides a thoroughly adequate web-based mail service for times when I am not using an email client. Still, with all the web ramblings about Google’s Gmail service, I thought I would review some of my web-based mail services and see what was in them and realised that most of the accounts have long since been removed or disabled due to lack of use.
To my mind, the premier web-based service is Fastmail, which is a very well thought-out and usable mail service. If you’re looking for a new mail provider, you should seriously consider them, and there’s no advertising!
The only other service active is Yahoo Mail – simply because I have had that for ages, and it used to be my way of reading normal mail accounts in a browser. Some of my mailing service lists still go here. Today I logged on and reviewed some of the settings and cleared out some of the junk, and I realised it is an excellent mail service. I really like their new feature AddressGuard, which allows for disposable email addresses that can be removed if they receive too much spam.
So, will I sign up for a Gmail account to compare it? You bet I will.
Earlier in the week, my fifteen-minute train journey was delayed due to overrunning engineering works. Any regular traveller on the South West Trains suburban lines into London Waterloo station will be used to these delays after weekends or bank holidays. I know it’s so likely that I even plan for it and force myself out of bed and to the station a little earlier if I know there have been engineering works nearby.
As always, some people are caught off guard by this, or perhaps they use it as a cover for the fact that they are running late. It’s amazing how many mobile phone conversations announce that the caller will be late for the office/appointment/meeting due to how late the trains are, when, in fact, there is no more than a ten-minute delay (which, when using London’s transport infrastructure, you should be accounting for anyway).
Earlier this week, however, there was a well-spoken gentleman in my carriage who insisted on calling – what appeared to be – most of his mobile phone contact book to let them know just how late he was. He also said that Justin would have to take the meeting (if Justin ever reads this, the gentleman in question claimed to have confidence that you wouldn’t screw it up, which I thought sounded good for you). All very well, but I didn’t want to know it.
The conversation was irritating, and irritation is always enhanced when a train is late (even if you have planned for it because others haven’t, and civilised behaviour goes out the window). The conversation, however, was loud, but each one was brief and to the point and without any pointless small-talk. The gentleman was efficient in his conversations and factual. He was, however, still irritating.
So I started looking for items on irritation factors caused by mobile telephony, only to find that Jakob Nielsen has some research on ‘Why Mobile Phones are Annoying‘ which implies that, upon testing, conversations face-to-face at the same volume are less irritating than the equivalent mobile conversation. The research suggests,
Designing phones that encourage users to speak softly will reduce their impact on other people. For example, more sensitive microphones and improved quality on incoming audio will make most users less inclined to shout.
[source]
Let’s hope Nokia et al. are listening.
I may have had Porche gadget envy earlier in the week but trust me, I missed neither the DVD nor the Jacuzzi in this one: DVD and jacuzzi in one [link]
via ohlalaparis
In other news, Take That are to get back together for the first time since their split in 1996. The article also notes that Mark Owen has been dropped by his record label.
UPDATE 25 April: Apparently Not.
UPDATE 30 April: It may be on again now but former member Robbie Williams will not be joining the band.
Perhaps it’s a little sad that the first thing that jumped out at me from this item at Engadget was the phone, not the car.
“But we think there’s a reason they decided to roll with the Treo 600 for the promotional photos”
Indeed.
Bloglines makes reading other sites quick and easy – as long as those sites provide a full RSS feed. I use it daily. However, you do miss site redesigns. Jase has had a minor change, which looks pretty good.
And just in case anybody is wondering about some of the design looking slightly strange here at Listen to Musak, well, it’s because I am doing some re-design work, and I’ve had to make some minor tweaks for the new design, which has thrown some of this design. If I were better at CSS, that shouldn’t be a problem, but I am not!
Of course, I’ve also found a good number of problems as I have been going through the site, which I am trying to fix as I go along, so hopefully, things will end up working better as well.
On Wednesday, I read about the launch of Amazon’s new A9 search service, so, of course, I had to go geekwise and try searching on the word ‘musak‘ to find this site nicely up the rankings. Why did I waste a few minutes doing that?
In addition, I searched on some other terms which would link to some of my sites and found a pointer to an entry I made at The Mirror Project. It seems the picture was chosen by a guest curator to be included in the Real Smooth Shave collection. In turn, that reminds me I have a new image to post there.