Slow down in blog posts here

Over the last few years things have slowed down when it comes to blogging on my own site. Don’t worry I’m not stopping as its been over 20 years of blogging but life has caught up with my limited spare time.

My task list is pretty huge and although I have lots I want to write about including getting the replace for my old Oura ring in a plastic bag, some of the micropayments changes and my thoughts on AI partners in regards to loneliness and isolation. I just don’t seem to have time.

The biggest draw on my time right now is writing my dating book, which is in its later stages of drafts. Right now I’m running through at least 1000 changes with grammarly. Although its very tempting to just accept all, it would ruining all the work which has been done. Plus its restructuring of some of the sentences are just plain wrong within the contexts of whats being said. Its a slow slog through all the suggestions but means I’m not blogging as much and heck not even doing many mixes right now.

Bear with me but things will adjust over time.

Snowfall rolling into Manchester time-lapse

I knew Snow was coming so I setup my Pixel2 to best capture the snowfall on Saturday 2nd Jan 2021. It was good but I didn’t position the camera behind my black out blinds and so you get a slight reflection and later in the video the light of living room in the sky (I obviously removed this part as it looked weird). I also need to sort out the autofocus next time.

Still a nice timelapse of the clouds rolling in then the snow for a short while.

Tenet was it worth the wait? kinda yes?

This is a spoiler free review of Tenet, yes #nospoiler… Although I’d love to discuss it with others who have seen it soon.

I gave Tenet 8 out of 10. Yes its worth watching, twice (this is what I have done). You will need to see it twice to fully appreachate all of whats going on. The cinematography is top notch in Tenet, expect awards for this.

Its what Nolan is so good at, immersive pacey stories, in Tenet he’s run a little wild with the complexity. Don’t worry there is moments of calm and explaining whats actually happening throughout the film, but not a lot to make it feel boring or make the audience feel talked at.

We all know Nolan loves playing with the 4th dimension of time, although Tenet isn’t about time travel as such. Its likely the easist way to explain it to people but when you see the effect it makes for more difficulty than it needs to be.


It is complex yes but not Primer complex (spoilers ahead)… If you put Memento at one end and Inception at the other. It would be somewhere in the middle, although the actual concept of inversion is somewhere closer to the 5th dimension tesseract of interestellar. Nolan helps the audience understand the concept slowly then drops the ball on you but helps by colour coding whats actually happening from which point of view. It makes sense when you see the scene.

Tenet has all of Nolans mates (Sir Micheal Cane, Kenneth Brannagh, etc) are in the film but this time I think for the first time, the stars of the film are minorities not white men. I won’t say much more but Nolan plays with this throughout the film to good effect. Its a stark contrast to a number of previous films which he has been critisied for. Its got everything of the other big Nolan films except I would suggest the heart of Interstellar. The story with Kat is believeable and maybe if I saw the full uncut version (I saw the IMAX 12A version) I might feel stronger for Kat and her motovations. Its not as strong as the relationship of Coop and Murph in Interstellar.



There is signs of Nolans notions of storytelling too, with John David Washington actually calling himself the protagonist, then being cut down to say he’s one of a few protagonists. Nolan made clear this needed to be shown in CInemas especially the IMAX and I agree, the aspect ratio is 2.20 : 1 and its shot with lots of close up shots, making you feel like a mouse looking up a lot of the time. Its 100% shot with IMAX cameras and going to be a interesting crop on 1.85:1 (widescreen)

Question I had and sure others have (without reading the reviews), will there be a second Tenet? Tenet doesn’t do what inception did at the end but like interstellar could easily make a sequal if there was interest. There is a lot of bigger view questions which are not answered and could make a neat sequal.

Is Tenet actually a Inception sequal or prequal? I would say no but there is a parts missing where they could fit together quite nicely. I would suggest if this is true, Inception would be the prequal to Tenet with the CIA and rouge figures using technology for different purposes than first intended.

End of the day its a very good film but not going to knock Inception off the top spot.

Updated Thursday night

The Falken asked me, was it worth the risk?

I realised I didn’t actually say much about my experience of going to the cinema during Covid19. This is the context which is why Tenet was so important to cinema.

I went to the VUE Manchester which is in the city centre, meaning I could walk to the cinema and back home without using any transport at all. Bookings were done online, when you book there is 4 seats either side of you also booked (aka 2 per side). If you book for 2 people, exactly the same is applied instantly after confirming. This is also where they capture your info for the UK government track and trace

Booking cinema tickets

The seats are the modern cinema seats so there is quite a distance between people in front and behind. On arrival to the cinema, there is the usual one way in and one way out. There is no kiosk with people just ushers with PPE directing you. I believe you can buy a ticket from a automated kiosk which happened to be on the ground floor and away from everything else. Of course there is hand sanitizer everywhere and its the good stuff, which sprays and melts into the skin without much rubbing.

Ticket checks are done with the e-ticket/barcode on your phone at a safe distance. There are arrows everywhere and the food and drinks are still available but everything is now behind the counter. Entry times are staggered with longer adverts and more trailers (also kinda funny seeing the trailers for films which should have been out in April/May/June 2020! This is certainly something you would have thought Hollywood would have a grip on – certainly a reason for object based media).

The cinema doesn’t feel full with only a capacity of about one quarter (objectively). Like most of the UK masks are required indoors except when eating & drinking. As the cinema is a mix, you can walk around with no mask but its discouraged.

I personally wore my mask on both days I visited the cinema, all the time on day one and all the time except when eating icecream during the adverts and trailers. I certainly wasn’t the only one, as most people I could see before the lights went down were wearing masks in the cinema.

I choose the first showings of the day to insure the cinema would be very cleaned and setup for the next day. Having worked in cinemas in the past I know how little time you get to clean in between showings. I assume the times would change to allow more cleaning time now, but it seems to be another 10mins on top of the usual 20mins. Maybe there might be more staff cleaning now?

Generally I felt quite safe, the IMAX is a massive theatre with a lot of space even if someone gets up in the middle for the toilet (although they needed to go out the back down the stairs and back in from the front again), there is plenty of space to walk in front for a split second. If I was in a smaller cinema I might feel less safe.

On a whole it was good both times and I’ll visit when WW1984 hits the IMAX. By the way, I’m not so keen on the tag line in the UK for Tenet of “Bond on acid”

Tenet and Inception, only separated by 10 years? I doubt it!

I know there is a ton of fan theory’s about the connection between Inception and Tenet.

I’ll be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a link, as its almost exactly 10 years between them both. My thoughts are, there is at low end. The same company could be at play for the sleep sharing device and the “glove” which creates time inversion. On the other end (wild side) of the scale, I do wonder if Cobe’s children from Inception could feature in Tenet?

I will be signing up to watch this in the Manchester IMAX cinema, likely at midnight or a very late showing to avoid as many people as possible. While wearing a mask in the dark.

Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (May 2020)

Silicon Valley TV show

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed by celebrity culture on lockdown or looking at the sorry state of instagram during lockdown.

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

You are seeing aspects of this happening in litmus test of thoughts from 45 non-journalist students from 17 nationalities students about the post-covid19 mediascape.


China’s plans to fundamentally change the internet stack from the bottom

Ian thinks: China’s attempt to change IP by going to the ITU is substantial and quite terrifying even in the face of the misinformation warfare. For anyone creating devices/services/apps for the Chinese market, its a real wake up call.

The secret market for your web browsing data

Ian thinks: These secret markets/ecosystem for personal data has been revealed over and over again. But this reveal is based purely on our web browsing data but is no less scary

How much is data worth?

Ian thinks: The discussion about the price of data pops its head up again. Its a difficult question but its worth something to someone.

But I have nothing to hide? Really?

Ian thinks: Really good video summary you can share with friends and family, for those who “have nothing to hide…”

Sorry was that, EST, BST, GMT, CET or just UTC?

Ian thinks: A good balanced look at what would happen if we all switched to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time. Makes some very good points on both sides. Tom Scott, adds his views from a programming point of view.

Snowdon on the privacy woes of Covid-19

Ian thinks: Vice interviews Edward Snowdon about how the different governments are taking advantage of our fear around Covid-19

Lilian Edwards proposal for Contact tracing

Ian thinks: Lilian is very creditable and while everybody is concerned and focused on contact tracing technology. Shes approached it from the equally important angle of policy.

Abolish Silicon Valley and rethink our future

Ian thinks: I haven’t read Wendy Li’s book yet but she makes some good if a bit over optimistic in points. But shes got the scars to back up every point.

Time to talk seriously about Universal basic income?

Ian thinks: Good to see a view outside the silicon reality distortion valley. Discussions for the post Covid-19 future lean heavily on Universal basic income.

Always been meaning to read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism?

Ian thinks: The dutch broadcaster VPRO kindly posted their documentary with Shoshana Zuboff online for all the people who didn’t make it through the 500+ pages of her book. Not deep enough try the 2hr lecture.

The time traveling web

memento

I read about W3C’s project Memento a while ago but its become a reality recently.

The Memento protocol is a straightforward extension of HTTP that adds a time dimension to the Web. It supports integrating live web resources, resources in versioning systems, and archived resources in web archives into an interoperable, distributed, machine-accessible versioning system for the entire web. W3C finds Memento work with online reversion history extremely useful for the Web in general and practical application on its own standards to be able to illustrate how they evolve over time

Its smart, simple and great because it works on top of http, instead of creating a whole different way of doing the same thing.

I can already imagine memento powered twitter service or memento powered BBC redux service.

Take back your lunches

lunch

How long do you take for lunch?

Personally, I take a full hour…

I consciously take my full hour or sometimes a little more, to balance the amount of time I sometimes work (I quantify my work time with hamster time tracker, so know how much time I have worked)

I very rarely eat at my desk, although many of my colleagues do it regularly. To be fair I have mentioned eating at the kitchen table (we have communal kitchen tables on each floor) but they always blame meetings or not enough time.

Take Back Your Lunch. In the best of worlds, that’s something we all ought to do every day. At the very least, I want to urge you to take back your lunch on Wednesday, and then on every Wednesday this summer, wherever you are. To find out where people will be gathering – or if you’d like to organize a Take Back Your Lunch Meetup in your city or town

Sounds good to me, reminds me of some of the early breakfast meetups there use to be in London.

When not to pay as you go…

IMG_20141124_192425

Ziferblat opens on Edge Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, I guess its so new that its not even on the website it seems.

I’ve heard of ziferblat from London. To be honest I’m not big fan of pay as you go services, especially when it comes to things I treat like leisure time.

So why am I not so keen?

I like to relax, I find the idea of paying for time to access a space or time a little upsetting and stressful. Life is busy enough, why put a clock against the time you want to enjoy and remember?

Having a time limit induces a state (trance) which is not consistent with relaxing and pleasure. The kind of things we associate with leisure or social time. How many times have you booked a restaurant and they have given you a set time and you thought that’s fine? To be honest the only places which I know does this and gets away with it is the all you can eat buffet places! 2hrs to stuff you’re face and then walk/roll out. Do you ever feel happy once you come out of these places? I doubt it!

How very apt to compare the all you can eat buffet places to the pay as you go model. I’m not saying ziferblat is necessary a all you can eat buffet, but I would say it could encourage overindulgence and  selfishness.

I mean you are paying by the minute, so better make sure you get what you need. Screw everybody else, where’s my coffee? What I have to wait for the toilet, don’t they know who I am?

Some things take time and time is there to be enjoyed… Some of you will say, ian’s gone off the deep end but I’ll leave you with a quote…

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
Steve Jobs

Poor Si Lumb almost got it in the neck from me… Little reminder about Phoneshop’s view on Pay as you Go!

https://twitter.com/king_puddin/status/165967429850243072

Gradually and then suddenly

Love this piece from seth godin on the way we look at the present. Found via martin rue

Gradually, because every day opportunities are missed, little bits of value are lost, customers become unentranced. We don’t notice so much, because hey, there’s a profit. Profit covers many sins. Of course, one day, once the foundation is rotted and the support is gone, so is the profit. Suddenly, apparently quite suddenly, it all falls apart.

It didn’t happen suddenly, you just noticed it suddenly.

The flipside works the same way. Trust is earned, value is delivered, concepts are learned. Day by day we improve and build an asset, but none of it seems to be paying off. Until one day, quite suddenly, we become the ten-year overnight success.

This is the way it works, but we too often make the mistake of focusing on the ‘suddenly’ part. The media writes about suddenly, we notice suddenly, we talk about suddenly.

Gradually and suddenly, all part of the present. But as Seth points out only suddenly gets the attention.

If I could get a pound for every time someone says to me, so what do we get out of it? They want a sudden effect not a gradual effect. Long lasting things take time.

Today we had a meeting with some lovely women from Abandon Normal Devices. They were recommended to us by someone I had met when I met a more formal meeting with guy who had come to the Quantified Self Manchester group (next meet-up is tomorrow by the way). Ok thats pretty crazy to follow but the point is, its a gradual thing which unfolds, grows and morphs into something special. Gradually and then Suddenly…

About time, chick-flick with a big message

About Time

I watched About time which is self described as being from the creator of Love Actually, Notting Hill and Four weddings and a Funeral.

The tagline is: A new funny film about love. With a bit of time travel. And you know what kind of a sucker I am for Time Travel, but I wasn’t convinced till I read a brief review.

There must be a reason for its 7.8 imdb rating. Well this sums it up

The main reason I’m writing this review is due to the fact that most of the negative reviewers on IMDb seem to have missed the point of this film entirely. I’m not going to go into much detail as I think the film speaks for itself (and I hate it when people put spoilers in their reviews).

It’s not a romantic comedy as most would have you believe. It’s a comedy/drama that revolves around the relationship between a father and son. The romantic themes are just a small part of this great film.

Once you stop thinking of it as a rom-com you will see the brilliance of it all. It’s not the greatest film of all time, it’s not the prettiest, the funniest or the best written.

What it is is a heartfelt tale of a father/son relationship. The time travel elements are just a plot device, the romance, just a plot device. It’s laugh out loud funny in spots and tear-jerking in others. It’s well written, but still light and breezy when it needs to be.

Look past the surface of this film and feel the emotion that these fine actors bring to the screen. Let go and just enjoy it for what it is.

And that person was right. The time traveling part was interesting but then a certain thing happens and your questioning what you would do. But the things which are really noteworthy for me is the message about life and the relationship with his father in the later parts of the film.

There’s a couple great quotes in the film and here’s one near the end…

Tim: We’re all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.