Month: March 2008

“?” asked a friend.
“!” I replied. Followed by “?”
The response:

AH, YES, GODDAMN MENUS, HIDING AWAY UP THERE, OUT OF SIGHT, WITH ALL THOSE TICKY BOXES AND STUFF

Well, quite.

Apparently I signed up to Twitter a month ago. There’s no recollection of the event in my head, but their database assures me I did. And yes, I realise I’m late to the party, but thus far all my tweets are about making tea and it’s not clear if that’s going to change.

Anyone else I know doing the Twitter thing and worth following?

I’m a bit of a fan of No Catch fish – the Shetland-based fishery farms organically, and supplies Sainsbury and Tesco. Their products aren’t cheap, but their sea trout and especially farmed cod are terrific. And their website is hilarious.

Sadly, the company’s in administration, apparently a victim of the global credit crunch (though there are dark rumours of dotcom-style profligacy).

Fingers crossed it all works out in the end. Cod makes me happy; dwindling white fish stocks, therefore, do not.

Meanwhile, at least reading this story caused me to stumble across my new favourite website: fishupdate.com.

I always buy Christmas cards.
But I never send them.
I stare at them for a while,
thinking I might,
but then in early March I put them away on a shelf.
Where I find last year’s cards.

Currently, I’m:

• Finishing off packaging up the judging process for SciCast, then… doing other stuff for SciCast. Including writing up ‘the vision,’ since it occurs to me that that’s not been packaged sensibly for more than two years now. Also cutting clipsreels of the films nominated for the different Awards categories.
• Trying to wrap up Walking With Robots. Which is largely an invoicing job. To whit:
• Invoicing. Oh joy.
• Consulting for a web video startup.
• Working with a chum (well, he’s doing most of the work, but…) on a radical icebreaker/meeting/introduction system, that’s suddenly spawning both psychology research projects and domestic grid/supercomputer problems.
• Hoping to restart my very first blog project, with some chums.
• Organising filming in schools for a video commission (fairly serious money involved, got to get my finger out on this one).
• Quoting for another video commission (urgent).
• Editing sequences for a sort-of commission from last November. Eek.
• Quoting for yet another video commission. Drat, forgot about that one.
• Thinking about what happens in Cambridge next week (film-making with geneticists).
• Contributing some spec stuff and atom templates to the Movable Type podcasting plugin effort.
• Thinking about film-making with science academics, and where that could go, and how to spend some money that’s kicking around already.
• Rebuilding several sites (including this and deletetheweb.com) in MT4.1.
• Building an example PodPress-based system for Gareth, and thinking about porting his podcast to that.
• Plotting how to set up a second editing base in Cardiff so I can spend more time there — starting to accumulate gear. This would be much easier if Apple came out with new monitors, already. Preferably before the end of the tax year.
• Trying to work out what to do about a car. I haven’t had one for a year, but I drove 3,000 miles last month. Oops.
• Writing a draft pitch for a ~£400k project that’s sort-of ‘offspring of SciCast’.
• Writing conference sessions for BIG.
• Thinking that I should really get around to joining the Institute of Physics, British Association, Royal Society of Arts, and a few others.
• Trying to plan some time away with Flossie, since we’ve barely seen each other in the last month.
• Investigating task management applications, but also taking note of how long it took to compile this list, let alone something properly GTD-like. Yikes.
• Probably a few other things I’ve forgotten.

Yikes. If you see anything in FireBox that might help — like, a freeze-dried additional Jonathan — please let me know.

Those dashing folks at MySociety have been cooking up more forehead-slap-‘why didn’t I think of that?’-inducing projects: First, WhatDoTheyKnow.com, which makes it easier for you to request information from government (Freedom of Information requests or otherwise).

Secondly, GroupsNearYou.com is a geographical database of mailing lists and social networks. Lovely idea; it’s well worth admins of such groups chucking their stuff in the database for others to find.

Websites that work only with the ‘www.’ prefix.

Come on, folks – it’s 2008! If we’re calling it via HTTP we all know it’s a frelling website we’re after, just serve up the damn page already!

[prompted by nasa.gov, which doesn’t work, though ‘www.nasa.gov’ does. Harrumph.]

Gia (also recently added to the IMDB – what the hell is going on over there?) posts a magnificent rant about vision, and passion, and ambition, and… having big ideas.

We hear a lot about ‘the vision thing’. Unfortunately, we don’t see very much of it in practice. It gets buried. Or mangled through committees. Or enacted by people who, in the end, don’t quite get it. Wrestling with realising a vision – and I’m bold enough to say publicly that aspects of SciCast are absolutely about trying to realise a vision – wrestling with that is heart-wrenching, complex, confusing, frustrating…

But also gratifying. And exciting. And intoxicating.

If we get SciCast wrong, or it screws up, or we fail to find proper funding, then hey, that’s OK. I’ll try again. Public service children’s media is too important to leave to someone else.

I tell myself this frequently. But day-to-day… it’s hard.

TED is important because it reminds us that being elitist can be a positive thing. If you dream, it’s good for the soul that things like this exist.

I have to work out how to get to TED. I’ve a sneaky idea or two – watch this space – but in the meantime, there’s BIG, in July. Not the same, and yet strangely… good for the soul.

And the title? More than ten years ago, that was. Blimey.

…and watch this:

Gorgeous.

More obscure linkbait – I’ve made it into the Internet Movie Database! Woohoo!

OK, so my entry only lists Mechannibals (shudder) and the Christmas Lectures, on both of which my credit was the thoroughly meaningless ‘Content Producer’… and I’m mysteriously the second ‘Jonathan Sanderson’ to get listed (curses!), but still…

I’m in the IMDB! Yay!