I can’t decide if these maps of the internet look organic – like some kind of monofilament web spun in technicolour; or galactic, some kind of nebulae…
Archive for November 2003
I go through phases of having music in the background while I’m working, but the usual pattern is for the first CD to finish and three hours of silence to elapse before I realise. The CD player is the other side of the room, which is just far enough for it to be beyond notice when things go quiet. FM radio in this area isn’t brilliant either, despite the fact that the apartment block has an external antenna.
Then I stumbled across streaming radio, after hooking up external speakers to the laptop base station. Problem solved – hiss-free continuous background music, and a wider selection of genres and styles you couldn’t wish for. Current favourite for building websites to is www.gaydarradio.com, which is exactly the kind of bouncy cheesy borderline hi-nrg pop you’d expect…
The BBC says
“The sound of your mobile ringtone could be in for a big change if a new service proves as popular in Europe as it has been in South Korea. Korean firm WiderThan’s service lets users choose what the person they are calling hears when their mobile rings. “
Clever idea, but anyone using it to call me is likely to be disappointed – my phone goes “ring ring” in a style last seen in 1995, so any other noises just get subconciously filtered. It takes me about 6 months to get used to a change in ring tone that I’ve made, so if a caller expects me to respond because they’re alerting me with the William Tell overture, they’re probably going to be disappointed…
…is Epitonic – ‘your source for cutting edge music’, as the site banner puts it. Normally that would have me expecting the sound of piano keys being hit at random while a warbling soprano rattled her key ring (ok, there is some of that) but a lot of the content is suprisingly good – and it’s in MP3 format and it’s free. Now all I need is the iPod…
But only for 50 minutes this evening. Having left the clubhouse with the group that appeared to be either a) in a real hurry to get somewhere or b) chased by something with very sharp teeth, my legs caught up with me somewhere just after Millennium Bridge and started complaining about the abuse they were getting. As I wasn’t the only one in the same condition, the group gradually fragmented, and I ended up with a minor gaggle cutting things short and heading down Ousegate rather than making the whole (and much, much longer) city centre loop.
If the initial pace had been a bit slower I’d probably have managed to push things out a bit further, but I was into my mid-run stride by the time we’d turned the corner past the northern end of the racecourse. That’s about 3 miles sooner than it would normally happen, which wasn’t a good sign. Sub 6-minute miles are all very well, but only for short distances.
