Archive For October, 2009
A vigorous rub down with high grade sandpaper does not turn me on. I get no frisson of excitement from power tools although a man in dirty overalls with a mouth full of nails does have a certain primal appeal. When jobs need doing I get a man in to do them. It has to [...]
Back in my twenties, once I realised that I wasn’t going to make a living as a pop star, I scaled back my ambitions to making sure that I created my first album before I reached thirty. I finished work … Continue reading →
Richard Hawley – Truelove’s Gutter (2009)
In which we enter a world of gentlemen’s hairdressers and brylcream, bakelite trimmers, a little something for the weekend. Outside, a fine drizzle and the lights reflecting off the soaking cobblestones. A bus hisses by, the smell of diesel hanging in the air, kaleidoscopic patterns in the rain filled gutter. [...]
Finding the time for this is hard – weeks have passed since I have given any serious thought to writing. Every day life spins such a delicate and complex web of activity which distracts me from the stuff that’s really important. For example, I should spend more time thinking about my tax return. Instead, when [...]
I was at the Brighthelm Centre in Brighton, UK, on Wednesday (October 21st) to hear Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, speak about food security over the next few years and the need to be preparing for a food landscape that looks very different from the one we now inhabit. Perhaps the most important [...]
Ah, resistance. Don’t you just love it? You know, when that annoying little inner critic screams at you that you’re no good, you can’t do it and you may as well just give up? I experienced this twice last week and am still suffering the consequences.On…
Ah, resistance. Don’t you just love it? You know, when that annoying little inner critic screams at you that you’re no good, you can’t do it and you may as well just give up? I experienced this twice last week and am still suffering the consequences.On…
Renowned net evangelist and author Cory Doctorow (who is exactly one month older than me, according to his Wikipedia entry) was in town for a panel discussion at The Brighton Salon, with Nico MacDonald and Michael Bull. The event was eagerly awaited by certain sections of the Brighton geekerati and I’d been looking forward to it for a while.
Macdonald, Bull, Robert Clowes (Salon chairman) and Doctorow at the Thistle Hotel
Bull went on to talk about the challenges of communicating with people that aren’t sitting next to you and the contradictions of increasing connectivity leading to greater isolation. Macdonald wrapped up with waxing lyrical about ‘the profundity of open source’ and how we create and deliver the work that we do better than ever (summed up as ‘I share, therefore I am’), but opined that open source culture doesn’t tend to create new forms and a concern that the ‘hive mind’ could reduce innovation. Panel discussions and questions from the audience followed.
Doctorow checks the event’s tweet stream
There were a few other choice quotes from the night that I tweeted from the audience, including
‘We can combine the talents of humanity for the first time’ and ‘The future’s going to be weirder than we can now predict.’All in all, plenty of thought-provoking material (even if there were no ideas that were particularly new to me) and a most engaging evening. One thing’s pretty much for sure – whatever the future’s going to look like, we can be pretty damned certain that it’s going to look very very different from how we might imagine or predict it now, and weirdness as the order of the day would be most likely!
(update: for a well-written and more extensive report on the evening, visit tomhume.org)
There comes a time when a piece of hardware is released that is so brilliant that it has to be bought. A case in point is the new offering from Logitech, the Squeezebox Boom – a cross between the classic Squeezebox, a device that has to be plugged into a hi fi, and an eighties [...]
Thanks to Dave Stone for blogging about Déformation professionnelle – the expression that brilliantly describes:
a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession and forget a broader perspective. It is a pun on the expression “formation professionnelle,” meaning “professional training.” The implication is that all (or most) professional training results to [...]
