social-hardware – Page 37 – Cubicgarden.com…

Another late night rant…

Ben pretty much sums up what I've been thinking and ranted about many times.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a “night person”. Having been on vacation for two weeks now, I’ve been able to set my own sleeping rhythm (well, more on that in a moment). I settled into a pattern of going to bed around 4am and getting up around mid-day, although some nights I haven’t turned into until 7am.

Yes, getting up at mid-day sounds pretty lazy. But I get so much work done between about 10pm and 4am that it more than makes up for it. It’s been like my old hacker-days when I was at school — I would come home from school and just learn programming, build websites, that kind of thing. I learnt so much by working late at night.

My mind just focuses to another level and I loose track of time as I churn out code, designs, specs, blog posts and goodness knows what else.

When I’m at work, I often will stay at the office until 7pm. Around 4pm, after the meetings and telephone calls have died down I get into that buzz, which continues until home-time.

I'm actually quite lucky because in the past I've worked for a few Cinemas which requires working till 3am on Fridays and Saturdays. Then working for Tesco latenight till 6am on Thursdays and Fridays got me into the habit of changing my sleep patterns on a pence. So although I prefer to work through the night and am actually more productive at night. I can change to going back to 10-6pm with no problems. I think it can all be learned too. Sarah can never work out how i'm able to stay up really late through-out the weekend and then go to work the next day for 5 days. I'm also able to fall a sleep within 5mins of putting my head down – a skill which can be learned too.

But that aside, what happened to the 24 hour culture? Why do tech conferences start at 9am? and why on earth does the London tube shut down at 12:30am on a weekend? I remember one of the neat things about working over night was the odd but interesting things Channel4 use to put on. I could never work with headphones on all the time at night so having the radio or tv on in the background at low volume was ideal. Nowadays I can just put on some podcasts. Geez I would have been so much smarter if timeshifted media was around when I was stacking the shelfs in Tesco.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Geek events I’m planning

I've been thinking about geek events and geek culture recently quite a lot. I'm a self described geek enjoy being around other geeks. And it seems I'm not the only one. I was flicking through my tagged for reading later entries in Great news today and came across a entry by Molly where she was talking about geekcruises. I thought it was more a joke than anything, but I was wrong. I did a look around the site and even did a few pricings for myself and Sarah. The prices are well, lets say out of my price range for right now. 3000 dollars seems to be a rough medium. But someone must be paying it and actually really enjoying it, and that proves there is a market.
So anyway enough of the talk, now its time for me to put my time and effort where my mind is…

Pledge number 1 – geekdinner nye2006

I will setup and run a geekdinner on new years 2006/07 but only if 100 other self described geeks will help out and/or commit to going to the geekdinner.

Believe it or not but you can text pledge geeknye2006 to 60022 if you live in England or Wales.

Pledge number 2 – geekcamp

I will setup and help run a geekcamp somewhere in Europe but only if 30 other self described geeks will join me and/or help out.

And yes again, you can text pledge geekcamp to 60022 if you live in England or Wales.

Although, I'm certain one of the events will go down better than another one (will reveal some other time, if you couldnt guess). I'm really getting a good feeling that this is a good time to arrange such events. Some one asked Slashdot the question Have Geeks Gone Mainstream?

Recently, I've been seeing more and more news stories about how 'geek' has gone mainstream. There have been a slew of articles with titles like Geek Pride and Geek Chic, which discuss how movies like 'The 40-Year Old Virgin' and 'Napoleon Dynamite', as well as television shows like 'Beauty and the Geek' have made it cool to be a geek. Two pinup calendars of geeks have been released this year, taking advantage of the new mainstream interest in all things geeky. These include the Geek Gorgeous Calendar, which features women who work in the hi-tech industry, and the Girls of Geekdom Calendar, which includes geeks like 'Art Geek' and 'Movie Geek'. So if being a geek has really become cool, why has interest in CS as a major dropped among incoming freshmen and women are still a minority in computer and engineering fields? Is it cooler to pretend to be a geek (wear 'Save Pedro' shirts, etc.) than to really be one?

When anonymous asks about CS, he/she's refering to Computer Science which I think is a major mistake. Being a geek does not mean your from a Computer Science background. Like I always say, some of the most geeky people I know are designer, music makers, etc. But the point is taken about the mainstream aspect of it. Sarah uses the term Geek hag quite a bit and I can certainly see how it could be applied.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Taking back the internet and our cityspaces

I bought Banksy's Wall and Piece book today (24 Dec 2005) while doing a last minute christmas shopping run in Bristol today. I've already seen quite a lot of the Banksy's work but its great to have most of it in one book which can be easily leant to people who I know is pretty good. Anyhow I was flicking through the book and I started to check out some of these quotes, specially this one.

Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt lika a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it's wet.

Its interesting because this is exactly the same vision of the internet Tim Berners-Lee and others had from day one. You know every part would be rewritable by anyone. Cant find the quote, but I did find this from the BBC. Damm I forgot to link to How the read/write web was lost. Which talks about how Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a read/write web was slowly edged out of the picture.

Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.

When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.

Just like Banksy's vision the internet slowly moved away from its core slightly utopian vision and started to become like the cityscapes of what Banksy pushes against. Although web 2.0 gets a lot of stick, the main thurst is about people. And thats a positive thing.

There's also been a long running meme that a website should not be a set thing which is delivered to the end browser. HTML is intreperated by browsers and always will be. We should expect every browser to do the basics correctly, like the box model in CSS should be apply in the same way to all browsers but for a site to expect there site to be displayed with the style they have set is unreasonable and not a good thing. Anyone should be able to change the style, remove the style and even extract the sections there really after without resulting to haxor techniques. You could say these techniques are the same ones applied by Banksy because things have got so bad in our cityscapes. The internet has luckly not got that bad yet. Actually with the advent of Firefox and its huge selection of public generated extensions the opposite is actually true. Then if you go one step further you have Greasemonkey which then allows you to alter any page in anyway you see fit and save the results to share with others. And now we have Flock which is browser which is made from day one to foster the vision of the read/write internet. Yes it all seems pretty much a bolt on for now, but that will change.

I have not really mentioned it on this blog yet, but Microsoft's SSE (RSS Simple sharing extensions) could close the feedback loop in the RSS space. Even if that fails, I can certainly see a tighter trackback type mechinasm or an annotation mechinasm growing in popularity. Jon Udell talks up the read/write web. I mean even today, the mainstream media are falling over themsleves to have user (hate that word so much) public generated comments and feedback, even if there implimented in odd and unsatficatory ways.

Although this is no biggy for most people reading this, its in the same way as Napster (and of course Bit torrent) have as default the option to share your downloads. Making you a supplier as well as a consumer, is a fundamental shift. The likes which Banksy can only wish for in the cityscapes of the analogue world. We need to keep this at the forefront of the web 2.0 dash and where ever we go from there. Parciptation of people is key.

Interestingly at the same time I bought Wall and Piece I was looking for We the media for my sister. She's got quite old fashioned views about the internet but rather than me trying to convince her, I thought as shes studying Fashion Journalism the book would be a ideal read on two counts. However it never quite happened because I simply could not find Dan Gilmor's we the media anywhere in Bristol on Christmas Eve. But what took me and even Sarah back was the fact that the books on offer in the Computer sections of Blackwells and Waterstones were so boring. I hate to say it but they were so web 1.0. The only saving grace was the new Search and Amazon books which were present at Waterstones. But generally they were about how to create HTML pages using Dreamweaver, how to program using PHP, ASP, etc, etc, etc… Nothing web 2.0 ish in the slightest. Nothing about blogging, wikis, podcasting, public parciptation! Its such a shame because it puts across such a different view of where the internet is today.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Some thoughts on the Wikipedia changes

I like many people have not said much about the recent stuff with Wikipedia but this post by Danah Boyd pretty much sums my thoughts and position on this subject. A few choice quotes.

Welcome to being a public figure – people will say mean things about you on the web. None of it is guaranteed to be true – its the web. (Of course, my view probably stems from being a native web kid – no one likes the meannies but weve gotten used to it.) Wikipedia is better than most of the web because YOU CAN CHANGE IT

I watched Internet Researchers take up the same anti-Wikipedia argument. I was floored. These arent just academics, theyre the academics who study the web. The academics who should know better. But they felt as though it was a problem that Wikipedia would allow for a man to be defamed

Its searchable and in the hands of everyone with digital access (a much larger population than those with encyclopedias in their homes). It also exists in hundreds of languages and is available to populations who cant even imagine what a library looks like. Yes, it is open. This means that people can contribute what they do know and that others who know something about that area will try to improve it. Over time, articles with a lot of attention begin to be inclusive and approximating neutral. The more people who contribute, the stronger and more valuable the resource. Boycotting Wikipedia doesnt make it go away, but it doesnt make it any better either

It will be truly sad if academics dont support the project, dont contribute knowledge. I will be outraged if academics continue to talk about having Wikipedia eliminated as a tool for information dispersal.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Geekdinner with Scoble and Dotben

So the first Geekdinner I've been to which was on a weekend was great fun. The conversations I had were fantastic through-out the night. I met some great new people and spent a lot with Sheila chatting away about life, XML and the universe. So odd meeting someone so on your level its actually pretty spooky.
The Geekdinner should have been renamed the Geekdinner with Ben Metcalfe and Robert Scoble, Z list meets A list but it works out ok this time.

Anyhow, so it was great catching up with Scoble again. He obviously didnt remember who I was at first but he actually did remember after a couple of seconds once I mentioned RSS and working for the BBC World Service. Can I also say did anyone get a picture of Scoble doing a flaming shot at that champagne bar we all went to afterwards?

So this is how the night went. I got to the Texas Embassy about 6:30pm, after finding somewhere just around the corner to park. I was hoping to get my hair cut but it never quite happened due to Saturday football crowds through Charlton, I must remember that next time.
I was at the bar and heard a couple of guys talking about Google Books and it actually turned out to be one of the guys behind Searchengine Watch. I also got talking with a student of Computer Science from De montfort. I and he was concerned that his course was not teaching anything about webservices, internet conectivity or even modern developent methods. And actually I got speaking to another student who had the same problems. Geez no wonder a lot of computer science students have such closed minds to such things?
Moving on. I'll drop out the conversations I had for now, as I want to elaborate on quite a few of them.

So after dinner which was the usual Tex-Mex type thing, Robert and Hugh did a little speech and actually opened it up to the crowd of about 150. The rest of the time was spent talking and drinking. By the time we got thrown out of the Embassy, the plan was hatched to head up to a Champagne Bar in Soho and Microsoft paid for us all. Yeah expensive champagne for about 30+ people, cheers Microsoft. After about a hour or so, we were being kicked out again. So Me, Sheila and Shahid from google ended up at a coffee bar in Soho and geeked about XML and related technologies. Its so great talking out loud about this stuff. XML will rule the world…

There's a Flickr pool for fun photos from the night.

So about those conversations.
Well he's a few I remember, this is good for my own memory as well as it might be of interest to others.

Talking to imp, she told me there was a problem with trackbacks on the BBC creative archive site and even on my own. I assured her that Trackbacks do work on cubicgarden (I get enough spam to know this for sure) but honestly I've never seen any from Haloscan.

I met Tim from dotnetsolutions, he's one of the guys from http://www.DHTMLcentral.com. It was quite late but from what I can gather there doing lots of Ajax type stuff now and leaning on there DHTML past to do creative and useable things. I've not really looked at that site for about 6/7 years but I do remember going there for scripts when Netscape 4.x just came out. That was also the days when I never use to think about cross-browser scripts and web standards. Gald things have changed for the better.

Trying to explain to Sheila what OPML was without any tools except handwaving while walking up a packed Saturday night charing cross road. Chris from Microsoft seemed to think it was a great standard, while I was trying to explain its not really a standard just happen to be the default way to share Blogrolls and subscriptions. I was going to mention XBEL and XOXO but never quite got around to it. I also noticed Uche has wrote a few XSL's to convert between OPML and XBEL and XOXO.

A brief talk and handshake with Dan Gillmor who of course wrote the hughly successful We the Media. I should have talked longer but I was just coming back from the toilet and caught him while he was making a move to leave it would seem. I know the Global voice's people were at the geekdinner but I didnt really get a chance to talk to anyone except Lucy Hoberman (BBC Creative R and D) before we went to the champagne bar and met Nicole. Nicole is a german woman who podcasts and blogs in German and English. We had a very interesting perspective talk about the differences and how your percived when writing and talking in another language online.

Spent quite a bit of time talking to Kosso and Dr Jo Twist about various things.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Ben and Mena and the internet conversation

I've been amazed by how the Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe exchange has blown up. Here's the movie if you dont know what I'm talking about.

So generally Ben was talking on the backchannel of the Les Blogs conference on his laptop. Mena was giving a talk about being civial and gentle to each other. This rubbed Ben and others up the wrong way and so Ben made his feelings known on the backchannel. However Mena saw the comment from Ben where he said Bullshit and procceed to stop her talk and ask the person named dotBen to stand up. Ben stood up and defended his view of the presentation while Mena took it very personally and started to question Ben about what his problem was. Yes she used F*ck and As*hole while addressing Ben.

But please please, go read Ben's complete entry about the whole thing and of course Mena's entry which seems to skirt over the issue a little. Even the Dave Winer has waded into the conversation.

In my usual style, I've got to highlight some of the best comments and views I've read around the whole incident.

Jem stone's post which was the first time I was aware of what had happened. Great picture by the way!

Liz Lawley's comment to Ben's blog entry.

Nobody seems to be acknowleding the huge power differentials that come into play there, and it’s simply *not* the same thing as making comments in the backchannel. For her to comment on and respond to Ben’s remarks are one thing (although civility in her response would have gone much further towards furthering her call for civility from others). For her to swear at him from the podium and and call him out is something quite different.

It’s also worth saying that there’s a difference between saying that a speaker’s remarks are bullshit, and saying that a person is an asshole. One is about content, the other is about personalities. I think Mena crossed a line there.

Ian Betteridge's pretty funny reply to Dave Winer's comment.

Nick S hits the nail on the head. Dave W can dish it out – preferably when he’s got some fauning acolytes around – but he can’t take it. The fact that he can call you a coward for having moderated comments on your blog while not having comments on his at all is typical of combination of hysteria and hypocrisy that characterises half of what he says.

And that he’s now claiming that the invention of the blogosphere is down to him having comments on his blog is classic Winerism. Dammit Dave, why don’t you just go the whole hog and claim the invention of the internet, the internal combusion engine, and gunpowder is down to you too?

The Register for there usual funny but well crafted entry.

The Blog Hearld for there first piece but for also stiring things up in Sixapart vs the BBC. Please, this is stupid.

A kinder, gentle blogosphere by Stowe Boyd.

Its even been dugged but the score to date is only 3 to date. Well its good to know its all dieing down now.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Being a geek girl in a male dominated geek world?

Ok i'm late to the party, but its time to reclaim the word Geek! I mean have you looked at the Flickr Geek clusters recently? I'm sorry but all the people I've known who are self described geeks do not have terriable dress sense and are really passionate and interesting people. The killer thing is also that Geeks usually hold down a good job and earn quite good salarys.

So I can not work out for the life of me why all the geek girls I've met are single? And from talking to them its not because there not trying. Someone female and single who would rather be annoymous sent me a link to the Geek girls are sexy photo pool. Then compared it to the Geek boys are sexy group. Yeah she's right, the boys are letting down geek culture. Not good, even I'm not doing my part. But it gets worst… I was sent a link to Geek guys are sexy. Something needs to change…

Cafe Geek now thats a concept worth exploring…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Last nights Geek Dinner with Molly, was fantastic…

Thanks to everyone who turned up and made the Geek Dinner with Molly the best yet

Everything went so well I'm actually still up with a big smile on my face, but am speechless in what to write at this moment. I'll fill in the details tomorrow. Till then you can catch all my photos here on Flickr. And all public ones here and here. Interestly, I'd not seen the Tim O'reilly geek dinner photos till now.

Ok so some observerations from yesterday
No matter how early I get to the venue someone will beat you. Even a full 45mins before the start of the Geek dinner with Molly, there were about a group of 8 guys drinking and chatting. The group included Don from Amazon.
Name badges are a good idea. Some people liked the idea of the sticky badges, others didnt. But it was great for me as I can now look through the photos and remember everyone name (for example Elly). But it doesnt stop there, it helps me go and speak to everyone at least once.
I need to rotate round more. There were some people who I spent a bit of time with and then there was Sheila, who I swear I spent about half the night talking to. We had some quite amazing and open conversations about being geek, relationships and a ton of other stuff. Fantastic but not ideal when your the host. Next time Sheila, I'm going to have to pass on my contact details so we can chat over email or something.
Find a venue where you can control the noise level. It was hard work for Molly and Andy shouting over the hogs heads background noise. But next time, we will be in a different venue. Imp also offered me a mini PA system if I need it next time.

Talking of Improbulus, I had a couple of interesting conversations with her about privicy and security online. I used my audioscrobbler experience as a example. When audioscrobbler first came online, I thought its cool but do I really want everyone knowing what I listen to? At the time it was a no. But I've come to realise that if you dont realese the information yourself with a little bit of control, someone other company will do it for you, and you will have even less control. Imp disagreed, which is fine and I like think shes right, but in my experience the opposite is true. Its just more amount of how much your willing to pay for your privacy and if its more than the next company. I remember quickly reading some advice to newbies online guff guide, and they were recommending that you do not let online sites store your card number because usually its store in a database with little or no security. Once again in my experience this has been true.

Imp's post also reminded me of a conversation which me, her and Shelia had about taxonomies and folksonmies. I couldnt go into details at the time because I really needed to circlate around and give out sticky labels for names badges. But trust me, Imp and Shelia were not done yet and I'm looking forward to talking about it more next time. Hey if you guys are up for it, we could do it at the scoble geek dinner?

Anyhow back to the geekdinner…

Fatbusinessman has created a group photo pool for Molly's Geekdinner. Should have thought about doing the same myself, good call Fatbusinessman.

More observations.
I should pick less technical people to do the dinners for. I got a feeling Molly being a designer really opened up the geekdinner to a range of people who may not have gone if it was Tim O'Reilly. Nothing against Tim or Scoble, but I'm thinking its best if I leave Hugh to do that category of people and I should focus on people like Molly. I mean we had many developers as usual, but also quite a few designers and even a librarian and architect. Everyone was fully at ease to express there geeky nature. And there's nothing better than hearing another person express there passion for something which the mainstream of people would see as kind of weird. I wont go into my post about being a self described geek but its quite interesting and quite relavent.
I'm sure I've seen you before? I must have said that too many times yesterday, I'm going to have to think of someother way to say the same thing. But I did finally meet Rachel Clarke and I was actually right, I had meet her before but at a different Geekdinner. I also met Pixel Diva (love the site design by the way) again, its been such a long time that I forgot what she looked like, but I knew I had seen her before. I seem to never forget faces, just names. Once I heard her voice and that strong accent, it all came back.

This was the last Geekdinner for this year by myself, but dont worry I'll be back in the new year with a new venue and more interesting guests. Don't forget Hugh's arranging the big christmas geek dinner with Robert Scoble which I'll be attending in the usual London tech lovey fashion. If your woman with a partner the girl geek dinner is well worth checking out.

If you are male and wish to attend this event you must bring a female with you or be brought by a female. NO FEMALE NO ENTRY!

Which I personally feel is fine because these events are usually over run with men and this is a good way to achive some balance. I have not quite convinced Sarah that we should go, but I'm working on it. If anyone of the beautiful woman I met yesterday have no partner to bring with them, please drop me a email.

I've just learned that there is also a Molly podcast which I guess the interview was about. Its titled the worst podcast ever because of some podcast disaster with a Sony Minidisc recorder. Interesting Hugh's comments about the BBC…

If this was the BBC, I would just cover my tracks, cut out a few seconds, and tell my boss that I grabbed a great clip of Molly. But in the spirit of podcasting, I let the tape run out in mid sentence.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31