linkmachinego.com

4 March 2000
‘I’ve done questionable things.’ — Roy Batty.
I’m sitting watching Blade Runner. I suppose this is as good a way as any to start a weblog…
5 March 2000
I also watched Bullitt and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Last Night. Movie trivia: Robert Duvall has a role as a very grumpy looking Taxi Driver in Bullit. It was weird seeing him look so young…
6 March 2000
In my real job I am a so-called “IT Support Analyst” but if this World Weekly News is right — I want to change my Job Title to Witchfinder General!
BBC News reports that Ken Livingstone will run for Mayor.
BBC News reports that the Antichrist is a vegetarian. Guh?!
Warren Ellis writes some of my favourite comics at the moment. His website has just got a redesign.
Find interestings posts from interesting people on slashdot.org: John Carmack, Jamie Zawinski and Tom Christiansen
My flatmate wants you to visit London Whites Online.
Web Applications that I’m using a lot lately: spyonit.com and clip2.com
7 March 2000
From the Guardian: Ken Livingstone tears up the rule book. Simon Hoggart on the “Stuff Blair Campaign“.
BBC News reports that the Internet price war is starting to hot up in the UK. I’ve recently moved over to btinternet.com — £9.99 a month for unlimited access at weekends and week-day nights.
Pictures from the race for London Mayor.
Websites for the major candidates for London major: Steve Norris, Frank Dobson, Ken Livingstone, Susan Kramer. The Official Major for London website.
8 March 2000
Watching the Detective – interview with the detective leading the murder hunt for Jill Dando.
According to The Economist the Internet is running out of names!
The Internet has been in the news alot today in the UK. Various Links: Nine high flying tech stocks join the FTSE-100 according to BBC News. BT to offer free net access — rather expensive unmetered access! This is London reports on the lastminute.com ipo.
9 March 2000
According to the Guardian Labour MPs love Harry Potter books.
I think I might be the antichrist.
Be Afraid. MI5 is watching your email according to the BBC — especially if you get emails from David Shayler
lastminute.com up’s it’s share price.
A life in Crime — Ian Rankin on crime novels. “Here’s the scoop: crime writing is sexy.”
10 March 2000
New book from O’Reilly: Tactical Systems Administration
Fantastic interview with Richard Ashcroft of The Verve in News Unlimited.
11 March 2000
Check out Blogger. It’s the website I use to update linkmachinego.com — the Blogger website just got a redesign.
[MP3] A new version of Winamp is available. Download from here. Winamp is a free MP3 player for Windows.
[quote] “I really do think that the battlelines have been drawn. I want to see comics as a pop medium, I want to see the Forbidden Planet empire reaching out to every city in the world like McDonald’s. I want to see comic creators and retailers in Vogue and on telly, but ranged against that brilliant global vision are the cornershop bankers who just want to sneak home with their brown paper bags and their Betty Page video’s and who’re just desperate to keep comics at the level of stamp collecting and train-spotting because they can’t face up to the glare of the real world. Which side will you be on? — its as simple as that.”Grant Morrison (1992)
12 March 2000
[Mayor for London] “Hoi! Lose the hair Beardy!” The Observer reports that the aides have told Frank Dobson to lose the beard or lose the election. Someone should report that bullshitting mirthmakers are running the Dobson campaign!
Whatever happened to Quentin Tarantino?” Is Tarantino the bizzaro Y2K Howard Hughes?
The Sunday Times has a profile of Ian Brady. Why bother?
Yet another “is the Technology bubble going to burst?” article.
[movies] Interview with Jeffery Wigand. This is the man who blew the whistle on Big Tobbacco and who’s story recently formed the inspiration for Michael Mann’s film The Insider.
Great two-part article/interview with John Romero on his upcoming game Daikatana [Part One] [Part Two]
[Mayor for London] Beardy to World: It Stays!
13 March 2000
[lastminute ipo] According to News Unlimited — lastminute is likely to be heavily over subscribed.
Download the trailer to Magnolia — a film I’m looking forward to watching soon!
Yet another “is the Internet bubble going to burst” article. The lastminute.com IPO seems to be generating a bunch of them in the UK press.
[Mayor for London] BBC News supplies a fascinating political analysis on beards in the British Government. Why no picture of Dobson without the beard? I’ve not seen one on the web anywhere… weird.
Media Nugget of the Day spotlights the Magnolia Soundtrack.
[Movies] Here’s a link to The Insider website. I found a link to the original source material for The Insider — an article in Vanity Fair — “The Man Who Knew To Much
14 March 2000
[lastminute ipo] BBC News reports that lastminute floats at 3.80 a share.
[lastminute] Various Links on Lastminute: Comment from NewsUnlimited. The current share price from UKinvest and finally the site in question: lastminute.com
The OED goes online. The Oxford English Dictionary took seventy years to complete. The fascinating story behind it’s creation can be found in the book The Professor and the Madman. Here’s a link to the OED’s page on it’s history.
Books Unlimited lists Mohamed al Fayed’s favourite books. Here’s a link to the BBC News profile of al Fayed from late last year.
Hey! Barbelith is being updated again… Probably the best UK blog around…. Check out The Bomb while you’re there….
15 March 2000
[personal shite] Okay…. I’m sitting in the easyEverything in Tottenham Court Road. My legs hurt… I’m thirsty… Let’s Blog!
Has anybody ever seen Rasputin and Alan Moore in the same room? Inquiring minds want to know…
[lastminute] Steve Bell on lastminute.com.
[movies] BBC News confirms that Speilberg’s next project will be AI — Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished (unstarted?) film about artificial intelligence. I love Kubrick films but Eyes Wide Shut was just awful…. sorry Stanley!! AI has been 30 years in the making… hopefully Speilberg can do justice to Kubrick’s vision — whatever that was.
[Mayor for London] Ken Livingstone broke Common’s rules on registered interests — apparently about 150, 000 squids worth of outside interests. What next? Stories on Ken’s flirtations with underage girls, drugs and sweets? Dobbo and the Rent Boys on Hampstead Heath?
My hour at easyEverything is up. I’m outta here…
The Guardian shines a spotlight on Alastair Campbell — Tony Blair’s press secretary. He does not seem to know very much about the Human Genome Project. I am not impressed.
16 March 2000
[mad] Biblical Action Figures. [via The Invisibles Mailing List]
[personal shite] It’s another one hour powerblog from easyEverything. Tom from Barbelith links to me! Yes I sometimes do this in the easyEverything from TCR… it’s close to GOSH!, Forbidden Planet and it’s on my way home from work… Thanks for the Link, Tom.
Another great cartoon from Steve Bell on the fate of the Rover Group.
The Guardian on easyEverything — this article captures the atmosphere pretty well. I’ve been visiting a lot recently — trying to cut those peak-rate phone bills — and it reminds me of the university computer rooms I used to work and study in.
[mp3] Wired News reports that AOL has shutdown an open-source Napster clone written by Nullsoft creators of Winamp. Slashdot has a discussion thread on this.
My hour is up. More later…
17 March 2000
[Mayor for London] The gloves start to come off in the race to become London’s mayor as the first signs of dirty tricks appear
[london] I booked tickets for the London Eye today. According to the Guardian the London Eye is the place to be seen….
[movies] I’ve just found the trailer for the movie High Fidelity which is based on Nick Hornby’s book. Don’t think I’ll be watching that one…
[internet] icontown [via The Face magazine — does The Face have a web site?]
[lists] The Death List — Top 28 Celebrity Deaths and Suicides! [via clip2.com] My Dead Pool? The Queen Mum and Barbara Cartland
18 March 2000
[Telly] Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) retuns on BBC1 tonight. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while…. You can find Trailers here.
[Mayor for London] 101 Things you never knew about Ken. [via The View From Here]
[my-head-hurts] God help us… todays big news is that David Beckham has had a haircut.
[Comics] New “Come In Alone” column by Warren Ellis in CBR. “Comics are plain, conservative, old-looking objects. And this sacred bloody ugliness bores into the brains of people immersed in the culture too long, until they see nothing wrong with it.”
[Major for London] More dirty tricks? Ken strikes back… check out this link. [via Haddock]
19 March 2000
[my-head-hurts] Interview in The Observer with David Irving. It’s too early in the morning to be reading the views of people like this.
[Comics] I am a reformed X-Men fan. I have not picked up a copy of this comic since the early ’90’s and my peak X-Men reading year was probably 1988-89. That was until last week… when I picked up an issue of Generation-X scripted by Warren Ellis. Here’s a trailer for the X-Men film which comes out this summer. I don’t want to be a born again X-Fan. I’m nearly thirty…. I’m too old for this shit….
[lastminute] Some fallout from lastminute.com’s recent ipo: BBC News report on delivery times for a bottle of Champagne from Lastminute and here’s a copy of the lastminute FAQ from Motley Fool’s chat forum.
20 March 2000
[Mayor for London] NewsUnlimited reports that Chris Evans is giving £100,000 to Ken’s campaign.
Can men read? Apparently men don’t like reading books with “love” in the title.
Frightening article about war correspondents during the Kosovo conflict.
“One difficulty is that the media have little or no memory. War correspondents have short working lives and there is no tradition or means for passing on their knowledge and experience. The military, on the other hand, is an institution and goes on forever. The military learned a lot from Vietnam and these days plans its media strategy with as much attention as its military strategy.”
Ralph Wiggum: “Help! She’s touching my special area!”
21 March 2000
[MP3] Gnutella Nullsoft’s open-source Napster clone lives on.
[Mayor for London] Beardy does not like redheads!
[I seem to be doing a lot of links about hair — Beckham, Dobson and Evans… I wish I could explain why but as always my motivations remain hidden from me. What the hell was I thinking of when I linked to a Ralph Wiggum quote straight after an interesting article about the media during Kosovo?]
22 March 2000
How Madonna became one of us” [NewsUnlimited]
Budget 2000 as seen by Steve Bell.
[random] I would have thought that the phrase “The revolution will be netcast!” would be on a lot more sites than it actually is. Interesting…
BBC News on maddening mobiles. These boys do something about it: phonebashing.
[tech] Useful article on which MP3 encoder is the best.
23 March 2000
[Personal Shite] Busy, Busy, Busy….
[tech] Nice overview of why text created on Windows PC’s looks tiny on Macintoshes….
[Link for a Friend!] The Official Dirty Dancing Web Site. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”
How to sack your bank manager. I wish.. [Text-Only Link]
[MP3] “Napster? Never heard of it mate” — UK reaction to Napster/MP3. It’s not an issue in the UK because nobody can afford to download MP3’s anyway. I reckon students are probably starting to get interested in it but you need free networking to make it fly like it is in the States — especially at American universities.
[Movies] I’m off to see Clockwork Orange….
24 March 2000
Great day for Cartoons in the Guardian — Steve Bell does a stormer on the Blair Baby/paternity leave story. Doonesbury has Uncle Duke doing a campaign ad for the iMac
[Movies] I enjoyed A Clockwork Orange but was amazed by the entrance, I said, the entrance of Weatherfields favorite butcher Fred Elliot halfway through the film!
25 March 2000
I am off to King’s Lynn in Norfolk for the weekend. There are no pay-as-you-surf internet shops in Lynn so the chances of updates this weekend are about the same as something interesting happening at the King’s Literary Festival [Text-only Link].
27 March 2000
Interesting article about Ali G. Apparently he’s the face of Channel 4?
28 March 2000
[Comics] Interview with Grant Morrison in ifuse. Nice review of Morrison’s Kissing Mr Quimper in The Independent. [via The Invisibles Mailing List]
[just plain weird] The story of Sealand as reported by the Guardian. Basic ingredients: two websites [#1] [#2], an offshore gun-tower seven miles of the Suffolk coast, an eccentric English couple and an international smuggling ring!
[Mayor for London] Norris proposes 24hr Tube on Friday and Saturday. I’m surprised nobody else thought of this — but I’d always assumed it was not possible to run a 24hr tube in London due to technical reasons? More reports of fresh allegations against Livingstone regarding his financial affairs.
29 March 2000
[Mac] Microsoft releases IE 5 for Macintosh. There also a beta version of Media Player available. Here’s a review of IE5.
[Movies] From Memepoolthe films of Alan Smithee
[movies] Interview in the Guardian with Oliver Stone.“There’s a few things I’ve been. Hedonist. Moralist. Conspiracist. Misogynist – which I hate because, God, I love women.” Here’s a list of Mr Stone’s Films. Great stuff — my personal favourite is JFK, by the way. However, I don’t believe in any of the conspiracy theories! Okay?
[music] Mick Jagger’s schooldays sound just as pointlessly violent and stupid as mine. “The most damaging revelation comes from friend and classmate Dick Taylor who dents his later hellraising image. “He wasn’t a rebel in any way, shape or form. He was one of the best-spoken people there, ” he said.”
30 March 2000
[tech] BT and Amstrad release e-m@iler — a telephone that allows pay-as-you-go access to email without a computer. Here’s a BBC News report.
[tech] Fuck Outlook Express! I hate it… I’m going back to my roots and downloading Peagsus Mail for Windows!
[quote] “What’ll it be next? Choice extracts from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? Trotting out the Nietzsche and the Shelley to dignify some old costumed claptrap? Probably. Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who’s dreaming who?”Grant Morrison (1989)
[Comics] Diamond Previews covers Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy. [scroll to the botton of the page!]
31 March 2000
[GM] Excellent! You can now browse the OneList archives of The Invisibles and TemporaryNexus mailing lists by each individual post rather than by daily digest versions.
[politics] New Labour is experiencing some mid-term jitters according to various press reports. Local elections plus the London Mayor’s race are fast approaching Two reports — from Newsunlimited and BBC News [Low Graphics].
[Comics] I’ve been buying the Stormwatch TPB’s that cover most of Warren Ellis’ run on the book. It’s good stuff — but I was totally confused about which order to read them in. There are four books… anyway I found this posting and all is suddenly clear… Oh yeah, Warren’s just posted a new Come In Alone column as well…
[Comics] Lots of comics links today… but this link was to good to pass up…. a column about… erm…. Bizarre Breasts in comic books [via gliff.org]
[telly] Remember Monkey? It’s being rereleased on video…. The Guardian does a profile of this weird TV Programme from the 80’s. ‘The Nature of Monkey was Irrepressible!’