Tamlyn

Do you sometimes feel you spend more time on the London Underground then actually at the office? Village Underground have gone a step further and converted some old Jubilee Line carriages into offices!

Going Underground has the scoop and more pictures.

Incidentally I rather like how the Village Underground site uses scrolling in an unconventional way. The foreground is fixed but the background can be scrolled about to see more images of the space. What they perhaps hadn’t considered is that this causes problems for people on mobile devices. The small screen of my phone means most of the content (and all the background) is hidden from view and cannot be scrolled.

[via Reaction!]

I got a spam MMS from my mobile provider, 3, this afternoon with a short video promoting Yahoo! Go. At the end were some instructions:

We’d like to keep you up to date with what’s now on 3. But if you’d prefer not to receive further messages just send us an email to preferences@3mail.com quote your 3 phone number in the body of the email and type ‘opt out MMS’ in the subject header.

I duly did that and received an automated response telling me they would deal within three days. A few hours later I received a phone call from 3. First the agent asked me to confirm my details - you called me, confirm your details! Then she asked me if I would like to opt out of 3 MMS - well, yes, clearly or I wouldn’t have emailed. And finally she politely asked me if I was aware that I could do all this on my phone through the My3 web service. I politely advised her that maybe she should be telling that to whoever wrote the MMS.

Seamless.

from xkcd, see also Lolcats if you need an explanation

Just after reading Ryan Carson’s two posts about airport advertising, I was in Johannesburg airport yesterday and noticed these:

The clever bit is in the placement. Jo’burg airport is currently undergoing a big extension project during which time there is a long walk between the international terminal and the domestic terminal. All along the walk, these huge adverts for Jonnie Walker provide encouragement with their slogan “Keep Walking”. Other quoted persons included Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela and Yoda.

Every time a new storage technology comes along someone predicts that in 1000 years time, mankind will have lost the knowledge of how to read today’s CDs/DVDs/memory sticks/whatever. Some people call this data rot or bit rot and claim we’re better off writing everything on paper.

And then you see this BBC news story explain how we’re currently using a Diamond synchrotron (whatever that is) to read 1000 year old books written with apple juice on bits of cow without even opening them.

I don’t think there’s much risk of people in the next millennium not being able to read what we wrote in this one. The question, perhaps, is would they want to?

The Big Chill have tagged each of the artists playing at the festival this summer on Last.fm. Then at the foot of the lineup pages on the site they link to the radio player for that tag: main stage lineup, sanctuary stage lineup… So simple, yet so effective. What better way to get you in the mood?

Out with CMSMS, in with Wordpress. Yay!

Please bear with me during the transition.

Here are some collaborative, social networking, tagging, web 2.0, blah blah websites for you to waste time on:

• Last.fm - personalised online radio and music community
• del.icio.us - social bookmarking of websites
• digg - collaborative news
• 43things - things people want to do
• 43places - places people want to visit
• 43people - people people want to meet
• Consumating - tag based dating
• StumbleUpon - find interesting websites

You have been warned…

I’ve always thought that iPods were overpriced and underspecced but I had never actually used one until last week. Read more »

I was having trouble getting Cynthia to validate the ALA site. After almost 10 minutes of searching I eventually found a small error message in an unintuitive place explaining what the problem was. So I dutifully filled out their feedback form to notify them of the perceived problem. I tried to submit it and was faced by ‘Frontpage Error: please notify the webmaster’. Hehe, I chuckled. So I dug out the appropriate email address and wrote to them about the two problems. “I hope this email doesn’t bounce” I joked. Sure enough it did bounce so I dug out the email address of HiSoftware, the company that makes Cynthia and whose clients include the US government, and emailed them about it - a little irate this time. Yep. That one bounced too…

I can only hope they’re having some kind of network outage, despite the fact that their website is still up (and what a horrific site it is too), because this level of ineptitude is unacceptable.

It all makes me feel a bit ill really. Although that’s probably because I am a bit ill. Hey ho.