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Talking at TEDxManchester

I’m humbled to announce I’ve been asked to talk at TedXManchester…

The first TEDxManchester took place in 2009 at the BBC’s New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road. We took over the historic Studio 7 and converted the BBC Philharmonic’s rehearsal space into a conference venue and created what was then Europe’s largest ever TEDx event.

This year we’re collaborating with our friends at Cornerhouse to bring you the long overdue second edition of TEDxManchester. We hope you find it a stimulating day of full of inspiring ideas, new connections and a lot of enjoyment. We look forward to hosting the growing community of Manchester TEDsters soon.

Its been 3 years since TEDxManchester at BBC Oxford Road which I masterminded. I did wonder why there hasn’t been another TEDxManchester since? Maybe because we really hit a high on the last one? Who knows?

Well the Cornerhouse has picked up the baton and seem to have a great line up of diverse speakers. Unfortunately its already sold out, so either you got a ticket or not. If you have then good on you and look forward to a very different kind of talk than I usually give.

I posted a slide above which might give you an idea (or not) of what I’m going to talk about. I’m pretty proud of my talk and hopefully it will really connect with people.

Chrissy Hammond said this on twitter which really humbled me…

Well last time I heard you speak it was riveting and your enthusiasm was infectious. I can’t believe this would be otherwise.

Who pays on the first date? a Ignite talk: 18th Jan

What you can see is a slide from my presentation which is all about who pays on the first date. I’m going to give a balanced view on the topic at Ignite Leeds on Wednesday 18th Jan. Of course once I do the talk, I’ll post the who presentation on Slideshare along with all my others.

New Years Resolutions 2012

Taken by Becky Davis in Cloud23

Following my review of last year… here’s my New Years Resolutions for 2012

More public talks
I quite like public talking although I personally think I’m not very good at it. I’ve forced myself to talk more in public and so I’m going to push my public talking more in 2012… Its starts with Ignite Leeds and a few others in the first half of 2012. More will come soon after.
Keep my calendar more clear
I find if I keep my calendar clear, adhoc things pop up and I quite enjoy this. So hopefully keeping it as empty as possible will help this happen. I’ve been known to use twitter a lot to arrange adhoc meetups and this year I’ll keep this going. This also fits with my idles about focusing more and removing the stuff which doesn’t matter so much, from my life.
Play more
Like previous years, I hope to play more games but unlike last few years I’m considering real life gaming like Werewolf, The thing, etc… I’m already playing Werewolf once every two months in the northern quarter with Larkin About. And the venue we have has bags of potential for other types of real life gaming experiences.
Inspire through what I do
I still love the simplistic of iamido.info. I feel there’s a lot more what I can do to inspire others through what I do. Hopefully some of this will come through what I do at work. Lots of friends say to me, why don’t you setup your own company? But to be honest I love my job and I feel like I’m in a bit of a startup environment within BBCR&D. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but either way hopefully it will show theres more to life than money. This also means even more oversharing or overlistening. But I’ve decided to pump more information into Google Plus (because of their Data Portability) instead of Facebook or Twitter. I think the circles are a good idea, and I think I could use them over another service like Path. Even considered documentating things like dates I go on just like 52 first dates.
Don’t settle for mis-information and totally bogus arguments
Quite a few times I’ve been having a debate with someone and they throw in something which is totally bogus. I mention it but we carry on regardless, then later on it comes back but worst. The other person builds a argument off the back of this mis-information. I then have to build a argument to counteract this mis-information. No more! The debate isn’t going to carry on now.
Never shy away controversy / push social limits (including complaining myself)
I understand social limits or boundaries but can’t help but push them. I don’t do it to be deliberately a pain to others but sometimes I use them as a transport towards something much more enlightening. In my blog post about VivID lounge, I faced a lot of angry people, but in the end I’m starting to see comments which confirm some of the points I was making. Its not about me, I’m just pushing the conciousness into the public where others can give a better reasoned argument. Someone needs to be the person who lights the match I guess, and thats me. I’m also adopting Senior Troublemaker as my title at work, which is very fitting. I’m sure my plans for #geekstalksexy will also cause some controversy. Lastly complaining is important (within reason) My ex-wife use to complain when something grated with her and you know, it always ended positively. So its time to shake off the British stiff upper lip…
Drink only when they serve decent cocktails or wine I actually like
I’ve already stopped drinking stuff I think is so-so, by extension I’m generally only going to drink when I’m really up for it and looking forward to enjoying the taste. This means no more drinking cherry beer just because theres nothing else to drink, no more settling for crappy cocktails made out of packets.
Improve my circus skills
I still loving my Diabolo and when I was off sick I was going to Manchester University Circus Skills. But when I went back to work the timing (2-4pm on a Wednesday) was never going fit with work. Now there’s the circus house next to me, and I’m hoping to make full use of it. On top of that, when it gets warm in MediaCity again, I’ll be pushing for Circus Skills classes again at lunch times. Maybe there’s a way to combine the two? Or even move one of the after hour classes away from South Manchester to East Manchester?
Buy more non-black shirts
If you know me, I tend to wear a lot of black shirts. Hey I like them and I have many of them (maybe I should take a photo of my wardrobe just to prove it). However I’m not against other colour shirts (I wear Orange/Yellow/Green/Red Tshirts for example), but they do need to be short sleeves and not dodgy cheques like you see on a lumberjack. So time for different shirts and you know what? Maybe even different colour trousers now and then…
Be more careful with money
I’m spending right now about 6 pounds on lunches bought at Booths at MediaCity (Booths is the Waitrose of the North) , this has got to stop. Not only that, I’m treating maybe too many people with free meals and drinks. Cool but I do need to limit the number per month.
Bake a cake
I don’t understand why but there seems to be something about engineers and baking cakes. I don’t personally get it, but the guys all bring in cakes every week for everyone else. I’ve not contributed to this and to be honest I can’t bake because I can’t help but mess with the recipe. Maybe its the creative side of me… or something. Anyway, sometime this year I’ll bake a cake and bring it in for BBC R&D, can’t pledge for its quality however
Eat healthy
Been consistently loosing weight at a slow pace, and to be honest my NHS dietation/nutritionist has been good. And we’ve identified the only time I eat bad is when I’m far enough away from decent quality food. So I’m going to avoid all the rubbish food places and stick to decent places (even if its at odds with number 10). I’ll also do more smaller shops, so I can pick up more fresh fruit and veg.

Join Techgrumps now…

With the 50th edition of the ever-so popular (Popular with 2 or 3 people at least) #Techgrumps podcast coming up, and it being the holiday season, we will be recording two or three special editions with as many new ranters as we can think of. Like YOU! If you have nothing much to say, but can whine on a bit under the influence of too much caffeine, you too can join this most illustrious cast. And yes, that is Comic Sans in the speech bubble. Angry now? Rant with us!Remember, techgrumps is a family (Family of feral polecats) show, so use age appropriate language…

Let us know which dates & times works for you (add your twitter name to the doodle) and we’ll be in touch…

Why you should go to the Mozilla Festival

Just in-case you had any reasons why you shouldn’t be at the Mozilla Festival? Here’s a whole bunch of reasons why you should be there. As most of you already know, we’re running the Dj and Vj Challenges during the Mozilla Festival event in association with Future Everything, Mozilla and BBC R&D.

We’re going to explore possible futures in the fields of Dj and Vj cultures with a aim to go live with something next year at the Future Everything Festival.

The whole event is at my previous college (Ravensbourne) which moved to its new location next to the Dome in North Greenwich. I’ve never checked out the new look college but if its anything like the new Salford University in Media City UK it looks to be something special and a great place to do a challenge like this.

Of course you want to be part of this… So why not sign up now and I’ll see you there in just under a months time…

If this then…. web pipelines are back again?

ifthisthenthat workflow setup for #workbetter tweets

I first read about if this then… on lifehacker today while riding into work on the tram.

If This Then That is a simple to use tool to keep your social networks, to-do lists, RSS feeds, imaging sites, and all your other webapps on the same page.

The core of If This Then That works off of different channels you can use to create your own recipes for sharing by using the basic instruction, “if this, then that.” For instance, you can set it so that if you text message something with a particular hashtag to a specified number, then it will automatically create a note in Evernote. You can also set it to automatically pull your photos off Instagram and save them to Dropbox, send you a text message when you have a Google Calender event, or even send you an email if it’s supposed to rain tomorrow. Provided you’re using one of the 35 different services and webapps currently supported, you can cross-link and integrate them in almost anyway you see fit.

It strikes me as a good stab at what I wrote about in 2006. Pipelines for the web…

That was quite some time ago and I’ve been hoping Conduit would get worked on but things have gone very quiet on that front. Then came along, Ping.FM which was also interesting for slightly different reasons before they got aquired. So I was surprised when I learned about IFTT, so I gave it a try.

So my first pipe or task, useful so I can save links from anywhere just by sending a correctly formatted instant messenger to the right bot.

I made it into a recipe, then decided to checked out the pre-existing recipes other people have made.

Here’s some of the ones I’m finding interesting…

So right now I’m pretty impressed with iftt but I’m hoping they add even more services soon. Don’t get me wrong the list is pretty huge right now, but I’d like to have some things like NewstoBook, DeskSMS, Top10, Google plus, etc…

Kindle Array the answer to the large scale e-ink display?

I have been asking the question over and over in different circles, is there such a thing as a large scale eink display?

It seems the answer is no but I’m more interested why not?

Then yesterday while at lunch with a couple of colleagues in BBC R&D, Robert was asking me questions about my Kindle because he was considering buying one for his girlfriend and I was running through the advantages and disadvantages. Somewhere in the conversation, Andy mentioned my question about a large scale eink display (the advantage of being public again). I explained why I think it would be good and somewhere along the conversation one of us 3 suggested (think it was Andy) taking a Kindle apart and stitching them together.

I had quick thought, you could make an array of kindles and then control them to display what you want. My next thought was if you could tile post to the Kindles/eink display.

And that was it! An array of eink displays fed the right part of the whole document.

The advantage of a Amazon Kindle over a standard eink display is the wifi radio and email address, which means you can send each one a document remotely via something like rasterbator and if you can control them, you can remotely make them display a document as a screensaver. Later in the lab while eating cake (we seem to eat cake quite a bit on Fridays) I thought maybe this could be done via Arduino using the USB shield. Practically you would only need to root each Kindle using this method. Then by uploading a slightly different image to each one, you could create a tiled display or as I’m calling it a digital array.

Ultimately you want some software running on a Kindle which you upload the document/image to, it interrogatives its neighbours to work out how big the array its in is and only displays the part which makes sense. Because the Kindle is running gnu/linux, it would be possible but to be fair I’m not even going there, but if someone else wants to be my guest.

I’ll be hacking around with this concept in the near future, and welcome any thoughts or ideas on this idea.

Currently I’m just double checking if there is a large format eink display and trying to work out what is the best eink display to start with? The Wifi Kindle makes sense because its cheap enough, software hackable and easily hardware hackable. Although the Kindle DX does also look pretty good. I’m hoping for the Kindle Fire sale to start pretty soon, maybe.

My manager Adrian at work set me the challenge of putting our whereabouts system on the array or even the MCUK status updates. Right now, I’m going to just get two going then build on that… Hopefully there will be more details as and when it happens…

An update…

Of course I’ve been doing my research and it seems NEC created a A3 size eink display a while ago, it also seems I wasn’t the only one thing about turning them into tiles.

Additionally, e-paper modules can be used to form large screen displays by combining up to eight modules, which incorporate the company’s original multi-tiling controller. The A3 e-paper module is composed of especially narrow frames, with two sides measuring just 1mm, which enables the creation of large screens that feature effective multi-tiling

Also I noticed on the eink site… This recent picture…

2.4 meters certainly counts as a large eink display… So the question is how do we get our hands one and how much do they cost?

Well I’m looking at NEC, Neolux and Motion Display if there listening…

Ubuntu is broken

It hurts me to say it but Ubuntu is broken for me.

I upgraded 2 machines to Ubuntu 11.04 on Saturday night and left them downloading/upgrading over night. One of the machines, my Pentium 4 desktop machine. Upgraded and after a reboot looks and feels pretty much the same as it did before hand. There was a message to say it wasn’t able to run Unity because the graphics card was too low spec and after a click ok, its pretty much the same as it was before, nothing really changed. All seems good.

However my laptop (Dell M1210 XPS) also got upgraded after the pop up came up. After a reboot, I logged into Ubuntu which I assumed had unity installed and I’m left with my usual desktop picture some icons but no menus at all. What makes things worst is the location where I assume there should have been a menu is now black. So down the left hand side is black and along the top is black. Nothing… I would show a screen shot but as I discovered my keyboard mappings have also been lost in the upgrade. Yes even Fn+Print Scrn no longer works. Luckily Gnome-Do still kind of works, so I’m able to open applications, including screenshots with some hassle.

I finally logged out and tried running Ubuntu in classic mode (I assume using Gnome instead of Unity). Things are better but still not correct. My keyboard shorts are still somewhat broken and its a nightmare not having Compiz cube switching which I didn’t know I was so use to now. After a little googling I got cube switching back but only using a keyboard short cut. It seems the automatic switching when the mouse touches the side of the screen is no longer available?

Right now I seem to have three choices…

Live without Compiz and run Ubuntu totally plain
Run Ubuntu with Compiz using classic mode and work on the annoying things like (you may have noticed) no chrome/window boarders. (at one point I had no menus! Try saving something with no save menu…) Compiz seems to accept some changes but do random things to some of my settings. Like currently I can’t move windows or even change there sizes.
Reinstall the whole thing from fresh and attempt to get Unity working

Its frustrating and I don’t really know what happened but for me right now Ubuntu 11.04 is simply broken… Expect screenshots as when I can consistently take them and upload them.

The internet operating system for real

I switched to Ubuntu over 4 years ago, and its been pretty smooth.

But its recently got even smoother thanks to Google’s Chrome browser.

Why? A lot of people don’t even know Chrome supports extensions like Firefox…

Evernote winds me up no end… I started using Nevernote. Its a java client which mainly works with evernote but to be fair its quite bulky and a little slow. However Google launched there web store and a whole bunch of html5 apps have made it into the web store. A few of the apps include Evernote clients which not only connect to Evernote but also keep a local store of the notes. Making Evernote finally fully usable and reliable on a Ubuntu laptop.

As you can also see, its not only Evernote, its also Tweetdeck without installing Adobe Air (because when I last checked the 64bit version was bad, and who wants it on there machine?). I actually stopped using Gwibber because of Tweetdeck in Chrome (sorry to say…) Readitlater, Dropbox, etc are more like Firefox extensions than full applications. I guess Mozilla’s Prism is more like the chrome applications. I did try a while ago to run Evernote in Prism but it really wasn’t built for it, maybe things have changed now but I’m using Chrome more and more, although I also use Firefox 3.6 still for most of my general stuff.

There’s a lot of low level chatter about the internet operating system but google are doing a great job actually making it happen… you can see why the concept of chrome os is fascinating

Retweet error or something more sinister?

Dave mee from Madlab Manchester tried to retweet a message about geeks talks sexy the other day but couldn’t because his iphone4 wouldn’t let him. No idea why, does anyone else know?

The picture was from the official iPhone twitter app – ironically (as Dave puts it), the only two accounts who have thrown this error up have been myself and Loz Kaye’s. Two people pushing for open platforms and transparency… Both accounts are listed as unretweetable?

Geeks talk sexy part 4: The dynamics of relationships

Photo credit – virginsuicides

Its that time again… Yes geeks talk sexy time… Sign up here .

In this Geeks talk sexy, we will de-construct what it means to be in a relationship. In a frank, geeky and enlightening way, we will explore the notion of relationships between one person and another. And ask the eternal question – Why should relationships be any different from a complex piece of code?

How do you decide your in a relationship?

At what date do you pose questions?

How do you deal with the differences?

What kind of life hacks do you apply to relationships?

Can you apply agile methodology to relationships?

Then when you think we’ve gone too deep, we’ll be thinking way outside the box by exploring what its like to have a relationship not based on the concept of monogamy.

This is certainly not for the faint hearted but there’s no doubt its going to be another eye opening geeks talk sexy. Next stop agile relationships…

Its going to be a good one, and look out for part 5 as its not long after. (keep May 7th free if possible) You can also follow the twitter account for geekstalksexy or the subscribe to the official geekstalksexy tumblr blog.

Geek talk sexy part 3: LGBT stand proud

photocredit : bresc

After the overwhelming success of the last geeks talk sexy part 2, we planned to cover LGBT. But there was a certain amount of worry that we were not going to be able to give it the justice that it deserves, simply because neither me, Samantha or Hwayoung were lgbt. Even Simon who joined the team after part 1, was neither. So this was really shooting in the dark for a lot of us.

The fear grew over the coming weeks as the geeks talk sexy got retweeted around. Technicalfault gets a mention here for his crazy amount of retweeting. At some point the event ended up attached as the pre-bollox club event and on the official canal street facebook page. The fear was more about people overrun by people who were expecting a discussion about LGBT generally rather that in the context of geek culture, but we neither have feared it all worked out great and we had our most successful geeks talk sexy to date.

We started late but setup quickly while quite eager people turned up and started to chat. After a weird rearrangement of the tables (blame Samantha for her double rainbow idea) and a series of questions on the projector. We kicked off with me showing the BBC Three documentary from Dawn Porter goes Lesbian a while ago. While we put the finishing touches to everything you couldn’t help but laugh at some of the things Dawn was saying on the documentary. Its really interesting how attitudes have changed.

We started when our special guest for the evening Ben Light turned up.

At the start the crowd of almost 40 people (best turn out to date by a bit) were a little quiet as we explained like the last one, we want to frame the discussions around geek culture oppose to the wider society. So after the recap we kicked started everything by reading out what peoples answers were to the questions we asked at the very start. Unfortunately I put up a earlier presentation and so the questions weren’t exactly what I was thinking, but we did get a general answer to how do/have you meet partners? Generally it was the same as the male and female answers from part 2, which makes total sense. I was hoping for some slightly different answers but everyone was very sensible with the answers.

Then started a conversation about the term LGBT after admitting I had never heard the term before till a volleyball player told me the Manchester Jump team was LGBT. The debate is pretty much the same one that is on the wikipedia page for LGBT. Some said Gay was a better term and some said Queer was even better still.

After this we got on to the debate over Bisexual relationships. I stuck up a post from the Savage love which was pointed to by quite a few blogs I had seen while doing research. The notion that Bi-sexual people were confused or greedy was quickly crushed by many and the similarities between straight, gay, lesbian, bi, etc relationships were discussed in some detail. I threw in a couple of bombs here and there in the way of the Kinsley scale and Bisexual erasure but everyone was pretty much agreed on most subjects except dating profiles with spelling mistakes.

This cause quite a bit of heated discussion and I would have loved to let it continue but we were already running late and the break was rapidly approaching. Hey and who couldn’t resist the lovely cocktails which were available for a generous donation to madlab.

Pina Gaylada, L33t Lesbian, Manchester Trans tea and Bigrasm were the order of the day at the cocktail bar. While people tucked into there cocktails, we setup the 1 minute rants section. To be fair we didn’t have many of them but the lies and lack of english on profiles came up again. I had a good old rant back about people getting far too touchy about spelling. Before you knew it we were on to our special guest Ben Light.

Unforgeable we had some nasty technical problem. Ben used Apple keynote to do is presentation and so we had to use Samanaths MacBook to do the presentation. What followed were a ton of different problems related to the lack of Video memory (who ever says it just works with Apple devices is seriously deluded and should have witnessed the systematic errors Ben and Samantha had to deal with). Anyway in the end, we got it working by reducing the screen resolution down to 800×600 and bouncing back and forth on the PDF instead of the keynote.

Ben focused on LGBT characters in video gaming and it was a fascinating talk (don’t think I’ve ever seen him give a average talk!) Even with the technical difficulties, he was able to show some interesting examples of LGBT characters in popular video games. (I will link to the presentation once Ben posts it to me). The presentation spurred a ton of interesting questions but we had to cut them short because we were running about 40mins late by that point.

After Ben and the Q&A it was a matter of pointing people to common bar as usual. Where conversations continued deep into the night.

I’d like to publicly thank everyone who made it to the event and made it our most popular event to date. Special thanks to Ben Light for the look at the questionable role of LGBT characters in mainstream video games.

Part 4 is still being resolved but we’re certainly going to delve into the world of Poly relationships in geeks talk sexy part 4: the dynamics of relationships.

Meet BBC North – 5th April

Myself on poster

Yes that is me before my bleed on the brain. Wow how scary did I look… Can’t imagine why they would want to use me to advertise BBC North?

Anyway things are going great at the BBC and we’re not far from moving into to Salford Quays. I got the chance to see the floor below where we are going to move to today and I was impressed. The space I thought would be like the broadcast centre or media centre in white city but it felt nothing like that. It actually felt very warm and cozy even with the huge amount of glass.

Can’t wait to get in to the space and make it ours.

LGBT now get there time to shine

After the success of Geeks talk sexy part 2, its now the time for the geeks talk sexy flash light to cast a light on the subject of being Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual in geek culture in 2011. We’ll be looking at the attitudes of there fellow geeks and how the infighting causes even more confusion. We’ll also be asking the same question we asked of our straight people, how do you meet people / how have you met people?

Its promises to be another great night, so don’t miss it. Friday March 18th from 7pm…

NO MATCH: Update your okcupid profile now

Send a clear sign to OKCupid… We don’t like what you’ve done…

Add NO MATCH to your profile picture and lets tell them we’re really not happy with what you’ve done choosing to be bought by Match.com

You can download my one here and add your own picture. Mine fits perfectly with the online now sign as you can see above.

Continue reading “NO MATCH: Update your okcupid profile now“

I really want dataportability for online dating as OKcupid gets bought by Match

Tim Dobson sent me a tweet earlier this today but I only saw it recently because he usually sends dodgy and crap stuff (*smile*). Anyway the news threw me…

OkCupid Acquired by Match.com for $50 Million.

I’m shocked… and to be honest I really want to get off OKcupid pretty soon. But I really want to take my data with me. I’m already considering building some kind of scaper so I can get my data out. The only good thing is…

OkCupid co-founder and CEO Sam Yagan will stay on at the site to run operations.

Sam Yagan also recently said

We Will Not Charge Users Following Match.com Acquisition

“Our goal is that [the acquisition] will have no effect whatsoever,” Yagan told us, saying that no positions will change within the company, and that it will continue full-steam ahead as usual — sans censorship or fees.

Sounds great but is this all lip service? To be honest, as some people have already noticed. A article about paid vs free online dating has been taken it down!

Internet denizens have also pointed out that a popular OKCupid article from last year titled “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating” has been taken down from the company’s blog.

“I chose to take that down. Match didn’t ask,” Yagan says, denying that the other site was attempting to censor OkCupid. Apparently, the story was pieced together from public information, and Yagan has learned that some of the assumptions made in it were untrue.

Also, he says, “It’s a common sense thing to do. We’re joining a bunch of new colleagues, there’s no need to have that post.”

There is the google cache of course. And no wonder it was removed… It starts this way…

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating

Today I’d like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don’t realize.

For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site…

Oi! No wonder it was removed, its a scaving deconstruction of the match.com business model, oh whoops I mean our new boss.

And if that wasn’t so bad enough, this bit will have you in stitches.

Match.com’s numbers are just as grim. They’re a public company, so we can get their exact subscriber info from the shareholder report they file each quarter. Here’s what we have from Q4 20094:

And finally this flow diagram kills it dead. The owners of Match.com must have been having kittens by the point.

Remember, sites like Match and eHarmony are in business to get you to buy a monthly subscription. There’s nothing wrong with profit motive, but the particular way these sites have chosen to make money creates strange incentives for them. Let’s look at how the pay sites acquire new subscribers.

That for me is a clear sign that we’re about to be shafted. Yagan might be right that he was not told to remove the blogs but to be honest the fact he felt that he had to take it down speaks volumes! And its going to be a very bumpy ride down to the bottom, I can feel it now. And I want to get off now.

I want out! And I’m not the only one. I’ll be interested to see what kind of protest the people of okcupid put up. Might be worth starting off a specially branded avatar… Bit like whats been done on flickr before.

Geeks Talk Sexy – The Other Half of the Population

Photo credit: hoyvinmayvin

The description says: Geeks Talk Sexy is back – bigger and better!

And it certainly will be bigger and much better.

So we’re kicking off with part 2 of the sexygeek series. Of course we always planned to do more. But I got a feeling part 2 might shock people because its quite distinct.

This time its all about the female geeks, except instead of the usual discussions about woman and men which we’ve all heard quite a few times. We’ll be digging down into the deep mystery of relationships between the two.

How do girl geeks and guy geeks interact in the geek community?

What happens when we go from techy hack day to romantic hack date?

What are the problems we have to overcome?

What can we do to make everyone feel comfortable in their role?

Yes the nitty gritty or you might prefer the nuts and bolts of male and female relationships within the scope of the geek culture.

Most discussions center around woman in the workforce, as entrepreneurs, in places which were along time ago though as only for men. But there is little talk about relationships of men and woman. In actual fact I’m kind of lying. There is quite a lot information but they tend to be buried deep down in places where most of us don’t go looking. So we’re uncovering and discussing it on Friday 4th Feb at Madlab. We may also have a very special guest stopping in, so what you waiting for? Sign up now at our event page.

Disclaimer

Now I have to add the very serious disclaimer because people are going to get very irate about the whole thing.

We are fully aware that this title and concept is only a vague approximation to reality and that gender is not just binary. We are in no way assuming that there are only straight, cis, monogamous, male or female geeks. For the purpose of the talk we picked the most obvious intersection for arising problems, which is the role of women in the geek community that is usually only discussed from a professional point of view.

We hope this decision does not offend anyone (although I got a feeling it will) and that people of all genders and orientations join us for the talk. Please do get in touch if you have got serious concerns.

The whole series

I said in my new years resolutions for 2011, a lot of things regarding Take Geek Culture to new heights. We (me, Samantha and Hwayoung) have worked hard on the series and have some cracking surprises to come. I really hope people bear with us, the first one was great and we learned a lot from that one but it was ultimately very difficult because we tried to cover a load of issues in one overview session. In this one we will stick to one subject, so it will be a lot more tighter. We’re also hoping to have a special guest join us for the event, who that will be will be revealed later. To get you all started, there is this Comfort-a-Crying-Woman

Next in the series we will be exploring Gay, Lesiban, Bi, Poly, Transexual and what ever else there is. I’m happy to say we have some help from Simon Carter who has stepped up to help us better represent section of geeks talk sexy. Me, Samantha and Hwayoung are not that familiar with most of these. So to do them any real justice we certainly need help.

Of course its all about part 2 right now, so what you waiting for? Sign up now!

The TV tracker

Tioti tv tracker

via Paul Pod at Tapeitofftheinternet

In the last blog post about SharetheTV and Trakt.TV, I mentioned the need for a way to track TV episodes which your social network were on. It got me thinking what ever happened to the promising startups of the time including tape it off the internet (tioti.com) and sharetv.

Back then, all these services relied on you putting all the data in and to be fair it might have been a little early. Now you got serious processing power under the TV from boxes like XBMC, Boxee, GoogleTV, etc. Setting up a TV tracker site would be pretty easy now. Almost all the boxes now talk to the Internet and there’s APIs a plenty now.

It is surprising no ones really pushed the idea yet. Like the prototype above shows, it doesn’t take much to get it right.

A new hope, a new blog

During Christmas I thought I’d do some maintenance to blog because I’ve been meaning to clean up a few things for a while. I’m hosting with GoDaddy.com mainly because there cheap and there pretty hassle free.

I had my /wordpress blog which you might have seen stuff like this at. Then I also had storytlr at the root of the cubicgarden domain and a couple other blogs which I was testing things on like mydreamscape. So I deleted the couple of test wordpress blogs and started putting a axe through storytlr (which is a real shame but I could never get the cron to work). Then I noticed there was no blog in the management option for /wordpress. Which meant yes it was either lost somewhere in the management interface or it was gone….

I was generally pissed off with Godaddy for not making it clear which blog I was deleting. Worst of all, its all happening on bloody Christmas day, when I should be relaxing not wondering what happen to my bloody blog. I almost canceled my contract with Godaddy right there and then, I got a message from the Godaddy twitter account with some somewhat useful information.

So anyway although I wasn’t able to recover everything back to how it was before, I now have a new blog and lifestream.

I had a backup of my blog from Mid December and I’ve been using Disqus for comments so pretty much everything up till then was safe. All the blog entries I usually write in Blogilo, and I had a backup of all the recent entries. So it was just a matter of digging them out and publishing them again with the correct date stamp.

The first thing you will notice is that the /wordpress is now gone (yeh!) and the lifestream is now finally working (double yeh!).

But….

There is still a lot of work to do. I still need to design the bloody thing and this time I’m hoping to do a proper job. On top of that I’m going to sort out all the external links to my life all over the web, so there all linked here in some logical fashion.

I also need to link up ianforrester.org to my lifestream and add in lots of lovely embedded goodness into my pages.

It was certainly quite hairy at one point but it kind of worked out… Happy Christmas everyone…

Manchester Werewolf chapter – Wednesday 1st December

Werewolf: A simple game of strategy and deception, played by a large group of people. The game is all about making accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, and social engineering.

What is there not to like?

For the last time this year, the chapter will be getting together to play the much enjoyed game of werewolf. This time the venue is changed to the place for digital people, Madlab in the northern quarter.

If you’ve never played before, I swear you will enjoy it. Its not one of those boring card or board games, werewolf is like poker but the cards and chips were eaten by a werewolf.

This will also be a great place to get some practice in before BarCampManchester4 which is that Saturday.

There will also be a surprise announcement on the night from myself, as I’ve been developing something which might be of interest to werewolf players across the nation.

The chapter will be back in the new year with more events… best way to stay tuned is signing up to the official facebook group for the Manchester Werewolf chapter.

Cinema’s Code of conduct

Generally the Wittertainment Code of Conduct is….

No Eating
No slurping
No rustling
No irresponsible parents
No hobbies
No talking
No mobile phone usage
No kicking of seats
No arriving late
No shoe removal

I’m in agreement with some of these, Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode have certainly put the cat out between the pigeons.

No Eating…. Well thats just simply stupid, popcorn and cinemas fit together like the internet and porn. Salt popcorn is nosier than sugar popcorn but cinemas still sell it by the bucket load. I do think its a pain when someone starts tucking into a bag of crisps but I’m not going to ban them from the cinema. However there are certain foods which should be banned, such as nuts with shells!
No Slurping… Come on if your sucking down on a drink and you can’t help but slurp, you must be under 10.
No Rustling… Ok agreed, no one wants to hear you undoing your bag in the middle of a film. The worst has to be someone cock undoing his velcro bag in the middle of inception.
No Irresponsible parents… Oh my goodness yes! No one wants to hear your kid screaming as the saw cuts through the actors hand in the latest saw movie.
No Hobbies… As a cinema usher this drives me nuts, I won’t even tell you what kind of stuff I’ve found after a showing. However I’m also guilty of updating my blog, make changes to a essay, etc while supervising a film as a usher. Of course I wouldn’t do it as viewer.
No Talking… This does wind me up, even now. I hate people who talk in the cinema, I don’t mind talking during the adverts, even during the trailers somewhat. But once the title comes up for the film, shut the heck up! No one wants to hear it. However I remember watching the Matrix Reloaded at Odeon Streatham, and someone shouted out something when Neo is about to take down Agent Smith after visiting the Oracle. It fit the mood perfectly, but then again I know other people who have done something similar and failed
No Mobile phone use… Yes please! I hate it when the person next to you is texting on there phone ruing the effect of darkness. I had this yesterday when I went to watch Harry Potter and the deadly hallows part one. The worst I ever had was when someone left there keypad sound on. On that one, I turned around and said "for f*** sake will you stop!"
No Kicking of seats… Never had this problem to be fair but I’ve told many people off for doing something like this to others.
No Arriving late… I almost don’t understand why cinemas are not like theatre’s which blocks people after a certain time. The nice thing about the IMAX showings in Manchester is that they do just that. Its simply not practical sometimes to have people trying to find there seats in the dark while the film is going. If seats are not allocated, then i’m sorry you lost your right to those seats as far as I’m concerned. Come in late, tuck in somewhere at the front or the far edges. Stay out of the way of the screen.
No Show removal… I’ve also had to tell a few people as a cinema usher to put there shoes back on. I’m not against slipping your shoes off so its still on your feet but I’ve stopped people who have taken off there shoes and even there socks! I mean for goodness sake, are you serious! Nasty public health type stuff!

There is loads more I could personally add but this list isn’t bad at all. Now which cinema chain’s going to adopt these rules? Don’t all rush at once…

Geeks talks sexy: What does sex have to do with geeks?

So finally we did it, yes the geeks talked sexy at Madlab. @smanthabail, @hwayoung and myself have been planning this series of talks for a while now and after the last change of dates we managed to get over 30 people to sign up to the 1st in a series of talks. Although we did so many signing up, about 20 turned up on the night but to be fair, we all had a great time. We kicked off at 19:30 with loads of geeky cocktails nicely provided by @MadlabUK. My favorate has to be Sex on the geek, which packed quite a punch.

To start we got everyone to write down some geek stereotypes which we then later read out, twittered and dispelled after the break. Here’s some of the stereotypes…

Geeks have bad dress sense
Geeks are Reclusive
Geeks don’t wash
sexually inactive
there all virgins
Obsessive and socially backward
geeks are young, anti-social and overweight
geeks only do it in the dark and missionary only
girls don’t like geeks
geeks only have online friends and partners

We broke down every stereotype with some evidence for each one. After the break, we started running through some of the rubbish we’ve collected from the main stream press on geeks. Things such as 10 reasons why woman love geeks and my personal favorite 10 real reasons why geeks make better lovers. All before descending down into the pits of the internet with tron style sex, erotic falconry and a live demonstration of chatroulette and the all new adult themed citizenx.

End of the session, I think everyone really enjoyed it but there was a feeling we can or could go much further that even we had imagined. Because of this we are going to juggle things around a little and see if we can go a little further a bit earlier that expected. I’d highly recommend you come to the next one (sometime in Jan/Feb 2011), but it will be much more serious that the last one. I expect number 3 will be much more fun and a lot more erotic.

Continue reading “Geeks talks sexy: What does sex have to do with geeks?“

More dream recording news

My lovely hypnotherapist, sent me a clipping from the Metro the other day. Its was a clipping about the ability to record your own dreams.

Although I saw this general thought in a post my boss sent me a while ago, it was good to read something similar in the mainstream press.

I’ve included the text for those who can’t be bothered to read the image.

A real hope of recording our dreams

Dreams could one day be recorded electronically, allowing them to be interpreted, scientists say. Experiments in which volunteers had electrodes surgically implanted deep inside their brains had already allowed researchers to ‘read’ people’s minds, said Dr Moran Cerf. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the development of a dream recorder, he added. ‘We would like to read people’s dreams,’ Dr Cerf said. ‘It would be wonderful to read people’s minds when they cannot communicate, such as people in comas.’

In tests on 12 epilepsy patients, electrodes recorded the activity of neurones in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe, which plays a major role in human memory and retention. The volunteers were shown more than 100 familiar images, such as Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, on a screen. From these, pictures that had triggered responsive neurons in different parts of the subjects’ MTLs were selected.

The patients were then shown two of these images superimposed and told to think about one of them, while the scientists ran the neuron patterns through a decoder. When the decoded information was fed back on to the superimposed images, the one whose neuron was firing more quickly was enhanced, while the other faded.

By watching this online feedback, more than two-thirds of subjects were able to make their targeted image completely visible and entirely eliminate the other picture. By observing which brain cells lit up and when, Dr Cerf and his US colleagues, Christof Koch and Itzhak Fried, said they were in effect able ‘read the subjects’ minds’. The study is published in the journal Nature.

Once again, I really need to get mydreamscape up and running…

Inbox zero?

Not likely…

My inbox at work — 24k of unread messages

I’m planning to put all the unread messages from while I was away in the DMZ folder and then pretty much dump them all in the trash bin once I go back to work. So if you’ve contacted me during the time I was off due to the bleed on my brain, then tough luck. I won’t be answering back sorry… There is no way I’m going to run through 24k of unread messages from May – October

Geeks talk sexy…. new date (now on the 19th November)

Excellent photo by hoyvinmayvin – cc: by-nc-sa

Sex and geeks don’t fit together or compute, most would say. However the truth may be the total opposite.

This quarter we take a brave step into the explicit adult world of sex, lies and alternative lifestyles by following the geek world underground.

Join us on the wild ride in to the unknown, in a series of open talks and discussions. Next stop sexy town.

The event is free to attend, but you MUST BE OVER 18.

We have a new date for geeks talk sexy, so don’t miss out, sign up now!!!

A halloween party for my fellow residences

Islington wharf where I now live now has a fantastic communal garden (which I’ve been using to read my kindle and play with my pacemaker) and I thought it would be a grand idea to have a party in the garden for all the residences of islington wharf.

So the plan is to have the party and allow people to bring a couple of friends with them. I will lay on a bit of party snacks (I got plenty left over from my flat warming party back in September) and everyone will bring there own drinks. On top of that, there will be two contests, one for the best carved pumpkin and another for the best fancy dress on the day. I’ve roped ISIS’s hollie into supplying the pumpkins and maybe supplying some really nice prizes on the night to the winners.

Finally I thought it might be nice to have a organised trick or treat for the kids of islington wharf. Get everyone ready with treats and go around the flats with a couple of adults to supervise the whole thing. I’m not sure how many kids there are in the flats but I’ve seen a couple playing in the garden since I’ve been here. Its slightly ambitious but even if we get 10% of the residents down on Sunday night, thats still over 20 people.

So why am I doing this?

Well when I first saw the location the garden was certainly a selling point. I really wanted a balcony but I gladly gave it up for a communal garden which I could relax in and share with others. I’ve seen a few people using the garden but not nearly as many as I would have thought. The thing about flats is they have a rep for being impersonal and loney places where people tend to not talk to each other as they leave there flats. In actual fact Tracey Langford said it in her recent interview for east manchester.

Tracey, who runs her own business, says the idea of a community appealed to them too: “We didn’t want to live in an soulless place where nobody spoke in the lift.” She adds, “We also wanted a high proportion of owner occupiers so that people really cared about the building. There is a mix of properties here with houses that face on to the communal garden, which are ideal for younger families.”

And that communal aspect prevails. Says Tracey, “In fact, the first Islintgon Wharf baby was born here a couple of months ago and the whole building was invited to the first birthday party of one of our residents!”

Its all about Community

Community, yep the big C word. Its one of those things which is very hard to just do, it needs to be organic. But fear not, this is just one of the ideas I have to bring people together. ISIS haven’t done a bad job so far but theres certainly some room for improvement. The next logical step I think is to sort out the community forum which is currently hosted on a external site somewhere. I signed up to join the forum ages ago and my membership is still pending (even after months).

My neighbor across the hallway is talking about setting up another better supported forum but I’m wondering why we don’t just setup a facebook group? Although to be fair it seems I’m not the only one who thought about this. The tricky part in a community is getting everyone on the same page (or getting the word out about the site), this requires actual physical work like putting up posters and speaking to people, something which seems to be sadly missing it seems.

ISIS should be involved in the community process too, but not be the driver of the process. It needs to come from the community/residents its self.

So I’m hoping to improve on the community building which has already started. I can’t say it will translate into sales for ISIS but for me this isn’t about that. Its about building a lovely place to live. I already live in a amazing place with some great views and great architecture but in this case, theres nothing wrong with wanting more. A rich vibrant community of caring people who I can share a wine with in the garden? I’m working on it one step at a time…

My lifestreaming dating idea realised for anyone to take on

People ask me why would I choose to open my ideas to the world, for anyone to take and make money on. For example mydreamscape.org.

But the way I see it is, I’m very unlikely to dedicate 10 years of my life to one idea, grow it and nurture it through all the stages of making it successful. I actually put this to Richard St John a while ago at TedXSheffield, because I was really interested in what he thought of those like myself who don’t necessarily want to be successful (as such). He cleverly turned the question around and said actually what i’m actually after is success in the idea or the meme. Ideally I would have a team of people and certain people would make there job to take an idea forward for the sake of the team.

But back to the point…

I’ve been sitting on the same principle idea for a long time to do with online dating. It was actually the wider part of what I presentation at Ignite Leeds.

I’ve stated before that some of the largest benefits we will see from creating and maintaining our Lifestreams will be the services created on the backbone of that data. We are starting to see the first big service phenomenon from that coming in the way of content readers that are built specifically for us based on the data shared by our social graph.

Early on when I first started writing about Lifestreaming I gave thought to services that could be built off of the data and one of the first that came to mind was a dating site. In fact I had multiple interviews at a top dating site a few years ago that was very interested in my knowledge and thoughts around Lifestreaming data. I didn’t get the job, but I still felt that Lifestreaming data would at some point help power the matchmaking process. Well apparently a new dating service called Wings feels the same way.

Wings has taken a unique and interesting approach when it comes to dating. They figured that instead of creating a site from scratch that people need to join, they’d just tap into the 500+ Million Facebook users and build a dating app within their eco-system. The innovation doesn’t stop there as when you join there is no super long, multi-page questionnaire. After joining the service will analyze your Facebook data and let you also connect your Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts to help paint a picture of who you are. I feel this is a much better way to build a profile for someone. Instead of a static survey filled out and frozen in time, your profile is dynamic based on the data collected on a daily basis.

This is the crux of my idea.

One of the most frustrating things about online dating is the lack of portability but also having to fill in those bloody profile statements or questions. So if you could leverage your lifestream instead to teach the system about who you really are. Then you might actually get better results. This would/could also cut down on Spam and more interestingly the lies people tell in online dating.

I thought about using the same principle as in APML to mark up whats important in peoples lives. Now what I realize is this can be better done with a “like” button or “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” So if you don’t want your drunken pictures from last night on your dating profile, you can vote it down or bury it all together.

When you interfere with the stream, the engine would mark the item up in a way to say it was interfered with. So it discourages you from simply removing all the bad crap from your stream and painting a perfect picture of yourself. The more you do it, the more it indicates the changes.

So why did I not post this on my blog earlier?

Well I thought the notion of a lifestream was still a very alpha geek thing (still do) and most people only have a couple of services they sign up to (and therefore can make use of). Remember if you don’t use the services then theres no way of the engine being able to work out what you like.

I’m also unsure if revealing your impact across the web will certainly generate better matches. Someone (wish I could remember who) said the thing about the profile is its your best foot forward (the best bits of you). Letting people know about you straight away is a massive risk that lots of people wouldn’t want to take.

However, I’ve noticed more and more, people linking to different parts of there impact across the web. For example in my okcupid profile I have a link to my blog, my last fm profile, my flickr and my twitter stream. And i’m not the only one, quite a few people have links to there last fm or/and flickr. Some even go as far as to link to there facebook (rather them that me).

OkCupid does a interesting thing when your replying to someone, it pulls out things you both like, so for example…

I think you both like cooking, films, poker, fight club, and donnie darko.

You can pretty much look at my blog, my delicious, my last.fm, etc to determine the similar things. So ultimately its about gathering the data with the permission of the user to build up a profile of that person, which they can use to tell others about themselves. Its quite a long shot but I thought it was too early. It would only work with certain public people like for example Tara Hunt (I actually did try and send her a email explain the idea a while ago)

Its all about dataportability

Up till I saw Wings and the blog post about it, the closest thing I’d seen to my idea was a weird site called Gelato which went half way but not the whole way. Gelato allowed you to put in parts of your lifestream but it doesn’t build a profile around it. Instead it supports openid, facebookconnect and a few other authentication methods.

I’m still looking forward to joining a site where the email system isn’t some propriety crap and the instant messaging system is even worst. I get the whole anonymity thing, but this can be solved by passing messages back and forth to a 3rd party (aka the company who is running the site). Using this method almost anything could be used including Twitter, Xmpp, etc. Wings is a facebook app which I guess is a interesting solution, although being a facebook app winds me up no end and the fact its only for an American audience also winds me up no end.

So is the idea dead? Not exactly, Wings is still a poor dating experience and doesn’t rely enough on the data which it has. You have to confirm a lot of things and to be frank, it really needs to be as enjoyable as Okcupid for me to really be interested. (In actual fact while were letting the cat out of the bag), I was going to build a dating site off the back of Storytlr before they stopped it and went open source. Everyone would be able to put in there streams and you would be able to identify people who were matches via a mechanism like dr foxxy.

What I’m saying is the concept is still sound (I think) but the actual implementation is terrible and I don’t think putting it inside of facebook actually works or does it any favors. So I look forward to seeing more sites based on our lifestreams…

Geeks talk sexy….

Excellent photo by hoyvinmayvin – cc: by-nc-sa

Sex and geeks don’t fit together or compute, most would say. However the truth may be the total opposite.

This quarter we take a brave step into the explicit adult world of sex, lies and alternative lifestyles by following the geek world underground.

Join us on the wild ride in to the unknown, in a series of open talks and discussions. Next stop sexy town.

The event is free to attend, but you MUST BE OVER 18.

Not many people know but every once in a while I do a talk at BarCamps titled “Sex.” I usually do it to be slightly controversial and to bring a certain edge to the talks which can be far too technical for some.

I’ve had mixed success, I think the funniest session was at BarCampLiverpool while the most serious was at BarCampLondon7. (Not sure what that says about the cities)

However while talking one night in the Northern Quarter with Samantha and Joshi about BarCampManchester3 and my plans to do another one. I mentioned the sex talks I’ve done previously and that meme must have stuck in Samantha’s head (I need to get better at doing that). She had a word with Hwa Young Jung over at Madlab (Manchester’s digital laboratory) and bish bosh boof we have a new series of talks and discussions planned for the next few months.

Of course we’re also after knowledgeable and thought provoking guests for the future, so if that interest you, give us a message on twitter.

This is what £1800+ worth of IKEA shopping looks like

The sad thing is although it was quite stressful getting the boxes neatly on to the 6 shopping carts (maximizes space otherwise I would need even more) I actually quite enjoyed it till I saw the bill at the end! By that point I was beyond caring…

All that shopping was just the big stuff that I couldn’t carry home on my scooter. Tomorrow i’ll get the stuff which I can easily fit in a car, such as rugs, bins etc. I don’t expect it to be anywhere near the amount I spent today

Why not use Cat5 in your home cinema setup?

We’ve been lied to. When everyone started introducing HD Televisions there was a new interconnect to get use. That interconnect or port was HDMI. We were told that HDMI was the only connection able to handle all that bandwidth needed for a 1080p signal. Others said rubbish, whats wrong with dv, ethernet and even optical.

Well its stuck we’re not using Hdmi on most things but theres a new challenger and its very familiar.

HdbaseT is a new internet connect standard and as you guessed its based on Ethernet which will make a lot of people happy. Yes you can use your standard Cat5e or Cat6 cables. Not only that, theres a whole range of other extra tricks which come with HdbaseT, but how does it compare to the others types?

Feature	HDMI 1.4a	DiiVA	DisplayPort 1.2	HDBaseT 1.0
Uncompressed Video/Audio	10.2Gbps	13.5Gbps	21.6 Gbps (17Gbps data)	10.2Gbps (can scale to 20Gbps)
Max Passive Cable Length	~5-7m	26m	15m for 5Gbps 3m for 5-21.6Gbps	100m (plus 8x multiple hops)
Cable type	HDMI	DiiVA	DisplayPort	Cat5e/6
Connector type	HDMI	DiiVA	DisplayPort	RJ-45
Charging power	No	5W	No	100W
Ethernet	100 Mbps	Gigabit	720Mbps	100 Mbps (can scale to Gigabit)
Daisy chainable	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Installation-friendly	Heck No	No	No	Yes (can use existing wiring)
USB	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Networking methods	None	Daisy & Star	Daisy & Star	Daisy & Star (with extended-range)

Power over ethernet, yes believe it or not but they will be able to supply not only data but also power over eithernet/hdbaseT, up to 100watts which is enough to power a 37inch tv. And the cable does not have to be Shielded which is great news for all those people who have laid ethernet in the walls of there house. Imagine running your whole TV off only one cable and nothing else…

Control signals allow remote controls to control anything on that network. And when we say network we mean just that. Switches or hubs can be used to connect devices and route signals around the network. This is like Samsung’s Anynet+ and other systems which allow you to control other related devices over a special cable. Instead of it a special magical cable, a cat5/6 cable will do the same trick.

This might sound a little pie in the sky but in actual fact its a standard and its been accepted by LG, Sony, Samsung and others. HdbaseT 1.0 specification is finished and ready to be used. There already working on the 2.0 spec now which will support up to 10.2gig a second through put. Theres also talk about using wireless too…

I look forward to seeing Hdmi going away and ethernet taking the position it once had.