Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Cashback (the film)

After a painful break up with his first girlfriend Suzy, Ben, an aspiring artist, develops insomnia. To take his mind off his problem he spends his nights working at a local supermarket, where he meets colourful characters. He falls in love with his colleague Sharon.

He lets his imagination run wild. In particular, he imagines that he can stop time for others, so that he can walk around in a world that is “frozen” like in pause mode of a film. He imagines female clients standing frozen in the supermarket, so that he can undress and draw them.

This film Cashback was reminded me of my earlier life working in Tesco over night, except the drawing them part. Anyway worth watching, as its a good well executed feel good British movie.

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I told you I would never upgrade to Windows Vista

My Ubuntu desktop

It took quite a long time but I finally got fed up with Windows XP when weird services started showing up plus it would take 1min to suspend. I could have reinstalled XP, upgraded to Vista or moved to Ubuntu 7.04. Although its not exactly the best time to do so, I moved to Ubuntu GNU/Linux and I'm slowly porting my settings and data over from the Windows drive. So far, Firefox, Thunderbird, Keepass, Hamachi are all up and running. I'll get the tricker stuff going tomorrow.

I'm finding ubuntuguide.org and TuxMobil useful by the way.

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Sainsbury’s without the alcohol range

I was doing some late night shopping in Sainsbury's as you do and walked pass a new range of fruit juices. These fruit juices are sold as popular alcoholic drinks without the alcoholic ingredient. So for example I'm currently drinking a Cosmopolitan without the Vodka, and its honestly great. But you know whats better, the Mojito version! Spearmint leaves, Lime and Sugar together is amazing and there's been many a time I've wanted to order one without the Rum. Well now my wishes have been granted.

The Sugar content on these drinks are actually not that bad but yeah you don't want too many of these on a night. I did try the mojito juice with some rum yesterday but to be honest it needed soda as the rum was over powering.

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Found a house mate at last

People keep saying, I saw you in the London paper or I saw you at Minibar. Generally there asking hows the house mate search going?

Well I'm glad to say finally after a bunch of weirdos and some simply rude people, I found a house mate through a friend of a friend. She's geeky and Japanese which you have to agree is a ideal match for a house mate in my house. Shes also moving in next weekend, so its all going well.

Now for those who find themselves in a similar position, here's a couple of thoughts.

Being in the London paper did nothing on the house sharing end of things at all. I didn't get a single request from that at all. I did however get 15 of my friends texting and calling me saying I saw you in the paper today and yesterday. Timeout has great contracts and rendered a couple of enquirers but no viewings. Craigslist was almost pointless. While Spareroom.com and Gumtree did get a few viewings. There was a couple more places the ad went up like Facebook (1 viewing, also cost nothing) Moveflat,
etc.

So generally the best thing to do always is to tap your friends networks.

Now if I get my hands on a Wii now….

 

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Over doing the caffeine

illy Expresso

Ok I have to be honest and say when I first heard this story I laughed and said 7 double expresso's is nothing.

A teenager was taken to hospital after overdosing on espresso coffee.

Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.

 

Now to be fair it was a teenage girl who 17 and shes maybe not use to drinking a lot of coffee anyway. But I got to say when I worked in Starbucks in Victoria. I use to drink about 4-5 double expresso's a shift. But then again I was also drinking about 4-6 cans of redbull on a weekend too.

I found this great site about caffeine via DL.TV a while back. Death by Caffeine allows you to put in your current weight and it will work out how much cups of coffee, tea, insert name of energy drink here it will take to kill you. This might sound all in bad taste following this teenagers near death experience but you got to look on the light side. Oh and drink less caffeine.

Some slighly shocking findings.

It would take over 200 cans of redbull to kill me by caffeine alone but only 150 expresso's. Actually a double shot of Starbucks Coffee has double the caffeine of Redbull when you look at it per ounce and a expresso 5 times more.

At the top end of the list is Fixx Energy which has 500mg (85ml per 100ml) of caffeine in a bottle, which just beats a Starbucks Grande Coffee which has 372mg but 79mg per 100ml. But if your deadly serious about your caffeine in take you need to look at the pills and mints. No-Doz, Maximum Strength and Dexatrim has 200mg per pill! No wonder I was still very wired at 8am in the morning after going out clubbing when I was younger. Luckly I never experienced what Jasmine did.

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In the Paper again, this time a city wide one

This was unexpected but Sarah set this up about a week ago and I knew nothing about it till Sarah text me earlier today. Shes been having a hard time recently and I really want to thank her for doing this and holding things together. I know we will end up being long term friends through-out.

So yeah a work paper yesterday, city wide today, national tomorrow? Well funny enough I'm having a interview with a national paper tomorrow about the Edinburgh TV Un-Festival. But seriously you won't see me tomorrow in anything, hopefully

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Is Design really seedy?

Blackbelt Jones wrote this great post about Seedcamp and the lack of design involvement.

From the Seedcamp about pages:

“There will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.”

How about designers?

Technology plays alone are starting to lose their distinctiveness in many of the more-crowded areas of the marketplace.

Great service and interaction design are on the rise as strategic differentiators for products as diverse as the iPhone and Facebook.

He's right, The only thing desiresable about the iphone is the interface, the technology is under powered or frankly from 2005. Thankfully its not all bad.

The line between hackers and interaction designers is blurring as they start small businesses that are starting to make waves in the big business press.

As I mentioned, my experience of HackDay Europe was that

“It really does seem that the hacker crowd in London/Europe at least is crossing over more and more with the interaction design crowd, and a new school of developers is coming through who are starting to become excellent interaction designers – who really know their medium and have empathy with users.”

This reminds me of my made up position name while at Ravensbourne, Designer/Developer. At the time I design was far too form based while development was far too programming based. Web designer meant you created HTML pages, Information designer meant you didn't actually touch any data or apis and Interaction designer meant you were too focused on art, hanging out in Hoxton and convince your clients they were always wrong. Things have changed for the better. The grey area between design and development
has been intersected by a 3rd force the hacker. So now you get pursuits like hardware hacking, alternative reality games, product user interface hacking. The fact is that its not about the titles, its about what vision you have in your head and how much effort your willing to put in to it.

Business-wise I think we have yet to see what affect the greying of design, development and hacking will have on startup culture.

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