Offmessage

Things have been afoot over at Isotoma land, making it almost impossible for me to actually maintain a blog. I could repost my status messages from facebook here, if you wanted? To be honest all they say is things like “Andy is very busy”, but it might give you the sense of something happening, if you fancied it?

Why so busy? We’re in the process of 4 Plone sites at the moment, one of which is distinctly massive, while also attempting to change the face of Open Source Content Management in our spare time. Watch this space and all that.

An intriguing list of reasons that startups fail. Very well considered. And unnerving, obviously
Found at waxy.org

Ah, Bill. Bill, Bill, Bill Bill… Bill. What are we going to do with you?

November 21st is No Music Day

I love Bill. I love Penkiln Burn. I love the KLF. I love Black Smoke. But I also love music. And you can shove your observance up your arse

I keep meaning to update offmessage such that I can make tiny little review posts that just quickly big up a particular thing. I haven’t done it yet (in fact I haven’t written a single new bit of this site in nearly 4 years) so instead… Buy Marquee Moon by Television. Influenced by the multi-layered guitars of bands like Love and Buffalo Springfield at one end and the jerky edgy raw power of bands like the 13th Floor Elevators at the other. They were one of the first bands to build the cult of CBGB’s (which is apparently closing!!)and the influence of Marquee Moon can be heard reverberating right through the late 70s and 80s. It rocks. Buy it. (or download it).

Wahey! After some difficult work fixing scary bugs and so on we have now got Sleevenotez back up and running and raring to go. We promise we won’t hide it again this time. You’ll need to register this time, but once you have you should find a much quicker, more stable system with some extra fandangly bits.

So. We’re hiring at the moment (if you’re interested please drop us a line). We put an advert on the Yorkshire and Humberside Graduate Link web site, as we’re looking for graduate types and thought this was a good way to dip our toes in the water of recruitment. We’ve had a very favourable response, but a couple have really scared me…

Two of the applicants have done degrees in “Web Engineering” (or something very similarly named). Both of them have portfolio web sites which, rightly enough, appear prominently on their CVs. Both of these portfolio websites use .bmp format images that are full size and then scaled by the image tag (one using images well over a megabyte in size being used as icons). I’m gobsmacked. I’m about to sound like my dad, but… Is this really the level of education that they are leaving University with? I’m actually tempted to write to the people running the courses. That is not a BSc, and it shouldn’t be called one.

In the long running series of “you have got to love the Internet” posts… All the deaths in Midsomer Murders from the most amazingly dedicated Midsomer fan site.

Fascinating thoughts on who *actually* writes wikipedia. I had heard James Wales’ comments that the vast majority of wikipedia was written by a small, hardcore user base a few times and was already sceptical… This piece confirms what I had thought…

For reasons that will become abundantly clear over the coming weeks (hopefully) or months (probably) I have gained a sudden interest in food on the Internet. So, let this be a first post in a new category of food related linking…

Jared’s excellent food blog makes me very very hungry.

Is this any good? It’s a cool idea, but then… There are many many poorly executed cool ideas out there…

The Rough Guide Book of Playlists