Monday Morning “Impediment to Productivity” – 20080915

Hi,

Ah yes, just when you think you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it turns out to be the headlights of a truck heading at you at high speed. Ever wonder how a bunny feels when it props in the middle of the highway. I don’t anymore.

Yesterday we spent a large chunk of the day attempting to “interface” with the public health system (and to all those politicians out there who are dragging there bums on the health issue might I suggest you go and sit in a casualty ward on a Saturday morning for a few hours. then fix it)

Entertaining? ‘Fraid not. See as I dashed out I forgot my MP3 player. Yes that was the ‘tremor in the force’ you felt early yesterday morning as I opened my bag and discovered that it was still on my bench charging. Bloody technology.

Time (as they say) passes and currently I am sitting in sitting in the Lomond Hotel waiting for MFI (the infamous My Friend Ian) to start playing. With luck I will have few tracks for you to listen to next week.

Next week is looking up, Kavisha Mazella is playing Monday night in Northcote and Jools and I are having our productivity impeded by strolling along and having a listen. We might have a little something extra for you to check out next week, we shall see how it goes.

So to sum up the week a lot of waiting. In the meantime, you’ve waited long enough, on with the sillies…


First a bit of housekeeping. To everyone who sent me a copy of ” HOW TO HANDLE IRRITATING SEATMATES ON AN AIRPLANE” (and the 30+ of you know who you are) thank you. But as I have pointed out if it hasn’t got a weblink I cant use it. And after the 17th arrival it probably wasn’t funny.

{it’s obviously my week to practices being a curmudgeon (in training)}


TED Talk of the week: Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library (Internet Archive) — every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history … It’s all free to the public — unless someone else gets to it first.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html

I use the Internet Archive to chase up recordings of obscure live bands and just love it. There is enough stuff here to Impede Productivity from now until doomsday. An amazing resource. (read extraordinary timesoak)

http://www.archive.org/index.php


Arachnophobes move along, there is nothing you want to see here. For the rest of you, “Play With Spider” is the creepiest piece of software I have seen in a while (and that includes the horror that is Vista). I am not really a fan of spiders at the best of time but I am a fan of silly time wasters and this sucked up a lot of time.

Basically, it’s a piece of flash eyecandy(?) where you lay out bugs for a spider to eat. The spider is creepily realistic. At one stage I was flicking between monitors and forgot that it was there, needless to say when I went back to the monitor it was interesting moment. The word gross kept popping into my mind.

Fabulously well done but .. Well have a look for your self.

http://www.onemotion.com/flash/spider/


And while we are the subject of more than two legs, Jools spotted this and sent this one along

“This made me laugh. Thought it would make a fine Impediment. (It worked for me)

Love, Jools

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaM9mrnOMJo  “

It cracked me write up.


Remember those refrigerator magnets you had when you were a kid ( or in my case last year) that were all letters? Letters is same idea except for two bits.

One: it’s played in a browser and
Two: Instead of just you playing with the letters you have to share with whoever else is logged in.

When I tried it there were about a dozen or so people in there and 12 people sharing letters and some of them had less than safe for work vocabularies. Stroll along and raise the tone.

http://lunchtimers.com/game/?game=letters&roomid=room1


Over at IndieMuse, David has posted “Feist On Sesame Street”. Feist performed with the Muppets on the show (I want a penguin), this song has a melody that will not leave you alone. Have a look at http://indiemuse.com/2008/07/16/feist-on-sesame-street/

Absolutely priceless.


It’s time for our “Duggup was a lot of fun this week” bit. Jools was flatout busy with other stuff this week and I spent the week bouncing between guitar & voice folk bands and experimental post rock bands.

My favourite this week was either “Lowry” or “Because Of Ghosts”. Some weeks it’s just to way too hard to choose, head over to http://duggup.com.au/  have a listen and let me know what you think.


Flash Game Dept: Impediments to Productivity is a the name at the top and it’s Monday so lets bring capitalism to it’s knees (unless you happen to be one of my clients in which case this one is blocked at the firewall.. Just kidding).

Last week I mentioned Runescape. Here is an email response from Fran R

“Hi

Long time no talk! Still enjoy the Monday emails.

Just a note re Runescape, it is REALLY REALLY REALLY popular with the kids (were talking Primary School 8 yo up) and there are a lot of players out there that do unscrupulous things on this game, dishonesty runs riot, kids trust is played on more often than you would like to see in this sort of thing. Thank god my son has now tired of this game it is a very worthy of impediment status and extremely addictive.

Cheers

Fran “

Thanks for that Fran, so from this we learn that there are a lot of unscrupulous 8 year olds out there taking advantage of poor innocent office workers just trying to kill a Monday morning and that you really should be careful out there.

This week is going to be seriously old school for two reasons

a: I’m slack

b: There isn’t a person on this list who doesn’t know how to play this one. Which means I wont have to write up explanations (see a)

http://www.getback.com/games-play/1632

Well that’s enough for this week.

Have a good one.

thatch

{Currently listening to Ian Bland and Thea Gilmore (on the MP3 player)}
{Currently reading: Moved onto RA MacAvoy’s Twisting The Rope}
{Quick Status Check: After sitting around in waiting rooms, Hell can be considered an aspirational upgrade}
{Crop Circle Status: The total for September is 2 and it seems that play has been called off on account of rain. Who knew aliens were afraid of getting wet?
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2008/2008.html  }

Published
Categorized as Mondays

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.