Exactly.

• If I don’t get a tan soon…
  Yesterday my long-awated book about sunshine was published

• Sunshine is a dark read | Metro.co.uk
  Books: Robert Mighall traces the enduring association between sunshine and happiness that has its roots in pagan equinox celebrations.

• Inside the Medieval Mind
  Inside the Medieval Mind - Robert Bartlett examines the way we thought during Medieval times. As the Middle Ages wore on, a world which previously seemed enchanted became a place to be mastered.
  (tags: BBC medieval)

• Soocial • Hassle-free contacts
  Looks interesting…
  (tags: social)

• Hotel California, Barcelona
  (tags: hotel barcelona hotelcalifornia)

• Get your sunshine here!
  Fed up with repeated bad summers? Still outraged, and craving sunshine after the washout of 2007? Hoping this summer will be better? Don’t just hope: do something about it.
  (tags: sunshine weather)

• Books: Oi! Are you looking for trouser trouble, mate? | Independent on Sunday, The | Find Articles at BNET.com
  Books: Oi! Are you looking for trouser trouble, mate? from Independent on Sunday, The in News provided free by Find Articles.

• Cross publish to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc.
  (tags: twitter, pownce, jaiku)

• Joikuspot convrt GPRS connection to wifi hotspt
  (tags: joikuspot wifi gprs)

• xFruits - Compose your information system
  With xFruits, mix and make delicious mixtures of feeds for blog, mobile and startpage.

That’s the message from ex-president Jimmy Carter who is urging American Demcocrats living abroad to register to vote at www.VoteFromAbroad.org.

Technorati tags: vote, elections, politics, democrats, midtermelections, abroad, votefromabroad, jimmycarter

I will be off the grid and Nick’s Notes won’t get updated for a few days while I undergo and recover from some minor surgery. See you on the other side.

Technorati tags: surgery

Beach Party 1

Originally uploaded by Nick Reynolds.

What summer’s were made for.

The sun is finally pouring down here today. Lifting temperatures and spirits. Spring has been a long time coming. Midsummer, the longest day, seems far too close. Time to go outside.

Eventually it’s a certainty, surely. Rumour has it though that an announcement is to be made in the next week detailing their purchase. But by who? My personal favourite is Google if for no other reason than they’ve got a lot of catching up to do with Yahoo! who have been making some very astute and creative purchases of late. Or it could be Yahoo! themselves who, by buying Technorati, would have outflanked Google by a mile yet again.
[Technorati tags: technorati buyout google yahoo]

Phew! That’s better.
We’re back up and running again as per usual. Stay tuned for more irrelevance and trivia . . .

Things might look a little odd around here for a while since I managed to trash my blog template (no back up!). It might take a few days to rebuild so bear with me. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
[Technorati tag: backup]

It seems like such an obvious observation but it has only just struck me that I don’t read magazines anymore.
It hit me after I had been standing in front of a rack of magazines trying really hard to buy one. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t buy even a single one.
And it’s not because I’m anti-magazine. I dearly wanted to buy one, or two or three, but I knew that for each magazine I could potentially buy (which probably totalled about 20) I knew there was only one or two pages I would actually read and enjoy.
Put all those disparate pages together in one place and I’d glady buy it. But wait a minute. I do already. It’s called the internet. And get this; it’s mostly free.
The internet has certainly eroded my reliance on print media even to the extent that I don’t buy newspapers very often, if at all. Added to which I get better quality from sources on the internet be they blogs, emails or social sites like Flickr or del.icio.us.
Update: I’ve just read Jeff Jarvis‘ post Media no more. Very pertinent. Superb. Read it.
[Technorati tags: magazines media internet newspapers]

When I’m getting near to the end of a bar of soap I take a new bar and stick the remains of the old bar onto the new bar ensuring zero wastage. I do it without thinking. Out of habit. And I know where it comes from.
I used to see my mother do it and she did it (and continues to do it) because her mother did it during the war. At this time many household items were in short supply and couldn’t afford to be wasted. This makes sense and I can understand it. My mother didn’t need to carry this ritual on after the war and I certainly don’t need to do it today.
As I write, however, I am thinking: is it so pointless after all? In the short term, immediate sense, yes it is. I don’t need to save slivers of soap. But what about the long term?
We live in a era of abundance and plenty (gernerally in the West that is) but as sure as day turns to night, this will not always be the case. Addmitedly soap may not be a commodity we need to save so fastidiously but there are many things that we do need to conserve and the ‘lesson of the soap’ is perhaps not a bad one to pass on to my son. Perhaps I will make a point of using the soap as a symbol or metaphor for truly scarce commdities rather than watch him pointlessely trying to stick one peice of soap to another when he could be conserving something more valuable.
[Technorati tags: habit conservation]