Kerblam! by Christopher

Saturday, December 16
Things I learnt today

I might not adhere to best practices all the time when blogging, but I do like to think I at least aspire to this fine gentleman's sentiments:

Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.
- Charles McCabe

Ok, so down to business. Just a quick post with absolutely no original opinions of my own, just cloddish repetition of other peoples' facts. Hah.

Again, thanks to the BBC web site's Magazine Monitor for this week's facts of note:

4. The world's tallest man has arms that are 1.06m long.
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5. The top six high street banks in the UK made an estimated £4.5bn from penalty charges in 2005.
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6. About 40% of the mango trees planted to offset the carbon emissions from Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head album have died - which releases carbon into the atmosphere.

(Hah! Take that you bunch of holier-than-thou, all-black-wearing, charitywork-doing middle-of-the-road hippies! heehee)

... And probably the most eyebrow-raising fact:

9. There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, say technology analysts.
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Today's discovery of note: rss2email, a funky little utility which aggregates content from newsfeeds, formats it as you desire, and fires it off to your email inbox - so you can just read RSS feeds like a regular email. Great news for technoluddites like myself who just realllllly can't be bothered to go fiddling about with all those content aggregators / aggregation web sites / Live Bookmarks in Firefox!

Also, note to self: Newsvine's 1st Birthday is coming up on the 6th of January. Todo: review the first year's operations, revise my initial review of the (then private-beta) site (and which was subsequently featured on the blog of Mike Davidson, one of the site's creators! go me). Also todo: congratulate site owners for 365 days of quality offerings and innovations (because if you've not checked the site out already, it really is a cracking little example of user-generated content and established media coming together in a neatly-presented package).

More immediately todo: gather things up and pack them properly, plus prepare some of the (home-made, I'm afraid) Christmas presents for family members, because knowing me I'll still leave it too late and miss the earlier train home. D'oh.

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 12/16/2006 02:37:00 AM. Roughly.
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