- Monoclebizarre magazine of the overpaid design-savvy intellectual eliteis selling co-branded bicycles… I’m still not sure I get the magazine, but I have to say I’m bloody loving the look of that bike. If I actually ever used a bike, that’s exactly the kind of one I’d want…
- Matt Biddulph has gone full time as CTO of Dopplr… I’m very happy for Mattand love dopplrjust can’t help feeling a little bit sad that we’re not working with each other, which is something I’ve wanted to do again pretty much immediately ever since we both left the BBC… Miss Webb as well…
- Grant Morrison has written a potential film script for We3, and a script review of it has found its way onto the internet… Any film of this would be heavily CGI, and it might not be an obvious candidate for the transition, given how sad and violent it is. But the comic was really weirdly moving. 21st Century Watership Down?
- The “Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies” has sold for $4000 at auction… ‘Allo ‘Allo went from quite poor to really terrible as time passed, but still I have some vague affection for the idea of this picture going to auction.
- My Los Angelene film industry chum Kerry recently went to watch the first episode of ‘Drive’ at the house of super-hot Firefly star, Nathan Fillion…. What he doesn’t mention is how at the event he ran into Twitter’s Biz Stone and then had a weird conversation about me. Had a conversation about me in a super-hot famous person’s house? Let me know!
- London’s Kerning is a hugeand I suspect quite beautifulposter recreating a map of London out of typography… It’s ¬£100. I’m really tempted. I wonder how much it would cost to get framed. Probably a hell of a lot more money than I’ve got available at the moment…
- The Guardian Technology blog has revealed that for the second time in almost as many months The Independent has got something startlingly wrong… This is the mobile phones kill bees thing that went around a while back. Apparently even the researchers of the original paper are sort of horrified by the way it was presented by the increasingly ‘invisible ray’-afraid Indy…
- Mike Migurski on Disinfo graphics… I have to say that I’ve found Dion Hinchcliffe’s diagrams around this subject absolutely totally confusing and meaningless but I’ve never had the nerve to say so in public until Biddulph pointed me towards Mike’s piece…
- I’m pretty gutted that Grindhouse’s release date has been pushed back in the UK, and more concerned still that they might release it as two films… I mean, come on! The general noise is that people who went to see it loved it, but that a whole bunch of people didn’t go and see it. Do people really think cutting it in half and making people pay twice will help?
Author: Tom Coates
Categories
Some things I'd like to do…
My life has been a bit strange and a bit strained recently, as anyone who knows me will be able to testify. There are a lot of reasons that I haven’t really been keeping this site particularly up to date, brain strain and stress aren’t the only ones (and I’ll talk about the rest of them sometime soon), but they’re definitely among them. Anyway, with the sun out and various forms of progress and movement coursing through my head, I’m starting to feel some kind of end to the crapulence and am starting to stretch out in various directions trying to work out what I can do with all the great swathes of frustrated energy that I’ve previously been turning almost totally inwards on myself.
My latest scheme, as of this evening, is to try and start thinking about some things that I’d just really like to do that I actually could probably get done and which would be experientially rewarding. I’m not talking about going and killing a hobo or toppling government or anything, just things that I’ve maybe always thought might be quite interesting to do, but I’ve never motivated myself to get out of bed and actually do.
My list so far is pretty small, and doesn’t include things I’d like to buy (own home would be nice but never going to happen at this rate). So here we go. Some things I’d really quite like to do:
- I’d like to go on a helicopter ride over London and take photos. In fact I’d like to go exploring a lot more and take a bunch of photos. I keep looking at my photos of Las Vegas and getting a sense of how fucking cool it was to see those things and how I’d like to see more super awesome things and crystalise them into pixels and keep them on the Internet forever. Feel the same way? Let me know!
- I want to get a man-facial—perhaps here or here—because I’ve never had one and I think it would be bloody interesting and/or weird and also because if you look right close up at the big versions of my recent weird headshots all you can see are big blackheads the size of Kent and I don’t care if you think it’s because I’m gay, because it’s pathetic enough for straight men not to do things because people might think they’re gay. Worse still for those of us who actually are.
- I want to go and see Spider-man 3 in the cinema on pretty much the day it comes out at the biggest bloody cinema that I can find with a whole bunch of the people I like most in the world. And I want popcorn. And I want a big vat of coke. And I don’t bloody care if it’s going to suck. And I don’t want people complaining that the cinema is crowded. And I want good seats in the middle, somewhere between row ten and row thirty.
- I want to go to the Fat Duck and have the super ridiculous tasting menu. With nice people. And I want to dress up a bit.
- I’d really like to learn how to Scuba-dive at some point too. And go to Burning Man. And PopTech. Also I want to go to the Far East, Egypt and the mud mosque of Djenne. But maybe that’s something for another time.
And while I’m on the subject, even though I said this wasn’t about buying things, I’d quite like to get this bicycle and potter around on it, even though apparently it’s a women’s bike and no man worth his salt would be seen on it. And I’d like to get this poster and frame it. And I’d like this case for my camera and finally own my own personal copy of Creative Suite 3. But maybe that’s another story for another day.
- The adventures of Rob Manuel… I briefly worked with Rob at B3ta, and found this surprisingly entertaining. I can’t tell off the top of my head whether it’s a joke he’s complicity with or would hate.
- Hicks likes Coda, the new application from Panic software on the Mac Hanging out with a bunch of Web Devs at work at the moment. Lots of debate generally around the place about whether Coda’s any good or not. PC people areas usualsuspicious of the hype…
- Coda is a relatively impressive looking new application for developing web sites… It’s quite beautifully implemented, and seems to simplify the professional web production process by drawing together all the applications you might need into one coherent application…
- Cameron Marlow has use the Yahoo maps API to create a super simple Long/Lat finder… I really really like this. I think it’s because it’s so simple a tool, so completely understated, that it totally could be a little desktop application. I can see this being genuinely useful to a whole bunch of people.
- Awesome design work on the new Manhattan transport maps… A significant improvement in an interesting balance between the London Underground maps and a street map. Very nice.
- My search for a headshot has now become an attempt to make a decent picture the most ‘interesting’ one on Flickr… Hence I’m linking to it here, hoping that the few extra page views it gets will result in it usurping that bloody thing Kottke linked to a while back. Bastard.
- A planet has been found that’s only 1.5 times the size of earth and appears to have liquid water running on its surface… Wow. That’s pretty amazing. What interests me is twofold. Firstly, obviously, is there life. Secondly, if there isn’t, how easy would it be to introduce some?
- Natalie Downe talks about Oxford Geek Night 2… This was a while back, but I love grassroots events and Nat’s done a really sterling job getting this one together. The next one’s supposed to be in June, I believe…
- Etsy’s Splatgirl creates beautiful little carrying cases for your Moo Cards – both for men and women. Also keyfobs! These are really lovely, and I actually might have to go and buy some.
- The Independent is quoting studies saying that WiFi is dangerous and could result in a whole bunch of cancers and stuff… These studies are highly dubious and have been quite rigorously debunked in certain quarters. This seems to me to be scaremongering to find a story, combined with a little bit of anti-technology angst.
- A fascinating follow-on editorial from The Independent on the whole WiFi gives you cancer scare… Really interested to note the absolute absence of citations of anyone who might conceivably disagree, or any quotations from people who might actually be generically expert in the areas concerned…
- Ian Betteridge dissects the current hysteria around WiFi as a cause of Cancer with significant aplomb… A good read, and a pretty comprehensive evisceration of the Independent’s coverage.
- Modern Life is Rubbish posts on the top UK weblogs by Bloglines subscribers… It’s an interesting list. I’m not sure I buy the figures though. RSS feeds are messy things. Many sites support multiple URLs for the same content. Still interesting.
- The song “Guy Love” from Scrubs is sort of lovely… Thanks to Simon Minor 9th for helping me find this beautiful expression of comfort in the homosocial without getting all anti-gay and stroppy. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, be aware!
- Those lovely chaps at Moo have launched their second product – attractive combo post/greetings cards that you radically personalise… I got a few of these a few days ago as part of their beta-testing programme and they’re pretty lovely. I’ll probably post a snap of them on Flickr if you’re in the area…
- Josh Clark talks about the new ‘People Search’ project Spock that’s currently in a closed beta and relates it to ideas about cross-site identifiers… He proposes that Spock might be a good way to correlate IDs for people across a web of data. It’s a fascinating idea with only one area of anxiety for me – people freak out about the privacy implications of stuff like this. I’ll have to think more about this one.
- TechCrunch talks about the Spock people search engine… Still, it comes right back to me that generally people really don’t like the idea of information about themselves being aggregated against their will, and user generated annotation of individuals seems troublingly susceptible to accusations of libel…
Categories
A Hack for Europe!
Right then. This is going to be quite a big deal so pay attention! A few months ago you’ll remember Yahoo! put together a Hack Day on their campus in Sunnyvale and invited several hundred designers, developers and engineers to come and crash the place. People camped in the grounds overnight, had access to a whole range of speakers and technical experts from Yahoo!, Flickr and Upcoming, and used the time to build a whole range of bloody fascinating things including a handbag that posted pictures to Flickr and a ybox. You’ll also remember the live entertainment, the piles of pizza, the donuts in the morning, the bleary-eyed pioneers and the heady stench of unwashed technologists on the Saturday evening.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I think we can do better than that. So it is with great pleasure that I’m going to direct you all to hackday.org and encourage you to sign up for the first Hack Day to be held in Europe. And this time it’s not only a Yahoo! event, because it’s a partnership with BBC Backstage. And it’s not at a campus, it’s at London’s bloody Alexandra Palace! On June 16th and 17th! Bring a kite!
Everything else remains the same. It’s a two day event, starting first thing on Saturday morning and running through to Sunday evening. We’ll have a whole bunch of speakers from Flickr, Yahoo! and the BBC to start us off. We’ll have food—mostly flat—to meet the specialised needs of our guests. There may be booze. I’m not telling. If you want, you can stay awake all night or crash out in a corner in a sleeping bag. The only requirement or restriction (except for the legal ones, which you should probably read) is that you come to the event and try and build something, ideally using some of the stuff that the organisations hosting the event have to offer. Did I mention it was free?
You can build robots if you’d like, or things involving televisions or tagging or photos or smart dust. There will be prizes for the best stuff made. And judges! And probably a limited number of free Flickr badges! And yes, there will probably be a band. And no, it probably won’t be Beck.
Even with space for hundreds of creative h4X0rs, an event this awesome will get oversubscribed, so I’m afraid not everyone who applies will get a ticket. And in order to makes sure that the people who actually make things get to come, I think there’s going to be a process where we weed out obsessive business networkers. So be patient once you’ve appliedwe’ll let you know as soon as we can if you’re invited or not. If you want to improve your chances, stick a couple of links to stuff you’ve made into the ‘Special Requirements’ field of the sign-up form. People who build get priority.
Anyway, that’s your lot. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this event and how great it is to be a small part of the incredible group of people from both organisations who are helping to make it a reality. I think it’s going to be really awesome and I’ve wanted to talk about it for a long time. Hope to see you there! Sign-up now!