Fantasist’s Scroll

Happy birthday, Bond!
Well, it’s more accurate to wish his creator, Ian Flemming, happy birthday.
Yes, today is Ian Flemming‘s birthday, according to the Wikipedia. Born in London, England in 1908, Flemming wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II, he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence. After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book.
After a several books that sold less and less well, Flemming started to write with the movies in mind. He wrote more sensational books filled with a larger than “normal” helping of psychopathic killers, beautiful women and bizarre plots to conquer the world. Though his books began to sell better, it was only years later that the movie industry took an interest, thus sealing the hopes of budding novelists everywhere of selling the movie rights to their novel.

Well, happy birthday anyway.

So, today, my Friday Fun Links have a theme.

I’m not sure if it was the cleaning this week or what, but I’ve been feeling very, well, um, “domestic”. So, my fun links this week pretty much all have to do with things around the house, or housing itself.
Okay, so let’s start from the outside and work our way in. First, I have a link to some interesting plans for an 11 foot by 7 foot flat in London. Apparently inspired by a janitor’s closet with a bathroom that sold for £170,000 in London’s upmarket Chelsea, the plan is really quite ingeneous.
Now, let’s talk furnishings… If you’ve just spent $335,000 on a large broom closet, you probably don’t have much left over for furnature, so it’ll be IKEA for you. No worries, though, thanks to the IKEA Hacker blog. Yes, the stuff on that blog all started life as humble IKEA flatpack that got modified into something wonderful. I especially like the breakfast nook for two.
But, you’ll need light for this tiny hovel, right? Well, thanks to Gizmodo, you can light your flat with the coolest, freakiest science-fiction lamps ever. Also, you can use the coolest, hippest, most radically arty light switches ever to turn the lights on. I thought the pool ball switch was cool for the mini-flat, since it was described as being about the size of a billards table.
But, wait! There’s more! Since this flat would be so totally strapped for space, there’d be no room for a rack of cookbooks in the kitchen, er, make that, by the tiny hotplate and microwave. So, instead, use the coo.boo Digital Cookbook that’s the size and shape of a spatula!
And, finally, in a barely related story, if you can squeeze into the fridge, get out some Ben and Jerry’s Steven Colbert’s Americone Dream ice cream. No, I’m not making that up, but, also no, it’s not quite available yet. Yet.

So, there you have it, a geek getting domestic and working on too little sleep. Enjoy your links and your Friday!
And, yes, this did appear on my other blog, Diary of a Network Geek.

Volunteering to be monitored?

Well, according to this article on the International Herald Tribune, folks in London maybe doing just that. There’s a company that’s offering a cell-phone based tracking service in Britain. In theory, it’s meant to track kids and such, but I can see how this kind of thing might get misused. For instance, employers tracking employees. I know that several of my former employers would have liked to know where I was 24/7!
In any case, I can see the value of this kind of service, but I can see how it could be perverted, too.
How would you imagine this service being used in the future? No, wait, go write it!

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest diarists in the English language, Samuel Pepys.

He was, born in London on this day in 1633 to a tailor and a washerwoman. However, thanks to an upper-class cousin who helped him get into good schools and got him government jobs, Pepys managed to work his way up from his humble beginings at a time when it was almost impossible to do so in England.

Pepys began his diary in 1659, a diary he would keep for almost ten years. No one knows what inspired him to start it, though it wasn’t unusual for well-educated men at the time to keep a diary. He was also a well-known collector, collecting such varied things as ship models, scientific instruments, portraits, ballads, money and women.  In fact, some critics see his diary as an attempt to collect his whole experience of the world.

What made him unique, however, was that, as far as we know, Pepys was the first Englishman to fill his diary with descriptions of his most personal and ordinary experiences: his aches and pains, what he liked to eat, going to the bathroom, his marital love life, and his extramarital affairs, graphic details that novelists wouldn’t start incorporating into their work for more than two hundred years.

An on-line version of his diary is available for viewing at PepysDiary.com.