Category: Random

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…

Thanks to Cory we have a result against the blogspammers! Cory chucked an e-mail to no less than Jeff Bezos drawing the post to his attention and within 36 hours received a reply. Onlineshop.us.com has now been dropped from the Amazon affiliate scheme and so hopefully will no longer be comment spamming all and sundry! Take that evil scum!

So Mail.bloody.app has just chewed up and spat out around two-years of e-mail from my lovely Mac and not even Danny O’Brien could fix it for me, so that’s pretty bloody annoying. And of course while I used to take regular back-ups, it’s been just long enough after the last time that this happened for me to (1) stop taking back-ups several months ago and (2) have deleted the back-ups I had made to make space for other crap.

Which leaves me in the unenviable position of asking anyone and everyone who was expecting anything from me or had planned to do something with me or with whom I’ve been talking recently in pretty much any capacity to get back in touch and remind me where we’d got to in the whole bloody conversation. I feel a bit like the guy in Memento at the moment, only on a much much larger (but no less fatal) timescale.

So I might – note might – be in San Francisco again in about three week’s time for a few nights, well actually only really two or three nights: 6th October, (maybe 8th October) and 9th October. I’d be going to an event in Sonoma on the 7th and 8th, so it would really be a flying visit. Does anyone have a convenient pile of floor or sofa that they might be prepared to lend me?

Test. Super test. Test with knobs on.

So, back from Amsterdam for one day and then off to Ashridge for a day/night for a work thing. I got a decent night’s sleep for pretty much the first time since I’ve been back in the country and am feeling slightly more creative and desperate to make something since coming back from Eurofoo. In the depths of last night we went into the grounds to try and find the bible circle – a stone bible on a plinth in the middle of a ring of enormous pine tress – and I managed to walk into a huge branch and scrape up half my face. And on the train this morning, I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that read “I seem to have mislaid my boyfriend” reading a book called “It’s Ok, I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers”. DNS on my work wifi network appears to be buggering around or I’d try and find you some links… Hopefully in the next couple of days I’ll start writing about proper grown-up things again. But in the meantime, have fun!

Not a lot to be said about this really except that I look awesome and I kicked ass on the go-carting front in the Dutch University town of Enschede…

So this is probably the last part of my little travelogue, so it’s probably going to be a bit long and probably more than a little self-indulgent and rambling. And I’ve already written the whole thing once twice and then lost it due to an accidental depression of the power button on my Powerbook at an innopportune moment (and a subsequent random crash, of all things). And I’m also pretty tired and jet-lagged. So I guess some of my usual vigour might be a little lacking.

So when we’d last spoken, oh patient readers, I’d been out at a hip-hop evening at a gay bar in San Francisco that (it turns out) was being DJ’d by Ernie’s bloke, although I didn’t know that at the time. And after feeling a bit like everyone’s dad, I’d collapsed back to the house of the most lovely Leslie and slept like one of your more sound-sleeping and reliable logs. Which was nice.

The following day was to be the last full day I would have in the city (and of the holiday) and I had a lot to pack in (which I did with varying degrees of success). I tried to start early and keep up the momentum. So first up I went off to this really big Starbucks with loads of space and wifi and about a billion Apple Users in it down on 9th and Howard to meet up with Jim Speth, the creator of iCommune and hopefully a future collaborator. So we talked for a while, which was neat and then met up with Ben Cerveny and ex-Barbelite Schlomo for an awesome, but slightly disturbingly enormous lunch (see terrifying pictures) down in a caf&eacuate; in an industrial dockland area of San Francisco.

From there Jim and Ben swapped travel buddies and Ben dropped me off near Union Square so that I could meet up with Mella and wander around the place. We got the trolley up towards Castro after roaming around downtown and then had one of the most awesome Cheesecakes I’ve ever had in my life (with strawberry goo) and then walked up to Haight Ashbury where Mella did some shoe-shopping. And after a slightly unfortunate delay in the centre, we again returned to Leslie’s to relax and watch TV for a bit. And once we’d gone our separate ways I wandered to an evening’s entertainment at “Tranny Shack” – a highly entertaining evening at a bar down on Harrison. And then bed, and muchos sleeping.

My final morning saw me wandering around the shops a little and then heading off to the airport where there was enormous and useful amounts of wifi. On the flight, I managed to watch Hellboy and sleep for seven hours (thanks for the tips, Heather) before we landed in London. And I know this is almost unbelievably interesting to you people, but then I went into work for a few hours and then I came home and then basically I went to bed!

I’m going to speed things up a bit now, because otherwise we might be here all night. So after staying up jet-lagged until around four in the morning, I got a full hour of sleep before wandering off to the airport for the next leg of my trip to Enschede in Holland with a group of other geeks to talk about geek stuff, which involved a number of interesting talks, driving around a go-karting track, avoiding foam parties in nearby clubs, watching the Olympics with Hammersley and playing Zendo.

Anyway, I’m back now, and I can’t quite believe the difference that this last couple of weeks has made to me. I feel astonishingly relaxed, clear-minded and calm. Lots of the doubt and anxiety I’ve been stuck with over the last few months has disappeared completely and my mind seems … well … I guess my mind seems quiet. Peaceful. Which is all really cool and nice and everything, I guess, except now I’ve got a new fear – that I’m going to get as wound up and tense and unlike myself again when I return to work in the morning. And that’s scaring the crap out of me.

So I’m back in London, basically, and haven’t written up the last couple of days of holiday (which I really want to do because it’ll help me remember it), but am now a bit hectic and confused because having landed in London this morning around 10.30am, I’m now still awake at 1am and have to get up at 5am tomorrow morning to fly to Amsterdam. And my alarm clock is unreliable and I’m scared I’m going to sleep through everything…

A quick Flickr odyssey of my time in San Francisco – I’ll probably pull out some of my favourite photos and post them on the site proper, but in the meantime:

• San Francisco Apple Store
• Gay marriage falters in San Francisco
• A skyline from the Metreon
• A car wash in San Francisco: I’m not kidding – I’m really this dull
• A car wash in San Francisco: Water on the windshield
• A pylon obscured by San Francisco fog
• My feet outside the Fairmont
• From the hill near the Fairmont
• The reception of the Fairmont Hotel
• Danny and Ada at the geek drinking
• Mella and I explore the Civic Center
• Asian festival down by the Metreon
• A yellow cable car in the sun
• A view from Coit Tower
• Mannequin fashion model
• A beautiful garden on Coit Tower
• Chug boat
• Towards the Golden Gate
• A schooner passes
• Mella at the Fish Restaurant by the bay
• A view from Ben Cerveny’s car at sunset
• A view of Coit Tower from Ben Cerveny’s flat
• In the offices of Technorati
• Walking from Technorati
• On the way to the Caltrain
• Caltrain station
• Danger, Do Not Enter
• Pipes underneath a road bridge
• 1-800-SUICIDE
• Guess where I went next?
• Jim Speth
• Ben Cerveny
• The restaurant
• The swirly pattern on the parasol
• Tom Coates underground in San Franscisco
• Almost my final visit of the holiday…