June 2004 Archives
June 30, 2004
More camphone pics
More pics from one of my regular traverses of the West End, including one of the many electric cars popping up all over the congestion charging zone and a Portuguese snack... Click here for a few more.
June 26, 2004
Red button finally delivers...
Every now and then I press the red button on the remote – usually to be greeted by some kind of error or a 'nothing here yet' message (of course, this might have been different if we'd chosen Sky and not NTL). Tonight I pressed the red button and got live, full-screen coverage of Glastonbury, including a fine, rattling and clattering version of practically my favourite song in the whole world – The Velvet Underground's What Goes On – from a man called Tim Booth whose principle charm for me was that he looks like he might be about my age (only a bit thinner, obviously)... Apparently he used to be in James (it says here...)
Domestic disorder
Everyone has their favourite button on the microwave. Here's mine.
Making things in a deflationary climate
The economics of making things is all over the place these days. I guess I understand how Argos can sell this really handsome steel barbecue for £9.99 (that's how much it costs if you visit a store) or John Lewis this beautiful six colour photo printer for £49.95 (likewise, it seems to be cheaper in-store than on the web site) or Dell this amazingly good PC for £369.00 (including delivery) but what I don't get is what happens once the margins have been driven out of the system entirely.
Presumably someone in Argos' supply chain is actually making some money on those barbecues but this continuous downward pressure on prices must mean that, in the end, once all the profit has been flushed out and passed back to the customer (this is a good time to be a customer), no one makes any money at all... Then what?
Links: The Economist and Paul Krugman, famously, on deflation and how to prevent it. Tesco saw deflation in non-food products in the last quarter. So did Japan (again).
June 25, 2004
Rembrandt?
Sometimes the crappy little pictures from my Camphone are really gorgeous – like this little Rembrandt from Blacks yesterday (and a few others from the phone).
June 23, 2004
Badges? Badgers?
I bought a big bag of 1970s and 80s badges from eBay (click the little pics for bigger ones). "I vote for I.I.C.C. Shooting Stars of Ibadan"?
Simpson of Piccadilly
Dropped into the lovely Simpson of Piccadilly yesterday – now no longer a classy clothing department store but a giant Waterstones book shop. When I got my first proper job I used to get my shirts there (I seem to remember you could buy a shirt from them and they'd repair the collar for you every time it wore out for nothing – can that possibly be true?). The shop was built especially for Simpson (home of the Daks brand – ready-to-wear innovators at a time when men still had their suits made for them) in 1936 and Waterstones have retained most of the important detail (I suppose they had no choice) – including the tiny lifts, the handsome curving handrails in the six storey stairwell and the genuinely beautiful curved glass windows on the Piccadilly side.
That other retail shrine in Tottenham Court Road – Heal's (also a Victorian design pioneer) – had similar windows but I guess they're a dreadful waste of retail space and now they're gone. I'm certain removing them was a false economy since they do beautiful things for the stock on display – canceling glare entirely even on a sunny day. Simpson was an innovator in its time – pioneering mass produced style and industrial-era marketing techniques – so I guess it's appropriate that modern innovators Waterstones should be there now.
(Click the small pics for bigger ones).
June 21, 2004
Go Walter!
Listen. I know I can't vote there (what with being British and living in Hertfordshire and all that) and I know I should probably worry more about the British political scene (which is coming along nicely isn't it?) but I can't help it. American electoral politics is going to be so entertaining between now and the Presidential election and the choice of candidates so unappetising (and my mother-in-law found some 1980s US election posters in her loft) so... I'm taking this opportunity to come out for Walter Mondale. He's my man.
June 17, 2004
Pauperism: 339. Anatomy: 611. Butter: 637. Dancing: 793. Greenland: 998. Mortality: 312
A long time ago, I worked in a library and one of the joys of the job was the Dewey Decimal classification system – a Victorian wonder of such arbitrary beauty that it often left me speechless in awe of Mr Dewey's simple ambition: to assign all of human knowledge (with some room for growth) a numeric classification. David Galbraith is obviously also a fan (but I can't tell where he stands on the religious wars of Dewey vs. Library of Congress). I also find myself wondering what happened to an effort I remember (from eight or nine years ago?) to classify the web using Dewey – Wakefulness: 135; Turkish baths: 613; Swedenborgians: 289; Shrubbery: 716; Embalming: 390; Locks and Keys: 683...
June 15, 2004
Good radio
A couple of outstanding BBC Radio programmes – Lionel Kellaway's really thought-provoking Nature on the ecological value of so-called 'brownfield' land and the risks to the well-being of City dwellers of building over it (click here to listen to the show). Providing the five million or more new homes we need over the next twenty years is going to be more complicated than we thought. Magdi Abdelhadi's gorgeous half-hour about reciting the koran (don't think you can listen to this one online, though. How frustrating and wasteful for such important programming to disappear as soon as it's been broadcast).
Social software in the real world?
I'm sort of interested in social software and I've signed up for every networking site since MIT's Firefly and Sixdegrees but I've always thought that it's all a bit academic until we start to see some second-order networking applications – sites whose primary function isn't just... well... networking... but something else, something more specific – like losing weight, for instance, or unloading the contents of your attic on eBay.
David Galbraith alerts me to a really quite nifty new chat application that he's been helping out with called Chatango and David MaCaney, CEO of Dublin-based Cafeslim, is connecting his customers – the slimmers – to help them get more from his weight loss programme. Chatango does IM-style presence detection without a download and that means your chat identity can be an ordinary http URL which – this is the neat bit – means you can paste it into your eBay or Craigslist listings and invite people to 'click to chat'. I've signed up for Chatango (but not for Cafeslim – which is probably the wrong way round) so you can now chat with me (provided I'm online) by clicking here: http://bowbrick.chatango.com.
June 14, 2004
Cafe fame
The lovely New Piccadilly cafe in Denman St, W1, beloved of students, tourists and formica fanatics alike (and, of course, Russell "Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans" Davies), makes it into the sidebar of a piece about Gordon Ramsay's favourite greasy spoon in The Observer. Russell and I met there only last week – me: steak, chips and peas; Russell: egg, bacon, chips and beans. Outstanding.
The wisdom of the EPG
Admirable prescience from someone at Tivo about last night's England France game.
June 13, 2004
So sue me...
Listen, I'm a parent. I'm going to do this from time to time: three pics of my beautiful children.
June 12, 2004
Going to the zoo...
Yesterday I cold-called London Zoo about their online marketing. We love the zoo round here – we have an annual pass – best private club in town, if you ask me – and I think these guys could really make good use of some decent online marketing. I can't think of a better way of promoting annual memberships and animal adoptions than with some clever digital work aimed at broadband families in the South East (and the super-glamorous Komodo dragons are arriving this summer so there's your hook). Anyway, Natalie in the PR department told me there was no point calling because the Elephants handle marketing these days and they've been relocated to Whipsnade so they're really really grumpy...
By the way, we'll be hanging out with the creatures this Friday evening at London Zoo's open evening, which looks like a lot of fun...
June 11, 2004
Middle management anarchists
Notcon was, of course, splendid. I didn't see enough of it to provide much of an overview (so you might want to read these guys: Wired News, David Brake, himself, Will Davies) but I so enjoyed the two presentations in my own session (the.. erm... 'business' strand) that I wanted to link to them for you. Tom Dolan's 'Shit I'm a Manager' was a handy primer for new managers but it was engaging principally because Tom has obviously really enjoyed learning about managing people and projects. I think he's probably an excellent and inspiring manager. Pete Windle's highly sarcastic 'Mediocraties of Scale' ran to about four minutes but his idea – we need to industrialise software production sharpish – was clever and almost certainly correct (Oops. Pete's presentation doesn't seem to be online).
June 10, 2004
Vine again
We got to Stella Vine's opening at Transition early enough to meet the artist properly and to see all the work before the celebs showed up. Brilliant. I took some polaroids. Jules wrote about it and edited some of my other photos into a 3-minute movie – Quicktime: 640x480 (11.3MB), 320x240 (8.4MB), 240x180 (4.1MB).
June 09, 2004
Stella Vine at Transition
This evening we're going here to see this and we are very excited (we don't get out much) – and last night we watched this video from French telly (or is it Swiss telly?) too.
June 08, 2004
Will the geeks break our democracy?
Geeks are purists. Or at least, most of them are. Pragmatism is tolerated but deprecated. (of course, some people think geeks are autistic but that's another story). Purists (and autistics) find much of the business of being human far too messy and random. This manifests itself in a generalised impatience with the inefficiencies and inequities of human societies, systems and institutions. Democracy is one of the geeks' big irritants. It's obviously a mess. No one would design a system like this – all friction and compromise. Nothing elegant about it. The geeks, consequently, would like to reengineer democracy to better reflect their worldview. To flush out the inefficiencies and replace them with shiny, end-to-end, 'open' methods for translating public opinion directly into legislation and for monitoring the process (keeping the legislators honest).
The latest in a string of very worthy geek interventions is called They Work For You, from the people who brought you FaxYourMP, Public Whip and Downing Street Says. TWFY does a simple thing beautifully. It turns Hansard – parliament's venerable contemporaneous record – into an accessible, searchable record of your representative's appearances in the Commons. Of course, it does a lot more than that, including allowing you to correct your MP's more egregious errors right there in the text, counting votes and marking interesting and important debates so they stand out from the rest.
So far so admirable. Surely no one would argue with making the work of legislators more accessible? I don't know. I find myself wondering whether the democratic institutions we rely on are robust enough to withstand the fire hose of transparency and accountability the democracy hackers are getting ready to turn on it. What the hackers are planning here (and with earlier initiatives) is a 'revolution from within' that could, whether they like it or not, rip up the democratic cobblestones to reveal an unknown and unknowable hyperdemocratic future below. I'm pretty sure that I'm just being neurotic here – more democracy must always be a good thing, right? But what if the system currently has just enough accountability in it to keep it moving. What if more accountability actually slowed it down, gummed it up. Turned it into a machine for producing accountability and not laws? What if the apparently entirely benign hacker plot to tidy up democracy for the common good turned out to be less Socratic dream and more nasty sci-fi fantasy (cue replicants).
June 07, 2004
Right you lot
According to my web site stats, at least 60% of you are viewing this site in one or other version of IE on a PC (85% if you add all those 'unknowns'). Take a look at the picture above (click for a bigger one). If Bowblog doesn't look like the screenshot (i.e. three columns, nicely centred on the page), please let me know and (here's your big test) if you know why it doesn't look right, please tell me. I can't figure it out but assume it's something to do with my stylesheet... There will be a lavish reward.
June 06, 2004
Sterling's green links
Bruce Sterling has this fantastically useful list of green (and green-ish) resources at Wired Blogs. Did he dig these links out for himself?
June 04, 2004
World's oldest company?
I sat down today to write 300 words for a special New Media Age to mark ten years of 'new media' in Britain and I thought I'd just get some perspective and see if I could find out how old a business can really get. Anyway, in Japan, I learn, there's a family-owned building firm that's 1400 years old. They completed their first job in 598 – or at least they will do as soon as they can get a skip... (of course, this article is a year old so they've probably gone bust by now – which would be pretty funny, really, wouldn't it)
Reading
Things I'd have read before if I hadn't been so busy nodding off in front of Hell's Kitchen. The Economist's encouraging survey of eCommerce from a couple of weeks ago. Another nice piece from The Economist, this one about the imminent transit of Venus. Freeman Dyson on theoretical science and a fascinating review of a book about City rats, both from the NYRB. Simon Schama was booked to entertain passengers on the QM2's maiden voyage, from The New Yorker. Another fascinating O'Reilly book, Spidering Hacks.
Firing myself
This is the kind of thing you find when you're cleaning out your storage unit: my P45 from Webmedia, given to me (by me) when I finally closed the doors in October 1998. The first time I made myself redundant but not the last...