I liked Amit’s post over on his tumblr blog, he makes a good point:

I earn my living—the food I eat, the apartment I sleep in, the books I read, etc. — by pushing plastic buttons all day long.

I don’t know Amit Gupta personally - I just randomly started following his updates on twitter - so it feels a bit strange to first-name him in this post. What’s the etiquette on that?

Speaking of twitter, you can find me here and I’m always keen to find new people to follow / be followed by as I think the real appeal of apps like these is the community aspect.

I emigrated to the USA in June this year, as my wife and I decided our future lay on this side of the Atlantic. It’s been a wonderful transition for me personally as I’ve only ever lived in England - and let me just say, the contrast is vast, this is a fantastic country with a real sense of community, the lack of which in England could so easily explain many of the social problems being experienced there.

We’re currently living in Missoula, a mid-sized city in the state of Montana
- here’s a particularly nice photo from Flickr of the city and it’s impressive scenic surroundings:

Now that we’re settled, I intend to get back to blogging - so if anyone’s still reading, I’ll be back real soon.

Metro (a daily newspaper available in London) have dispelled their top 5 urban myths. At number 1:

1. You accidentally swallow about eight spiders a year in your sleep

Why it’s not true:
Spiders have a natural instinct to stay alive and crawling into the heavy-breathing hot, wet mouths of animals goes strongly against this.

Who started it:
Back in 1993 a columnist for PC Professional named Lisa Holst decided to prove that you could make up anything on the internet and people would believe it.

She did this by making up a set of facts that were utterly ridiculous, the spider myth among them (which itself was taken from a collection of insect folklore that dates back to the 1950s, and emailing her findings around the world.

I find this very comforting, as I heard that one a while ago and it kinda freaked me out.

Jeffrey Zeldman posted about a personal experience of when budgets are spent just to ensure the same budget is delivered the next year:

The client—the marketing side of a product development group—had a budget of $60,000 to spend. So they spent it, even though the R&D side of the product development group had not been able to deliver the product.

It’s a theme that comes to mind pretty often - whether it’s in the case of the M4 Motorway (runs past Reading on it’s way from London to South Wales) which always seems to have some sort of roadworks going on to erect another set of new informational signs (that usually inform you that there is a delay due to roadworks… endless loop, that) or the fact that new buildings were constantly appearing all over campus at Loughborough while I was there because - and this is just conjecture that was commonly believed around the place - the huge revenue from the sports side of things couldn’t solely be put back in to the sports concerns.

Seems like there are a hundred million places excess money could be going that would make massive differences to people’s lives. But then things just don’t work that way, do they?

Jonny sent over a link to a remarkable bit of graffiti stop-frame animation today - check out the video here.

An ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in baden (fantoche).

I had to share… that’s just amazing, I can’t imagine how long it must have taken to complete.