Monkey On Unicycle

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.

29 April 2008

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.

5 a day

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, resulting in blogger’s guilt.

Framed like this, with a crap surplus and a crap deficit, the solution is obvious. I should blog my mobile pics. Furthermore, I should commit myself to a quota. Five a day would seem to be about right and handily piggybacks on the well known sprout of nutritional wisdom.

I considered posting them on Flickr where they could be properly ordered in space and time but this is a tad extra work and they might be a bit crap when I’m trying to clean up my Flickr photostream. Not sure how it’ll pan out so I’m keeping it simple and making no commitments. I guess some may have a story, some may be arty and some might obviously be filler.

If you want to do some arty web2.0-style group bonding, feel free to join in. I’ll be using the 5aday tag for such posts which shall continue until such time as I grow weary of them.

So here are the five I took last night to make my quota. Today is likely to be more interesting, what with the Blogger meet and being on Eggheads and all:

coworking crawl

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 socially with a geeky co-affiliation.  Had to keep telling myself it’s okay to get the head down and spending some time in the coding zone between breaks.  Reading the live-blogging of the day did feel weird and a little self-regarding.  Perhaps I should have left that shit until the end of the day.

After the novelty’s worn off and some good routes have been worn in, maybe this will be an accepted mode of working.  Like a travelling circus it somehow seems more viable than parking in one place.

Took an instant liking to Jibbering Records.  Appealing grunge-bohemian with the most unpushy cafe service I’ve ever experienced.  It was only guilt on my part that propelled me to order a tea at a measily quid a pop.  There was the possibility mooted of adopting the basement as a more persistent coworking space which could be fun.

3 become 2

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.  Set your instruments accordingly.

Waffle: The ‘postcards from the web’ idea that was hosted on sixball.wordpress.com have been ported over to simonhammond.com/blog.  This leaves a slick new home for the personal journal currently residing at sixball.co.uk.  I used to enjoy rolling my own blog but it was flaky in a couple of places and the WordPress-hosted site now has all the features I need, and more.  It makes no sense to reinvent a very well engineered wheel.

Ultimately, sixball.co.uk will map, or at least redirect, to the WordPress hosting.  I hope to even get round to importing the content when I get a chance although this is a bit more work (another of the downsides of a one-off blog).

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