Towse: views from the hill

Well, that’s a relief … Took the Personality Disorder Test and came up with

• Paranoid: Low
  
• Schizoid: Low
  
• Schizotypal: Low
  
• Antisocial: Low
  
• Borderline: Low
  
• Histrionic: Low
  
• Narcissistic: Moderate
  
• Avoidant: Low
  
• Dependent: Low
  
• Obsessive-Compulsive: Moderate

Bet you dollars to donuts that the OCD was triggered when I ‘fessed about my packrat tendencies, and “narcissistic”? Isn’t everyone to some degree?

I’d love to give this to some of my fellow nutcases and see how they rate.

(We’re all a bit narcissistic, right?)

From the Telegraph comes this article by Kim Willsher.

First, there was the novel written without using the letter ‘e’. Now a French author has produced what he claims is the first book with no verbs.

Brad Templeton’s a bright guy. His take on Gmail raises some questions I hadn’t thought about plus he manages to limn better than I could the reasons behind Gmail despite the nifty search capabilities Google is offering.

One suggestion I read on someone’s blog (forgive me … I flit around so much I can’t remember whose) was to use Gmail to archive mailing lists, news-source e-mails, newsletters from Powell’s and Chronicle Books and the National Women’s Law Center and other bits and pieces that arrive on a regular basis. The stash would be easily searchable, but there wouldn’t be any worries about whether or not the archives were covered by the ECPA and easily available to the DHS or a snooping attorney.

My advice is to keep your personal e-mails on your hard drive. Why make it easy for someone to snoop? Of course, if you’re worried about the DHS snooping through your e-mail, you need to remember that given a solid set of reasons they can get a search warrant for your hard drive just as easily as they can get a search warrant for your Gmail archives.

Wendy McClure gives a “meticulously detailed recap of a news segment” — Blogging! The Latest Cyber Craze! — that appeared on the Chicago FOX News affiliate on May 5, 2004.

McClure taped (and critiqued) the show because her blog and her bloggedness featured in the news segment. Seems McClure took up blogging four years ago and “since then, she spends an HOUR AND A HALF each week on her computer just blah-blah-blogging!”

(an HOUR AND A HALF each week! Yikes, can you imagine?)

Take a look, and be sure to stop by McClure’s blog as well.

newsmap “is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

Checkout how the maps differ from Australia to India to UK to USA. Split out the map for “entertainment” or “sports”.

Fascinating. A standing ovation for The Hive Group

The more observant will notice that I use blogrolling.com to maintain my lists of hot crossed sites and hot crossed blogs.

Earlier today blogrolling.com (now owned by those whacky folks at tucows.com) went south and my lists vanished. The blogrolling.com site vanished altogether and, oddly enough — being as they’re owned by two different entities — blogger.com went flaky as well. I couldn’t use Blogger’s “preview” feature, my “publish” efforts didn’t seem to take and then took all at once giving me four copies of a given post, and my handy-dandy [Blog This!] button stopped working.

My blogrolling lists are back now but a visit to blogrolling.com triggers a fatal error. Ooops. May have spoken too soon. The last visit triggered a 404, which means we’re back where we were an hour or two ago.

In any case, while I had a chance I snagged off my list of blogrolling links and embed the lists in my template (as I’d been doing before finding blogrolling). I’ll probably only use blogrolling from now on to collect “new” links, and set up some sort of schedule to update the template with new links.

update: blogrolling is back (sort of) which gives me a duplicate set of the links. I can get to blogrolling.com, but when I try to get to my account to clearout the list blogrolling keeps, the error I get is “Got error 127 from table handler.”

So for now, I’m going to leave this as it now is and check back until I catch the window where I can clear out my old blogrolls and start fresh.

further update: blogrolling came back sufficiently for me to flush my blogrolling lists. Now I’ll use blogrolling for “new” sites and periodically update the lists on the templates to include the new links.

Ain’t computers wonderful?

Matt Siber’s The Untitled Project “is a series of photographs of urban settings accompanied by a graphical text layout. The photographs have been digitally stripped of all traces of textual information. The text pieces show the removed text in the approximate location and font as it was found in the photograph.”

Very strange effect. Check out the photographs and the Project Statement

Jonathan Rauch writes in the March 2003 Atlantic about Caring for Your Introvert. As an INFJ, this article fit perfectly.

Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age tells me that when they were my age

• Joseph Guillotin proposed a beheading machine to the French National Assembly.
  
• The Marquis de Sade, imprisoned for much of his life, wrote the novel Justine.
  

How heartwarming is that?

Chris Pirillo, the #1 Chris on the Web, has a money-making idea: Rent My Chest!