sixball

AI-Optimisation may be the new SEO (AIO?). LLMs fill in the ontological gap of the Semantic Web ideal. Easily readable and writable by AI + humans, it might look a lot like Web 1.0. Wondering what this means for front-end devs. This is still deeply in draft mode but published because I promised.It’ll be finished […]

I have told my little sister that I don’t believe my young nephews will ever learn to drive. Why? Self-driving cars are reasonably safe and getting safer. Touched on this briefly ages ago: https://sihammond.medium.com/why-citymapper-will-be-bigger-than-uber-xxxxl-942c87fda71c Positive feedback loops will push human drivers off the road. When I learnt to drive, a key principle was to behave […]

I don’t pretend to understand this stuff (hence the total lack of a seven-figure bonus this year)  but I do know that the Bank of England cannot simply ‘print money’.  It’s all done electronically these days. I’m imagining Sir Mervyn King sitting in front of a leather-bound keyboard, surrounded by advisors, and taking immense care […]

Finding myself with a bit of time before work this morning, I got stuck into decluttering a box of old notebooks, print-outs and the like. In doing so, I inadvertently roused the ghost of sixball past (even before he became sixball). He was an engaging chap, creative but chaotic. What he lacked in self-awareness he […]

I love the Tube.  I love the fact that it’s always warm, dry and, if there’s not one waiting to leave right now, another will be along in just a couple of minutes.  It’s both futuristic in its automation and quirkily old-fashioned in decor.  Teleportation implemented by victorians. But… I’ve been a cycle-commuter all my […]

Google Maps is awesome but it’s not always the most detailed source and it’s not always possible to fix errors. That’s why I sometimes turn to Open Street Map. It can be described as the Wikipedia of Maps: it’s not guaranteed to give you what you need but is totally open to being fixed. Last […]

It’s possible than living in the vicinity of some of London’s architectural landmarks, the London Eye, the Gherkin, City Hall, the dome of St Paul’s. Buildings are definitely getting more curvaceous (I’m ignoring the Shard). This, combined with my own extensive experience of inhabiting confined space has led me to be convinced of the inevitability […]

A nice routine I’ve adopted in the last month or so is to hook up with a couple of like-minded souls every week or two and sample a pub where the history has stained the timbers and talk a particular dialect of computing nerdish. In Ye Old Cheshire Cheese where Dickens found inspiration, we recall […]

It’s been over a month since I headed down to the big smoke. Now I’ve actually sorted accommodation for the next month or two I have time to pull some random nuggets out the experience bank while they are still fresh. The plan, as you may recall, was to use the excellent Airbnb.com service (basically, […]

I keep meaning to write something about the beneficial side-effects of juggling. Something along the lines of ‘everything I know about life I learned from juggling’ but it always sounds a little contrived once I start thinking it through. One idea that sticks, however, is one that I want to expand upon more fully later: […]

As noted in an earlier episode, I love books. Or I thought I did. Now I’m wondering if I actually like well-edited prose in the palm of my hand and I just got confused. I’m just starting to twig there might be a viable alternative in the form of e-books. I know what you are […]

The history of progress is a long list of people of losing their jobs. From farm workers, typing pools, messengers, coal men: you name it, some pesky innovation has come and made the human redundant. Yet the population remains employed, by and large. The grandsons of blacksmiths become mechanics, cobblers to surf-boarders, typesetters to WordPress […]

In case anyone feels like making a billion quid and eliminating some pathetic gripes of privileged whiners like myself, here are a couple of things that you could bestow to the world.  No charge. Flip-up cycle extremities I don’t need my bike to collapse to the size of a lunch box and I don’t want […]

The theoretical potential of publishing to the whole damn world for all time can sometimes feel inhibiting.  Especially if there’s a prominent blogging community established in the vicinity.  You can find yourself second-guessing the likely response from an uncertain and imaginary readership, and that’s usually enough to abort too many drafts. Although flatlining WordPress Stats […]

I finally got round to importing my Yahoo! Mail into GMail and wrote a ‘vacation’ response so I could finally walk away from this weeping sore of an inbox: Hello, You just tried to reach me at this Yahoo! address and kind of failed. Maybe you found it in an old e-mail folder or scribbled […]

For the first time in my life I did some early xmas shopping this week and I’m here to tell you that now is absolutely the bestest time to stuff stockings.  All the xmas stock is out yet there’s little of the rabid gift grubbing that jingles your soul in the Last Week. Put me […]

Moving house is always a good excuse for a decluttering and one thing I’ve been dragging around with me the last decade is my ergonomic kneeling stool.  Loved but never used, up on eBay it went and fetched the princely sum of £15 plus P&P.  The P&P requires corrugated cardboard, folded (and possibly joined) to […]

It’s generally held that early traumatic experiences can be pivotal to the shaping of an individual.  Something about my childhood might be inferred from the fact that one of my most vivid comes from ‘The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang‘, an 80’s animated spin-off from the popular ‘Happy Days’ TV series. Most of it […]

Cycled into work along the old railway line this morning.  Always feels like a lovely, leafy wormhole to Harborne. This morning I got a rosy ‘hello’ from a gent sipping an early export on joining the trail at Hagley road and a smallish dog made an embarrassing but enthusiastic attempt at killing my shoe. It […]

Normal relationship stuff is being unpleasantly spiked with international news this evening. N flew out to visit her family for a couple of weeks this afternoon.  Unfortunately, they happen to live in Tabriz, in Iran.   This was supposed to be a sure win for the presidential challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, it being his home […]

…but I can’t help noticing that it’s a big deal at the moment.  There’s this credit-crunch, global recession, economic crisis going on and we are all Having to Deal With It.  Whether this means roughing it with supermarket beans, camping in the UK or whatever. There’s the Economic Climate story where everything just happened.  We […]

When I read a few weeks ago that Alastair Campbell and John Prescott were launching a Web2.0 campaign to get Labour a fourth term of office I was naturally skeptical. It smelt like a desperate bit of bandwagon-jumping.  The name ‘Go Fourth‘ seems vaguely amateurish and the obvious Twitter account hadn’t even been bagged.  Utterly […]

The word ‘community’ is bandied about a fair bit these days and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a cosy term used lazily.  As an exercise, I used the pseudo-random idea generator in my head to squeeze out some candidates: The 20th Bristol Juggling & Circus Skills Convention Birmingham Bloggers Asda customers Bohemia patrons […]

The bit I really love about flying is that fleeting moment, a few thousand feet up, when your sense of scale shifts.  Towns are shown up as real entities interconnected across the landscape via moving channels of light particles, each of which are likely to be aware only of the few nearest particles nearest them.  […]

Something seems to be happening to me.  Maybe it’s age-related and so, along with the hormone that spurs nasal and aural tufts, there’s a chemical cascade that propels me into the back yard to get all horticultural. Some context: our back yard is a jungle.  A small tribe held together by the absolute belief in […]

I’m in day 2 of a classic bout of flu.  So I’m steering clear of web server admin and directing my delirious attentions here in a sort of cursory round-up. It’s been a busy week-and-a-bit with the new job.   All the grappling with new stuff leaves my synapses frazzled but I can feel my neurons […]

Returned to regular nine-to-fivery yesterday, starting on a Friday for administrative reasons.  Lots of being introduced and instantly forgetting names before getting myself and my desk detritus installed. Plush lunch with new colleagues: steak, wine and strawberry ice-cream on the top floor of staff house.  Like many campus buildings, it seems altitude is tied to […]

As my N80 once again burbles its dying charge and I brace myself for regular employment again the time is clearly ripe for a switch of mobile.  When I got the N80 it was the hottest thing around with a large display and wifi.  It was also uncharacteristically unstable for a Nokia but I put […]

Did a scan of the Spam folder this morning to see if anything was slipping through the net. Only one false positive (a Flickr notification) but I learnt a lot along the way: Paris Hilton Infested With Cockroaches Paris Hilton Charges For Pussy Cats skinned alive in Alabama What would a “PhD” title do for […]

The planets aligned last weekend and we took the chance to take a mad touristic dash around London (why is everyone in London or Edinburgh lately?). The weather was fab. Some of the attractions, less so. Walking along the South Bank, the place was littered with ‘living statues’ or whatever the hell they’re called. There’s […]

A quick work update and banking rant: Whilst the freelance work has been warming up nicely, it’s not yet enough to live on. So I figured it’s time to slide that to evenings/weekends and return to the world of regular work. I applied for a couple of jobs back at uni that seemed like good […]

Monday night saw me at the Malthouse (mistakenly) then the Flapper (learning about Norse gods and the insider’s guide to living on a longboat).  Birmingham Bloggermeets: Great for random topics and predictable hangovers. I also gave away a computer desk and acquired a breadmaker in the last couple of days.  I’d like to say I […]

Messing around with crowds the last week or so. Lent a hand with a flashmob waterfight over the weekend in the centre of Brum.  Lots of kids appeared from nowhere and got fucking saturated for 15 minutes.  It was fun. Straight after that, we got more hi-tech.  We rigged up a 5ft LED display to […]

The blogging irony: the more I do the less time I have to write about it. Will attempt to remedy by posting short, pithy updates. The last couple of weeks have been made interesting by hanging around entrepreneurial types. Earlier, at the Young Entrepreneurs Forum at the University of Warwick. Latterly at the SPEED social […]

Extra nutrition yesterday.  Would have liked to have also snapped some of the meetings I had yesterday but not quite at that stage of auto-voyeurism yet.

I’ll come clean and tell you today was a pretty forgettable one.  Knocked up a website portfolio in the morning and then coded in the central library in the afternoon.  I found a spot where you could catch a whiff of free wifi.  Look for British Art.

The monthly Blogger meet and the Egghead broadcast both started at 6pm. Thank Frigg for iPlayer. The Learning Centre was rammed so I’ll need to survey other spots for nomadic coding on campus until this coworking thing takes off.

In the spirit of documenting mundanity as it happens, I hit upon an idea last night. It arises out of a couple of problems that I’ve recognised recently. I snap lots of random crap with my phone that tends to stay locked up there taking up space. I don’t post everyday crap on this blog, […]

Pleased with how the coworking crawl turned out.  A whimsical spark of an idea shot off at short notice, it quickly attracted some hefty support. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone invoked it again in the not-too-distant future. Kind of a new experience framing these guys as coworkers rather than just dudes I see purely […]

Yeah, I know shuffled my blogs around so much in the last couple of years I can’t even recall.  Its awful but I’m here to tell you it’s gonna get better. This is the bottom line, the rest is just waffle: I had three blogs; now there will be just two:  Simon Hammond and sixball.  […]