I spent the last couple of hours in Flash to get the header showing blog post extracts in a tag cloud style. Trying to layout text with non fixed-width fonts is more trial and error than an exact science. Well it may be an exact science if you come up with a really complicated algorithm to do it, but the weekends too short for that and I have ironing and cleaning to do.

Anyways, I’m sure it’ll break when I end up with an odd character in the first sentence of a post.

While we were working in New York the other week I was waiting outside CUNY for Dave to finish his meeting when a journalist came over and introduced himself. He was doing person on the street opinion pieces and wanted my (British) view on the Imus story.

We had quite a long chat and I explained how most people in the UK probably wouldn’t have even understood what the phrase meant or that it had any kind of racial connotations. We also went into how race related controversy in Europe tends to be focussed on European and West Asian differences than black and white. The UK equivalents of Imus, I felt, tended to be able to get away with saying anything, as long as they were genuinely funny.

Anyway, I thought we’d had quite an intelligent discussion. That is, until I saw how it came out in print, where I basically sound like a complete idiot. Also, I wasn’t a tourist!

Not that the rest of them aren’t any good, but some songs have great intros.

• Jolene - Dolly Parton
• Rock ‘n’ Roll Star - Oasis (that’s how to start your first album)
• Sweet Home Alabama - Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Clocks - Coldplay
• Missing - Everything But The Girl
• Pure Shores - All Saints
• Huddle Formation - The Go! Team
• Young Fresh N’ New - Kelis
• Promiscuous - Nelly Furtado
• Regret - New Order
• Ready Steady Go - Paul Oakenfold
• Electioneering - Radiohead

I like lists. No, I really like lists. I find myself making them all the time, I even have a wordpress category (which is really just a list) about iTunes playlists.

I’m not so keen about being on other people’s lists though.

I didn’t used to like the teacher taking the register at school. I can’t really explain why, but something to do with the formality of reading everyone’s name out still makes my stomach turn. I’d get more and more nervous as it got towards ‘S’. Keen, Robinson, Stocks, Shaw. It felt like once the register had been taken, that was the start of the school day and you couldn’t go anywhere for the next six hours.

I can also remember having lots of really awkward moments with the class register. My class seemed to have lots of tricky names that new teachers would always struggle with, like Szejner and Oschovi (I know I’ve spelt that wrong). There was the time a girl had died and the teacher didn’t know. He got to her name and kept reading it out again and again, getting really annoyed that nobody in class would say that she wasn’t here. We all just looked at the floor not knowing what to say.

Once you leave the school there are even more lists that you need to be on. Now, I work for big corp inc. so I should have expected a few. What’s surprising is that most of the lists seem to be career related. We have assessment lists, ranking lists, potential technical leaders lists, technical resource lists, executive resource lists, top talent lists (which is a particular favourite as it’s colloquially known as the ‘top totty’ list), inventors lists, senior inventors lists, master inventors lists, master inventors who are really brainy lists. The lists go on and on.

These lists fill me with the same kind of dread I used to have about the register. Why can’t I just be a number? It’s much nicer than being an element in a list.

I was getting fed up of the green pointaway theme, in fact I never liked it all that much from the start come to think of it. So I spent the weekend doing a new one. I want to do some more stuff with the header (which is why it’s in Flash), but I’m using “Dave Braines” patented project management techniques and not trying to do everything in one go. So here it is.