July 2004 Archives
July 19, 2004
Dyson's networking needs
Esther Dyson must be the most demanding networker on the planet. It turns out she favours LinkedIn for her day-to-day people wrangling. She has some pretty specific requirements for her networking software. You probably wouldn't go too far wrong copying and pasting them into your own requirements statement if you're building yourself a networking app right now.
Through the looking glass
When I was a kid I used to lie in bed at night with my crappy Sanyo radio and roam the shortwave bands. I loved those voices from distant places. My favourite was Radio Tirana. On the nightly English-language news a male/female duo with the plummiest RP delivery imaginable (accents presumably acquired at Oxbridge and barely inflected by their utterly unknowable lives in the most isolated nation on earth) read the latest tractor production figures.
The other-worldliness of Hoxha-era Albania was intoxicating for a curious fourteen year-old. I wrote to the address provided. My dad was sure my letter would never get there. As a stamp collector (and former postman) he knew that, in the 1970s, Albania was the only nation on earth not to have signed the various International treaties on the exchange of mail. He was wrong. Not only did my letter get to Tirana (I remember the address: Radio Tirana, Albania) but I got a gorgeous reply in a massive dun envelope of such crude construction it had practically dissolved in transit. I wish I could remember what was in it...
I do remember that the Albanians didn't actually bother to print stamps at the time so I got a brilliant, smudged rubber stamp mark instead – even better. Kept it for years. Anyway, that's really a very roundabout way of saying that I got a similar tingle of mystery and general oddness from my visit to what is, according to Slashdot, North Korea's first official web site.
By the way, I think you should really take the trouble to sign up for the site (although I can't be sure what the privacy/security implications of getting an official North Korean webmail address are). Once registered you'll get access to a lot of North Korean music by artists like The Korean People's Army Merited State Chorus and The Wangjaesan Light Music Band and also some streaming movies. You'll be invited to provide your profession (just select 'worker') and choose from a list of password reminder questions that includes: 'how will Korea change after reunification?'
(And here's a lovely gallery of old transistor radios – not my Sanyo, though...).
July 17, 2004
Two kinds of business insight
Here's a really fascinating peek inside the Movable Type machine from Mena Trott. Like a lot of inventors, she's giving up the CEO role in favour of a more experienced operator. People usually keep schtum about this kind of thing... While I'm posting business stuff, a terrific piece from Business Week about the decline of Sun and Scott McNealy's heroic mistakes. Incidentally, these two pieces are a good illustration of the difference between blogging (high concept) and journalism (high production values). Trott's blog entry is an immensely valuable insight into her business and the way business is done now – from her own, properly subjective, perspective. The Business Week piece is a big budget production – written by a team. Forty Sun executives, past and present, were interviewed for the story. No blogger will ever be able to throw that kind of resource at a story. A recipe for coexistence, if you ask me...
July 15, 2004
Graf Schmaf
Ivan reckons I should have written something about the Graf Report. Of course he's right – I'll get around to it – but, in the meantime, here's a useful statistical analysis of the report from Azeem.
July 14, 2004
Azeem Azhar on IP
Azeem wrote an excellent review of two new books about intellectual property – one from the sainted Larry Lessig and one from William Fisher – a more level-headed Harvard law professor. I missed the review because Azeem hid it away in the weird Libertarian-Trotskyist thicket they call Spiked. Definitely worth a read.
Good links...
Ivan alerts me to this genuinely amazing web site (with real historic value). Jonathan at Things to this lovely linklog (apparently run by estate agents), David Galbraith to this niche weblog (with a staggering PageRank of 9) and Robin Kearney to this excellent Mac weblog (quite geeky).
Got Bokeh?
I sold a lens on eBay the other day and my buyer wrote to tell me he'd seen the pics on my weblog and that I have 'great Bokeh'. So now I can confirm that Bokeh is not a Japanese sexual practice but the word photographers use for those blurred discs you see in the out-of-focus areas of photographs. Fascinating. Ken Rockwell has a pretty good explanation. Mike Johnston says he's the man who added the 'h' to the end of the English transliteration and has some good examples. Some test images here are really quite lovely in their own right and here's a technical explanation from Harold M. Merklinger.
July 13, 2004
A car for cartoon villains
I can't tell you how much it cheers me up to learn that the number 2 result for 'hummer h2' at Google is a marvelous bit of brand mischief called Fuck You and Your H2. So far, 845 people have taken the trouble to give the finger to a Hummer, take a photograph and upload it to FUH2. How's that for engagement with the brand? It's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the H2 is the world's stupidest car: 3,500 kilos of bog standard 4x4 wrapped in a brutalist pseudo-military suburban assault vehicle skin that resembles the original Hummer, as popularised by macho celebrities after the first Gulf War.
There's one round the corner from our house – black with black glass, natch – sporting a set of bling bling chrome wheel rims that keep spinning even after you've stopped the car – perhaps the most childish aftermarket car accessory in history – "Look! My wheels keep spinning even after I've stopped! It looks like I'm driving along really fast even when I'm at a red light!"
Anyway, the H2 must surely represent the high water mark for the 4X4. Although it's been a big hit and is already spawning clones from half a dozen manufacturers (and they're assembling the damn things in Russia now), sales of the three-and-a-half tonne school run device are down by a quarter since the invasion of Iraq.
The H2 and its ilk are the contemporary equivalent of the muscle cars of the early seventies – killed off by that other oil crisis – only with less charm. Steve McQueen could drive a Mustang in Bullitt and Warren Oates a GTO in Two Lane Blacktop but only a cartoon villain (Emissions Man?) would drive a Hummer. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a lot to answer for.
July 09, 2004
MP3 thoughts
The esteemed Phil Gyford just digitised a decade-and-a-half of radio recordings from audio cassette. That sounds like a public service to me – if he now feels able to feed that lot into a respectable P2P network I think he'll have markedly enriched the public domain and will surely one day get an MBE (Phil's advancement can't be far off now). Anyway, Phil's effort reminded me that I've always thought it would be a pretty neat business idea to buy a little van, paint it with a groovy logo and run around collecting people's vinyl record collections, digitising and returning them on nice firewire hard drives. The neat thing about this is that (copyright permitting – not a trivial matter), you'd be able to build a big 'stock' of digitised tunes as you encoded people's collections. Ultimately, you'd hardly need to actually encode anything – you'd just pull the track from stock. Anyone got a van?
July 06, 2004
Why don't more cars look like this?
Saw the two Nissan Figaros in the top pic on a forecourt round the corner – someone's obviously developing a specialism. Why, meanwhile, in the ocean of car choice, is there so little real variation? The design vocabulary of cars is so restricted and advances so slowly. What are the keywords on the mood boards at the car designers these days: sexy, aggressive, practical, safe, sporty, flexible, successful, family, active, fun? Other designed goods have a much wider vocabulary – what's wrong with: 'eccentric, cheeky, brassy, edgy, funny, baroque, playful, green, chintzy, daft, alternative'? Why are clever cars like the 1991 Figaro stuck in a sort of experimental ghetto? Are we so inflexible, so blinded by decades of auto engineering convention that we can't imagine ourselves in something new?
Ivan points out that what we actually like about cars might be different from what we tell the manufacturers in those focus groups – for instance, in the latest brilliant Peugeot 407 ad, the car I really want is the oversize wooden baby toy and not the very dull 407 itself.
July 05, 2004
Reading
Aidan Rankin's gripping piece from The New Statesman about his experiment with being right-wing. He joined UKIP and spent a couple of years working on policy and campaigns until the nastiness overcame him. Thankfully, the experience worked like an inoculation and Rankin is now back on the left (or, at least, somewhere in the middle). Lovely review of a scientific critique of the Rorschach test from the NYRB.
British, amateurish, brilliant...
Thank you to the eight staff (I counted them) of the marvelous Circus Ricardo who entertained us Saturday afternoon. An almost perfect treat – artless, funny, very British – the polar opposite of hyper-finished, totally slick (and equally wonderful) Shrek 2.
Those eight staff, of course, did everything, so we bought our candy floss from the tight-rope walker and watched the juggler pick up litter afterwards. Click the small pics for bigger ones.
$75M well spent
We saw our first blockbuster of the Summer this weekend – Shrek 2. A complete, delirious pleasure. What impresses me most about great Hollywood output like this is not so much the specific expression (which is very good) as the sheer ambition, the quite awesome unwillingness to compromise, to leave anything half done. Americans – when making movies, especially – really care. There's not a slack moment, not the tiniest slip in the commitment to creating a giant, unarguable aesthetic unity. You might not like the final product – you might even hate its obsessive and arch re-use of movie and TV history – but you can't argue with its life force.
• There's something depressing about the way British stars pack the cast list: in a huge creative enterprise like this, we're reduced to talent – support staff. We're constitutionally incapable of making anything so grand, so monumental. We apparently can't do epic – only cheeky, ironic, eccentric, cute (sometimes ugly, often amateurish). Once in a while I'd like to see us produce something really grand.
• Shrek 2's audience is pretty well-defined – in our 9:45 Sunday morning screening (only bleary-eyed parents and small children permitted) we saw four ads for identikit small MPVs (those 'flexible' slab-sided multi-seat mini-buses for young families): Toyota, Renault, Peugeot and... er... Mazda? All silver, by the way. Must be this season's colour...
July 02, 2004
Tivo for experiences
Finally, a gadget that allows you to rewind life. A tiny video camera (the manufacturers expect you to clip it to your glasses – but if you got used to that Bluetooth headset this should be easy enough) that records continuously and retains a 30-second buffer. Pressing record writes the last 30 seconds to disk – in principle, you need never miss anything again. In practice, of course, you'll find yourself needing a larger and larger buffer. I think I'd need about thirty-five years...
The wholesale Tivo-isation of life is under way. There'll soon be no need to actually experience anything – you can just wait til you get home and replay the whole thing on the big screen in your living room. Once we're all time-shifting life, the disconcerting feeling that your companion is experiencing things a couple of minutes behind you (because they put life on pause while they went for a smoke) will become commonplace...
July 01, 2004
Getting on the net at Foyle's
I'd like to be able to say that I'm a fan of Foyle's O'Reilly-sponsored free wi-fi hotspot – what with the nice organic food, reasonable coffee and jazz music etc. but I can't, really, because on the three occasions I've been there over the last week or two I haven't been able to get it to work. The otherwise helpful staff are reduced to shrugs and apologies and the shop's network admin doesn't want to know (understandably, I guess – she has real users to support). If you have an angle on how to get my Powerbook (Airport Extreme, X.3.4) online at Foyle's, do drop me a line. Then perhaps I'll provide the glowing testimonial I'd like to...