Geeky London Beers

March 9, 2011 — Si

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 our own childhood influences: Bertha, Button Moon and Chock-A-Block, GOTO statements and the sound of tape loading that was as familiar as bird song.

From the pub where Pepys watched London burn in 1666 we leapfrog impatiently into the present to hook up on Last.fm and Latitude. The Shard emerges like a crystalline volcano behind us meanwhile.

The historical scribblers above could not have begun to imagine. They may have fitted into each other’s world – a mere couple of centuries apart – with some adjustment but history has since compressed. The future is not evenly distributed, even amongst the tightest generation. This is why this time and place crackles with possibliites.

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On Dropping

January 21, 2011 — Si

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: mastering failure.

Juggling is a bit like magic in that you hide something from the audience. There is nothing up your sleeves but – squint as they might – the casual observer will totally fail to see thousands upon thousands of drops. All these fumbles, collisions and runaways happened while they weren’t looking. You repeated, varied and noticed them over and over again until they became as familiar as the feel of your knackered beanbags.

Then you turn the drops off for a few seconds and it looks good.

You can probably see the point coming around the corner right about now. Success is the sweet juice from many crushing failures. Or alternatively, it’s a tower built from failure’s bones. It’s been expressed far more poetically over the ages but in it’s purest form: befriend failure.

This ramble was brought to you in conjunction with the fine beers at the Dove Free House, Broadway Market.

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big papery thing tied up with string

November 30, 2010 — Si

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 thinking: e-books aren’t real. They’re ghostly, massless substitutes for books. Real books can be tossed about, lent, and displayed as testaments to accrued wisdom and badges of affinity. Yet I can imagine similar objections to the innovation of the pulped wood printing: Made out of paper? What if it gets wet? Won’t the goat eat it? Paper tears – it doesn’t wear! Stick to tablets!

A more serious consideration is the reading ‘experience’. I’m not a fan of reading off a laptop for whatever reason but have no problem with a smartphone and an iPad. And anyone who thinks that the latest Kindle is not for the serious reader needs to shut up and go play with one right now.

Book ownership is like gym membership: there’s no point having it if it’s inaccessible. I always have my phone with me (and usually my iPad) so can whip it out and dip into that awesome book instead of checking Facebook for the latest Farmville stats. When I switch devices, it knows where I got up to – no more bus ticket bookmarks! I can annotate and highlight passages without feeling guilty and, intriguingly, see which passages make popular highlights. Most importantly, I can read in bed without getting out to turn out the light.

End result: more reading and that can’t be bad.

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the end of jobs

July 30, 2010 — Si

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 themers.

Technology relieves the human of the mundane, repetitive and physical work compelled by economics. Services and products get cheaper which makes everyone gets relatively richer to how they were. New product and services become viable.

Career-wise, the best escape from this logical encroachment is to head for the high ground of human creativity, rich interaction – anything with soul that cannot be automated or mass-produced. Anything else will be available so easily to be virtually free.

The safe money, following the wobbly arc of this logic, is on the wranglers of the intangible: artists, poets, philosophers, gurus and the like. Those not inclined this way will still be able to live in far greater comfort than is typical today, free to pursue whatever happens to take their interest. Historical quirks may have us calling them students.

History also suggests that once physical and leisure needs are amply met there’s a thirst for status, respect and possibly fame. This is a conundrum. Everyone might have 3 hour working weeks and personal Nutri-Matic drinks synthesizer but not everyone can be famous: it’s a limited resource.

People will scrabble for attention and recognition, awarding themselves titles, honours and distinctions until someone conceives a mirror which gives everyone the impression they are top of the heap. Then we are done.

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invent this please

June 3, 2010 — Si

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 to hang it up like some kind of piece of theatre but I would like it to take up less space when I bring it into the house.  A quick sizing has the bike frame well under 8″ wide yet the handle bar pushes that out to 23″.  My hallway is 33″ wide.  Visualise, if you will.

If I could unlock and flip the handlebar in exactly the same way as my bike clamp already does then me, my fellow cyclists and all visitors to their dwellings would be spared the merciless paunch poker.  Pedals, likewise.  I’ve seen them on fold-up bikes, dammit, so don’t try to tell me it’s not possible.

Tidy printout scaling

For some reason I have cut-throat airline tickets in mind for this although you only usually need to print off the first page and ignore the dozen pages of terms and conditions for those.  This is the curiously common situation where a printout spills onto the last page by just a single line or two, causing a spasm at the sloppiness of it (to be recycled as eco-guilt later).  Extra points for irony if the offending text is boilerplate ‘Please consider the environment think before printing this email’.  This is the sort of thing that can totally suck the pleasure out of your mid-morning latte.

Yes, I know it’s possible to change the zoom in preview but how often do you do this?  How hard in comparison for the printer driver to optionally squeeze or stretch the text by 10% to make best use of the paper?  Please, make it so and let me find something new to bleat about.  Thanks.

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blogging like no-one’s reading

May 29, 2010 — Si

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 offer some reassurance here, I’d like to give fair warning to anyone subscribed to this blog with the expectation of well-written, lucid and accountable prose of general interest.  The quality bar is about to drop through the floor.

From here on in, this blog is likely to spout incoherent rambles, irresponsible/unjustified assertions and turgid verbiage that only makes sense in the context of being me.  There’s also a real danger of cusswords.

Thanks for reading thus far.  Continued subscription indicates you agree to the receipt of unmitigated bollocks from this direction for the foreseeable future.  A comment to this effect would be greatly appreciated.

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