Check out the jones.com corporate web portal, complete with CyberTools.

Whether you are conscious of it or not, when you think about something, your eyes always move in a certain direction; this is called CLEM [conjugate lateral eye movement]. In the early 70s, a scientific study found that looking to the left is associated with visual thinking, and looking to the right is associated with symbolic thinking. I’m told that when I’m deep in thought about something, my eyes always move to my left, indicating that I’m a visual thinker. This could explain why I find things like programming and math[s] quite difficult; I just haven’t got the level of symbolic / logical thinking required to juggle many things round in my brain at once. I think some kind of survey would be useful here; one which would associate direction of eye movement to the persons occupation. While I haven’t got the time or the means to do such a survey, here’s a quick poll to find out which of you are lefties and which are righties:

I’ve been looking for a house to buy, just outside of the city. One I looked at was in a place called Stargate; a strange name for a place I thought, especially when it’s somewhere as undramatic as the outskirts of Gateshead. Apart from a non-descript clump of houses, a few roundabouts, a strange circular portal into infinity and a few cows, there wasn’t really much there.

Coincidentally, the film was on Channel 4 later that evening.

Reading the collection of ‘end of world scenarios’ at Exit Mundi reminds me of my old Geography teacher, Mr Hughes. He used to sit there at the front of the class, rumbling about how we’re all going to die in some natural disaster. He droned on about the Earths increasing over-population and how, if an asteroid did knock out the odd continent or two, it would be ‘a blessing in disguise’. Shocking really. Even though we cowered behind our desks during his somewhat terrifying lessons, he was a very good teacher and it was with sadness that I recently discovered that he is now wheelchair-bound after suffering from a severe stroke. So here’s to Mr Hughes; thanks to you I’ll never forget what a Roche Moutonée is.

Jaguar is unleashed soon and it is already getting glowing reviews [reg required]. I’m not sure when it will be available in the UK although one thing is for sure: I’ll be the first in line.

The rumours of a new Apple PDA have been floating around for a few years now, but some of the features of 10.2 do give this rumour some credance; the incorporation of Inkwell, iCal and Sherlock 3’s web services seems to indicate that some kind of portable device is on the cards; John Markoff for the New York Times certainly thinks this is the case.

Have you ever wondered what the sentence “I was looking forward to a lovely plate of Bigbury Bay Oysters…” sounds like in the ancient celtic language of Cornish? Well, here’s your chance to find out.

I like Simon Hoegsberg’s images of pedestrians at Marble Arch in London. Although I refute his claims that the images aren’t set up in some way. [via Exploding Fist]

Well that’s the last time I buy confectionary from Cadbury’s. Can advertisers plunge the depths any deeper than comparing the Cadbury’s ‘Temptations’ product to the war-torn area of Kashmir by saying that both are ‘too good to share’?. MediaGuardian | Advertising | Cadbury’s Ad Upsets India

BALTIC is a new international centre for contemporary art situated on the south bank of the river Tyne in Gateshead. Converted from a 1950s grain silo, it is similar in nature to the Tate Modern in London; it’s a big building next to a river converted into a contemporary arts space. However, the similarity ends there; whereas the Tate Modern houses a permanent collection, showing a history of 20th Century art, BALTIC has no such collection. Instead, its programme consists of a series of events and exhibitions that may dominate 1 or more of its 5 floors at any one time. We visited BALTIC for the first time last week; we knew that some of the exhibitions were finishing, so we decided we’d better catch them while we could. Overall, I was impressed; I think the north east of England really needs somewhere like this – a free and open centre of creativity. That said, many of the current exhibitions didn’t do much for me, although I really liked Jane & Louise Wilson’s short film ‘Dreamtime’. Perhaps my only major disappointment with BALTIC is its website; it is unusable, uninteresting and doesn’t use the medium of the web to its greatest potential. The website should be a major part of BALTIC; instead of being a supporting brochure site with an ‘innovative’ user interface which is completely unusable, it should be like BALTIC itself: open, accessible and constantly changing. It should be a major point of reference, it should be accessible and useful from within the building as well as being a place to create community and online collaboration worldwide. I know BALTIC has just opened, so I should give it time; but the website as it stands at the moment shows no promise at all.

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web is this weeks issue of A List Apart; I don’t think I’ve ever read an article so densely packed with information. A must-read for any weblogger.

Every year, the number of A-level passes increases and every year A-Levels are criticised for becoming too easy. If exams are becoming easier, then we can expect the average A-Level question to be along the lines of ‘spell your name’ in about 20 years time, right? I put this criticism down to one thing: that adults can’t cope with the fact that kids are getting smarter.
Update: Boy wonder passes computing A-level

‘The individuals well versed in many areas of communication design are vital to the success of the Web, there is great need for a revitalization of the medium after the venture capitalists and green-eyed tycoons attempted an infestation.’

– from Dave Rau’s article Two Sides at altsense.net.

I was browsing in His Master’s Voice the other day; there were umpteen copies of The Lord of the Rings DVD just near the entrance – an expected location for a newly released DVD of a popular film I thought. However, during the course of last week, the DVD appeared in places I didn’t expect to see it. I went to Waterstones – a book shop – and there they were, flying off the shelves and into hands of eager fans [this must be the place where people who’ve actually read the book get their copies]. I went to the petrol station to refuel my car, and there was Frodo, Gandalf et al staring at me from the pay counter next the reduced-price Cadbury’s Cream Eggs and the Duracells. I wondered where else I might see them: in newsagents, post offices, shoe shops, pasty shops… on specialised Lord of The Rings vending machines. The bad news is that the 30 disc edition comes out soon; you won’t be able to see for the darn things.

Apple have released some new PowerMac G4 machines with a new face. It seems like they’re really squeezing all they can out of the old the four-handled design which dates back to the blueberry G3s. It looks a bit ugly, but I suppose if you’re a power user, looks aren’t a priority. The fact that you can run two 23 inch cinema displays simultaneously off it is pretty impressive though.

Plink is now available as a WAP site. I thought this might be useful to those who, like me:

a) Go into a record shop and forget what they went in for.
b) Go into a record shop with the intention of leaving with something but are unsure what exactly.

So, introducing Plink Wap [these names are getting sillier aren’t they?]; enter the following address into your WAP browser and bookmark it: http://www.subsist.org/plink/wap/

Apparently, this video [Quicktime, 4 Meg] has been included as an extra on the Lord of the Rings DVD release. Seriously, there’s something deeply disturbing about the likes of Shatner or Nimoy trying to entertain with their non-existent singing voices. I bet Peter Falk never lowered himself in such a way.

I can’t think of a better tribute to the work of MC Escher than to apply modern technology to his creations. When mathematician Henrik Lenstra saw the blank spot in Escher’s ‘Print Gallery’, he knew there must be a way of completing the drawing using the mathematical model Escher used. This site explains Lenstra’s project and contains some amazing animations of the results of his work.

You may remember my quest to find out the truth behind Sesame Street’s funk masterpiece ‘The Pinball Song’. Well, thanks go to Seth for emailing me with some great information about it:

‘I have found (through ASCAP) that the author is listed as one Walt Kramer. The copyright is owned by Sesame Street, Inc. and licensing is handled through Sony/ATV Tunes. I’m still waiting for a reply from the Sesame Street music director re: more info on Walt and the song (which also may be known as J Imagination (Lower) or Sesame Street Cues.’

I bought a new old car a while ago: a Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget 99. Saab’s have a weird uniqueness to them which makes you feel like you’re in a plane; which is no surprise considering they make planes [hence the ‘aeroplan’ bit]. In fact, my car is about as heavy as a plane, which would account for its thirst for fuel. Here’s some Saab history; my favourite is the Saab 92001, the prototype for their first production model.

It seems that bloggers’ adoption of RSS [Rich Site Summary] has spurred the evolution of weblogs. With an increasing number of bloggers making the transition from using diary-like date headers to creating news sources with headlines and more topical content, RSS is altering the ‘Blogosphere’ in a major and irrevocable way.

Thanks to Blogger and Moveable Type, providing RSS versions of blog content has become a common activity. And with software like NetNewsWire Lite for OS X, I can read what’s new at my favourite blogs without opening a browser. In my list of subscriptions, blogs nestle amongst more traditional news sources: Wired, MacSlash, Slashdot and The Register. While many of these news sources have a pretty standard format of RSS file – title, link and short description – the way bloggers format their RSS varies. By definition, RSS lends itself to sites with headlines, precis text and long articles. But blogs tend to be short articles of text without the need of an article description. This poses a problem: placing your blog post into the RSS description tag means that the RSS item has no extra content to point to, unless you have a comments feature on your page. The result of this is that people are changing their blogs to fit into the RSS model; they’re adding titles and comment facilities, to the point where blogs look less like diaries and more like Slashdot.

So, weblogs are adapting to a relative newcomer to the blogosphere – RSS - and I wonder what other technologies are on the horizon that will adapt them even further.