A new BBC take on Little Dorrit started on PBS in the U.S. tonight.
It’s nice. No surprise there, as it’s been adapted by Andrew Davies (newest Bleak House, Middlemarch, 1995 Pride and Prejudice).
Good time for it, too, with its threads of ruinous debt and government bureaucracy, all packaged up to satisfy a need to find amusement in despair.
Every once in a while I go on a sentimental journey back to websites I once maintained. This morning, for the first time in a number of years, I checked out the IU Alumni Association site that I tended 12 years ago.
It’s undergone I-don’t-know-how-many redesigns since my day, but I never mind. Time moves on and I’m sure I’d hate the looks of my 1997 idea of cool if I had a look at it now. In fact, I don’t even want to check the wayback machine for fear of a cringe attack.
I did spot one little bit of my snarky copy that was either preserved or overlooked on the license plate lobbying page:
“What do Indiana, Tennessee, and New York have in common?Funny to think about web development back then. If anything interactive was needed for the site, I was all about CGI/Perl, and flat text files were the only databases I thought I needed. And we got by; it was fine for the time.
I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone, a long time ago. I even tried to sell a t-shirt from the classifieds in the back of the book in the late 70s (Linda for First Lady; got a cease-and-desist).
While I’m loathe to visit a newsstand anymore I almost did pick up the new issue for a little better reading experience of Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover. A skim shows it would be worth the effort for a more energetic person. A tidbit: he reveals that AIG, by forming a savings and loan, was able to choose to be regulated by a laisse-faire regulatory agency in no way able to watch over it. If we’re going to focus on a narrow piece of the story, like the bonuses, why not that piece instead? It seems pretty important.
But I can’t get with reading long articles online. I tried to print it out but was short on ink.* I want it read to me like an audio book. RS, why don’t you give it a try as a podcast? Not every story, maybe not every feature. Just a selection of nice long meaty articles that people like me might want to luxuriate in.
Would I pay? Maybe. A little.
Further on persistence of interest: 12 days later people are still passing around links to the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer encounter.
On the latest This Week in Tech Leo LaPorte said his network will be dropping its exclusive arrangement with Stickam so the shows can be viewed live on other services.
He also mentioned in passing that each service would use its own chat tool, and that’s what got me wondering about something. If the chat is going to be further fragmented anyway, I wonder if Leo would mind if a few grownups gathered in its own chatroom to watch some of the shows.
I’d like to be able to watch the Gillmor Gang while chatting with a more mature group like the old NewsGang. In such a room, we could be as profane as the panelists if we wanted to be. It’s less offensive to me to see the occasional naughty word than it is to swim in a stream of whining “advice” for Steve on getting a decent mic or learning about lighting or shutting up about Twitter or shutting up about the Beatles. We could post links, too. Not all links are self-serving spam. Used by grownups, they probably would provide background on the topic under discussion.
My mother’s intuition tells me the snark comes from very young men—a sort of Digg, YouTube commenting crowd. I’m glad for Leo that he enjoys such a following; that crowd is necessary to achieve a really decent-sized tech audience. Their conversation just isn’t to my taste. Also I’m not so sure it’s his advertisers’ most desirable audience. Maybe he could even get a sponsor for a different sort of room, or make it into a premium service by serving it up with one of the video streams on special page.
Update (April 6): Christian Burns suggested a Friendfeed room would be good for this purpose. Today it happened in Friendfeed, in the beta interface and it didn’t even need a room.
Veer’s new pricing on stock photos looks good, and they say they’ll be accepting user art soon.
I love their stuff. Check out the design essentials and fun stuff galleries.
But why oh why oh why oh why oh why do stock business pictures always always always feature nothing but gleaming smiles—people just delighted to distraction over the piece of paper they’re reviewing together. You can’t use photos like that without screaming “This is a con.”
