A bit of idle surfing

I’m bound a bit closer to the apartment today; I’d hoped to take advantage of the warm weather to ride south along the river, but found that someone had vandalized my bicycle overnight.  Nothing major, but they pulled the stem out of one tire and left me flat. It will take a day to get a replacement and get things back on the road (note to add inside bicycle parking to the list of apartment essentials).

So, caught inside, I caught up with some reading and some idle surfing.

An article about ChatRoulette led me to a new social Web site that  randomly connects people using the application.  The twist is that it’s a video connection, not just text chat.  In the abstract, this could give you an unexpected window into homes, laboratories, and offices worldwide.  In practice, its absolutely creepy, connecting with an endless array of slack-jaw’d teens in gritty dorm rooms.  ‘Depressing and monotonous.

In contrast, How I Ran an Ad on Fox News is a fun vignette from online magazine Slate.   In it’s march to take over the world, Google is now selling television advertising time at absurdly reasonable rates (it suggests how broad the cable media landscape has actually become).  Slate takes up the challenge and gets good response; maybe I should consider an experimental media buy for the business.

While the Internet is accused of causing the  destruction of print media, it really has been a boon for visual media.   Many aspiring artists have brought their works online to display, to sell, to talk about, displaying a real richness of methods and subjects.

I like to explore the space using StumbleUpon, as plug-in that randomly skips around sites within a category.  Flicking through Painting or Photography produces a lot of variety, most of good quality.  I like to couple it with the firefusk plug-in, which downloads a gallery of images in the same directory, saving a lot of clicking when I find a promising work.

Watercolour by David Reeves - Creations of Another Kind