Some information about me for those who feel a need to know about this sort of thing.

We arrived back yesterday evening from fifteen days in Agadir, on the coast of Morocco. Upon arrival there we had been equipped with a rock-festival-like wrist band which entitled us to unlimited food and drink.

In Petersburg, Kentucky, USA, just 4 miles west of the Northern Kentucky/Greater Cincinnati International Airport, a Creation Museum is being built. This walk through history museum will, it says, “be a wonderful alternative to the evolutionary natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the gospel of Christ and the authority of the scripture”.

A possible starting date for the internet, plus a few interesting facts.

The UK’s oldest award for children’s writing, the Carnegie Medal, has selected 10 former winners to mark the 70th anniversary of the award.

This week the magazine Real People accidentally sent every reader the winning scratchcard in its weekly competition. Chaos ensued. This serves to remind me of the Great Hoover Disaster of 1992.

A shopping trip to Porvoo today yielded a couple of unexpected presents in the form of two old Saint books from a junk shop. I have been trying to find some for the last year, but they are not available…

OJ Simpson writes an unusual kind of book. Read it and weep. Etc.

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch reacted to the growing public anger about these festive OJ Christmas specials, by personally intervening and cancelling both. Judith Regan then issued a long (2,000 words and more) statement in which she defended herself and her decision to create the book and tv show.

Polly Toynbee discussed the fact that, despite strong indications that crime is steadily dropping in Britain, fear of lawlessness is a major factor in the then-current general election campaign.

This is a complete curriculum vitae, with a downloadable pdf version coming soon.

Today Alan Freeman died. Fluff is no more. Not ‘arf!

The ascii smiley is officially twenty five years old today. How do we know? The man who invented them has a note to this effect on his web page.

This month’s Uncut has a review of Hellzapoppin’, possibly the funniest film every made.

Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises: issues that I may want to think about more deeply sometime soon.

The Guardian asked a number of arts “luminaries”: what would you do for culture if you were running the next government? One interesting answer was: have less policy.

Last year I remember reading something about somebody backing up the entire internet a few months ago, but I noted in passing and then promptly forgot about it. This morning I found another reference to it, and followed it to archive.org where the Wayback Machine does indeed give you access to the past of the internet.

One of the interesting things about the web is that it usually makes no distinction between the important and the trivial. This means that there is a wealth of detail available about almost anything.

This is a short piece that I wrote for the first session of the epedagogy course called Epedagogy, Learning and Second Life. It contains a set of useful links.

The other day I was thinking about the fifties television western series Wagon Train. I was thinking about it because I remembered that Gene Rodenberry had pitched Star Trek to the television networks by describing it as “Wagon Train in space”.

I decided a week or so ago that the experiment with my so-called WeeMe in the sidebar had gone on long enough. Accessing my WeeWorld account had proved less interesting than turning my computer off.

There are philosophical reasons why a memi is a good idea, and these can be discussed either theoretically or in terms of a generalised set of envisaged users. However there are also reasons closer to home: small, personal examples that can reveal more in some ways than carefully annotated, wider arguments.

I finished reading an article about the twenty fifth birthday of Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum – the tiny computer that most of Britain (including me) bought to begin their video-gaming experience. This set me thinking about the now almost-forgotten PiMan.