After getting used to Rooibos tea tasting like a teaspoonful of Golden Virginia mixed with boiling water, it’s actually a very pleasant drink. In fact, if this page is to be beliieved, Rooibos is the ultimate health drink.

A Rumination Upon Japan, Korea and Glory by The Hand of Odd [written before the World Cup began, but worth a read].

Thankfully, I never VerisignedOn; instead, I chose to register with PairNIC who don’t seem to be quite as dastardly. So, if you currently have a domain with Verisign, why not let them know how unhappy you are with their service and transfer your domain over to PairNIC? Here’s a tutorial on how to do it.

Dasher is one of the most impressive and revolutionary computer interfaces I have seen for a long time. It allows the user to enter text using very small movements of the input device. This is ideal for palmtop computers as well for use by those who are unable to input text using a keyboard. You can download a demo here, although it doesn’t seem to be available for Mac users.

Rhizome, what have you done?

At the weekend I rediscovered my record player after it had been lying under a pile of books and papers for a few months. Now I’m buying vinyl again like there’s no tomorrow, mainly from Boomkat – an excellent online record shop selling mainly electronic, nu-jazz and leftfield music.

I don’t think the theme tune to Steptoe & Son is the right choice for Apple’s ‘Switch’ ads.

The Royal National Institute for the Blind [RNIB] has questioned Macromedia’s claims that Flash MX can be used to design sites that are accessible to those who are blind.

AIlog is now available as an RSS feed. RSS rules.

Designing on both sides of your brain. Are you rational or creative? I like to think I’m both.

Henri Cartier-Bresson > America

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

From ‘The Salmon of Doubt’, the collection of writings by Douglas Adams.

There are no fibreglass cows here in Newcastle, although there is walking french bread. High profile street-art does seem to be the in thing at the moment.

It’s good to see the Web Standards Project back and in blog format. And I must say, the redesign looks great, especially with OS X Quartz text rendering enabled. I checked the site on my iMac which isn’t running Unsanity’s Silk software and I was amazed at the difference. So, it seems that web designers have a new challenge, something else to cater for when they think about what fonts to use for their site. An increasing number of Mac users are viewing websites in their full glory of smoothly rendered text, whereas the greater percentage of computer users are stuck with pixely font rendering, unaware of how good websites can look on OS X machines with Quartz enabled. The difference this technology makes to the presentation of a website should not be underestimated.

I got on the London to Newcastle train and sat down in my allocated seat. Next to me were two businessmen who obviously knew each other, they were possibly colleages in the same place of work. Halfway through the journey, my phone rang, so I walked out of the seated area of the carriage and into the bit that joins the two carriages together to answer it – I’m considerate like that. After the phone call, I returned to my seat and noticed that one of the businessmen wasn’t there. At first I thought nothing of it; he must have gone to get some food from the buffet car. But half an hour went by without his return and I became curious as to where he was. ‘Excuse me’ I said to the man who remained ‘Where did your friend go?’. The man replied ‘Excuse me?’ to which I said ‘The man who was sitting opposite you earlier’. ‘Sorry’ he replied ‘I don’t remember anyone sitting there’. ‘But you were talking to him! I thought he was your colleague or something’. The man stared at me before returning to his newspaper.

Half of this story happened and half of it didn’t. It was a boring train journey.

As you may have gathered, I’ve had a busy few weeks. You see, I’m the sort of person who can’t say no to people when they ask a favour, and when those favours turn out to be major tasks which require quite a bit of time, I begin to regret my kindness. So I took on too much, even to the point where I wasn’t getting enough sleep and it felt as though all of my waking hours were spent working. On Friday, the work that had been weighing down on me was finally complete and the feeling of joy at this fact was amplified by celebrating England’s World Cup win against Argentina. I had England down as getting their backsides kicked; happily I was proved wrong.

Silk 1.0 enables you to use any OS X application with Quartz text rendering turned on. It also means that text is rendered beautifully in the browser of your choice; surely an enhancement which, once installed, you can’t do without. This utility requires OS X 10.1.5, so be sure to run Software Update to upgrade your OS.

When there’s a million people right outside, waving flags because everyone else is, trust Stu to be sitting in the ICA watching contemporary Japanese cinema.

I think Prince William liked Ozzy the most.

Like a passing train that you should be on, does it seems to you that the latest phase in the development of personal web publishing is passing you by? If, like me, you’re slightly confused about what RDF Site Summary (RSS) is, here’s an introduction that is worth reading. Update: Here’s a more up-to-date article at webreference.com