Links and online oddities

My parents have set off on a road trip across the USA. They (and my two younger sisters) have been resident in the USA for many years and now my folks have no children at home they are taking the chance to see a bit more of that huge country. I’m following their progress on […]

Our Members of Parliament are supposed to be representing us, however most of us are too busy to be able to keep track of what is being said on our behalf by our local MP. They Work for You gives you an easy method to search on exactly what issues you local MP is speaking […]

I was intrigued by a banner on a web site and clicked it, to find Tell An American To Vote.
Most of the 7.1 million Americans living overseas do not vote. Now is your chance to tell them to! Just fill in your personal message below and we’ll send your American friends all the information they […]

Bruce rants,
people who give their kids place-names as first names, like ‘Chester’, ‘Paris’, ‘Bethany‘ or - especially irritating - ‘India’ or ‘Asia’. They should be forced to change their own name to ‘Thorngumbald’, ‘Pratts Bottom’, or ‘Swinket Mease Rigg’

I shall henceforth be known as Ms. Swinket Mease Rigg, thankyouverymuch … do you think I can […]

Simon asks, “What makes a geek?”, the answer so far appears to involve lego.
In other news, some people have way to much time on their hands (requires Quicktime and sound - via Bruce Lawson).

I’ve been wanting my mother to start blogging for ages as she has plenty of interesting things to say and finds some excellent web sites. She has just made her first ‘real’ post to Just Thinking about Theology and Society and I think it only right to officially welcome her to the blogosphere.

… only in KenyaAAA!
I’ve been singing this all day.

UserFriendly on the Google changes - despite the “redesign” Google is still full of font tags and other crud from yesteryear.

My t-shirts arrived yesterday from Threadless, I am currently wearing I Am Analog, and I also bought Y Bird. So I have clothes, without having to go into a shop … which is good.

Ma’hed lee qalleel d-Khayey d-Breeyaan, ellaa dlaa gukhkaa.

The counties that I have visited, shown in yellow on a map. Via John Davies, who is doing far better than I at touring the UK!

Made by marnanel
Map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey. © Crown copyright 2001.

People vs. Peer
“Ms. Ordinary” attempts to break the world record for charity fundraising (and to steal the glory from disgraced Peer Jeffrey Archer who is attempting to do the same)

My bookcrossing.com release kit arrived today, so I am all set to free up some shelf space by releasing some of my old books ‘into the wild’.

I met Hiran a few years ago, when a bunch of us used to meet up supposedly to talk about Dreamweaver UltraDev, he’s a funny chap and his blog makes entertaining reading - Hiran de Silva.

Despite my sister Alison being newly qualified as a doctor it’s not a family vocation and I try and stay away from all things medical, this article made me laugh though. I’ve definitely had a few UBIs in my time.

Face composer

Woman broils Apple Powerbook … the mind boggles … (via my Mother).

Kittens, weird but it made me laugh on a Monday moning. Via Glasshaus.

Find out which Ani Difranco album you are most like - I got:
You are to the teeth. You’re opinionated, somewhat stubborn… you like the world to know where you stand on everything, whether they want to know or not. Some might call you imflammatory, others enlightened. But isn’t everything just a matter of perspective?

Yeah .. […]

I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, mostly to do with web development, and in particular to do with web standards, there are some very clever people on the many of these mailing lists and so most of the time I lurk quietly reading, and learning a lot.
However, some folk (as a generalisation they […]

“Geez, I wonder what my name would be, if I were a Free Software package and someone made me part of Debian?” - if this question is keeping you up at night, discover your Debian Package Name right now. (I’m librachel-perl)

Netscape 7.0 Preview Release is out. I haven’t downloaded it yet, I’ll grab the Linux download overnight.
Jeff Gates’ writing about life, and particular in life with kids, boundaries and personal space touched a few chords over here .. definately a site I’ll be returning to again.(via Zeldman)

My mother, who is marvellous at finding interesting web stuff, sent me this link - The Political Compass. Interesting to see where your views put you. I end up slap bang in the middle of the libertarian left, but I doubt that would surprise anyone who knows me!

Drew has set up shop on CafePress… I particularly like the ladies tank top.

I’m drowning in it… I had a dream last night that I sent the wrong replies to various people’s emails. That would be bad. What’s worse is that I’m dreaming about email… aaaaaahhhh… go generate your own evil plan.

Respect for the guy who has recorded every beer that he has drunk since march 1988 (via Coudal partners )

This is what you get if you click through the link that says ‘first time here’, on the British School of Motoring Web site. Well thank you, now that you have instructed me on how to use the web and I have downloaded an insane variety of plugins, I may now attempt to find out […]

Al Sparber writes about software piracy, citing the places that allow people to remain anonymous on the net as a big cause of this problem. I don’t disagree on the fact that is the case, after all if we were all tied down to our IP and email address in the same way we are […]

The small person had her first taste of life-without-internet connection this weekend.
“Agh.. somethings happened to my pooter!” she yells, running into my room. An investigation revealed a ‘page cannot be displayed’ - the reason being the apparant demise of my ISDN provider.
The above meant a return to pay per minute internet access for the weekend, […]

I’ve added a ‘play’ section to this site, for random things I build. While updating the pages, my connection decided to bomb out so if you were on the site this morning and got loads of errors I was waiting to get back online to upload my includes! The play section is for just that […]

I like digging through the server logs from my sites. All sorts of interesting things are to be found.
In my referers for my business / web development site I find Croc o’Lyle a blog dedicated to usability, web design, information architecture and user experience practices, and also Elegant Hack a one-person website devoted to exploring […]

HTML is a wonderful thing … on websites … it is NOT so wonderful when it arrives in my inbox by way of html emails.
I don’t want your pretty pictures, bizarre fonts or your tasteful pink backgrounds. I certainly don’t want JavaScript and things loading from other servers, I would like to be able to […]

The world’s gone spam bonkers! Zeldman has collected a marvellous array of ways to beat the spambots, and my other half has coded a way to redirect known bots with ASP

The regular visitor will note the minor redesign, I hope you like it and it works for you. Check out the new about this site section for more info.
There is now an option for all those who hate the purple - try the high contrast stylesheet from the right hand panel.
I’m still fixing minor bugs […]

Lots of interesting writing being posted at Independents Day - Celebrating the independent web.
Speaking of good writing, I’m currently reading “Where Wizards Stay up Late - the origins of the internet”, totally fascinating, documenting a period in history that is within my own lifetime yet seems so distant from the net as we know it […]

SexRanks appeared in my referrer logs, its appearance has also been noted by Glen Murphy and at I Don’t Smoke. I then noticed that if you click through to that page, the referrer (where you have just come from) appears at the top of the ‘vote for this site’ list. Mystery solved, some of our […]

… over the next few days I will be moving this site from its current host, to a new hosting company, Chicagowebs.
Due to them being a US company and this being a .co.uk domain, I have the fun of trying to get Nominet to move the domain to a neutral tag… and I have no […]

BeerLog - marvellous.
I’ve been too busy too post, working away on a secret project, well its not really secret but it isn’t finished yet.

Lap Dance - requires Flash. Via the Women Designers list.

A shiny new month and a nice clean page to fill with random stuff.
Pixelsurgeon have been sending a fair bit of traffic my way since yesterday - I like digging through my referrers, I find loads of interesting sites that way.

The 1000 journal Project is a very cool idea. I love projects like this.

Just some of the nice people (in no particular order) who link to me.
Dreamweaverfever
Sooper Dooper
A site for Sore Eyes
Stumpy -p
Web Nouveau Table-less Sites List
Mo Morgan(dot com)
Dan Brusca
Fem.Mass
My 2p
Tired lil Brit Girl

What should I put on the fence? (dot com)
One bloke fights for the right to chain his bike to a fence so that he can cycle to work… by chaining all the objects that aren’t specifically mentioned in the bicycle banning notice to the fence - only in England do we see such marvellous […]

I don’t know if I’ll get to any this year… but all the memories of past festivals come flooding back with a little help from SeeThru

Stupid warning labels from actual products.
My favourite has to be
“Warning! This is not underwear! Do not attempt to put in pants.” — On the packaging for a wristwatch

Cute story - I used to have pet mice

Dogs in Elk - I am laughing so much my stomach hurts. How weird is this story?
Thanks to Not So Soft for pointing me to this one.

I love UserFriendly and today’s cartoon is a classic.

“My night of shame at the topless bar“. I love the cartoons =) Via Orbyn

Gnod - “Even if you don’t know what you are looking for - gnod will find it”. Via Designflea, which is also worth a visit.
Style and typography online. Interesting articles and ideas.

I love online tests, the sillier the better. This evening I did SeeThru’s ‘Are you a lesbian?‘ and the result is that I scored 120, according to SeeThru,
“Lezza, whatever. If it moves, you’ll consider it. You are either a greedy bisexual, or you are greedy-bisexual-curious. You want to have your cake and eat it. […]

My favourite so far has to be Plastic Bag Bondage. I guess they were a bit disappointed when they ended up here!
Also in my collection I have searchers for Old Woman Shopping Trolleys, and my favourite Sexy Babe of the Year 2001. Marvellous.

Katbot - very cool =)
Make sure you mute your sound if in the office though, you’ll never pass this off as work related

If you have spent much time reading blogs or online journals in the last few months, chances are you happened on Kaycee’s blog. Kaycee a 19 year old girl dying from cancer. Her writing touched many people, myself included.
Today, a revelation from her ‘mother’ Debbie.
“Her name was not Kaycee and she was not my daughter, […]

Independents Day - celebrating independent content and design. In my eyes the content and creativity brought to the web by people not in search of commercial gain is the best thing about this online world. Go sign up!

I looked at my logs today and noticed a large number of referers from a site called serbiancafe.com, being nosy I go and have a look. It appears to be an asp message board… I can recognise the words Copy Paste, IIS 5.0 and Visual Inter DEV .NET.. but I’d love to know why they […]

This made me remember that things could be worse …and made me giggle so I got funny looks from the guys in the office, thanks to Orbyn.com for that link

Thanks to Plasticbag for pointing me in the direction of Seethru which contains such delights as 10 commandments for net newbies. Lots of entertaining reading there.