Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
Twilight in the Desert: the coming Saudi oil shock and the world economy by Matthew R Simmons is reviewed in The New Statesman. Eek! Via 3 Quarks Daily, posted here mostly so Vinay can provide in comments whatever linkage he can to his stuff.
Via Amazon UK: Digital download, dead tree edition. Bizarrely, the tree is cheaper. Umm…
Er… why does the iTunes Music Store suddenly think I’m in Canada? And why won’t it do as it’s told and show me the UK store?
Eek!
While I’m on the subject of music – as you may know I’ve spent most of the year banging on about a band called The Go! Team and their album Thunder, Lightning, Strike! I think we’ve used some of their stuff as incidental music in Mechannibals, but if it had been up to me we’d have approached them for a title theme (mind you, McDonald’s were in touch as well, about six months earlier).
Anyway, they’re on the Mercury Prize shortlist (stupid Flash site, impossible to link to properly – try the BBC instead, but skip the review that gets off on rather the wrong footing by getting the album title wrong, then falls right off the rails by spelling ‘Lightning’ wrong.).
Upshot: all of you people who’ve been laughing at me because I’m not ‘hip’ and ‘down’ and clearly I know nothing about music: you can piss right off. Did I not also call Franz (three months after the people who really know but still) six months before you? Wasn’t I waxing lyrical about A Little Less Conversation in much the same way, a year before that?
Finger on the bloody pulse, me. No, really. Stop laughing at the back, I ruddy well have. Tsk.
Pure ukulele joy. Yes, you read that right. Jake Shimabukuro playing ‘While my guitar gently weeps’ as you’ve never heard before, but will want to see again. Trust me on this.
I’ve just posted something very similar to this to the NetNewsWire users’ mailing list, but I figure a wider audience might be appropriate. Unfortunately, the only outlet I have is this blog, so you lot will have to do.
Round the table pictured in the previous post, some of us were musing on the problem of keeping up with one’s aggregator, should one happen to drop offline for a few days or (with enough subscriptions) minutes. ‘Mark all as read’ is something of a blunt instrument. I found myself wishing for something analogous to a spam filter, only less judgemental; tools to handle situations like:
I realise that this sort of stuff will be (a.) hard, (b.) a fundamental change in the way we use aggregators and (c.) the cause of an awful lot of head-clutching about UI issues. But I do wonder if the next stage of aggregator development shouldn’t involve some sort of heuristic filtering and assistance. That is, if an aggregator shouldn’t take ‘subscribe’ as meaning ‘this looks interesting, add it to the pool from which you draw posts of the type I read.’
Thoughts, anyone? Am I completely mad? Or did I simply read too many of those articles about ‘software agents’ that came out of the Media Lab around 1993?
[update: Quote NetNewsWire author Brent Simmons:
Filtering features of various types are on the to-do list. It’s too soon to provide more details, but I will, as features become more concrete.
Yay! Also see the comments for an interesting link from Allan, and the comments to that link for… basically, lots of people have been having the same idea over the last few months. I’m just late to the party, again.]
After OpenTech was formally over, I ended up in the bar with this bunch of reprobates. Clockwise from top left:
Oh, hell. I’ve written one of those ‘look at all my amazing celebrity friends’ posts. Somebody find me a cat so I can take pictures of it and descend into total blog cliché.
Somewhere in the hold of an A320 are 27 tapes of video shot at OpenTech 2005 yesterday. Apparently, I’ve volunteered to capture, edit, encode and upload these. Oh, crap. Sometimes I’m such an idiot.
As a result of helping out with all that yesterday, I didn’t actually see much of the event as it happened. I missed both Danny O’Brien and Ted Nelson. Boo!
When (if) I finally make it to Glasgow, I’ll start a blog for OpenTech Video updates. Hosting is being handled by some kind souls with academic access (ie. effectively unlimited free bandwidth – how we love the research councils), but I’ll try to keep people updated via something regularly updated. If I start capture tomorrow, with luck the videos will start to appear around Wednesday or Thursday.
Day two was better than day one. Inevitable, given the presence of the internationally-reknowned Best Demo competition, but there was also a somewhat freer air. I suspect many of us had decided we weren’t going to prefer the more formal approach and had resolved to enjoy it regardless, which certainly helped.
I’ll likely post some session notes at some point, but to be honest I wasn’t there for the programme. For me, the attraction is the unusual mix of people. It was good to see so many new faces this year, and to put faces to names from the chat list. There was, however, a particularly lovely flame vortex experiment…
I didn’t win Best Demo, incidentally: not entirely surprising considering that my act consisted mostly of a badly-timed and arguably not very funny gag attempting to poke fun at the perceived cliquiness of the group. The demo, such as it was, didn’t actually work, but that was at least progress from my entry last year, for which I attempted a demo I genuinely couldn’t do. It’s not clear I’ve got the hang of this.
For reasons that will likely never become entirely clear, I find myself sitting in the eternally grim Heathrow gate 5 lounge (aside: why is Heathrow so much less pleasant than Gatwick?). I’m en route to Newcastle, a curious choice considering that I live in Glasgow, and indeed have no business on Tyneside. However, since my car is at Newcastle airport, it seems I’m traveling to, via, etc. I’ve been merrily trotting out some quip about ‘beating the congestion charge by parking in Newcastle,’ but frankly this now rings a tad hollow.
My flight, you see, was at 15:55. I, conversely, arrived at the airport somewhat too late to take that. Had it been delayed, even modestly, I’d have been able to sprint/run/shamble with additional alacrity and, most likely, would now be in Glasgow. However, it was not delayed. Unlike every subsequent flight. The 8:45 is currently scheduled for 9:30, which gets me home at something like… you know, really, I just don’t wish to think about that.
London, anyway. OpenTech and stuff. Fun. More anon.
Update: Arrived home at 2am. 13 hours or so travel from Stoke Newington. Ugh.
Hurray! There are downsides to this year’s BIG Event being more like a conventional conference – rather more on that anon – but there is, at least, WiFi here.
Our hosts, the Centre for Life in Newcastle, have a remarkable building. I’ve described it as having been designed by an architect who’d heard about the work of Buckminster Fuller, but hadn’t actually seen any of it. It’s really rather lovely, though wandering around the exhibition space I can’t shake the feeling that I’m forever round the back of where I should be. Perhaps it’d have been better if I’d entered at the front rather than through the side door.
So far, however, we have a curious conference. It’s… well, it’s a conference. There’s always been this aspect to the BIG Event – it’s a loose affiliation of disparate specialists, hence it’s about extended networking, with sessions mostly being explorations of how each of our specialisms overlap and differ with whatever we think the group average is. A good example from this morning was Richard Ellam’s session collecting notes about setting up a small workshop. Hardly earth-shattering, but extremely useful. But this year… that’s all there is, so far. It’s more formal, less free-form, less silly. As I type, there are four parallel sessions ongoing, and there’s nobody sitting around outside talking nonsense.
The jury’s out, for the moment. It all ties in with the chair’s keynote this morning, asking what BIG is actually about. Not what it was founded for, but what it is now and what it should be in the future. Should we admit that we are, let’s face it, predominantly science communication people? Most of the attendees are relatively junior in their organisations (there’s now a separate body for the decision makers) – what are the implications of that? So… what is this organisation of something like a hundred members? What’s it for?
Right now, I’m inclined to regret the move to a more formal structure. However, if this year’s bash forces us to discuss what it is we value about BIG, then it’s been a worthwhile experiment.