nocto

as part of a whole host of changes to this site (most of which won’t concern the reader at all coz they are all about me messing with code, which is half of what this site is about to me) i’ve had categories for weblog posts programmed in for several months. i stalled on the idea when i got to asking myself:

1. what the hell should the categories be?, and
2. how the hell do i categorise everything without going nuts?

jon udell has a nice idea for dynamic categories which helps me with thinking about part 2. for part 1 i’m leaning towards borrowing some taxonomical ideas from dmoz but i’m not entirely convinced yet.

[found via erik benson]

the mystery of the m67, part of pathetic motorways.

since i’ve moved here it’s always seemed a bit odd that you can zoom out east of manchester on the m67, signposted sheffield, only to get thrown off (generally after sitting in a large traffic bottleneck for a long time) onto a really twisty a roads to actually cross across the spine of the country towards sheffield. i’m not really surprised to find out that the road wasn’t supposed to finish there and that there was a grand plan to connect the road all the way over to the m1. by the looks of the maps it was intended to be a southern alternative to the m62 and would use old railway tunnels for one carriageway.

i sort of wish they’d finished this as it would have saved me many late night twists down the a628 home. having a motorway junction that i could head west on at the flouch hotel would be really great from a speed point of view. on the other hand it’s probably not so good from a pretty countryside point of view and would have affected the area i live in so that it wouldn’t be how it is today if it had better access to the motorway network.

i don’t know whether it was the fact that the motorway would run through the edge of the peak district national park that did for this motorway or the cost of getting through that landscape. another motorway website points out:

it was probably dropped when it was realised that putting a motorway through an old rail tunnel was a “distinctly crap idea”.

i have learnt today that c roads shouldn’t ever appear on road signs (but i follow the sign for the c577 to scholes all the time) but i’ve failed to find out why some roads cling onto being a brackets m roads rather than becoming fully fledged motorways with m numbers.

what’s your law? despite the exhortation to stick to science and avoid flippancy in thinking of an empirical law to be named after you my favourite bit is:

Kai’s Example Dilemma

A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.

[found via kottke]

i just found a packet of vice versas at the garage! i haven’t seen them since about 1994. maybe i should have bought more than one packet as these aren’t going to last very long…. have they just brought them back or have they never been away and just hiding from me?

filing this away for some future time when i need a new project: the dirkon, a paper pinhole camera from 1979 czechoslovakia.

The name Dirkon is a play on words based on the combination of the parts of two words: Dirk- is the beginning of the Czech word dírka – pinhole, and -kon is the end of the name of a well-known Japanese camera which needs no introduction.

[found via boing boing]

ps. 25th april 2004 is worldwide pinhole photography day

i seem to have forgotten how to take one photo at a time, panoramic photos are so much fun to play with.

no buses? injured pigeon? lost your specs? wife not left you any tea? don’t call 999. unbelievable. i’m hoping some of these are wind ups but i’m not sure that people thinking the emergency services are a good place to play gags is any better than people just being totally bloody stupid really.

[found via meish]

how many brand logos can you draw off the top of your head? the one’s in this austrian survey are

• adidas
• lacoste
• apple
• maggi
• bp
• peugeot
• coca cola
• philips
• eskimo (walls in the uk)
• toyota
• iglo
• i don’t even know what brand the last one is

have a go yourself before clicking through to see them. i’d have done lousily. i think apple and bp are the only ones i’d have managed a reasonable hash at.

and i wouldn’t have done much better on pete bevin’s list of american logos over at write only media either.

[i've a fair idea on pepsi (round thing with a sort of wave across it, red and blue), texaco (black circle with red star), nike (big tick), gap (tall skinny white letters on dark blue), mcdonalds (golden arches) and kelloggs (big red loopy k), i know about the backward R in toys r us, i can see in my head the round starbucks logo with a woman (mermaid?) in it but couldn't hope to put it down on paper, i think ikea is just blocky writing in yellow on blue, no idea on the others.]

the house always looks so bare when the decorations come down. (darren’s comment: ‘oh we do have a square foot of space in this house after all!’)

i didn’t get round to showing off my scuppered skiing snowmen cake before so i’ll make up for the emptiness in the living room by posting it here to round off christmas. you can’t really tell what a drift of royal icing they’ve had to contend with from the photograph.