almost witty

Wired UK magazine

Originally uploaded by jovike

Back in 1994, Wired magazine tried to launch a UK version, working closely with the Guardian. Since I was barely in university, I couldn’t afford to waste precious money on such a future-looking magazine, so it came and went from my local newsagent but Jem Stone has kindly linked me to a fantastically grimly hilarious email about the trials and tribulations of Wired UK take 1.

Skip to today, and Conde Nast (the current publishers of Wired) have also announced plans to take Wired to the UK - to be edited by the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, David Rowan.

Not being part of the A-list (or even C-list) crowd of tech journalists, I can’t help but to wonder if it’s going to work second time around, just when the credit crunch is slowly being felt and the second dotcom boom is beginning to fade as a consequence. Besides which, I can only think of a couple of Brit-based tech journalists off the top of my head. And one of them only because she has a fantastically unique name.

There is a rising appetite for gadget magazines in the UK, already well served by the likes of Stuff and T3, but merging that with the internet era on a dead tree format? I’m assuming that TechCrunch UK and sites like it aren’t exactly burning up page impressions - and that’s on a free website.

But of course this gets back to my personal flaw in offering problems and reasons not to do something - but never to point out a solution.

- Gor blimey, what an episode. Just how many elements can you mix in?
- The visual FX were gor-blimey-spectacular.
- If only the episode had been called This Stolen Earth. Work in a bit of literary/sci-fi reference, that’s what I say… (is there a Shakespearian line about This Quiet Earth?)
- Suddenly, the propensity for even the official Doctor Who news outlets to start plugging the identity of the mysterious villain coming back, makes no total sense. Since that’s not what the cliffhanger centres around…

More spoilers here:
(continue reading…)

These are the Twitters I sent over the last 24 hours…

• 20:10 Is wondering whether bbc wales has managed to keep the best secret ever #

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London bus

Originally uploaded by E01

Thanks to incredibly slow London traffic, I managed to spend three hours on the 266 bus route between Hammersmith and Brent Cross, and back. It wouldn’t be so bad but I got to Brent Cross *just* when all the shops were closing. I was starving at this point, and even though there was plenty of food out on display - because all the shops were closing up their tills, nobody would sell me any. Damn nit!

The plus side in my mini-trail across half of London is that I did spot a few random London moments, including:

- one chap who got on the bus, and spent the next 30 minutes loudly listening to, and nodding along to a rap music album. Stored on his phone which he was listening to by keeping it against his ear, and generously sharing it with the rest of us grumpy passengers. And he had bling-bling white trainers on. And he was white, just to defeat another stereotype.

- spotted a taxi parked on the side of the road, and next to the taxi was a man kneeling on a prayer mat, praying presumably towards Mecca

and your random London link is this series of images musing on what 2090 London would look like, once it’s been flooded.