Review: Notes from a Big Country

Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson.

I loved the other Bryson books I’ve read (A Short History… and Notes From a Small Island), so had high hopes for this one. To be honest I found it a little disappointing. There are still some hilarious moments (the first encounter of Bryson’s head with a football comes to mind), and witty observations. But I hadn’t realised this book was a compilation of newspaper columns, and they do become a bit formulaic after reading many of them. Still worthwhile, but I’d recommend Notes From a Small Island over this.

3/5 stars.

End of an æra

So Encyclopædia Dramatica is no more, replaced by the rather anodyne http://ohinternet.com/. At first glance I hated Oh Internet, it just seems so bland and corporate, but on a closer look some of the articles are fairly interesting. If it wasn’t for its predecessor I’d probably consider it a rather good site. I expect the creators will do fairly well out of it at least.

But there are plenty of blogs about internet culture, and we already have KnowYourMeme. ED was different. Sure, parts of its content were hateful and it had a nasty habit of harassing Wikipedia editors. Yet its “take no prisoners” style of humour and critique could be laugh-till-you-puke funny. And not just puke because someone stuck a Goatse pic in the middle of the article, but because its incisive style was just what some of the more self-important parts of the Internet needed.

I doubt we’ll see the like of ED again. Many might say that’s a good thing, but I’m not so sure.

Also: I wonder how long it will be until someone tries to delete ED’s Wikipedia article. Again.

Update: Here’s one of the mirrors that has sprung up http://encyclopediadramatica.ch (nsfw, obviously!) It looks to have a strong “campaignAnon” contingent. According to AnonNews the owners of Oh Internet have threatened to sue anyone who tries to replicate, mirror or redistribute the old ED. That should go down well. *grabs popcorn*

Update 2: I forgot to mention my favourite thing about ED. In amongst all the hate and bile was the article on b3ta (nsfw). It even said “the people on b3ta actually are pretty nice”. There was some discussion on the talk page (now lost) about making the article nastier, but no one ever did anything.

b3ta – so fluffy even ED can’t say anything bad about it

Review: Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion

I think I’ll start copying my short reviews of what I’ve been reading here from Goodreads. This is the first:


Yes!: 50 secrets from the science of persuasion by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin, Robert B. Cialdini

I did think that Cialdini’s famous “Influence” was more valuable for studying the underlying principles in depth, and would highly recommend that book to anyone. “Yes!” covers much of the same material more briefly. However this is still a quick and interesting read, with some great examples. One of the chapters in this book helped us boost response rates by around 20% with a simple change to our marketing!

4/5 stars.

Valentine’s day

I’m a sad lonely single and haven’t had a Valentine’s card in years.
So I was mildly excited on receiving a plain envelope through my letterbox today, and even more excited when it turned out to indeed be a Valentine’s card!

“Who could it be from?” I thought. “Could it really be possible that someone out there actually LIKES me?” For a brief moment I actually felt a rare burst of self-esteem. With trepidation I opened the card.

Inside it said “from Jesus”.

I feel like I have been trolled by Christianity.

Bittersweet bundle of misery

Good grief, Winamp for Android is awesome. MixZing was certainly clever, but was getting increasingly buggy and frustrating. Winamp runs smooth as anything and has a wonderful interface, yet it’s still in beta! Only thing I miss is being able to swipe on the lockscreen to skip tracks, but that’s a minor quibble. Haven’t yet got the wireless sync to work, but if it does then this moves into killer app territory.

So I installed Winamp on the laptop to try and use wireless sync. Had it scan my library, then popped on the “Top Rated” playlist. Eerily it started playing my favourite songs – from about 2 years ago when I last used Winamp – on a different computer! It must save rating/playcount information in the files I guess. Kind of nice, I haven’t listened to some of these songs in a long time and it’s evoking some serious nostalgia.

Amusingly in my library this is just titled “That Music From the Dancing Car Advert”:

It got me thinking, a lot of music listening history is stored on last.fm. It would be nice to be able to say “take me back to 200X” and cue up a playlist of stuff I was listening to then. Maybe pull up some timely photos from Facebook/Flickr to add to the experience, and some old BBC news headlines. Automatically lower the screen resolution to a suitable level – ok, maybe not that.