Olly, our four year-old, is on his way home dressed as a fish after his impeccably multi-cultural, non-denominational Xmas concert yesterday.
Month: December 2002
Category theft
This blog needs better categories but the prospect of coming up with a useful set was too boring – besides, it’s hard work thinking up categories for things that don’t exist yet – much easier to retrospectively categorise. Anyway, the nice people at the iSociety Blog have solved the problem for me. They’ve already invented a good set of categories so I’ve lifted them wholesale and they’re now in use with very little modification. Now I just need to make them visible…
Those iSociety categories:
Blogging
Cities/Spaces
Communities
Economics/Money
Humour
Internet/Broadband
Media/TV
Mobile Internet
Mobile Telephony
Networks
Politics/Government
Social Software
TechnoCulture
Work
Oxford conference on code, the net, ideas
I just registered for this conference. Looks like a good opportunity to hear Lessig et al in action – organised by the ambitious (and well-funded) Oxford Internet Institute.
Telecoms mast toppled – singularity deferred
Here’s a tough reminder that technology always exists in a (potentially hostile) human context. People respond to technology and to change in complicated and often contradictory ways. As a result, technologists and businesses cannot assume unhindered forward progress. It’s this kind of human friction that practically guarantees we’ll never arrive at the dreamed-of ‘singularity‘ but also that we’ll probably never create a breed of self-replicating robots that turn on us as prey!
“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” – Tim O’Reilly
I’ll join the throng bookmarking this cogent defense of file sharing from publisher Tim O’Reilly. Tim is the man who made a fortune by selling his early portal, the Global Network Navigator, to AOL and has been able to pursue the life of the Libertarian Gentleman Publisher ever since. His books (with their beautiful Dover Press animal woodcuts) are the backbone of the geek culture and his conferences and events increasingly organise the whole geek mindset.
A ‘documentary musical’
I have no idea what it’s like to live in a young offenders’ prison like the notorious Feltham but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the arrival of Crime TV veteran Roger Graef, poet Simon Armitage, pioneer documentary director Brian Hill and Channel 4 to make a ‘documentary musical’ in which the prisoners themselves, their wardens and counsellors perform rap tunes about their lives and aspirations made a dent in the routine. The result, Feltham Sings, shown on Channel 4 tonight, was chilling and moving and often surreal (a particularly disturbed boy rapped about suicide while two of his warders sang a chorus about paracetamol) and reminded me of what Channel 4 was invented for.
Barbie is among us
My daughter Billie is three today and yesterday we had a party. Barbie came. I mean the real Barbie. Then she left and fifteen dumbstruck three and four year-olds won’t ever be the same again.
Speechless
Matt Webb’s account of what happened to him fourteen years ago left me speechless. Link via LINKMACHINEGO.
RSI and accupuncture
Danny’s got RSI. You can actually see me getting RSI in real time here. My RSI – numbness and loss of strength in my left arm and a horrible pain in my shoulder (I was pretty sure I’d had a stroke) – coincides with leaving my job and my Aeron chair and taking up residence in my ergonomically-unsound shed. The cure? Accupuncture (plus a proper keyboard for the laptop). My excellent NHS GP gives me five minutes with the needles and I feel miraculously better. But the NHS won’t fund accupuncture and the inflexibility of the system forbids my doctor from charging me for it so he’s giving me this mysteriously effective (I still don’t really believe in it) treatment for nothing.
Soho Lunch with Juliet, Azeem and Duncan
(there’d be a picture here only it’s gone)