July 2006 Archives

So I finally finished my first Chocolate phone film. If you want to add your own, the tag is objectsofdesire

The film, on YouTube

Mathmatiks.com :: Urban Lifestyle Design & Consulting :: Collections :: High-End Focused Projects

Awesome mathematically-named jewelry. You know, I haven't used the lens-flare filter in photoshop in almost ten years but I thought in this instance I'd treat myself;-) Mathematics is linked to from the San Fran streetwars site, btw.

And speaking of streetwars I've just noticed (sorry--rambling a bit here--bear with me...) a post on digitalcatharsis expressing concern about the Streetwars event currently underway in London. He makes some good points about the likely interaction between the transport system, the security forces and a bunch of sandal-wearing geeks armed with water pistols. His point is of course we're looking at another Menezes killing and in many ways I agree.

On the other hand, I think the game is incredibly liberating. I hate myself for not taking pictures of Clementine in the bath. I love her, I think she's beautiful and I want to have photographs of her in my family album but I don't take the pictures (whether consciously or not) because of the whole pedophile thing. Increasingly, we are self-censoring and self-restricting. We're reducing the richness and depth of our lives because of some sort of media-generated awareness. I think it's fantastic San Francisco is filled with twenty-somethings dressed in black shooting each other with water pistols. It's especially encouraging to see Americans, who totally over-reacted to being bombed reclaiming their freedom like this.

Until very recently, the UK has had quite a measured response to terrorist attacks on its own soil (beautifully exemplified by this policeman's request for members of the public to move) but with crazy anti-terror legislation on the books it might be time for us to reclaim the streets too.

One of the guys in strategy just sent this around. Apparently the Masturbathon is to support the Marie Stopes reproductive health charity.

They're absolutely serious and go into some detail about the logistics:

Once you have checked in your belongings please find your place in the relevant area for you. There are four main areas: The Comfort area, Women only area, Men only area and a mixed area. The areas are separated and you will not be able to view single-gender areas from the mixed area. We recommend that you spend some time in the Comfort area, which is a no masturbation zone, to acclimatise and get comfortable before proceeding to one of the other rooms.

The style inside is a comfortable Moroccan theme with plenty of pillows and recliner cushions. There will be relaxing music and plenty of visual stimulation to help you get in the mood. The environment is clean and padded with places to lie back all around the room. There are individual cubicles for those who prefer privacy. Fresh disposable paper sheets will be available for every participant. So will extra batteries and plenty of ID Lubricants.

Goodness:-)

I haven't got the plugin installed that lets you ping a post back to the index without disrupting the order of the posts so I can't highlight the post, but I wanted to show you the most recent comment from an old post I did about BT which reffered to an even older post that also had some good comments on it...

I work for BT and even i am disgusted by them. They have the monopoly and basically don't give a f*ck about their customers. I get customers screaming at me and crying down the phone with problem after problem day after day, but BT don't give us, the call agents, the resources or authorisation to help them. They don't care if we help them, they just want to grab their money. So frustrating!! Basically BT are money grabbing bloodsuckers and i wouldn't touch them with a 10 ft barge pole!! Oh... and while the bosses are rolling in it from all the money they drain from people for their shit service, we're on little more than minimum wage! Cunts.

Now that's what i call having an opinion. Has anyone called the secret phone number recently? I can't imagine it still works...

Wow, I hadn't noticed that MySpace runs on Cold Fusion... I find eBay occasionally searching for missing dll files, so I guess anything is possible;-)

I love this use of as big as a house on this Italian forum iMovie '06: commenti e impressioni [Archivio] - Forum Macitynet

Il nuovissimo iMovie '06 ha un bug grande come una casa, riguarda l'applicazione dei vari fade-in fade-out audio.

And btw I never did work out how to fade audio in iMovie HD--if anyone wants to help me out I'd be much obliged:-)

My Japanese is a little rusty, but I know what "802.11" and "URL" mean:-) Browsing on the DS looks sweet.

(Thank you lis)

(Video not working? Get it from YouTube)

Just got back from UGtv, crashed on the couch and have just woken up to Open University classics. How to give yourself jetlag without ever getting on a plane...

Basically it was reasonably well attended with a few interesting speakers (and good catering too). I was hoping to hear about innovative image and film creation based on partnerships between production, broadcast and audience players. In the end, most talks and their associated questions were largely to do with how cheap UGtv is... More later if I can muster the enthusiasm.

The obligatory YouTube videos and Flickr photo set

Technorati: ugtv, ugtv06

Am off to UGTV '06 — User-Generated TV summit I'll let you know how it goes.

Technorati: ugtv, ugtv06

Wow, thanks to all the great folk out there commenting on the Pea harvest blog project:-)

Polkadotholes: Birdseye blog!

Russel Davies has some nice things to say about Colin Wright's pea harvest blog russell davies: blogging for peas

Thanks Russ, it's been a long journey getting here and I hope it's worth it:-)

What a great idea

Thanks to Ross Mayfield for pointing me at Dandelife Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Dandelife. He says:

There is a gap in social software for binding stories in a chronology. For building biographies of people, places and things.

Which gave me a huge nudge and a smile as I've been meaning to post about randomaccessmemory, a project to store collective memories and allow communal browsing of the stored results. It was a beautiful site and a great idea but it happened just before web2.0. It epitomises everything that web2.0 is great for but can't take part (no community, no rss, no tagging, no flickr links etc). Apparently a new version of RAM launched in October 2005 so I could be wrong (I think I last left a RAM in 2001 so it's been a while)

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06

I can't believe I'm the only blogger who uses the category Techno-bollocks...

Mark has new toy :-)

Technotag: facewarp k800i

Apache on Symbian. Just imagine what you could do with that (updating walled gardens in poor connection areas for example). Now if only I was smart enough to install and try this thing myself;-)

This from the Nokia faq page:

In general, it is better not to think web server that happens to be on a mobile device but instead personal context-rich mobile device with HTTP access to it. Technically they say the same thing, but the latter alternative describes much better what this is all about.

I've been working with a man called Colin Wright over at Birdseye. It's been really interesting helping his team get started online. We helped the corporates look into their organisation, find a voice with a genuine passion and then stand back and let him get on with it.

The result is Life on the pea harvest, a diary held by the team responsible for the harvest with hosting and tech support paid for by their employer.

I think Colin's voice resonates on a number of fundamental levels. You can't help but respect his nutty obsession with peas and his constant struggle for quality. It turns out he's got a dog too (she's called Doris) and he phones his podcasts (peapods?) in from the field every morning at 5:30 as he meditates on his life and shares his thoughts with Doris...

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Piers Fawkes has come in to tell us about his new research stuff :-)

Jed sent me this drawing a while back. Just came across it again and thought I would post a shot. For those that haven't met Jed, he draws. He sketches constantly.

What I would give to have a compilation of all the postcards he's ever created:-)