Year: 2005

Busy weekend. Friday morning is frantic cleaning, followed by a work away-day that runs directly into my brother’s arrival in town. Saturday is Open Tech (and fights with London Underground, and expensive taxi rides, and brief hanging outs and Blood Shot Surfers with Hammersley, Doctorow, Webb, Alice, Danny and about a million other neat people). Sunday is little brother and the Apple Store and interesting twists on English breakfasts at Leon on Carnaby Street. And now I’ve got about a ton of work to do before an early morning meeting which means that I have no real time for all the write-ups and thinking and digesting and catching-up with stuff that I really need – and want – to do. You have had more direct commentary from Open Tech if I’d managed to get the bloody wifi working. In the meantime, here are my photos from the day.

Something new and bad is happening around London right now – apparently incidents have closed three tube stations, and Sky News has something about a guy with a rucksack that exploded, although there are no casualties currently reported. The standard attempt to get to in contact with friends and colleagues isn’t working because the mobile network is down for some reason. Keep getting pings from people on IM though.

I’d just like to say ‘Thank You’ to all the lovely people who came to celebrate my 33rd birthday with me last night at the awesome Back to Basics Seafood Restaurant in Fitzrovia last night. I had a lovely time and you’re all charming people and I look forward to seeing you all soon. Thanks again!

Funny weekend. Not what I was expecting. My list of things to do had some things struck off it, but none of them were really terribly exciting. The bits of writing I’d meant to do did not get done – the things I have nearly completed remain nearly completed. Ah but the tiny victories: The bathroom is clean! The kitchen is clean! I have installed Tiger on my desktop Mac! I have done some shopping!

These are the wonders that keep me from doing useful things in the world and thinking about the web and computers and navigation and media distribution. There are dark, dark times when I think we should all learn from the great lessons that The Sims taught a generation – the way to success is to start with a small flat, regular delivery pizza and a maid.

The one vaguely web-related thing that I have done over the weekend has caused me a little angst as well. I’ve put Adwords on Barbelith. I never thought I’d do that, but I have to find some way of maintaining the site in the longer term. It’s only unregistered users who see them – mainly people referred from Google, and as such I don’t feel too guilty about it. But it doesn’t sit well. They’ve been up a day and so far they’ve brought in $6. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

• Springtails – musical game, music-learning tool or musical instrument? Certainly it’s a nice bit of Flash. You can imagine artists of emergence learning a new vocabulary of music where you set up patterns and let them roll against one another..
• An interview with the people who designed the Optimus keyboard with the little displays under every key They’re positing a price point in excess of $200-$300. If it’s not a lot more than that, it’s really practical…

• There are seven words you’re not allowed to say in kindergarten In which Nat Torkington encourages his children to rise up and defy the lunacy of American school restrictions
• 37 signals on Frank Gehry’s proposed Brooklyn development So you see this confirms my theory – first you start off with real things, then you get ironic treatments of real things, then the ironic treatments become the real things – those skyscrapers look like a theme park to me…
• la Pate a Son – Flash music generation game or interface It has its own fiddly rule set and you learn by playing which is interesting. Weirdly fascinating…
• Planarity Interesting little Flash game in which you try to stop any of the lines crossing over. Strangely fascinating.
• Mr Kerry Bailey writes the funniest thing I have ever read about the Cruise / Holmes relationship “‘You adore him,’ Rodriguez told Holmes when the actress was at a loss for words to describe her love.” “I adore him,” Katy responded, then followed with, “ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD.”

• Infosthetics weblog on information visualisation and aesthetics Oh this is so my new favourite site. Beautiful interesting interfaces to explore and play with. Ideas everywhere. Awesome stuff…
• Colin Farrell Joins The Sex Tape Elite You have to wonder sometimes if they want this stuff to get out into public. Not that anyone would be interested in such a thing, of course.
• Spin magazine recognise the most important albums of the last twenty years Radiohead’s at number one, depressingly. But the Pixies’ place at number six with their best album has cheered me up enormously…
• The Optimus keyboard has a tiny screen under each key, so that you can remap it easily to any combination Mr Webb informs me that each button costs tens of dollars at the moment, and as such it doesn’t look likely to go on the market any time soon – but it rocks and I want one…

• Sharp to Mass Produce an LCD with Switchable Viewing Angle Oh this is so ’24’ it’s awesome. Also I love that they’re turning one of the traditional problems with LCD screens (narrow viewing angles) into a feature. That’s so neat!
• Television took 30 years to reach a mass audience – broadband has taken three “Ofcom predicted that virtually all British homes – 99.6% – would have access to a broadband connection by the end of this year. By 2010, it suggested that more people could be watching television over the internet than via analogue sets.”
• Glowing temperature-sensitive sink-fixtures Loving this – visual feedback on how hot the water is from the tap. How useful would that be!

We walk out of the building onto Portland Place and there are people everywhere. Milling around every door of all the nearby offices are people chatting and smiling. A bus pulls up besides us and stops. The driver tells the people inside that they’re stopping for two minutes of silence. Around us the noise-level raises slightly and then almost instantaneously – without any warning – stops. Without any apparent signal everyone goes quiet and stands still. All around me are people standing quietly. No one makes eye contact. A motorcycle slows and stops. A couple of cars go past until they can find somewhere to pause for a moment. The noise of traffic disappears. The building work from around the corner gets quieter. Someone is whistling. Then they stop. London is full of mannequins. There’s no noise. There’s no movement. It’s eerie. And then just as suddenly, just as randomly – as if someone unpaused the city – everything’s back to normal. Which is exactly how it should be.