Links

The Good

I got interested in typography and fonts (do you like this site?).

I found The Trouble With EM 'n EN (and Other Shady Characters) useful (unicode punctuation codes for HTML) which is part of ...

... a great site A List Apart.

I also read The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.

I can recommend Joel Spolsky's web publishing empire as fascinating reading. He even has translations. Into Hebrew.

Citeseer is an invaluable source of free academic papers.

Unlike some other portals, like the ACM or SpringerLink portals, it will not attempt to charge you a considerable fee, to read an academic paper which was written for nothing. Long live citeseer, may they rank high on Google.

The Wayback Machine archives the Web from 1996.

To me, this looked just moderately amusing — but if a useful link moves, or a server goes and I'm in a hurry, then it demonstrates its worth.

If you like, take a look at Google, Yahoo, and the BBC, way back in '96, '97. Be careful about putting photos of yourself online with embarrassing haircuts.

Cats that look like Hitler is hilarious. Who would have thought it?

I haven't seen anything as funny since The Producers.

Fancy seeing a web page translated into Swedish Chef? Try the Dialectizer.

Ctrl-Alt-Del is an online comic strip about computer gamers. I'm not one myself but I'm enough of a geek to appreciate it — and it's very clever. For example ...

The nature of truth in fiction.

A comment on online behaviour and etiquette.

Boobies!

I have to mention xkcd. Here are some favourites:

Relativity

On love

Binary sudoku

Copyright

Copyright law

Obsessive compulsive

The Bad

Congestion charges, speedbumps, Controlled Parking Zones, speed cameras, clamping cowboys, traffic wardens, and the number 73 bus.

I'm a disinterested party since I don't drive, but it offends me. If you want to get people out their cars, fine, but not by random harassment and theft, however profitable that may be for local government. Improve the bus service (which is good and historic, but just needs to be even better).

So here's my other gripe: London Buses are too big for London roads. If you think London is just like Amsterdam (or Munich, or Paris, or even Rome), just a tad larger, than you won't get it. No. London is a monster agglomoration of roads designed for horses, serving 10 million people in cars. Driving would be a challenge even if you were the only thing on the road, and in London you never are. The routemaster was a design classic well-adapted to its environment. Its successors may look great in photos (on empty, straight, well-maintained roads, ha ha) but make sense in London like water-lilies in the sahara, strawberries and chips, or committees and common sense. By the way there's a book on the routemaster on sale, for example here.

Bad grammar!

I'm no grammar saint and I don't want you to be. But a couple of things bug me:

The apostrophe.

‘It's’ equals ‘it is’; ‘its’ is a pronoun. The apostrophe in this case does not indicate a genitive; otherwise you'd write ‘min'e’ and ‘hi's’. It can be a grave error.
Pronouns. The rule of thumb is: say ‘my dog and I’ where you could say ‘I’. As in: ‘I walk’ hence ‘my dog and I walk’ but; ‘greetings from me’ hence ‘greetings from my dog and me’.

It's no good saying “what I say as a native speaker defines the language”; everybody used to get it right, then some people tried to make everybody else feel bad about themselves by saying ‘I’ rather than ‘me’. It's a faux intellectualism, hlike hputting ayches heverywhere to htry to hsound hposh.

Somehow, people don't thank me me for pointing this out. I guess it's fear; people are afraid of what they don't know. Sure, me too; I worry about the possibility of forces beyond my control, like ice-cream melting all over me when I only have a cheap serviette that smears sticky stuff everywhere — that's a genuine reason for apprehension — but scared of apostrophes and pronouns? Get a grip, get it right.

While I'm at it, let me mention the difference between ‘that’ and ‘which’. Personally, I don't get excited about this, but people have asked and it's quite interesting.

‘That’ adds information which restricts the class of objects to be considered.
‘Which’ adds information which does not (but may tell you something you didn't know).

For example: ‘rivers that are in europe’, but ‘the river, which here is narrow’, or ‘computers, which have become more powerful year by year’ and ‘computers that are second-hand’.

The simple test is: use ‘that’ if you can remove the word without changing meaning: ‘rivers in europe’, ‘second-hand computers’. Use ‘which’ if you can remove the whole clause without changing the meaning: ‘the river’, ‘computers’.

E-mail me to know the difference between ‘jealousy’ and ‘envy’, ‘fewer’ and ‘less’, or how often to use commas. There's a nice list of anti-pedantry here.

I don't like the OQO computer, it broke. There are plenty of other sub-laptops out there; I'd buy another brand.

I don't like Dynamism much either — they have some cool-looking stuff on their webpage but they didn't seem to care particularly about any of the things that are important to me, like ... buying computers that don't break, or ... having my e-mails answered, or even “no more mix-ups, it really is in the post this time” meaning ... no more mix-ups, it really is in the post this time.

There are other vendors, for example the splendidly-named Geekstuff4u. I've not done business with them but they'd be hard-pressed to do worse.

The Ugly