By all accounts, the Going Solo conference in Lausanne earlier this year was a success and Steph is running a second edition here in the UK. She’s also looking for help in the form of a sponsorship person so if you’re interested, what are you waiting for?
Availability: as soon as possible
Remuneration: 20% commission on cash sponsorships
Profile: skilled in negotiating and closing sponsorship deals, knowledge of the tech/freelancing world a plus.
Firefox was the star of the party last night, when it was awarded with a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a single day, over 8 million.
A good time seemed to be had by all, with the free drinks flowing, sponsored by Glaxstar, eBay and Glubble. It was interesting how there were a lot of suits there, far more than I expected.
Off to Henley for the Henley Royal Regatta. Should see some good racing and lots of hats. But hopefully not too much rain although it did not start too well today
Death Watch - Mark Billingham. Reasonable thriller.
Operation Certain Death - Damien Lewis. I didn’t buy this but found it in the back of a truck I was travelling in. The tale of a hostage situation in Sierra Leone in 2000, the book describes the rescue mission by the SAS/Paras. Good story, but definitely needed stronger editing.
Spirit Gate - Kate Elliot I loved the writing and the characters, but got lost at times as there’s so much happening and you keep cutting between different groups. It’s not until the end of the book that they come together and you understand what they have to add to the story. Another free book from Tor.
The 39 Steps - John Buchan. This was a birthday present from the group playing the Penguin We Tell Stories ARG. The first story from that campaign was a retelling by Charles Cumming of this book, which was originally published in 1915. My initial reaction was how small the book was, just over 100 pages only. But the story is good, definitely the ’shocker’ that Buchan intended to write. Really enjoyable.
The Dark Tide, Andrew Gross - another thriller, based on the story of a man who took advantage of a bomb to disappear. Enjoyed this one, good characterisation
Chasing Harry Winston,Lauren Weisberger - from the author who brought us The Devil Wears Prada, this was OK but never as good as the first book. I cared about the hero and her journey (which was far better than the film) but here, the girls who try and sort out their relationship with men are OK, but ultimately shallow and I never really saw them grow.
The Shadow Isle, Katherine Kerr - the penultimate book in the long Deverry Series, it was an inbetweener that still read well. Just need to wait how she ends it all.
The Sanctury - Raymond Khoury. A thriller that I never really got into, getting all confused. It’s one of those in the ‘historical mystery’ mold, but nothing lifts it up.
I was supposed to be doing some biz dev today, but the meeting got cancelled after the other party spent all night playing werewolf (I still don’t see the attraction in that game). I thought I’d try and do something a little bit different and Annie Mole came through via Twitter, after she’d just written a post about a consultation exercise taking place at Battersea Power Station.
They’re looking at doing the place up, after it has in effect been abandoned for 25 years. It’s been tried twice before, so there’s no guarantee, but the idea looks good. It definitely needs something doing, as it’s a gorgeous building, just waiting to be used. The idea is a mixed use place, with parks, new buildings, shops and galleries. They’re looking at building a tower bigger than the chimneys, to act as a cooling tower for the green development.
First up, you go round a presentation and model about the new development. It all looks very good and all the posters are positive. Part of my feedback is I think they should also list objections or problems and what they are doing about it, to make the coverage more balanced. I also suggested to the team they should start showing feedback and their responses, so people can see that it’s actually been read and listened to. They seemed to think that was a good idea and gave the indication they’d be doing that - so if there’s a feedback board up later this week, it’s all down to me!
After the questionnaire, you get to wander into the site, following a fenced off track, but you ge thte chance to at least look in the building. I’m surprised it’s still standing, as it’s nothing but an empty shell, only walls and broken windows. It’s a fascinating view of a building that seems to have so much potential just trying to burst out.
I think it’s well worth a trip if you are in the area. Full details can be found at Battersea Power station page
After my day at Interesting, I jumped on the Tube up to the BBC run Mashed, up at Alexandra Palace. This was a 36 hour or so hacking festival, with people all over the place coding and building new tools, most of which had something to do with a whole load of BBC feeds/API/data that were available (although in most cases only for the weekend, as a trial).
I’m not a coder, so I was not doing anything on that side. I went along to mee tup with a few people and to take part in the Social Flight Sim, a mad idea put together by Ewan Spence. He’d pulled together some people to build a flight simulator, using Google Earth as the ‘world’ and then bashed together a wooden plane to hold all the controls.
The pilot controlled the speed, height and direction, whilst the navigator managed the course. IT was originally thought that we would have to fly continuously through the night, but with a plane that could travel at 30 thousand kilometers/hour (even if the tech could not keep up with it) we could zoom by the boring bits such as the Pacific and the Atlantic.
Ewan has a video of the presentation, where he co-opted some of the pyrotechnics that the BBC had put up, to make a grand entrance (with the smoke subsequently opening up the roof again). No big prizes, but it got mentioned in dispatches a few times for being memorable!
Around 50 projects were presented, with the Northenders subtitle translator winning a couple of things. Other prizes went to Twitter on TV, using the interactiveTV API to feed in Twitter feeds to the TV, a accessibility project that pulled the data from the BBC feeds and re-presented it in a format that made it far more accessible for visual or leaning impaired people and a FireEagle>Lonely Planet hack that gave you information about where you are.
Overall, I had a great time; the organisation looked great, they kept us well fed and watered and the beanbags were their usual brilliant selves. Looking forward to the next one!
I spent most of today at Interesting 08, the conference put together by Russell Davies, pulling a whole lot of, well, interesting people together. I had a great, thought-provoking day
Here’s some notes on the talks. They ranged from 3 mins to about 20 and covered all sorts of topics. The notes are really just impressions.
Roo Reynolds - Lego is fun and everyone should be using more.
Gemma Teed - horses spook because they are herd/predator animals, even if now they spook at umbrellas instead of lions, tigers and bears. ( I used to ride one that hated pigs, a common fear of horses, and used to end up dancing all over the road if we came across one unexpectedly)
Collyn Chipperfield - tired of reality, why aren’t we doing more with fantasy. Let’s explore the possible.
Steve Hardy - Generalists do a lot of things. They present information: synthesise and summarise. They Generate ideas: link and leap. They connect people: mix and match. They understand world view: experience and empathise.
Daniel Raven Ellison - Geography is about place and space, security and freedom. Geography is the now and the future. We need to do more earth writing, changing and challenging what goes on
Michael Johnson - a walk through guitars and graphic design whilst playing the guitar to illustrate the journey. (one of the faves)
Phil Gyford - masks. How masks mean y you have to communicate more with gestures and body language instead of it all being in the face.
James Wallis - a geophysical survey of World of Warcraft, where timing walking distance shows the world to be about a 12km diameter sphere, but the gravity is similar to Earth, so it has a density about 500x greater than Earth. Such a dense mass distorts time (which is why so much is wasted in there)
Matt Dent - how he designed the reverse of the new coins and the process that went into actually getting it done.
Matt Webb - the ancient Patagonians communicated using mirrors and light and you were supposed to be able to see across the country, something that is not possible due to diffraction etc . All this changed when the Conquistidors arrived. Did they infect the continent with European physics as well as smallpox?
Andrew Webb - travelling the country looking at food and how it’s made Surprised and happy at the passion, talent and openness on show.
Andrew Walkingshaw - the naming of things. Names give power. On the web, everything has a name, but my sites are not me, they’re just aspects of me.
Andrew Dick - had insomnia for 10 years. the best cure he’s found is audio books of crime novels. Needs to have a strong plot (although writing is rarely good), abridged versions are best, no moral ambiguity, has to be a little bit thrilling - boring stuff means you think about other things and it should make going to sleep fun.
Jenny Owen - a tribute to Churchill
Matt Irvine - an ad hoc recorder orchestra (Completely mad, I got up on stage for this)
Lloyd Davies - some ukelele playing and then some mediatation
Simon/Ken/Curtis - welcome to Mars. A reading about the development of the suburbs to weird spacey sound effects.
Anna Pickard - words are funny, especially with k or p or b. She likes biscuit. (I like soggy)
Younghee Jung - a view of toilets around the world
James Bridle - IN vino, civitas. Booze has always been part of civilisation.
Kim Plowright - a history of vacuum cleaners. First ones were on the backs of carts brought to you. First personal ones cost 5 months wage.
James Houston - a remized Radiohead Nude video, which he’d used as final part of his degree
Jim Le Fevre - using a camera and a record player to make animation. (zoetropes) (Brilliant demonstration)
Gavin Starks - Acoustic Cosmology. the readings from the universe can be turned into sound.
Joel Gethin Lewis - Hiraeth, a welsh term for a sense of longing, of being in the moment and time sin his life when he’s been there (I though it was supposed to be spelled hiraedd)
George Oates - A brief run through the ‘prizes’ that get offered on Flickr and how they are used to give and receive recognition.
Lea Becker - scribbles are good. what are good illustrations. sometimes just let the ideas flow.
Leisa Riechelt - the brain is designed to learn. we continuously lose brain cells from the moment we are born, the ones we keep depend on how we use them
Max Gadney - a look at the tools of WWII. Are we only now able to start to look at WWII with real scholorship?
Lots and lots of different things, all sorts of topics, all sorts of wonders. What would you want to talk about. Me, I have an idea around geneology.
I’m off to Hide and Seek Fest in a fortnight, a London games festival that is taking place over a weekend, with lots of different types of games. However, one of them has already started - the Day of the Figurines
You go to the Southbank Centre, sign up, choose your tiny little figure from the ones displayed and then start playing by text. You have a map and a set of commands and you control your person that way. Each day is the equivalent of an hour in the game. You can move around, get things, talk to people and get set challenges. So far I’m cold and hungry, so not having good day! Go and sign up, it’s fun.
Yesterday, I was planning on going to the Flickr Walk about and then wondering off later to catch pictures of the London Naked Bike Ride where “riders decorate their bodies and bikes with messages of protest against oil dependency and car culture.” I got up late and never really got my stuff together to get to London early enough for the photowalk, so just decided to watch the latter.
Just before 4pm, police bikes screamed down the Mall to stop traffic at the corner on Parliament Square. I got myself into position and started clicking away - click through the image and you can see the rest of the set. It’s indicative of the internet I think that the images with the largest view counts are the ones with women in!
The place was full of tourists - it has to be one of the busiest tourist places in London. The overwhelming reaction was FUN. There were smiles and laughter, a shared moment at what was the obviously eccentricity of the British (even though these rides take place world wide).
These two fine chaps are after a date. But they have a few requirements:
1. Be able to reverse a trailer
2. Be able to rig a single in the dark.
3. Be able to rig an 8 in 20 mins.
4. Know nielson kellerman wiring
5. Remember rigger serial numbers and the boats they belong to
6. Recall rigging tables
7. Know what all the above means
I think they’re being too picky!
I’ve decided to try and track the books I have read. I’m rereading a few of my collection, so a mix of old and new. So here’s May
Today has been a mixed day. This morning we ran a series of races for the beginner scullers. They seemed to be happy, even the guy who managed to fall in three times. This afternoon i was building a den in the woods with mike’s kids (mike runs the army rowing course i’m hanging around). Now we’re sitting on the hard in front of the boat house watching the food on the bbq cook whilst mike does a spot of arc welding (in shorts. He says it’s the best way to get a tan!).
Wonder what tomorrow will bring
Trying out scribe to post from the phone. So far so good but it could all in wrong when i hit send 
I usually cite Raiders of the Lost Ark as my favourite film and this week has been marked in my calendar for months as the time to see the new Indy film after a 19 year gap. Today I did and I’m still not sure what to think. So more after the cut.
Here’s my veggies on April 13
And here they are on May 13.
They’ve all survived, although I needed to put slug killer down, and are growing well. I’ve had a lot of rocket and lettuce todate, the rest I need to wait for.
I feel really proud of my little veggies
Kevin Anderson was speaking on a panel the other day about The Future of Newspapers. Regardless of what else is happening in the industry, if they keep doing things like this, I’m not sure they deserve a future.
NML had a conversation with a Daily Mail reporter, which turned into an article about how she, and many other women, are turning to ‘e-venge’ to get their own back on men. From her perspective, that is not what she was interviewed about, furthermore, they proceeded to make a lot of mistakes in what they did write.
But Natalie does have her own blog and in this case, can correct the 26 inaccuracies she sees in the article. Zoe also wrote about the Daily Mail in a Guardian piece and their attitude to content on the web:
“We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.”
Jounalists need to understand copyright, when they can use stuff and how they can use it. They also need to realise that people can challenge what they are doing using the same tools they are misquoting.
Maryam has a list of books from Library Thing - the list of the most unread books on people’s shelves. It’s actually a dynamic list based on tags, so the current list is not necessarily what she has recorded - but here’s my take on the current list.
Bold are the ones I’ve read, italics the ones I’ve started. Asterisks are ones I really liked.
|
# The ultimate hitchhiker’s guide by Douglas Adams* # Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrellby Susanna Clarke # The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini* # Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy # The illearth war by Stephen R. Donaldson # Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel* # Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra # Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky # One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez # Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray # The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien # Ulysses by James Joyce # War and peace by Leo Tolstoy # Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert # Elantris by Brandon Sanderson # The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky # Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller # Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte # The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood # Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson # A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens # The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie # Middlemarch by George Eliot # Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi # The name of the rose by Umberto Eco # The Kor’an by Anonymous # Moby Dick by Herman Melville # The Odyssey by Homer # The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer # Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez # The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo # The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova # Foucault’s pendulum by Umberto Eco # Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand # The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding # The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas # The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas # The Iliad by Homer # The sound and the fury by William Faulkner # Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf # Emma by Jane Austen # Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak # Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence # Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan Swift # The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne # Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond* # Dracula by Bram Stoker # Lady Chatterley’s lover by D.H. Lawrence # A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers # Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens # The once and future king by T. H. White* # Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe # To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf |
# Mansfield Park by Jane Austen # Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood # Great Expectations by Charles Dickens # Labyrinth by Kate Mosse* # Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy # Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond* # The corrections by Jonathan Franzen # Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe # Underworld by Don DeLillo # Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott # The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck # Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte # Count Brass by Michael Moorcock # The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake # The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells # Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy # The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin # Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald # A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce # A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain # The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri # The inferno by Dante Alighieri # Gravity’s rainbow by Thomas Pynchon # The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand # Swann’s way by Marcel Proust # The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver # The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon # The portrait of a lady by Henry James # Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen # Silas Marner by George Eliot # The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde # The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas # The god of small things by Arundhati Roy # The confusion by Neal Stephenson # One flew over the cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey # The book thief by Markus Zusak # Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley # The system of the world by Neal Stephenson # Bleak House by Charles Dickens # The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene # Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson # The known world by Edward P. Jones # The time traveler’s wife by Audrey Niffenegger # The mill on the Floss by George Eliot # The English patient by Michael Ondaatje # Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon # Dubliners by James Joyce # The bonesetter’s daughter by Amy Tan # Les misĂ©rables by Victor Hugo # Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace # Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad # Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison # Persuasion by Jane Austen |
Looks like I have some reading to do. What about you?
Yesterday, the Guardian ran a GameCamp in London, helped a lot by Sony who provided the venue at their 3Rooms building in Shoreditch. By shear co-incidence, there was a Gamecamp in Toronto on the same day, the difference being that the London one was based on the BarCamp premise of a self organising day for sessions whereas the Toronto one was a more traditional planned conference. I helped organise this, insofar I input a lot of advice on running BarCamps and not so much the running around finding venues and sponsors which was all down to Bobbie Johnson.
After a few false starts, we ended up at the Sony 3Rooms as a venue. This is not an ideal place, being open plan so sessions could overpower each other, but even so, it provided a perfect backdrop to the day. Decorated with all sorts of stuff and full of Sony products, they provided the venue, the wifi and the food, often the most difficult things to organise for an event like this, so many thanks to them. We also got some consoles from Nintendo (I saw lots of bowling taking place) and Microsoft but the most popular by far was Rock Band, provided by fellow organisers Dan and Adrian from Six to Start, which kept people playing all day. I even had my first go on the drums.
About 100 people turned up and after a brief introduction the grid was opened and the sessions started to fill up. Even though many people had not been to a barcamp type event before, the format was embraced. Sessions ranged from how to kill someone (really) to religion in games. As with all such events, the sessions were of mixed quality and attendance but what made the day for many was just the chance to connect and interact in an informal environment. I never made any sessions on the morning, running around checking all was fine, but went to a few in the afternoon, such as ones on future of ARGS, hacking hardware, designing a game based on Jane Austen novels. Interestingly I never got my laptop out, but did take photos.
The feedback in the pub later seemed to indicate that the day was well enjoyed - now we need to arrange another one!
Do we praise Sony for their brave move in making 250000 songs available for free listening on the We7 music site or condemn for making you listen to a 10 second ad before every song? I’m not sure, my first instinct is annoyance and frustration that they still don’t get it. The ratio seems a lot, say 10 seconds every 3 minutes, (so at 5.5%) but it’s not as much of your time as commercial TV in the US, at 18 mins in every 60, at 30%. But I think the frequency will get annoying very quickly and will probably the variety, or lack of it when it comes to the types of ads. This is a broadcast mechanism only, so it’s commercial radio without the presenters and only one companies songs, but the ad frequency is far higher than radio - so why listen? You can only listen on your computer and not placeshift to your mobile device. I wonder how many listeners they will get?
I went to a blogger screening last night of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This was arranged via Twitter by Sizemore, with about 30 people turning up for the show. The film is made by the same people who did The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, 2 films I’ve not seen nor really had the desire to see, so I was not sure what to expect.
What I did get was a fun film that had me and the rest of the watchers laughing from the start. The basic plot is that Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), a TV star of the hit show Crime Scene (which means some funny parodies of CSI), breaks up with Peter (Jason Segal). Peter goes off to Hawaii to try and get over he, only to end up at the same hotel as Sarah and her new boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). The story was nothing new, but it was delivered in a great way - and I so want to see the Dracula Puppet Rock Opera I loved it and if you want a laugh, go see the film. There’s a far better review over at Going Underground
One other great aspect of the night was getting a chance to have a good chat with people I’d only briefly met before, primarily londonfilmgeek and Imajes. I also met a lot of new people, such as Mecca and LJ (well, those are the people I have cards from - there were a lot more than that!)
On the digital marketing perpective, compare the US and the UK sites. The front page is different, with the UK site pushing Russell Brand to the front, but once inside it’s the same. Down to the fact that to see the 18+ version of the trailer, they still expect you to have a US driving licence!!!!
I'm Rachel Clarke and this is my personal blog, about life, stuff and a bit of technology. The marketing stuff can be found at Behind the Buzz.
more about »
