dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

Via Tym , I learnt that Andrew Sullivan wrote a recent column in the Times decrying the atomisation of society by iPod. Which may be true, but is hardly a revelation - Warren St. John in the New York Times already noted how some iPod users use it to shut out the world more than a year ago, and a few bloggers have said the same thing . Heck, even graffiti artists have grasped the iSolating effects. Not quite sure how the isolation effect is that different from what was achieved using Walkmen and Discmen previously, although perhaps the iPod seems even more ubiquitous than those products. I suppose the dimension Sullivan adds to the thinking is that he sees the ubiquity of iPod usage as a metaphor for the echo chamber effect: You get your news from your favourite blogs, the ones that won’t challenge your view of the world. You tune into a satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market - for new age fanatics, liberal talk or Christian rock. Television is all cable. ...

Here's the secret to getting your lift to go into express mode . Otis only, apparently. And here's a playlist of every free song in the iTunes music store. Okay, that just means songs below 30 seconds in length. (Via Jason Barrow .) Queer Eye for the Reporter Gal : how come Superman's super vision doesn't come with fashion sense? That red-and-blue outfit really doesn't work. Singaporean band Soul'D Out keeps a blog . Good to see blogs here expanding into different spaces - promotion, that sort of thing... speaking of soul power, here's Ultimate Christian Wrestling . How to tidy your kitchen and inflict pain on your enemies at the same time (lots of well-designed stuff to look at)... since I'm also jonesing for good type design, here's the f ree font blog , including Kontrapunkt , which I linked to before. And Halle Berry is a good sport .

Here's " Kidnap ", an ad for the Marriott from McCann-Erikson Singapore. Funny, albeit very wrong. (Eagle eyes - and ears - will note that although the AdForum page says the language spoken is Malay, it's clearly Mandarin.) Maybe the man can help out in World Jump Day .

You too can stop global warming! Just jump at the right time. Of course, I don't know how to judge the physics - fact or farrago? In any case it only caters to those in timezones from the International Date Line to +2 GMT (Istanbul), so those of us in the opposite part of the world will just brace ourselves for the impact. Edit: welcome to all my Belgian visitors! Any chance of sending over mussels and beer?

Here's an athletics-based theological question, but one that's perhaps relevant on Oscar night (although actors seem less wont to thank God in acceptance speeches than musicians): does God care who wins ? I think there's a level at which athletes who thank God after an athletic victory move beyond acknowledging their faith and towards showboating, almost as though they were saying "God has chosen me and not you", which, regardless of your religious inclination, would be a terrible theological message.

I just glanced through the Observer blog (via Ben Hammersley ). Talk about how to use corporate blogging - this one really lays out the guts of the process of taking a newspaper to press, and is quite open about the choices that have to be made, as well as how they respond to other newspapers : Not too much to follow, although the Mail on Sunday story about Prince Charles is interesting. We'll change our royal coverage to include the claims in Gavin Hewitt's book on his life as a BBC correspondent to include his transcripts of Charles saying that the British people are obsessed with his private life. It's really impressive what the Guardian and Observer are doing over from Farringdon, they're perhaps the most net-savvy of any major world newspaper. While the New York Times was up online early, they've made it really hard to access the archives, and they took forever to do something as basic as making URLs clickable. Whereas the Guardian and Observer have done s...

Today's Sunday Times (no online version of the article) has a piece on the planned conversion of the long-defunct St James Power Station, recently the site of such art exhibitions as Reconstruction of a City . The station will be turned into a huge club complex, about 10 times the size of the recently-defunct Embassy. The developer's website notes that in bringing in the funk, the space will hold 3 restaurants and 9 (9!) clubs. All that made me think of Berghain , a converted power station in Berlin that Geeta over at The Original Soundtrack described as "ten Fabrics stitched together - the most full-on place I've been to in my life, both vibe-wise and architecture-wise". If the new place is even half as good as that sounds, I'd be psyched. But then, power station conversions are always exciting, as Tamsin Blanchard noted a while back in the Guardian . It's like loft conversions writ on awesome scale. Heck, a good conversion can even win you a Pritzker...