Tale of two paths, Outsourced vs The IT Crowd?

The IT Crowd

The high-rise towers of Renham Industries are full of go-getters, success stories, and winners… apart from in the basement. While their beautiful colleagues work upstairs in fantastic surroundings, the I.T. department – Jen, Roy and Moss – lurk below ground, scorned by their co-workers as geeky losers.

Channel4's attempt to bring geeky humour to the mainstream? Maybe. Who can tell but I douht it will be as good as what the amatuers can do. Kevin Rose and friends are doing there own titled Outsourced. And is expected to be a true taste of geekyness. At the moment the only geeky non news type shows I can think of are, The Scene and that old BBC show Attachments (which I can not find via the BBC site. But you can buy the VHS here). So generally anything would be a improvement on whats currently there. But I am worrying that the IT Crowd will simply recycle the same geek stereotypes and make the whole sitcom about laughing at geek culture. Don't get me wrong nothing wrong with laughing at ourselves but there are limits. I guess its like the whole arguement about Little Britian and many other sitcoms. But to be fair if you look at the Office (the orginal british version) its got stereotypes but it doesnt take the piss out of a group of people. Little Britian does not take the piss out of people who are gay, just that one guy who thinks he's the only gay in the village. Anyhow I'll reserve judgement till I actually see the sitcom which you can sign up and watch online before the broadcast at the end of this month.

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Traveling on public transport in London

Theres something about public transport which I like. Ah yes the ability to sit down and read and listen without too much interuption. I swear I'm pretty much going through my whole 240+ RSS feed subscriptions in one journey too and from work. So yeah pretty much within 2hrs I'm able to tag all the interesting entries which I wish to read or look at later.

Its not only my RSS which I'm able to go through much quicker now. I have actually added more podcasts to my subscription because I'm going through them pretty quickly now.

As a lot of you know I've now moved to Woolwich and that means I need to get a totally different train into London now a days. I was, still am (will always be) nervious of reading my aggregator via my laptop on the train. People get mugged for a lot less and I've been pretty lucky so far. I get some really weird looks and I cant work out if its either my Firefox Tshirt or the laptop? Now I know the social enginnering tshirt would certainly cause a second glance but I cant work out if its just that sly glance of I know that logo, I use that browser at home too or more what the heck is he doing on a train to dartford with a laptop? Who knows? Interesttingly on the way to work this week me and Dave were talking about taking apart BBC's unencypted Digital TV signals and the licence which this can be done under, yeah usual geeky culture politics stuff that we tend to talk about. When this women (cant remember her name right now) stopped us and asked if we had heard of Creative Commons. Honestly me and Dave gave each other a double look (like you only see in Cartoons) and said yes, absolutly! During the course of the conversation which went from Greenwich to London Bridge we touched on Boingboing, gaming, Licencing and a few more things. I did give her my business card before she ran off into the crowd of people pushing there way to work. Although Sarah wasnt that pleased about that. She has not emailed me yet, but it was great to have a geeky conversation on the train.

I did have another conversation with some stranger on the train this week but it was very very odd and maybe not worth getting into.

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