Back in 1994, Wired magazine tried to launch a UK version, working closely with the Guardian. Since I was barely in university, I couldn't afford to waste precious money on such a future-looking magazine, so it came and went from my local newsagent but Jem Stone has kindly linked me to a fantastically grimly hilarious email about the trials and tribulations of Wired UK take 1.
Skip to today, and Conde Nast (the current publishers of Wired) have also announced plans to take Wired to the UK - to be edited by the Jewish Chronicle's editor, David Rowan.
Not being part of the A-list (or even C-list) crowd of tech journalists, I can't help but to wonder if it's going to work second time around, just when the credit crunch is slowly being felt and the second dotcom boom is beginning to fade as a consequence. Besides which, I can only think of a couple of Brit-based tech journalists off the top of my head. And one of them only because she has a fantastically unique name.
There is a rising appetite for gadget magazines in the UK, already well served by the likes of Stuff and T3, but merging that with the internet era on a dead tree format? I'm assuming that TechCrunch UK and sites like it aren't exactly burning up page impressions - and that's on a free website.
But of course this gets back to my personal flaw in offering problems and reasons not to do something - but never to point out a solution.
- Gor blimey, what an episode. Just how many elements can you mix in?
- The visual FX were gor-blimey-spectacular.
- If only the episode had been called This Stolen Earth. Work in a bit of literary/sci-fi reference, that's what I say...
More spoilers here:
( More... )
These are the Twitters I sent over the last 24 hours...
- 20:10 Is wondering whether bbc wales has managed to keep the best secret ever #
As anyone who was unfortunate enough to attend EIMC between 1992-1996, my college years were mostly spent (in hindsight) being bullied by my peers (due to a classic misjudgement between media perceptions formed from a childhood in mid Wales, and brutal everyday reality amongst a bunch of 18-year-old kids) before the Internet and Stephen Fry proved to be a salvation of sorts.
So it was a real surprise when an old college friend/acquaintance ended up chatting to me online, and then describing my college-version-of-me as an "intellect", an "analyst", a "schmoozer" (hah! Try saying that to any of my ex-workmates! I once managed to tell the head of the company I was working for that the idea she was endorsing was the daftest thing in the world. In front of 300 people.) and "a tireless questioner, hungry for truth, always debating, annoyingly challenging". Whereas I just thought I was the snarky git at the back of the room throwing in the odd awkward question without actually offering any kind of solution or alternative.
Of course, said friend then accused me of settling for mediocrity, and said that they'd always thought I'd be the one who'd "stand up and challenge" things. Although I think my college and ex-workplace experiences have put paid to that.
But isn't it odd how someone can have a totally different perception about you as a person to your own self-perception? Especially when said someone and I didn't exactly get on like a house on fire back then...
London bus
Originally uploaded by E01
Thanks to incredibly slow London traffic, I managed to spend three hours on the 266 bus route between Hammersmith and Brent Cross, and back. It wouldn't be so bad but I got to Brent Cross *just* when all the shops were closing. I was starving at this point, and even though there was plenty of food out on display - because all the shops were closing up their tills, nobody would sell me any. Damn nit!
The plus side in my mini-trail across half of London is that I did spot a few random London moments, including:
- one chap who got on the bus, and spent the next 30 minutes loudly listening to, and nodding along to a rap music album. Stored on his phone which he was listening to by keeping it against his ear, and generously sharing it with the rest of us grumpy passengers. And he had bling-bling white trainers on. And he was white, just to defeat another stereotype.
- spotted a taxi parked on the side of the road, and next to the taxi was a man kneeling on a prayer mat, praying presumably towards Mecca
and your random London link is this series of images musing on what 2090 London would look like, once it's been flooded.
So it's Glastonbury weekend - a weekend where I traditionally muse on the fact that I'm starting to get too old to go to such a weekend as a first-timer, and that I really need to get off my backside, and make arrangements to go.
Except this weekend, if I really wanted to go by myself, I could - tickets are still available for a festival that usually sells out within the first day of tickets being made available. Scalpers are probably walking the hills of Pitdown bereft and blaming the credit crunch.
Some commentators blame the lack of sales on poor weather, although most of them are blaming it on the fact that rapper Jay-Z is headlining what used to be a rock music festival. Although since the Pet Shop Boys have also headlined it in the past, I'm not sure that excuse stands up.
An element of the truth may be heard in a work conversation I overheard, where someone expressed a genuine fear that because a rapper was headlining, the crowd would essentially be full of chavs and violent gangsta dudes. Which therefore meant this person wasn't going, because he/she was afraid of all the violence that would ensue.
and there was me thinking Glastonbury was meant to be a haven of openness, love to your fellow man, and meeting cool new people and all that.
Then again, one of my friends is working it this year, and she's taken a 12-pack of condoms...
These are the Twitters I sent over the last 24 hours...
- 17:38 is realising there's nothing like watching Twitters between A-list bloggers to realise how low your station in life is ;) #
Appropos of nothing, I ended up upgrading to Windows Vista last night. (well, rather, my new swanky laptop which I got for a ridiculously cheap price arrived).
Straight away ran into a few problems. All the fancy graphics are nice, but don't actually amount to even a ramp of beans, let alone a hill. The much-vaunted security issues seem positively annoying when you're trying to set up a new laptop.
The worst issue is that my favourite game in the whole wide world, Civilisation 4, refuses to run on Vista. I've tried running patches, installing DirectX, uninstalling and reinstalling and each time various little bugs come up. including that it can't find the DVD - even though I ran it from the DVD in the first place.
Which wouldn't be so bad if ... half the reason I upgraded was so that Civilisation 4 could run comparatively smoothly on it instead of crashing when my old laptop would overheat.
Have you used/tried Vista in earnest and anger? Would I really be sad if I resorted to trying to dual-boot it just so I could run a game?
These are the Twitters I sent over the last 24 hours...
- 18:34 is wondering if I should try and find someone to go to Glastonbury with this weekend... #
Slate looks into the Breast Motion Power Generator
