From an off-the-record report of a departmental seminar somewhere in the UK.

I’ve always kind of wondered whether this is kind of tribute to blue jeans/bleu de Gênes, but I’ve never had the courage to ask, mainly because if I’m wrong they’re going to think I’m fucking crazy.

Also via Margaret Marks, a machine that does perfect translations in a number of European languages.

For a client I need a shared hosting solution with storable.pm installed. WebFusion/HostEurope/Pipex won’t do it. Any ideas?
(Update: thanks for a couple of suggestions, but I’ve decided to dive into PHP.)

From Kitten. There’s lots of good stuff coming out of the WordPress community, but not what quite a lot of people seem to have been requesting for a while: a functional multi-author system. At the moment WP trumpets its various user levels but no mention is made of the fact that same-level users can all [...]

Toast oven => PC. There’s loads more good stuff on GeekDIY.com.

Seriously, if I write this blog in Portuguese, will someone invite me onto Orkut? Or am I better off just heading down the Brazilian bar down the street? All these do-good schemes always end up in trouble - just check the story of rioting at the Forum over in Lorna’s Shorts.

This is interesting. Unipeak reproduces my site (your site) dynamically on theirs, as it were, turns off my ads, and turns on theirs. The site is presented as a tool to help among others the poor old Chinese, but the fact that my material ends up being cached by Google as if it were theirs [...]

For reasons that are unclear to me, the burlesque leader who ruled Dublin during carnival used to be known as Mayor of the Bull Ring. Barcelona’s Mayor Clos is so damn serious that he wants to close our bull-ring, but the chances that he’ll stop making a fool of himself the rest of the time [...]

Sez Rob (via Memepool). There’s a generation-by-generation analysis of the techniques buried somewhere around here, but it has got slightly less amusing recently: early last month I was getting up to 200/hr - not good, even if they do go straight to trash - and, though that problem has been killed, new contact emails receive [...]

I reckon that most of the money invested by local and regional government in providing e-services, ranging from bog-standard pages for rural councils to the more ambitious attempts seen here in Barcelona, was wasted. This is because most projects served either as a means to funnel money to new media businesses set up by the [...]

There’s a guide here. Looks pretty clunky to me and dynamic generation of pages just shunts the MT rebuild issue down the row. Textpattern looks interesting in a hippy kind of way, but I may have to start sending postcards again…

Kaleboel figures for insignificant reasons in an academic paper by Fernando Tricas-García and Juan Julián Merelo-Guervós. The Spanish-speaking Blogosphere: Towards the Powerlaw? (PDF) introduces a spider-based tool developed by the authors, the Blogómetro, and includes the following interesting comment:

Yet another triumph for capitalism: try out show me your ass and spit at me on Burger King’s Subservient Chicken.
Via Language Log.

WiFi-SM (via wondering) sounds good:
I’ve been using WiFi-SM for one month and it’s amazing ! When somebody suffers on earth, not only I know it, but I can also feel a little bit of his/her pain. I don’t feel guilty anymore and I can enjoy life without limitation. I love WiFi-SM
Here’s the blurb:

Den mailed to point out a site run by a Barcelona taxi driver, Francisco Dugo aka Taxi Tupi, with a webcam and lots of lovely photos. How public-spirited!

Here. Now all I need to do is stop the cat vomiting on the kitchen table.

This is the kind of news that must break the hearts of the beards who want to establish little, backward Islamic fiefdoms:

This is what I call a good post:

The headline figure this morning is 20%, but the survey (.doc) asks the question twice and the other answer is different. First there’s question 3:
I’m going to read you a list of apparatus and new technologies that are being used more and more frequently in Spain. Tell me, please, of each one whether you have [...]