Month: October 2004

So tonight I’ve had two minor brushes with fame. I decided to go and see Layer Cake at the Odeon Marble Arch but arrived a little early. And while waiting for the theatre to open, I suddenly heard Drop The Dead Donkey star (and somewhat early nineties crush of mine) Neil Pearson barking into a mobile phone, “Well it’s been slammed by the press but the box office is huge”. I have no idea what he was talking about since he doesn’t appear to have been in a film for a while, but hey. If you’re interested, he went to see Saw (IMDB rating 7.3 – not bad).

And while still reeling from this little piece of celebrity spotting fun-gossip stuff, when Layer cake finally started it didn’t take long for me to start recognising little parts of London – particularly our gangster hero’s West London den, which it turns out is just at the end of my road. I pass it on the way to get the tube into work. Unless I get the bus. If I get a chance I’ll take a picture tomorrow so that you film buffs can get all excited by it when you see the movie. This is the second weird “check out where I live” moment that I’ve had in the last couple of days. The other one being this pic on Esther Dyson’s Flickr Photostream which turns the map of my area into a cool Union Jack. I live on the top left of that picture. Mr Layer Cake Gangster bod works at the bottom left.

Which leads me to the film itself. The plot’s pretty generic gangster – small-time-ish crook gets in the middle of some larger intrigue and tries to get out of it by being smart and canny – but it’s assembled carefully, paced pretty well and doesn’t look cheap. It’s got a few stylised bits in it, but essentially it’s a good old-fashioned gangster film that doesn’t try and be too clever with the format. It’s pretty well-acted, pretty exciting, the women are pretty much breasts with legs or nagging psychos but then you could say Daniel Craig is pretty much breasts with legs as well and you won’t see me complaining. London looks great and I pretty much enjoyed myself. Not a stunner, but a good way to spend a couple of hours…

Addendum Looks like (from the comments and from this link that Neil was talking about his role in the Kevin Spacey-directed Cloaca, currently showing at London’s Old Vic. It is indeed true that the press are not keen.

Right. So I’m going to San Francisco again on Wednesday, but I’m only in town for a very short period of time as I’m spending Thursday and Friday in Sonoma for the Online Community Report Summit 2004 and then flying back to the UK on Sunday afternoon. I think I’m booked up for the Wednesday night too catching up with Web 2.0 people, but Friday night / Saturday and first thing Sunday morning I think I’m free to do stuff, talk to people or muck around. Does anyone have any ideas about what I should get up to?

More importantly, my current plan will be to be in The Pork Store on 16th / Valencia around 10am on Sunday 3rd October for my last Californian meal for a good few months (or at a pinch maybe that place down by the dry docks that Jim and Ben took me to last time). If anyone should feel like they want to join me, then they’d be more than welcome… I’ll post more nearer the time.

So I love Flickr. I think it’s absolutely awesome. I’ve been weblogging for five years (almost – see me in thirty days) and the fun I have using Flickr reminds me of the immediate joy and excitement that I used to get from writing on my site. The stuff I post there – the stuff I write there – is resolutely frivolous and personal and bears no relationship to my job, technical/design interests or the industry in which I work.

As my weblog over the last few years has changed to become more sober and more work-oriented, and as the pieces I tend to write have become longer and less-frequent, it has at times felt like posting had ceased to be a pleasure and was becoming a chore. I don’t know why that might be – possibly it’s a result of Movable Type‘s posting interface interface, the obvious practical utility and web-native aspects of the post-per-page format or maybe it’s just because of my own determination to bore the world slowly to death. Whatever the reason, I think Flickr’s gradually making me feel more positive about the whole thing. I think it’s helping me find a different parallel space where I can post in a completely different register.

For all these reasons, and because I finally got moblogging working on my Nokia 6230, I was more than happy to pay to go Pro. And thanks to Feedburner I’ve even merged plasticbag.org’s feeds with my Flickr feed to create a slightly more varied and nuanced reflection of my life (that isn’t monomaniacally obsessed with social software, comment spam or music technology). So hopefully now, those of you who are subscribing to the plasticbag.org feed (around 1,000 of you by my reckoning) will actually have something to read each day.

Of course one of the greatest things about Flickr is that it has an API that other people can hook into. My favourite example of its use recently has been the Flickr Rainbow applet that uses tagged up photos and what amounts to a tiny (and obvious) controlled vocabulary filter around colour to assemble a rainbow of photographs. I only wish that Mr Webb’s favcol was still around so that he could build use Flickr to determine the web’s favourite red or purple…