Fire alarm at ClientCorp. Helped break up the morning nicely 
Happy invoicing!
- Get Them on the Blower: London’s Forgotten Pneumatic Messaging Network - A detailed history of the tubes which played an important role in the Victorian Internet: ”Whilst telegram messages travelled at great speed between cities, forwarding them a few hundred yards in the heavily crowded streets of London via messenger boys could take hours and sometimes over a day… the world’s first practical pneumatic tube carried messages in carriers in 1853, between the Electric and International Telegraph Company headquarters (called the Central Telegraph Station) on Telegraph Street in Lothbury and their offices at the Stock Exchange on Threadneedle Street. Half of all telegrams in London were being sent between these two offices.”
- Conversation With a Tech Support Scammer - "When investigating an incident that involved domain redirection and a suspected tech support scam, I recorded my interactions with the individual posing as a help desk technician and researched the background of this scheme. It was an educational exchange, to say the least. Here’s what I learned about this person’s and his employer’s techniques and objectives." One to send to your non-techy friends and relations.
- Medieval Ethics: Designing Historical Systems - It’s about ethics in videogames: ”In contrast to values such as modern capitalism that tend to creep into medieval games unintentionally, the values in Crusader Kings were very deliberately designed… The values that a good Crusader Kings player is encouraged to adopt within the game world are essentially the values of the European feudal system.”
- The Insane Story of the Guy Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln - 150 years ago yesterday, John Wilkes Booth was surrounded by the 16th Cavalry and, completely against orders, killed by the extremely religious Boston Corbett: ”He became a regular at sidewalk churches around the city, peppering street preachers’ prayers with boisterous refrains of “Glory to God!” and “Come to Christ!” The ministers eventually encouraged him to stake out a corner of his own, not so much because the young man had potential but to keep his annoying chorus at a distance.”
- On cups and mugs - "I wake up from a period of bard-hibernation to find a fascinating debate going on in social media about the distinction between ‘cup’ and ‘mug’.” David Crystal explains the all-important differences.
- It Is Shocking What You Can Find On the Internet - Denny Cherry on some of the systems found to be wide open to anybody by security researcher Paul McMillan: ”There are some pretty big control systems online as well. Here’s the control systems for a hydro-electric plant which is producing around 480kw of power… Maybe there’s someone important hooked up to this heart monitoring system at a hospital.”
- Maple Syrup Rebellion - "Fighting to keep their syrup out of the hands of the powerful Quebec monopoly, producers sneak barrels by night, deal in a black market and even flee the province.”
- The King of Bullsh*t News - "How a small British news agency and its founder fill your Facebook feed with stories that are wonderful, wacky – and often wrong." BuzzFeed, in their article, admit to having been taken in by this mob too: this is where the tabloid press get all those made-up viral news stories.
- The Search for Blind Lemon - Memoirs of growing up and learning to play the Blues as a young white boy in the Deep South, by the late Jim Dickinson, who in his time played with everyone from Lulu to the Rolling Stones: ”I don’t know when I first heard the music in my head. I don’t remember not hearing it. Sometimes in the morning it would be the first thing I heard, shutting out the sounds of reality—the traffic outside the window and the people moving around… I was hypnotized. It was like being hit over the head. Never in my short life had I heard anything that so moved me. It was like music from heaven, yet these men were clearly not the angels described to me in my mother’s church.”
- Tell Us Your Story - "All the brands that want to hear your stories." For example, maybe you’d like to tell us all a story about your piles:
Happy invoicing!
