sj's Longest Now [v.1]

1. Anyone convinced that Davos (webcasts) is a playground of the elite, joyously squandering money to impose their offensive presence on the quiet Swiss countryside,
will be comforted by the fact that their website is just barely
functional.   It’s site map and use of javascript
“error-window” popups to replace the expected Hot Link Action for the events schedule made me smile.

2005 will be the year of the wiki.  And not simply because Wikimania will be Europe’s hottest event next summer. Mark my words… even if Gartner‘s coolness report doesn’t realize it yet.

My new UVW! campaign starts
tonight.  Everyone who volunteers time to communicate to the rest
of the world, not merely to let their friends know about their personal
lives, or to impress everyone with the skill of their photoshop
manipulations, should at least take a peek at the GV project and see
which of their private dreams they can project onto it.

The last time I saw such a grand idea for collective interaction, it
had the flavour of one particular group trying to stamp its impressum
on the democracy of the ether.  This time, for once, it’s just a
group of people, y’know?  Of at least two genders, five major world religions, seven languages, and a dozen professions. 

See, firstly, the cleaned transcript
of the Manifesto session from last weekend’s Internet and Society
conference.  Then see the recent product of that session : the Global Voices Wiki, complete with a draft manifesto. 

Secondly, scour the blogosphere to see what people are saying about this new endeavour.  It’s not different from previous efforts to unite bloggers in common cause, exactly, just another persistent step along the path towards cohesive greatness.

For all you linguists out there.  Here is a fantastically droll essay on the sufferings of a British expat pronouncing his way through life in Holland (Hmm, here’s another shorter one; must be the latest fad).

The author references what must be the greatest English pronunciation criticism ever written, The Chaos — one which I first encounted this month.  I ascribe this in part to my growing up in the US, where few English teachers could pronounce all of the Britishisms required to preserve rhyme and meter.  However, it turns out that this gem was genreally lost for a few decades, and only slowly and in various editions made its way into the general consciousness at the end of the last century.  It never fails to make me smile just trying to read it through in my head.

The origin of the poem is curious; it is claimed to have been devised by a teacher of English for a young student, or to help multinational NATO personnel polish their accents.  It was certainly composed by a Dutchman, Gerald Nolst Trenite (1870-1946), and parts continued to be written until his death.  Perhaps this is why I first saw it on a page about pronouncing Dutch…  I like it so much, and clean online copies are so hard to come by, I should put up my own.

Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

A little advice from Mr. Wong on designing the Ultimate War Sim. I think the need for true-to-life games phenomenally outstrips the current supply… save perhaps for the trivial case, that most infinite game of all.

In other news, I have to stop myself from wikifying blog postings recently, even in a nice editor interface like Manila-on-IE.

Finally granted a residency permit in 1999, and now wealthy enough to support himself on the outside, Nasseri has yet to leave Paris National Airport.

“As of the summer of 2004, Nasseri is still living in the airport. He does not lack for money — Dreamworks paid him a rumored $250,000 for the rights to his story.”

Of course he has no bank accounts, so the checks are being held by Christian Bourguet, the famous lawyer who took on his case a decade ago.

As for the plastic red bench, which has served as his de facto home for the last 15 years and must by now be a collector’s item, he says, “I’ll take it to DreamWorks… and send it by FedEx.” [NYT]

…with a wild-card trip to the Athens Olympics. Nate
rocks my world. And what a boost for British wrestling! I’m *so*
excited.  He seems to have had an AMAZING trip, too. 

to be believed. And some can use as many channels to the public as possible. The images from abu Ghraib qualify… the americans in those photos are representing all of us — even those tangentially part of the coalition — to the world.

Now embedding: the world’s greatest ad for swearing.  Care of the ever-loving blue-eyed channel4… you have to say it just like that.

If you’ve ever wanted to make your own string of heiroglyphs, you should check out the international standard for abbreviating a heiroglyph chain in the latin character-set, and then visit heiro, a lovely heiroglyph generator whose output you can use however you please.