Ianforrester

The Chemistry of Love and all that jazz

So I've not really said much about my love life for a long time. You know its been a year since I've been single and I've been thinking about love and what makes a good quality relationship for a while now. When Carl Honore stood up at thinking digital conference and talked about the slow movement I was thinking hummm maybe there are some things i should be slowing down on. But the talk which really got me thinking was Helen Fisher's talk on the chemistry of love. Then Kate sent me a link to the a wired article which I did see the first time, but never blogged due the situation I was in, it didn't seem wise to blog about it. < href="http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/sexdrive/2007/04/sexdrive_0406">The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers.

When I first read the wired piece I thought it was going to be crud, but actually it turns out to be quite interesting and quite fair….

Geeks build it so you will come

Geeks get personal with tech

Geeks dig consensual role playing/li>
Geeks interact/li>
Geeks get things done/li>
Geeks are hot …/li>

Geeks don't shock easily/li>
cGeeks know kinky people/li>>>
Geeks understand multi-dimensional relationships/li>
Geeks aren't threatened by new tech or “the future of sex/li>

For example here's two which spring to mindd out of the long list of 10. So on the purely odd front, geeks don't shock easily and geeks know kinky people.

Geeks have seen all the porn you can imagine and then some, priming them to be open to your sexual peccadilloes. They are not only less likely to be shocked by your exotic requests — they might not even realize that other people think your turn-ons are exotic.

Conversely, your geek lover might be relieved that your wildest fantasy involves only two other people, five utensils and a trapeze.

Geeks haven't just seen a variety of positions, kinks and fetishes in blue movies. They know (or are) people who enjoy those things, so they don't dismiss entire categories of sexual interests as the sole province of a bunch of weirdos in San Francisco.

It's hard to sustain prejudice and bias against an abstract group when you develop relationships with individuals and discover they're just like you. It doesn't matter if they dress up like ponies, or refuse to conform to a societal idea of gender norms, or eat pancakes for dinner. Geek lovers know better than to try to impose their sexual preferences or standards on others — including your friends — and are more likely to love and let love.

This is very true, I've been talking to a few non-geek friends recently and I've started to wonder if I'm unshockable. At BarCampNorthEast, me and Emma Persky were talking about shocking movies and I mentioned I've never seen 2 girls 1 cup. Anyway we got talking about it and Emma was able to explain it without too much problem. Some of reactions on Youtube are classic, but back to why geeks make great lovers.

Geeks understand multi-dimensional relationships

Geeks connect with their online buddies in several guises, often getting to know the person behind the avatar as friendships deepen and move from adult communities to personal IM.

A geek can flow seamlessly between conversation about a friend's partner and kids in one window and an elaborate group sex scene in another, without feeling any discontinuity between the personas. Even if the friend is a 43-year-old father of two in IM, and a 22-year-old dominatrix in the group.

With all that going on, a geek has no problem accepting that sometimes you want mocha ripple cherry fudge chunk swirl with almonds and a waffle and sometimes you want vanilla lite.

Now this is one which I agree with but seems in conflict with what Carl Honore said about slowing down. Or maybe it isn't? I'm regularly doing that multi-dimensional thing and I find it quite natural. I do wonder how strange it looks to someone looking in from the outside. Talking of which, Cristiano alerted me to Alton Towers most stupidest move yet.

Alton Towers is testing an anti-PDA and smartphone policy during this week's half-term break with a view to a full-time ban.The ban at the popular family resort has been in operation from 25 May and will extend until 1 June during which the famous park will become a 'PDA-Free Zone'.However, Alton Towers said that if the ban is successful they will introduce it on a full-time basis.The reasoning behind the ban is to get parents to disconnect from office life and reconnect with their families.

How dare these people tell me how to live my life. If I socialise with friends via twitter on my mobile so what? Hell when I first heard about this I thought it was because of the XCFE chess stuff or the mini-videos you get of people filming ridesI mean who hasn't been stuck on AIR?). But no, its Alton towers clamping down on us who enjoy living in the multi-dimensional space.

So I've not only been sitting on my sofa thinking about this stuff, nope I've been out and about including yes believe it or not on a couple of dates. Nothing to report yet however. So back to pondering.

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Progress on my alternative to the Xbox for XBMC

So I did head out to the computer fair today, Holly crap, I've never seen a computer fair so big in my life. I spent about 3hours looking around all the stalls before deciding on a nice compaq desktop pc. It was going for 80 pounds and I got it knocked down to 70 pounds. Unfortually the stall only took cash and so I had to ride all the way from Bowlers to the Manchester United stadium to get some cash out. Anyway, after adding some more carbon to the atmosphere (card transations are so much greener that cash) I was a proud owner of the fastest desktop machine I've ever owned. Compaq Evo550, which is a 2.8ghz Pentium 4 with 512meg of Ram and 20gig hard drive. I could have added more memory and hard drive space but why? Its only going to run Ubuntu + XBMC. I will have to replace the CD drive for a DVD drive at some point but otherwise the machines is almost ideal for XBMC. Theres slots for 2 more PCI cards and even a Low profile AGP slot, which means I can buy a nice powerful graphics card which supports OpenGL2.0 (the only real hard requirement from the XBMC team so far). The Intel on board graphic card does a reasonable job, I'm able to playback standard def video without the CPU going over 20%.

So I'll try and build some kind of batch script, to keep XBMC upto date. And hopefully pick up some knowledge on how to boot straight into XBMC and use a wii remote with it soon.

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Inspiring video: muto, an ambiguous animation painted on public walls

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Yeah I might have only seen this but wow!

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Engineers unveil .MT9 format, I think .XM or .MOD

Found via Diggnation and Neowin

Korean computer engineers are introducing a new digital music format that has a six-channel audio equalizer and separate controls on the sound volume for each musical instrument, such as guitar, drum, base and voice. The new format, which has a file extension format of MT9 and a commercial title of “Music 2.0”, is poised to replace the popular MP3 file format as the de-facto standard of the digital music source, its inventors say.

The MT9 technology was selected as a candidate item for the new digital music standard at the last regular meeting of Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), the international body of the digital music and video industry.

Interesting but not really… I instantly thought it sounded like .XM, .MOD and .S3M. Although there is a question about how much people will actually use such a format and how the bands will feel about such a format. To be honest, who cares what the bands think?

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First thing I did once I got broadband

Yes at long last I have reasonably stable broadband again. I say reasonable because it seems to discount every few hours, but I'm sure that will go soon. The rest is done at 4am before going to bed

Anyway, I'd had setup a couple of boxes with plain Ubuntu 8.04 on them. They were pretty useless without the internet, even Samba isn't included on the CD. So once I got online I was able to download all those updates and software packages. One of port of call was installing xbox media centre to see how well it ran on a slightly better machine that the xbox. Actually it as quickly discovered I'm going off buying/building a new machine. The CPU usage was always on 100% and the only way I could get it from 9fps to a more healthy 18fps (this is while in the menus still btw) was by installing EnvyNG. Envy basiclly instals the corret video driver. After that I could also watch video at about 20fps. The video I was seeing was slow and I had not attempted the AC3 or High Def ones yet. So my port of call is to go to the largest computer fairs in Europe? to pick up some hopefully 2nd hand computer parts. Should be fun, I'm aiming for something between a AMD 2800 and Quad Core chip. That should cope with the demands of XBMC. I'm also tempted to switch the Nvedia graphics card too as its a 4th generation card and the XBMC team are recommeding a 6th generation. But at this stage, the CPU is the most important thing to get right.

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Crawling the walls for broadband still

Before anything else, having no broadband internet access at home is driving me insane. I'm crawling the walls of my apartment. I am so close to cracking one of the neighbours WEP wireless points but everytime I load up Backtrack2 (security linux livecd) I rethink, hey I'm stronger that this and shouldn't be breaking someones poorly secured WEP point. And then I go for a walk or ride down to the BBC for some late night browsing. But when I get there, I end up doing work instead of my own personal stuff. My 3G phone isnt working at 3G speeds, so I'm actually restricted to GPRS/EDGE speeds, I'm also restricted to off peak for my 3g data plan, which means I can only dialup between 6pm – 8am.

Manchester is great what I see of it. I'm planning to spend way more time in the city

I know my blog was down for a while. Being offline there was little I could do to put it back online sometimes. So I've almost decided I'm going to make the jump from Blojsom to WordPress. Reasons will be explained later when i'm not so

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Pete Tong tries a Pacemaker

I also took my Pacemaker to Bristol on the weekend and got a chance to quickly flash my pacemaker past my cousins noses. My cousins were the ones which taught me how to mix and somewhat scratch all those years ago. So I was interested in showing them that my move to laptop djing hadn't gone to waste.

I've been thinking about doing a couple of sets in a few Manchester bars/clubs. Unlike London people don't mind a bit of trance while drinking, so I could I reckon convince a few managers to give me a spot. I mean the pacemaker is still rarely known by people and it uses up much less room that a dj box or even a laptop. I was actually mixing away in Kate's car the other day going up to Newcastle. All I needed was one ear phone in and I could comfitably do mixes while chatting away. Try doing a mix even on a laptop while in a moving car…

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Thinking Digital Conference

The thinking digital conference was great. At one point I twittered that I felt like I was at TED. And seriously I wasn't joking. some of the speakers like Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurtzwell, Helen Fisher, Jonathan Harris, Tara Hunt, etc, were top notch speakers and worthy of the ticket price alone. But rather that go completely out there, the conference was unpinned by a lot of business type talks like for example Greg Dyke, Doug Richard and Casper Berry. There was also the usual what is the future of mobile, green technologies, the future of media and social networking. All the panels were interesting and included a bit of time for some good crowd questions.

So a quick time out for some of my favorate talks. Helen Fisher's talk was simply amazing. She deconstructed why woman are in the position there in now and what the future spells for woman. As Helen calls it woman are shedding 1000's years of a farming lifestyle in favor of something much natrual like in the stone age. Helen asked the question What is love? and pointed at 3 parts of the brain. 1st one being sex (drive, lust,etc), 2nd being romantic love (passion, obsession, etc) and 3rd being deep feelings of attachment (calm, monogahmy, security). Helen sees the first part as a way of getting out there looking for a partner, the 2nd part to keep you faithful and the 3rd part to able you and your partner sane enough to raise children. Pushing things along Helen asks the question if we know about these chemical reactions in the brain, can we have casual sex? Yes we can but the brain systems are stimulated and there is a 1/3 chance you will fall in love with your casual sex partner. Its also possible to have the brain parts act upon different people. Aka you have the drive to have sex with one person, feel loving to another person and feel safe and calm with another person. There not connected.

Female sexuality is growing – Woman are as sexual as men! Always have been. But on the other hand Men are as romantic as woman, Men always have been. Some world wide trends, Fact! When woman are better educated, or higher income theres more sexuality. People who divorce have more sexuality, people with access to conception are more likely to express there sexuality,

21st centery marriage, a marriage between equals is now commons. Divorce isn't a fail, its a positive things.

A few other things, picked up from Helens talk
1. Bad – Use of Anti-Depressions, the drugs kill the sex drive, performance and Fantasies. Helen believes it also effects your romantic love and attachment brain areas. Helen calls it the numbing of the world
2. We working harder on our relationships that ever before.
3. Divorice rate is flatting out, maybe because we're marrying later
4. Peer marriages / marriages of equals are here to stay, Marriages are also happier maybe for the same reason.
5. Middle age isn't the end, there are drugs which can help you keep the drive. While the romantic love and attachement comes natrually.

I had heard some people moan about the conference being not like your traditional Technology/New Media conference. Well maybe if you had only hear the title you might be mistaken for what the conference was about. But one look at the list of presenters and there would be no doubt what kind of conference this was going to be. I mean can you imagine Ray Kurtzwell at Future of Webapps? Xtech (maybe), Web 2.0 expo, etc. Nope theres always been a need for a high end conference in the UK for a while, yes it will be expensive but you don't get this kind of quality for cheap. It was a risk which did pay off, the codeworks team are already talking about thinking digital 2009 which I'm sure will be even better and even better attended.

The Venue for Thinking Digital was the Sage2 in Gateshead. I've never been inside of it before but it was a excellent venue for such a event except one thing. Power for the audience. I know there were quite a few people blogging and once they had run out of battery power they looked for anywhere to plug in and charge up. If the team had just spread some 6ways across the bottom and top of the seating, then chained them along a few meters then used black tape to keep them stuck down, it would have covered the problem. It was sad to hear too, because the speed of the network was blazing. I was uploading videos of about 100meg to blip.tv in less that 5mins flat. Flickr photos were painless too, I sometimes reduce the resolution on photos to flickr, so uploading is quicker. But there was no need. During uploading to Blip, I saw a peak of 891kbps. So total kudos to the best internet conference experience I've ever had next to Over the Air.

All the videos I shot are online already, but the quality is low, if I had knew what uploading would be like, I might have opted for VGA quality. There were other cameras shooting the whole thing, so I assume, one was for archiving and the other for the live screens inside the venue. I asked permission before and I think you'll agree, although the records are complete the quality of the sound and vision wasn't the best. Fear not there is a set of audio only podcasts which need to be edited by myself and uploaded to Blip.TV and IT Conversations.

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BarCampNorthEast

So on top of the thinking digital conference there was also a barcamp arranged by Gareth and Alistar. I had heard there were troubles with the venue right to the very last day regarding costs but the event went ahead without a problem. Unlike most other barcamps, the North East one took place in a small art gallery in Newcastle. the venue was very open and sometime you did get bleed from other speakers near by, but generally the spaces were big enough to accommodate most people. There were 4 spaces, and 2 of them had projectors. So most people opted for talks instead of presentations. These actually worked very well, for example Tara Hunts talk about mind hacks was attended by almost everyone in a werewolf like circle. But it wasn't just the celebs drawing the crowds, a session about the gender unbalance in geek events went down a storm and some of the guys said they felt privileged to have been involved. Smaller talks like the OLPC vs Thin Client computing went down well with some passionate debate. Talking about passion, the werewolf games after midnight started a huge debate about cross examination and the rules of the game. Without going into so much detail as to bore you all. If you got someone defending themselves and you want to butt in on a point. I feel you should be able to, if its very relevant and timely. No you can't start a conversation and no its not in the rules, but hell i'd let it go if I was moderating. Having official cross examination time slows the game down and isn't always needed speacially if the players are as passionate to kill the werewolves as last night. Another point about yesterday, never listen to a player for the final word once the game as started. Always speak to the moderator directly as he/she will give you the correct/right answer. Not one which suits themselves. Emma did a great job of telling everyone the rules but after the cards were delt. This is maybe the reason why the werewolves won the first game so easily.

Generally the BarCamp lacked people, there were at the peak about 40 people i beleive. About 10 stayed over which is a good percentage I guess. The food was ok, but we could have done with some more variaty I guess. There was also no end session, just everyone going to Belle & Herbs (which is great) which was a shame because it would have been nice to get peoples view on how it all went. I also felt having some people wondering through the barcamp looking at art pieces was a little ignoying and made me feel a little less trusting of leaving my stuff around. The board slots were also quite empty too, this could be down to the lack of people. If we had more people say 80, it would have felt more packed and more like a event. Overall it was a good event and worth attending, Gareth and Alistar worked hard on this event with additional help from people Vikki and Meri. I wouldn't mind using the same venue again for number 2. But theres already plans a foot for number 2. Keep your eyes peeled

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