Monthly Archives: January 2006

Streaked lighting

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Yeah, I know it looks like a double exposure, but it’s not. It’s Art (capital A). Or, if you prefer, wacky lighting on a building on London’s South Bank.

Wireless!

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Neat use of Photoshop. It’s an ad for the Nikon Coolpix P-1 digital camera — which can upload pictures via WiFi.

Kennedy’s little secret

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The BBC’s Political Editor writes in his Blog:

It was – people say – Westminster’s worst kept secret. I refer, of course, to Charles Kennedy’s drinking.

The implication, therefore, is that we political reporters conspired to keep it that way – a secret. Hold on a second. Not so fast. There is a big, big difference between knowing that Charles Kennedy drank a lot and knowing that he had a drink problem and was undergoing treatment.

I knew the first but certainly did not know the second. The same is true of all the political reporters I know and all but Charles Kennedy’s closest circle. I knew that Mr Kennedy sometimes drank more than he should. I could see that for myself and I heard it from those who worked closely with him.

Dave’s domain name

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Hmmm… The domain www.davidcameron.co.uk is taken. The WHOIS database says “The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.”

Google Ad(non)sense contd.

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The logic behind the Adsense engine is truly weird. As I write this, the top posts on this Blog are:

  • A neat little Apple Mac facility
  • A link to Simon Jenkins’s column about the future of newspapers
  • An item about population shrinkage in industrialised countries
  • An item about how Microsoft has shut down the Blog of a Chinese dissident
  • An account of an eBay farce
  • A note about the Windows Metafile vulnerability
  • An item about the award of the Charles Stark Draper Prize to the inventors of the CCD
  • An item about the funding of some daft research
  • A pic of a personalised numberplate
  • A report that Sony has begun to settle the class-action suits resulting from its DRM fiasco.

    So what ads does Google Adsense put up based on the above content? Answer: one link to a site dealing with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and three anti-piracy sites. It’s idiotic.

    • Two hours later: It gets worse. Two of the piracy-related ads have been replaced — by one for “Jewish Tours of Berlin” and one for “School History Software”. Could it be that the Google engine is somehow inferring a link between the Economist story about population shrinkage and the Holocaust?

    A neat trick

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    If you highlight a word in Text Edit or Microsoft Word running on a Mac and then drag-and-drop it onto the Safari icon in the dock, a new browser window will open with the results of a Google search on the word. Neat.

    Thanks to Pete for the hint.