What’s changed at the BBC News site?  There must be something because I spend more time at Sky or the papers instead now.  On the rare occasions I do visit something about the site irritates me.

bbcpulse BBC Is Pulse Enabled? Whatever Next? Advertising?As I read an article today something kept distracting me, it happened so fast it was over before I could see the cause.  My head bobbing trying to find the cause must have been a site.

To find out what was happening I stopped reading the article and watched the refresh gauge on the bottom right of my browser.  After a few seconds there it was!  A brief flicker.  Not a full refresh, just the mere shade of an outline on the progress bar which suggested something was happening in the background.

bbc2 300x142 BBC Is Pulse Enabled? Whatever Next? Advertising?There was no ticker on this page so that could not be the cause.

I viewed the source and a few lines down spied an odd statement in an HTML comment “PULSE_ENABLED:yes”  WTF?

Are the BBC are trying to annoy me (as if the license fee squandered on pointless court cases isn’t enough)?

Sifting through copious amounts of JavaScript and duplicated dependencies and a bizarre selection of bloated common css errors leads to many more curious comments.bbc3 BBC Is Pulse Enabled? Whatever Next? Advertising?

It’s sad, I like their content and I suppose as I pay for it so I should be encouraged to use it but this “pulse” issue is probably the  reason I lost interest in it.

peculiar as I assume this problem is going to reek havoc with their stats, but then why should the BBC be monitoring stats?

 

I got stuck today so grabbed my thesaurus (the old fashioned version with words printed on paper) and started digging around for a few alternatives.

I found what I needed, only I don’t think many people would have heard of it so I performed a blog search to see how common it was.

The word is Peripeteia and it means A sudden change of events or reversal of circumstances, especially in literary work and this is Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs explaining what it means. He also mentions AnagnorisisThe moment of recognition of discovery

If you have a few minutes take this trip with Mike to a sheep farm and you may experience your own anagnorisis!

 

Are you still surprised when you discover a friend on a new social network?  The number of useful social media sites is growing.  Specialist sites for our interests help keep us focused as opposed to facebook and twitter.

3736525 s 300x200 Six degrees of seperation rapidly becoming threeYou have to be specific to be terrific, as my mentor used to say.  Facebook and Twitter are great just so long as you have a good tool to agrregate the data (sly reference to PalRelay).

I recently joined SoundCloud and managed to get martynwalker as a username.  A couple of days later I was contacted by an old school buddy.

How valuable is that? A school friend not spoken to since 1974 contacted me and we enjoyed a 36 year catchup that we couldn’t hoped to have done without social media.

He found me as I favourited a musician we both like and my username rang a bell (or should that be a triangle?).

 
 

Wordle: A few lines of code
Wordle: Easy Wiki Mosaik Edit Problems!

Just spent a few minutes playing with Wordle and created a few “Word Clouds”. Grab any text or website and throw it into the Wordle generator for endless moments of word funart!

 

Last night I discovered Mosaik on Flattr. Mosaik released The Leandi Construction Kit and encourages you remix and have some fun with it. So I have!

 

..and I was just about to get an iphone. The best bit shows Steve Jobs explaining how to overcome the signal range limitation.

 

951911 blog Music industry on its knees comes begging for your helpThe last joke left by the Mandybill government, the Digital Economy Act, may be taken to court by BT and TalkTalk, so says The Register.  Let’s hope so.

 

It’s a struggle to watch this advert, but watch the pretty girl stick tweesers into a live socket – its electrifying!  (sorry)

 

I am reading The Time of Singing by Elizabeth Chadwick which mentions Framlingham Castle and Roger Bigod, a Lord that once lived there. I took these pictures a few weeks ago. Having visited the place before reading the book has added an interesting dynamic to the experience.

© 2011 Martyn Walker | Software Architect | Hiker And Hacker Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha