Ianforrester

Manchester Werewolf Chapter with Larkin about at Barcelona bar

Wednesday we had a very successful night of werewolf…

I didn’t have my DSLR with me, so I only captured a few low rez photos of the action. Almost everything just worked…

Working with Larkin About (remember that ARG) was a great success and I’m sure the reason we got different players is simply because they were involved. The Location was great because the bar owner really wanted to help make it a successful event. He (Mike) even said next time he will happily do service to the circle, so people don’t even have to leave the game to get drinks. Its also staged happy hour when we’re playing, so cocktails start off at 2 for £5 and rise to 2 for £9 a few hours later. And to be honest the cocktails are actually not bad at all. I was drinking Cosmopolitans (as I do) and they were actually much better than average. Not quite the quality of NoHo, Scho Rehab or Aphotica but not far off.

Barcelona bar is a great venue with the slightly raised platform where we were playing werewolf and the space around it for people who were dead (as such) or just people not playing… The raised platform isn’t exactly round but its good enough to fit a good number of people looking at each other.

Playing the Thing to start the proceeding was a inspired thought, because it meant as people joined us, they could also just join the next round. In the end we played the thing then 2 different games of werewolf.

Everyone really enjoyed themselves and we played till bar closing time…

Only two slight negatives

Not having food and consuming a ton of lovely cocktails (yes someone had to do it). Barcelona bar is due to start doing pancakes, and I had thought they were doing them already. So assuming I would be able to grab a sandwich somewhere I thought a savoury pancakes might work. Next time I’m sure they will be up and running in this area
A lot of the regular players from MadLab, BarCamps, etc… didn’t turn up, which was a shame. However we did have a ton of new people and we even roped a couple in for a small drink, into the game actual game.

Anyway we’ve decided to do Werewolf on a bi-monthly schedule. So look out for details of the next game in January 2012… Thanks to everyone who turned up, and remember I am never the werewolf…

Techgrumps live! from VivID Lounge

We (me, josh and nathan rae) did our first live Techgrumps on Sunday 20th November… Live from VivID Lounge…

Its also a Manchester only affair, as you’d expect with it being LIVE… Ian,Josh and guest Nathan eat breakfast while waxing lyrical… about exploring Sci-Fi elitism and a concept to replace the Royal Mail with UAVs all live on Sunday 20th November…

You can download it in Mpeg3 or Ogg Vorbis

Feel inspired by, I am, I do…

The Hodge ping’ed me on gtalk today and pointed me at a hack He and Caius had done for Honda Hack day

Its called I am, I do…

What is this?
I am, I do is a user edited database of stories, advice and inspiration of people following their dream. We started by asking people we knew who are doing what they love to answer a few questions and put them in a nice database for you to read, sort, store and share but we now want to open it up to everyone who is doing what they love, it doesn’t have to be working for yourself, if you love your job then let us know! You might inspire others
Why did you do this?
I’m inspired everyday by the people in my social circle, when I have a question or want to try something new, I can reach out for advice and one of them has probably done something similar before, we think there are a lot of people in similar situations who want to do something but are just missing a bit of inspiration
Anything else?
We would love schools and job centres to point people at this website and show the stories of people who have switched jobs, careers, countries to do what they want and that if your dream is reasonable, your dream is possible, you’ve just got to work at it

Its a simple but a great/noble idea… No fuss, fill in the questions and attach it to your profile (which is tied to your Twitter account). I spent about 30mins filling out about 8 questions, and you can see the result here.

It weirdly reminds me of something like the early days of OK Cupid when you would fill in questions about yourself. Of course the aim was very different in that case, it was all about getting a date but underneath that, it was about defining yourself. The aim of I am, I do is purely to inspire others. I do expect if it became bigger, some would use it as a place to show off but why? There’s nothing to gain from lying or showing off… This is good!

Some will dismiss it, as pointless because it doesn’t have badges or scores but I say excellent… Its simply a place to read inspiring stories from people you may or may not know.

As I was saying previously, we are all amazing and opportunities to learn a little more about each other should be the end point. Its the richness of life…

Great work Dom and Caius… don’t be tempted to add achievements, metrics, scores or anything else like that… You only have to look at the mess something like Klout has gotten its self into.

On the question: What has been your biggest achievement to date and why was it special?

I don’t care to count my achievements by size… Some of the tiny discussions I’ve had, have changed peoples directions. It might only be one person but that person might do something incredible and become something they never thought they could be in the past… I’m happy that I can help inspire others to be the best they can be. Some of this might be through London Geekdinner, BarCampLondon/Manchester, my work at BBC Backstage including Hackdays, etc, etc. I expect there will be many more chances to inspire in the future.

I really mean it, our fascination with size and instant impact is like a drug (I guess it also feeds the ego). I’d certainly welcome quality over size in some cases.

Poll: On the first date who pays?

On the first date, who pays? My Qriously poll

For those who can’t read the poll, 100 people answered from around the world via Qriously the question of who should pay on the first date? Something I talked at length about before.

60% said the man should pay on the first date, 27% said the woman and only 13% said go dutch (thinking I should have put split it instead of go Dutch, to avoid any language misunderstanding). Yes the man should pay is the number one option but what totally surprises me is the small amount of votes for going dutch?

I didn’t tweet the poll and to be honest I forgot to change it because it was meant to be part of the Leeds ignite talk I was going to give on the 15th November. This has now been put back to early next year…

The Insight…

60% (60) people are in favour of The Man (Top Geographies are United States, United Kingdom, India)

13% (13) people are in favour of Go Dutch (Top Geographies are United States, Thailand, India)

27% (27) people are in favour of The Woman (Top Geographies are United States, Spain, Chile)

The poll was answered by 46% Female and 54% Male and the average sentiment is strongly towards The Man

There was 100 Answers and 2,963 Views over only 18mins uptime, not bad for a first time without any additional push from myself.

I will run it again during my talk at Leeds Ignite and change the “go dutch” note and focus it on just the UK and maybe Europe?

The Circus House in Ancoats

Theres quite a bit of things happening to the retail park right next to New Islington… But someone clued me into a new venture called the circus house which started just 2 days ago.

The Circus house is the embodied dream of Owen, Alex and Sian; three Circus performers with 10 years teaching experience. One day whilst having a moan about the lack of circus training space in Manchester a light clicked on….and The Circus House was born.

The Circus House is a Community Interest Company – all profits go back into the company to buy new equipment, produce shows and pay for top quality professionals to come and share their skills.

Anyone is welcome from beginners to professionals looking to train daily, and anybody in the middle too! There will be weekly classes, one off master classes, free training and space hire.

We aim to be affordable and to offer storage space for equipment. To run inclusion classes and to reach out to not only the circus community but the wider communities of Manchester —and beyond!

Of course I’ll be checking it out very soon, because frankly all the other circus skills places are in south Manchester

The secret of luck or the richness of life?

Derren Brown isn’t a household name outside the UK, no idea why… but he recently did a excellent show in the conclusion to his experiments series…

In the show he slowly convinces a town that a statute in a local public garden it might be lucky. Through a series of other activities and press attention, people start touching the statute more and more over the months. But where it gets interesting is when he tries to find a person who by the end of the show will bet a huge amount of money on a roll of a dice. So convinced he might just be lucky.

What Derren is proving is the power of the mind… Something I’ve seen long understood from my time in hospital and afterwards. To be honest it was one of Derren’s best ever shows and something I love about his style… Unravelling some of the more complex mysteries of life.

The secret to luck is opportunity…

If you take the opportunities you will make more human connections, gain more experience and feel more lucky… (Roughly)

Its something I’ve become very versed in recently.

Opportunities are there for the taking… When you understand this, your world is your oyster.

I was trying to explain this blog entry on the train to Tim Waters who I hopefully didn’t bore to death between Liverpool and Manchester. I used the tale of the Japanese lady on the train story to explain taking opportunities. Its very easy to just stick your headphones in your ears and ignore the world of opportunities which are served up to us everyday… I personally don’t put my earphones in my ears when going to work till I get out the front door of the apartment I live in. Why? Because I’ve had some fascinating conversations in the lift with people (yes and some of them are lovely woman).

For example once I got in the lift and the lift went up a few floors and stopped. Doors open and a woman gets in wearing PJ’s and fluffy sleepers.

It could have been easy to ignore her and stare at the glossy silver lift doors but instead, I couldn’t help myself. “So, sleepers…?” *big grin*. She smiled and said “…well you know their all the rage now…”

There’s plenty more I can say about this but seeing how I’ve had this blog entry open for a good few weeks, I think its best ended with a vague reference to social objects mixed with opportunities…

Maybe luck actually feels like the richness of life…?

Occupy everything?

I’ve said nothing about the #occupy movement…

The last #smc_mcr was all about #occupy and raised a ton of interesting debate, which I’ve seen played out elsewhere.

One of the best observers of the occupy movement I’ve seen is from Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff, he’s his piece on CNN of all places…

To be fair, the reason why some mainstream news journalists and many of the audiences they serve see the Occupy Wall Street protests as incoherent is because the press and the public are themselves. It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped.

One of the biggest problems have with occupy is the lack of a coherent and mass adopted message. Rushkoff is right, this notion is very 20th century and our media isn’t setup to deal with these new type of movement/message. I made the comment at #smc_mcr that in the same way the terrorists adopted a decentralised method to bomb there targets, also made it extremely difficult (some would say impossible) to find and stop them.

I know comparing the occupy movement to a suicide bombers is a leap and half, plus its not ideal but the idea of a decentralised movement is scary to the powers that be.

People are very upset, be it the 99% upset with the 1%, wall street, rising unemployment, rising oil prices, the lack of helium, whatever. Its enough to make people stand up and say there simply not happy.

Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher. What upsets banking’s defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

How they say there not happy is another story of course…. But it reminds me of pay it forward in nature. Simple rule set in which you can frame your own movement.

Take shelter or Occupy? Thats the question, as we head into 2012 and a collapse of our man made systems and way of life.

…in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirely different than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-down investors and media makers alike…

Which Desktop Environment?

OMG!Ubuntu is running a poll on what desktop environment linux users are using…

The results are actually quite surprising on two counts…

Gnome 3 is actually quite high with over 28% of the vote (over 4000 users). Even though you have to install it separately in Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10.
Gnome legacy is surprisingly low (lower than XCFE and KDE) for all the fuss about moving forward…

I know its not anything scientific but its a good sign… not quite sure what it says about Unity?

Stem based mixing coming your way soon?

One of the killer ideas which came out of the Mozilla Festival in the Dj challenge was the idea of Stem based mixing…

The idea is great and I think there’s plenty of momentum behind it. Daniel James and Fin Stamp worked this idea through and now there’s a post on the Mixxx forums. Here’s the details of the post…

At the Mozilla Festival in London last weekend, I took part in a Hack the DJ workshop, looking at ways to take digital DJ’ing to the next level. One of the ideas proposed was stem mixing, using multichannel files in DJ applications. A proprietary implementation of this idea is Fireplayer but this app is built with the intention that users will buy remixable versions of (a very limited number of) well-known songs from an in-app store. I would like to work towards a new open standard for stem mixing, something that is compatible with sharing our mixes on the open web – legally, of course – but could also be used by record labels that sell tracks to DJs.

For example, eight channel Ogg Vorbis files where the first two tracks are a stereo mix of the drums, third and fourth stereo bass, fifth and sixth stereo vocals, and seventh and eighth tracks everything else. This means that you can mute or solo individual stems in the mix, giving you the versatility of four-deck or eight-deck mixing but without the problems of keeping many decks in sync, since the stems within a single file are locked on the same timeline. Also, it makes using the mixer a lot simpler than for many-deck mixing, because you don’t need to keep assigning the crossfader to the various different decks.

Of course this means that the eight channel .ogg file has to be prepared specially for DJ’ing, but this is already possible in Audacity. So we have a file format, and an editor, but what we don’t yet have is full support for stem mixing in open source DJ applications. Sweep supports scratching on eight-channel files, but it doesn’t have a mixer. Mixxx has a mixer, but doesn’t support multichannel Ogg files (yet), as far as I can see.

So, what do you think? Is stem mixing a genuinely useful feature that will allow DJs to be more creative, or will it fail if the best music continues to be available in stereo only? Please add your comments below

I like to think this could be massive thing because although you might be able to get the Stem’s of a tune if your a international superstar dj and have contacts in high places. But if your just a bedroom dj or even play out quite a bit but not a popular name, getting access to the stems of a tune is near impossible.

In fact what were trying to do is standardise the format, so it means the bedroom producers and the massive music businesses can compete on a level platform. This might strike fear into some but when the stereo track is no more and everyone is expecting the Stems of the track as standard, then you will have to go along with it.

Ogg Vorbis is a great starting point and knowing it can support up to 200+ tracks is great for future capability. There are a ton of questions of how it works for a Dj but its certainly a challenge which will be fun to have. I just hope we can stay away from the logic/alberton type interface…

Can’t wait to mix with Stem’ed Ogg Vorbis files…!