Month: February 2004

Ah, bless Tim Burton. Just when you think there aren’t enough fairy stories, along he comes pointing a camera at, one suspects, pretty much what the world looks like from inside his head.

Big Fish is lovely. Barking mad, unapologetically whimsical, curiously but inconsequentially incomprehensible, brilliantly cast.

‘It’s true what they say: when you meet the love of your life, time stops. What they don’t tell you is that when it starts again, it goes really fast to catch up.’ Glorious.

This is what ConConUK looked like from the back room (after a vicious turf war denied me a seat in the main room. Or maybe I went to the bar, I don’t recall). Funnily enough, the grain/pixellation/terrible colour noise apparent here perfectly captures the atmosphere of the iChatAV stream. Somehow, I don’t think this is an intentional feature of my cameraphone.

Look, we were doing it because (a.) we could, and (b.) it seemed like it might be useful. Not because it was a(nother) great promo for Apple kit. But of course, nobody will believe that.

Picture the scene; ‘The Dover Castle,’ says somebody (Danny?), ‘That should hold enough people.’ The room holds about 40; more like 90 turn up. Ah. So, we spill into a back room (AKA ‘The Cheap Seats’), from about half of which a view is afforded of the main room through a non-opening window. There’s sound, thanks to a PA that turns out to be

[picking up where Movable Type cut this off, grrrr:] turns out to be better than feared. But it’s a little odd being at a small-scale event, and having no idea what the speaker looks like.

However, near the front of the main room a chap called William has an iBook and an iSight FireWire video camera; after a couple of minutes’ tinkering in one of the breaks we have a video stream running wirelessly to my PowerBook in the back room. Which is cool and all, but not really very clever on our part. We’re just Mac users, and we trust that this sort of thing is worth trying. It’ll either be so simple we’ll have it working almost immediately, or in only a few minutes we’ll have exhausted the obvious possibilities; either way, there’s still time to get to the bar. And yet, even in an audience of alpha geeks, this caused a minor stir.

It’s easy to forget how good Apple are at making simple things completely transparent, and mildly-complex things pretty-dang-simple. But of course, using this stuff will always come across as smug: ‘It just works’ is the sort of phrase people want to wipe off your face with a soggy core dump. Unfortunately for all parties, it happens to be true.

What frustrates me is that I didn’t think of having QuickTime Streaming Server/Broadcaster installed before I turned up, and that the cable for my miniDV camera was in Glasgow. With all of that kit, we could have pumped two feeds to every wireless-capable box in the room. Now that would have been neat.

OK, my main post about ConConUK. By the time I regain bandwidth and post this, others will have covered far more in more detail, so I’ll just add some personal notes and observations.

General impressions

• It’s easy to forget quite how invigorating/knackering congregations of clever people can be. Sure, I work with such people, but it’s slightly different in one’s day job. At least, one’s brain spins rather less.
• The corollary, of course, is the faintly patronising assumption people make that only ‘their’ group produces such gatherings. Bunk. I was amazed, for example, that nobody I asked had ever been to the British Association meetings. I know they’ve shrunk of late, and the last one I attended (three years ago?) wasn’t remotely as mind-blowing as, say, Sheffield in 1989, but still… a different set of geeks. Interesting.

Digital Democracy – Ra! Ra! Ra!

• I’ve posted about YourParty here before, and I was aware of the whole MySociety thing, so you might expect me to be interested in digital democracy ‘stuff’. You’d be right, but for some reason it surprised the heck out of me. Sure, that portion of the proceedings featured hugely amusing/incisive summaries, but there’s more to it than that.
• The analysis of the lack of analysis of the Dean campaign failure was brief but made me sit up; odd details of some of the current UK projects had me nodding in approval. I’d have gaped in slack-jawed wonder, only that makes me look foolish. I think I’m most impressed that the UK folks are picking simple projects with clear utility that make a genuine difference, rather than gunning for big headlines with meaningless fluff. FaxYourMP is a terrific service – the sort of thing that plain should exist. There’s clearly a whole heap of stuff coming along of similar efficiency, and I heartily commend the people who are spotting the gaps, and filling them.
• All the democracy stuff reminded me of peoples’ approach to the net environmental movement five years ago. I think the BBC actually ran a story titled ‘Will the internet save the environment?’ – I certainly heard that question asked at the BA more than once. The answer, of course, is ‘Durr… no. But people might.’ It’s arguably too late for the environment, but at least the democracy folks appear to be avoiding the same error/sloppiness. In the UK, anyway.

Not hi-, not low-, but just-the-right-tech

• Email in Cambodia – and if this story checks out, it’ll be in series 15 of How2 – is apparently delivered by motorbike. With a PC and WiFi on board it simply drives past a string of post offices, doing a bi-directional sync as it passes. Simple, elegant, probably very effective, if rather high latency. Two aspects amuse me in particular: firstly, this is somebody taking the phrase ‘never underestimate the bandwidth of a lorryload of tapes’ commendably literally; secondly, I like the idea that to increase bandwidth, you simply slow the bike down a bit so it has longer to sync.
• Lovely observations of technology use in India where, as the speaker pointed out, you don’t need a 3G mobile with push blah and geowarchalked WAP whatever to find out where the nearest photocopier is – you simply ask somebody. Makes one wonder what proportion of Western technology is dedicated to solving problems that can more readily be solved by talking to people.
• Speaking of which – Tom Steinberg, ‘I employed the killer research technology of the 21st Century – a British accent on the telephone.’

Lucky Dip

• OK, so Tom Coates convinced me that I have to read up about ‘FluidTime.’ I don’t know what the heck it is, but it sounds like the sort of way I work anyway.
• Dave Green should take his snackspot.org rant to the Edinburgh Fringe. I’m very serious about this.
• That was fun, let’s do it again.

Well, that was weird. There’ll be a little flurry of posts here as I catch up on some of the stuff that’s happened, but in short: went to London; ConConUK and the London alpha-geek circle; was made a (very tasty) sarnie by a celeb who’s far too big a name to still be doing such things; arrived at hotel at 2am to be told ‘no rooms’; big stroppy argument, mostly in French (and believe me, my French is not up to this…), and I end up in the Marriot with a view of the Thames through the London Eye; auditions, featuring very silly leafblower action; more drinks with the celeb; fishcakes to die for; home in time for… oh, I’ve no tea at home. And it’ll be well gone midnight.

More detail in later posts.

If you’re reading this from the website (rather than in a news aggregator), you’ll likely have noticed that the title has changed. Yes, after very nearly two years, I’ve finally worked out what to call this thing. And like all the best ideas, it seems downright obvious in retrospect. But first, a little history:

A quern or quernstone was a mill used for making flour. Specifically, it was a small mill used by an individual to grind flour for their daily bread.

When I first bought a laptop, ten years ago, like all good Macs it needed a name. It struck me then that a PowerBook was about the same size as a quern, and that I used it for metaphorically the same purpose: grinding my daily bread. It was even made of the same material, silicon. So, my PowerBook was named ‘Quern’ as a reminder of how far technology has progressed, and of how little life has changed.

Subsequently, I bought quern.demon.co.uk, and eventually quernstone.com. And now I post thoughts and comments and links here, while going about my daily grinding on Quern IV, my latest PowerBook.

The Daily Grind, see?

Plus, I like the irony. Look – today I couldn’t resist stopping by the office to make a radio-controlled rubber duck. That’s my ‘daily grind.’