Blog
Organising the Workspace
Having been inspired by Lifehacker's workspace show and tell, I've decided to organise my workspace a bit. I have a quite deep, wooden desk with drawers which tend to fill with clutter. I've decided to feed a power strip through the back of one of the drawers so I can...
Zemanta
Image via Wikipedia I'm trying out a Zemanta blog post. What it does, apparently, is to suggest ideas for the article you're currently writing. It's a semantic blog suggestion feature, and it's manifested in this instance as a firefox plugin that adds a write...
Empathic Web
Originally appeared on Nodalities Blog: http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities Last week I listened to a talk by Shane Hipps, a Porsche "consumer anthropologist" turned Mennonite minister. The speaker, clearly aware of the contradictory nature of his background, made a...
Selfish Web Users
The BBC reported a few days ago that: Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research. The idea is that people are using the web to get things done, and don’t seem to notice that service providers want them to stick around. They...
Defensive Pre-tension
I was listening to one of Stephen Fry's 'podgrams' – "Wallpaper" – in which he briefly touched on the idea that the English tend to classify something as pretentious if they don't understand it. It's a form of defense of tradition or perspective. Intelligence or...
Perspective Applications
Originally appeared on Nodalities Blog: http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities Looking at the world through a closed metaphor, like a walled garden, actually stops you from expanding the scope of possibilities available to the software you develop. This is because...
Back from travels
Well, I and the wife traveled to Limoges in France to Amsterdam over the last two weeks. In France, I had the misfortune of being almost completely without the ability to smell or taste anything thanks to a lingering cold which also incapacitated me on the final...
Semantic Metaphors
Edit: the original blog post on Nodalities blog has been archived/deleted/ignored. I've republished it here. I tend to live in a world of metaphor. It's not my fault, according to Lakoff and Johnson. We all use metaphor all the time: to construct our thoughts and work...
Walled gardens: mapping the parties
Originally appeared on the Nodalities blog – which has since been consigned to the wayback machine. 29th April 2008, 11:34 am by Zach Beauvais In: Uncategorized The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing on kind of thing in terms of another. -Lakoff and...