Tag: london

Breaking the grid in the city and online

Grids and boxes

Molly has wrote a really good comparsion between the grid systems of most American cities and the grids of websites in an entry for Alist apart titled Thinking outside the grid. Thanks to Sheila for the heads up.

On the other hand, Tucson’s designers planned for only a certain amount of growth, and this has caused innumerable problems in maintaining the city’s ease of navigation and usability as the city grew beyond its planned limits. Furthermore, the constraints of Tucson’s grid do not encourage the emergence of alternative neighborhoods and communities. Many residents of Tucson will agree that the city lacks a vibrant center—or many unique communities—as a result, and that when those isolated spots do exist, they’re easy to get to, but people aren’t motivated to get out and find them.

London, unlike Tucson, is a maze. I know Londoners who carry around a London A-Z guidebook to help them navigate! The city’s transportation system is so challenging that would-be cab drivers must pass a test demonstrating that they possess The Knowledge in order to drive traditional black cabs. The city’s organic growth hasn’t exactly made it the easiest place to navigate.

Fantastic stuff, specially when you start thinking about the differences between the two cities communities and how blogs look compared to news sites.

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Jon Stewart Live in London for only one night

And even more book signing

I posted a entry about a evening with Jon Stewart a while ago. And just got back from a fantastic evening. Jon was on top form and had everyone clapping and cheering on a lot of sadly amusing blunders and failings of the American government, Mainstream media and people generally. I wont go into too much detail except to say after the performance my wife Sarah had a chance meeting with Jon Stewart while I was in the toilet. All I can say is that she was glowing all the way home afterwards. Bless…

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Geekdinner with Scoble and Dotben

Ben and Scoble pause for a quick photo

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?

The Sheila and Myself at Geekdinner

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…

The champange bar afterwards paid for my microsoft

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.

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Project house moving almost complete but no ADSL

The project house moving is almost complete. Me and Sarah a little more decorating to do this week and next weekend and we should be pretty much done. However Demon or BT is not being very helpful about Broadband access. On the 15th November there was Broadband as Demon said there would be, then the next day it was gone! Now all I get is a ADSL sync error, indicating that there is no broadband at all. Yeah really sucky, and of course Demon blame BT and BT are not returning or answering any of my calls. So for a short period (hopefully) I have no Internet access at home.

However I just wanted to say, the Geekdinner this Thursday is still on. Nothing has changed, just because I dont reply to a email for a while does not mean I'm dead… Also my work place has started killing the process signtuare for GAIM, so I'm not on instant messenger much either right now. I have ways around it, but choose not to use them for now. Anyhow hope to see you all Thursday at the Hogs Head.

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Moving house at long last.

In less than 2 weeks, me and Sarah will have bought and moved into our first house. This has been one of the most stressful times I've ever experienced. But I still highly recommend Shared Ownership to first time buyers living and buying in England.

In total me and Sarah have spent roughly just over 2500 pounds in solicitors fees, house deposit, mortgage arrangements, etc to secure the house from viewing to exchanging contracts. Not bad if you consider stamp duty alone could have cost us 1500 pounds plus if the house was not in Woolwich. Our solicitors Barnes Morley were pretty good. There online transaction checker was good but slow to update, I dont think its really integrated into there way of working yet. But the emails back and forth were always answered quickly and fully at stupid times of the day (for me answering emails at 7-8am would be a nightmare come true). Even when we asked the most simple and basic questions, our solicitor totally understood and made it as clear as possible for us first time buyers.

So from Novemeber its goodbye leafy Beckenham and hello urban Woolwich. Some of the things to look forward to is the near future for Woolwich. The Woolwich Arsenal DLR which has started work already and is due to end in 2009 will provide a train link straight into Bank DLR/Tube station. Then we have the olympics in the east end of London in 2012 which will include the woolwich area. I think there's some river things planned for charlton and greewich which is the next areas along. And the last thing which is also going on is the Thames gateway scheme, which includes a bridge a little bit down the road in Thamesmead and a whole host of other projects.

So all together, theres quite a lot of things going on in the area and us buying a place there might have been a really good idea for the future.

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Geek Dinner with Tim O’Reilly – Thursday 13th October

Tim O'Reilly



Geek dinner with Tim O'Reilly: Thursday October 13, at the Hogs Head, 11 Dering Street, Westminster, London

Tim O'Reilly is stopping over in London for a few days before the Euro OSCON conference.

The venue is the quiet and chilled out Hogs Head 11 Dering Street, near Oxford Street. We have the whole lower floor which seats up to 60 people and there is a nice cover charge of one pound for the finger buffet, which is payable on the door.

We have the downstairs bar from 7pm till 11pm. Tim is expected to get to the venue about 7:30pm and is looking forward to meeting London geeks and bloggers.

Lee has now changed the geekdinner.co.uk blog. So leave a comment here or on the geekdinner blog, if your interested in going.

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Geek Dinner is back with a bang

So yeah I hear Robert Scoble is back for another Geek Dinner on the 10th December via Ben's Blog. But I've got an announcement to say that I'm currently arranging with Tim O'reilly a geekdinner for thursday 13th October. I'm sure Tim will say yes and hopefully by the time I blog this, he would have agreed already. Lee Wilkins is fully aware of this and is stand by waiting for the final go from myself (just sent him the email).

Obviously he will also be doing some presentations and interviews around the BBC before. So if your a BBC member of staff working on the 13th October, try and keep your calendar clear on that day, so you can either attend a session in White City or Bush House with Tim. If your interested but have never heard Tim talk before, please check out this recommended podcast by Paul

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I love rollercoasters

Are you ready to scream?

I've ridden some of the best but I had forgot how fun it was to ride a new one till today. A friend of ours was going to Thorpe Park for her birthday and asked if me and Sarah would like to come along as her husband did not really enjoy rollercoasters. I guess Coasters is one of those subjects we just never got around to talking about. So it was a bit of a shock when we explain how much we adored coasters.

Nemesis Inferno really brough back my desire to ride more exotic coasters, and from the picture it looks like one I heard about a while ago is coming to England next year. From a little browsing around it seems the unknown coaster's development name is stealth but looks like a carbon copy of Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster. Going on estimates it seems Dragster is 2 times the height but 60+ meters in the UK is pretty good going and I'm wondering how they got the planning permission for such a tall structure, so close to Heathrow airport? To get a feel for how this amazing roller coaster will look check out this shot from the top of dragster, this one from the ground and this one from the side. Thorpe Park isnt the only one doing this type of ride, Warner Bros are building Superman: Escape which is seems to be the same height, same designers and looks like this. So even at half the height its going to be one hell of a Hydraulic launch ride.

On another note, Oakwood is also building a secret rollercoaster which seems to have a few people interested. Plus its good to finally see Drayton Manor build another decent coaster to go with the slightly aging but still only english stand up coaster – Shockwave

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Blame it on July 7th?

Canary wharf in the fog

Saturday night after my friends party, I decided to popup to the Isle of dogs, where Canary Wharf and the other tall buildings of the docklands sit. I had my digital camera with me and decided it would be a great night to take some pictures of the warm but slightly cloudy night. The low bearing clouds have a interesting effect on the lights of tall buildings. So I was scooting around the complex taking pictures when about 40mins in, a dressed up security guard told me to stop shooting under some made up July 7 law. I instantly questioned this made up law and he was kind of thrown off guard with my questioning, so changed his tone and said I needed a permit to take pictures around there. Yep well it seems the July 7th attacks has the other Canary Wharf security so worried that they let me drive up and take pictures in the middle of a road and park my bike next to the security office. Seriously after talking to this jumped up security guard, I drove off to get a permit at 3am just to spite him. When I arrived at the security office, the managing security guard told me the dressed up security guard only controls one of the smaller buildings and I was allowed to take pictures of any of the buildings as long as I dont take pictures of the entrances and exits.
So the facts of the matter was this jumped and dressed up security guard got touchy that I took pictures of his building next to the DLR station and made up some crappy story to stop me from taking pictures. Yeah well he was lucky I was too tired to go back and tell him where to stick his story. To be very fair to the rest of the security guards throughout the complex, they were pleased to help me take the pictures and were all very accommodating.
Its just a shame the pictures were not as good as they could have been…

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