Manchester - 5 years later...

Well, Manchester has changed a hell of a lot since I used to live here. I'm sitting here in a Starbucks (one of several - they're as common here as they are in Seattle, it seems) checking my email online.

Downtown - which was bombed in 1996 by the IRA using a van full of semtex - is ... erm... different. Much different. Almost unrecognizable in fact.

It's all glass and towers now. There's a huge ferris wheel downtown in the area that used to be called the Corn Exchange. What the Corn Exchange was (a bunch of hippy low-rent shops and cool clothes stores, kind of like Pike Place market without the food) is now a glitzy ritzy store area called The Triangle. Across the street, what was the Daily Mirror print shop for Manchester is now a huge semi-enclosed nightclub, food and movie location called The PrintWorks - everything you could want in a night on the town, all in one spot.

The movie theatres in the PrintWorks are great too - large, American-style stadium seating affairs - with screens that seem larger than Cinerama in Seattle. And upstairs, in the balcony, there are armchairs with phones to get waiter service while you watch the movie. We need something like this in Seattle.

The Trains have also changed - as has the train station - and are now plush Star Trek-like affairs complete with sci-fi doors.

All change.

I need to take some photos before I come back. I'll put them up on Flickr.com in my photo section - and I'll need to scan in some that I took the day after the Manchester bombing for comparison.

It's weird. Five years is a long time - but you don't notice it while it's happening.

Hyperlinks in Paper Media

Well well well... things have changed quite a bit since I was last in England. Here's a surprising one though.

The Granuiad¹ (sic) is now putting hyperlinks in its articles. No, I don't mean that they're spelling them out with an http://whatever and everything... no, they're actually putting the whole text-in-blue-with-an-underline thingy in print media.

It's actually surprisingly effective. Instead of clicking on said link (which frankly, will only start doing something once someone actually manages to put together working E-Paper for the masses), you just look across the page until you see the call-out box which has all of the "anchors" for the links. It's a very very cute way of handling glossaries in printed articles. I wholeheartedly approve.

¹That would be The Guardian newspaper, which for a while now has been warmly referred to as the Granuiad, because for the longest time it had the worst proof reading in the business.