I don’t like being called paranoid. It has negative connotations for me. You could say I’m a bit paranoid about being labelled paranoid ;-).
But when I voice things like how PR firms keep dossiers about journalists, I inevitably attract the label by those who are lucky enough to live away from the media bubble. Unfortunately, it’s not a figment of my overactive imagination, as demonstrated by this fascinating account from Wired:
The story: Wired journalist Fred Vogelstein was accidentally sent his dossier in an email.
Aside from the contents of the dossier, the original interview ironically centred around a case study about organisational blogging and corporate transparency.
I’m listening to Eva Cassidy’s version of Over the Rainbow at the moment. There are a couple of songs that are so simply gorgeous that I spontaneously burst into tears every time I hear them. This is one.
The other is Gabriel by Lamb. If I had to chose one favourite song, this may well be it. Sob!
Except online. I hate it when my fave websites haven’t been updated for a while. So sincere apologies for not updating this one. You see, my jog last Saturday turned up some really interesting things in relation to the SMH photo taking article, and I was writing a long rant about it all when I accidentally closed the Safari window, and the erstwhile browser didn’t remind me that I had other tabs open. Grrr. It was a very witty and inciteful post, too, and I was so upset I couldn’t stomach updating Swandives for more than a week.
Hmmm….just looked up the meaning of erstwhile and found I was using it incorrectly. Somehow, I’d formed the opinion that it meant something like worthy, commendable etc (and I was using it above with irony). But it doesn’t. And here’s the really weird thing…I actually use Firefox most of the time on the Mac anyways, so it really is erstwhile in that respect.
But enough rambling. Here’s a few things I’m liking right now:
* The news of Nathaniel’s coming into the world - congrats to Leah and Matt
* I’m re-reading Jane Austen’s Emma - again. I had to study it for the HSC many years ago and it’s still my fave JA novel. This time round I’m revelling in all the little nuances that I missed in the first three readings.
* I’ve started running at lunch times, with daylight saving gone and it being darker in the evenings.
I am supposed to be out running this morning. Which I am going to do - I’m just waiting for my meagre brekkie to go down and doing a bit of browsing in the meantime. And I came across this very interesting article by SMH photographer Jon Reid about the legality of taking photos. I’m linking to it here because I’ve had similar conversations with people (including people at work) who think that you can’t just snap away at anybody. It’s a personal bugbear to be told I’m wrong when I know that I’m correct; a character flaw that I should have gotten over by now, but sadly haven’t.
At the risk of sounding like a total scammer, I am lunching on these gorgeous, FREE sandwiches. They were left over from a lunch pow-wow at work and put in the tearoom under a first-come-first-served basis. Not being able to wait until 1pm rolled round I took my tinned salmon and wholemeal roll to the tearoom to whip up a bitta nosh, and woah! Instant sangas! Woohooin!
Has Google lost its mojo?
I’ve been pondering this one lately as, completely anecdotally, search results seem a bit…well…dull. It may not be a problem with the big G, rather crap info on the internet, but surely, in this big wide world of the web, there’s better info out there than that which is being returned under the guise of search results.
Have you noticed how orange and green are the colours du jour for blogs?
Witness this page. Tis designed by Beccary and I like it coz it’s so pretty. And I love the colours.
And perhaps because of this design I noticed that many websites these days are using the same colours to great effect. The really weird thing is that I’m generally a fan of neither green nor orange, being more of the blue, purple persuation. But it just looks so darn good.
In Australia, Network Ten (bless it, note the irony) buried this show somewhere in the wee small hours, and did the usual thing of not running episodes some weeks when it suited them. So I missed the second series. And I love this show - it’s clever and interesting and incorporates all the things I love about sci-fi. I’m gonna buy the DVDs of the series as soon as I work out a place to put them.
In the meantime, I’ll be availing myself of the Battlestar Galactica Videomaker Toolkit over at Scifi.com. It’s simply awesome. It’s a heap of visual, sound and music clips that you can use to make yourself a Galactica movie.
You can then upload the vid to the site, but I strongly advise reading the terms and conditions that apply coz they’re a wee bit scary and include words such as irrevocable, non-exclusive, exploit and sell.
* Had lunch with Sal yesterday at this fab-u-lous little japanese place in the city. Was great to catch up and the food was yumoo - and healthy. That doesn’t happen too often.
* Japanese yesterday kicked off a mini-japanese craze in my food cravings. I’m currently eating instant miso soup…mmm
* News.com.au has this great article about hate on the internet. I’ve been meaning to post something on this whole internet flaming phenomenon for a while now…and I will do so….sometime…when I get my act together. It’s a topic I feel strongly about and will elaborate when I have more time (and I’m not distracted by yummo miso soup..mmm).
* I’m not sure that I lost any weight last week, but I don’t think I gained either. Nothing significant anyhow. I’m a tad disappointed since the primary aim here is loss but, on the bright side, perhaps my body is saving it all up for a hefty total loss next week.
and I was so upset I couldn’t stomach updating Swandives for more than a week.
