Across Weirdish Wild Space

From JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame, speaking at this year’s Harvard commencement speech about working at Amnesty International :

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

It’s an excellent address in total to be honest, dwelling on the value of failure and imagination and well worth the time to read or watch.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Songbird just popped out a 1.0 release candidate, a huge jump from the 0.7 release they’ve had on the site. Lotta talent behind this mozilla-based music player including some of the master crew behind the llama-ass-kicking winamp.

I’ve never been that big a fan of iTunes. I’ve always considered it a necessary evil because of needing podcasts seamlessly (downloading via rss in NetNewswire and related is never as smooth and integration with my iPod (particularly automatic syncing of podcasts), but fact of the matter is it’s at best a mediocre music player, lacks customization, and I really, really dislike the way everything gets pumped through the iTunes music store. Sure Apple has to monetize those song sales, but really. I never buy from them and after a while it annoys me.

On Linux, there’s been some interesting things going on, but really what I want out of my player is something that’s going to just simply play my music, help me enjoy it more, manage my podcasts and iPod, and probably most importantly, help me discover or find out about other music I might like.

Strangely, because I’d seen previous versions of Songbird, and while I’d liked it better than Amarok (which i think has a schizoid interface), I thought it was a little simplistic as a drop-in replacement.

I have to say though, I’ve just downloaded the 1.0 release candidate and it is really quite impressive. First and foremost the last.fm integration and music recommendation engine is actually well thought out, works well in the interface and is unobtrusive and fast. I learned new things about bands I’ve had in my library for years just tonight. Surprisingly, since I don’t go to many concerts, (mostly because I never find out about them in time), I really like the concert feature which lets me know when bands in my library may be having concerts near me in London (I’d love it if it alerted me when certain bands I’ve flagged are playing in London until I turned off an alert since usually my problem is never being able to know about tickets before they’re sold out), and really loving the lyrics feature which has already let me know how wrong I’ve been singing along to some songs I’ve had for years to.

To be honest, it could easily replace my iTunes on my desktop, though now I have to find a way to get the equivalent functionality I have in SizzlingKeys (or that I could get with QuickSilver, I’d love that too) so I can keyboard command the thing without moving off the keyboard. There really needs to be a OS integrated way to deal with manipulating at least the fast play/pause, fast forward/switch/back function from the keyboard and would love it if it had some sort of growl or equivalent integration (correction: just found a couple of growl integration add-ons here but none updated to the 1.0rc yet).

A few bugs I ran into but overall for a release candidate, a pretty damn solid version of the software to look at. Oh, and another nice thing, it manages my iTunes collection from Songbird meaning that I don’t even really have to switch at the moment.

God, I love The Onion. I”m very glad that even their ability to poke fun at those in power hasn’t been dampened by Barack’s election win. Seriously, the one good indication that democracy and freedom are still alive and well in any country are people poking fun at politicos with impunity.

And in other political parody awesomeness…

• Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress
• Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

Well, much like the rest of the jubilant free world, it’s hard not to look at Obama’s landslide election in the United States and hope that, well… finally they’ve come to their senses. It’s been a hard eight years, and I don’t think anyone would argue that things have gotten amazingly worse than they were under the tender ministrations of the Bush years.

Also, the historic precedent of the 44th president can’t be denied and hopefully will reverse some long-standing horribleness about racism and the politics of exclusion in the States.

Anyhow, the poor guy has a hell of a job ahead of him and a whack of messes and crises to deal with. Let’s hope he can live up to the potential and promises of his campaign and the speech he made in front of the Tiergarten in Germany.

As I write this, Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri are still processing votes with it looking like Obama will take two more of those states, but currently,

• Electoral College votes : Obama 251 – McCain 171
• Senate : Dems 56 – Reps 40 (4 remain)

Let’s hope the next four can do something about the last eight.

Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama ran so our children could fly.
- interwiewee on NPR Radio

Seriously, 28 Oct and the snow is coming down in huge, big fluffy flakes and sticking to everything. It’s actually very beautiful but I can’t believe it’s snowing this early already.

Wow… I am seriously jonezing for some snowboarding now though. Anyone got any ski trips planned yet ?

I’m pondering whether I could pull off National Novel Writing Month this year and pen a novel in the month of November as the nights get longer and the days colder.

50k words by the end of the month ? That does seem a little daunting. Say 2000 words a day over 25 days ?

Ok, maybe it wouldn’t be a good novel, but…

Any great suggestions anyone ?...

One of the things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org. Consistently, these guys are just amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.

This viral replaces a simple first and last name of someone you send it to in the actual text shown in various places in the flash video making it seem like McCain won by one vote because of their not voting.

Absolutely brilliant. Can’t believe this would be too hard to do either.

OK, admittedly, as much as I really loathed the “Wassup” commercials when they were on television (and think Bud is a terrible beer), this parody is absolutely fantastic :

If you are unfamiliar with them, the original is here too :

(via BoingBoing.)

OK, as more than casual readers know, I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffet. Not only do I try and invest like him, but I think he’s very sharp beyond being just an astute and wiley investor. Great, but very long interview with him here on the Warren Buffett CNBC Interview:

”... you only find out who’s
been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach.”

(via clusterstock.)

Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.

We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.

Interestingly, we have noticed as well, the difficulty in prioritizing at the story level rather than epic or theme level so I thought this was a pretty nice presentation.

Really liked the idea of Kano analysis as an additional screen on the product backlog : exciters/delighters, and mandatory/baseline. Particularly the idea of driving that via a simple survey of just a few tens of users – a functional questioning asking how people feel if it’s present and a dysfunctional question asking how people feel if it’s absent.

Bit long, but definitely worth your time if you’re using doing agile development and working with a product backlog (doubly so if your backlog is more of an attic that never gets looked at). Weird little thing, note the slides appear below the video of Mike doing the hand waving and talking which makes full screen not so useful on it. You’ll miss important stuff… so maybe move the browser down 1/8 of the screen before starting the presentation.

(via someone, but I don’t remember who… =< )

I was surprised to see this posted on the 37Signals blog today as I was combing through my feeds. I used to live on English Beach in Vancouver and this guy would be balancing rocks as you see in the video all the time. It is truly astonishing to see, and more so late at night when there is no one around and the tide has come in and there are all these isolated anthropomorphic figures separated on little rock islands by the tide. I don’t think the video does it justice, but considering this was literally right outside my door when I lived on Beach Ave, figured it needed a post.

Plus, really getting tired of England the past week and missing Vancouver and Canada and living next to the sea and friends far away (and really tired of absurd internal politics at work). Nice reminder of how beautiful the city is. Do kind of imagine I’ll be living back there someday…

OK, one final picture from my flickr just to rub it in…

(via Signal vs. Noise.)

Admittedly I have an unhealthy obsession with my mac notebooks.

They are not only slight fetish objects, but my office, the centre of my digital and online life and basically some of the best designed objects I’ve ever owned.

For some reason, it seems almost just that a company so fanatical about design has made its next big leap, not through building, but sculpting its product. Very impressive. And also, I am very very happy they are now environmentally friendly (Congratulations Ze !! You won ! Can you start talking to me again now if I buy a new one ?... =] )

Now the real big question is whether I get the Macbook Air in early November now it’s addressed my concerns (graphics and SSD storage space up to 128GB) or grab one of the new macbooks.

Also, the keynote was fascinating to watch in terms of the drivers of what’s made them successful and their momentum.

I’m also stunned they’ve managed to give their customers more of what they want and make it cheaper. Barring serious issues coming to light with the new products I can’t see why you would want to buy another laptop (even with how nice the Lenovo 301 is).

Meant to post this a while back from an email that went round at work.

Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.

Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

(thanks to Anu K. for the link)

Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital has a fabulous presentation to scare the bejesus out of their startups on what the current financial crisis means for their fledglings.

While I don’t agree with all of it, it’s got some excellent economic analysis in it of the real reasons there is a very real and serious problem at the moment and why it’s going to be hard for new companies to borrow and in general why we’ve all had perverse economic incentives to take on debt rather than save (I notice it missed deregulation in there, but hey, no one’s perfect).

It’s good and explains some very complex issues reasonably simply (hey, you didn’t want someone with an economics background like me presenting it, trust me) and if it doesn’t make some startups batten down the hatches, start cutting expenses and try to eek it out for a while, I don’t know what will.

Their bottom line : It’s not a normal downturn and recovery will take quite a while. I love the slide, Get Real or Go Home as a conclusion.

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I’m not sure I really believe Sequoia really thinks things are this bad, but having the presentation out there probably has put the fear of God into some startups whose burn rates have been something like it was in the 90’s.

Interestingly, the most inadvertent reaction came from VC watcher TechCrunch who had the Post line “Profit Maximization V. Survival Maximization.” While the article was focusing on the role and blame a lot of VCs have (I believe) incorrectly pinned on VCs for the downturn, I thought the headline was a more basic question that I thought a lot of companies should have been asking themselves a while back. Sure, you need a balance of both, especially if the question of shareholders enters the picture, but the fact is a lot of companies have been, for a while now, confusing profit maximization with survival maximization and a lot of them are probably going to be treated unkindly by the increasingly likely recession coming on.

Long term view, stick with the three rules of why you should be starting a company :

1. You can do something no one else can do
2. You can do something better than anyone else can do (and defend your ability and advantage to do so)
3. You have a particular insight into consumers or businesses you can capitalize on better than anyone else

You’ll notice that these are all based on survival maximization rather than profitability.

I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.

Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages.

And I really especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think…

Love it. Not easy to tell who is responsible but the DNS record whois mentions Pollinate media in Oregon.

Now, if someone came up with something like this for the Canadian elections… =<

via scaryideas.

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

But like everything, new technologies and capabilities mean a bit of learning and some of the things we tried didn’t work exactly as planned, and some initial assumptions about the way the site would be used and our audience didn’t turn out as we expected.

So, the web team and our excellent tech partners, CivicActions have been working hard on making improvements particularly in the areas of layout design, information architecture, usability, landing pages (one thing we found is that the main landing page is not necessarily the only landing page due to google’s near pervasive ability to have people jump to places in the site from search results) and improvements to impact both searchability, cross linking and ultimately SEO to make thing easier for our constituents and the people we are trying to reach to find. There are also a few technical improvements on the end to make things run faster and more reliably.

It’s a big piece of work and a lot of sweat and negotiated has gone into the improvements and carefully thought-out trade-offs.

A big, big hand to the web team and our Civi partners for some great work done and getting it up and out the door.

Contrast the new :

with the original launch :

Would love to hear (constructive) comments back. We’ll be doing a big usability push and working on some persona-based design work in the coming months to carve out the future direction of the site and its focus.

YouTube has just started putting full length versions of vintage television shows such as MacGyver and (oh no !) the original Star Trek online for viewing with their “theatre mode.”

Apparently, though, it doesn’t look like they’re available outside of the US or Canada unless you’re doing a VPN workaround like evil little me. Yes, ssh tunneling to your own servers is the bees’ knees.

It is frightening how big an influence growing up on Star Trek TOS had on me (my Mom was a huge Trekkie). Besides, fundamental ideas about the future being better, stronger faster and ideas about technological progress, good and evil and fundamental rights, was this underlying theme below it all of the idea that one man, can indeed, summon the future. Oh, and oh yeah, that diversity itself is being attracted to green-skinned Orion dancing women… =] And let’s never forget the show was the first ever television show to actually show an interracial kiss (gasp!).

Anyhow, if giving you that link doesn’t waste most of the rest of your otherwise productive afternoon, I don’t know what will.

via Lifehacker

One of the awful things about being an ex-pat way too often is you kinda miss these silly non-holidays (and long weekends) back on the native soil.

Just hope everyone back there in the True North Strong and Free has a excellent Turkey Day and a very good and restful long weekend.

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

via Cool Hunting

So, spent the weekend at Alton Towers grace of a friend who makes a yearly pilgimmage there.

I have to admit I was a little sceptical about a British theme park. As a friend stated back in Canada when I was IMing with them once I got back, “Theme parks seem rather un-English.”

But it was scads of fun.

And besides pondering how much fun it must be to be a roller coaster designer and that a good book scam would be travelling the world and rating all the world’s amusement rides (and getting soaked because of the drizzle, a maniac insisting on a water ride and catching a rather bad cold in time for work on Monday), I have to say that Alton Towers, while small, was absolutely loads of fun. Doubly so if you stay overnight in the hotels. Stay in the Alton not the SplashLandings which is more for kids (but has a waterpark !).

Anyhow, here is my list of rollercoasters tops list :

1. Rita: Queen of Speed
   Just damn fun because of the speed. 100mph in 2.5 seconds off launch. It’s fast… sooo fast…
2. Oblivion
   For sheer holy shit ! value, this had to take it. Literally it’s just a freefall plunge from roughly 200ft up into a dark hole in the ground and pulling about 4Gs but the absolute evil part if they hold the coaster for a few seconds with you dangling over the edge of nothing, before they suddenly drop it. Plus the production value on the slightly orwellian tv screens and commentary as you go up are fantastic
3. Air
   I had never seen a coaster like this, so it was a bit of a first for me. You are strapped in and then tilted up so you are literally doing a Superman around the entire ride. Massively fun with loads of loops, spins and through some engineering marvel, one of the most incredibly smooth rides I’ve ever been on. Way better than Nemesis which is similar in that you dangle your feet.
4. Pinball-Whizzer
   The great thing about this coaster is that the entire car can freely rotate 360 degrees so you are spun about while moving round corners and up and down hills. Fantastically fun and twice as good if you get into the seats facing backwards.

Oh, and a special mention to Hex which takes place inside the semi-restored and absolutely gorgeous castle of Alton Towers (will someone please give them some money to restore this beautiful edifice up to its former glory ?). A ghost story of super high production values with a fabulous little finale that is part ride and a fantastic bit of optical illusion. I have to say I was impressed even though I knew what they were doing.

Hammed it up with loads of posed photos taken on the rides but didn’t think in advance enough to get the oh so important chess playing photo :

Pondering this evening about moving a bunch of services around and generally just making life easier and cheaper for myself online

In particular, after a long time using a few people I’m moving some things around, so there might be a little disruption over the next few days as things get shuffled around.

1. Domain registrar
   I’ve been really unhappy with my current domain registrar lazylizard which I registered way back when in pre-history. Almost every year without fail they forget to renew my registration and disable wakatara for a day or so. So, moving over to godaddy
2. Email and calendaring
   I have been very happy with textdrive for a while, and have no beefs whatsoever with them except for the fact that shared hosting has been a bit limiting so thinking of actually moving the entire wakatara mail infrastructure to either google or build another server for mail and other services. Cost-wise google has it beat hand’s down but need to see if I’ll have as much flexibility as I’ve had in the past controlling my own mail servers. I guess for main mail I can make gmail the main and then set up other mx records for domain servers.
3. Web hosting
   Is looking pretty strong on slicehost. I’ve been using them for a while and am quite happy with them. In particular, having my own virtual server is more what I’m used to and keeps me honest about my skills and what I’m doing. Well, I’ll say that now until the first time I completely hose my server. Just waiting for the slice upgrade to finish off right now and then I can post this I guess.
4. Repository hosting
   I am really loving git and using it all the time and have completely abandoned svn except where I need to use it for work related things. So github is looking very nice actually
5. Backups
   Even though I’m not really liking it that much, am using Mozy (it’s slow !). Might move things over to a simple rsync and amazon S3 but at the moment, it’s hard to beat $5 a month.

Cross your fingers and hold on… ought to be interesting.

I am a little worried about the degree of dependence this is forcing on me on online services, but considering my alternative to this was moving a whole bunch of stuff over to amazon ec2 and S3, it’s probably a sounder choice. Hope Richard Stallman is wrong about that whole cloud computing thing being a trap.

Beat junkies Hifana as two fishermen from a animated music video with stylistic nods to traditional Japanese folklore. Very cool.

Wamono

Money As Debt is a fantastic 45 min or so animated feature on the fundamental changed nature of money, loans and the banking system that disabuses people of the notion that money and especially loans are still tired to underlying value (like, say for instance gold).

The first half on the actual idea of money is debt gives a real insight into how we’re in the middle of our current financial crisis, though the second half goes off into some interesting talk of more sustainable money systems and then sadly goes somewhat into the realm of the weird talking about conspiracy theories and pins things on the idea of a cabal rather than a systemic problem and breakdown.

Basically, though it underlines the idea that banks can create as much money as people can borrow and the entire system of money creation and legal tender is based on the promise of the borrower to pay.

If too many people are unable to pay their promises, the fundamental debt repayment that all this money was created upon and the only real value to money that banks have multiplicatively lent out is cut from under them, which is why the crisis is so scary.

When I was a kid, before i got into power gaming and being a master geek, I used to read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories which were the forerunners of so many computer games and text adventures that were to follow. Ah yes, the path to being a high school social outcast…

And just in time for Halloween, someone has put together The Outbreak, a little video interactive adventure that is a hell of a nod of the head and petite homage to Romero’s ‘78 classic Dawn of the Dead.

Really interesting use of flash video as well. Like the opening screen before the movie loads especially.

Much as Google’s mission to organize all the world’s information gets scarier and scarier, it is without question an interesting beast. It’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto is actually extending well beyond merely being passive to actively trying to do good.

And you have to be impressed with their latest initiative to spend $10M USD on ideas to change the world and fund them. They’ve also got a deceptively simple site for submitting ideas and then getting everyone to vote on which are the best ones. Oh, and very importantly, a nice music video :

I particularly like the criteria they’ve used to define ideas and how they are measuring their merit :

Guidelines

Our goal is to set as few rules as possible. However, we ask that you put your idea into one of the following categories and consider the evaluation criteria below.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

Criteria:

* Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
* Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
* Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
* Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
* Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

And remember, under Pastafarianism, they are near-divine beings and in no way related to the pirates of today.

In fact, the rise in global warming, other catastrophes, and possibly even the Bush administration is directly related to their decline. See evidence below.

I always remember when I was a kid naively thinking Christmas should be this day, but September 21st, the day before the autumnal equinox would work for me as well. Any day we could get people to commit to there being a day of peace, even ceasefires, as long as it was a global gesture would be amazing.

It’s a very nice idea. Peace on earth, everyone…

Almost forgot to mention why I was in Berlin.

I’m here attending RailsConf Europe 08. Some of it’s been incredibly interesting and useful, some of it strange and almost incidental (why is everyone obsessed with performance and JRuby all of a sudden ?).

More details and write up to follow when I’ve got a chance.

Somewhat strangely, considering how much of my undergrad studies focused on the Cold War, I’ve never actually been to Berlin, but am off this week (while someone minds the house) to visit the German capital.

Iconically, I’m staying a stone’s throw away from Checkpoint Charlie on the Alexanderplatz, behind the former Wall, so kinda intrigued to see the city.

Don’t speak any more than a sprinkling of German, but at least my Turkish has been improving rapidly and should come in handy considering where I’m staying.

Sure I’ll be posting some photos and scribblings soon…

One thing I really love about programs that are all over the open source thing is how quickly they can add features. Since pidgin got facebook chat via plugin, I knew it was just a brief wait until Adium had it and was unreasonably happy today when the latest update now supports chatting in Adium with facebook friends.

I know it’s stupid, but with all the firefox tabs I always have open, facebook chat never really worked for me. I’d always be losing chats in the zillions of tabs I had open.

Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjae here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now), who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many.

Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. Inososhi ? LovdByLess ? They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

“The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”
Mark Twain

In a stone-cold coolness coup of epic proportions the Guardian got Medium Lobster from the amazing Fafblog writing one of their political columns this past Thursday . I hope it’s becomes a very, very regular thing…

Favourite quote from the article. (Nearly dmade me spit out my coffee…) :

Mitt Romney

Pros: History of rapid flip-flops will neatly counterbalance McCain’s record of stunning policy reversals to achieve perfect pandering equilibrium; ability to suck opponents into the inky void of his soul should prove useful in veep debate; sweats liquid money.

Cons: Eccentric space-god religion could appear unacceptably bizarre to pious nation of devout 2000-year-old Jewish zombie worshipers.

(nb: if you’re not following the US presidential race and its dramatis personae closely, this probably won’t be that funny… Oh, and before anyone gets the wrong idea… I’m Canadian, not American… For differences, see here. =] )

The Year of the Political Blogger Has Arrived

In more serious news… The New York Times, which missed Loobster doing the Guardian gig, has a fab article on the rise of the political blogger. Excellent reading and definitely pro-am political journalism is becoming a trend to be noted for any activist organization (offer void in countries where written political dissidence is prohibited).

(via Fafblog, BoingBoing, the NYTimes and dem random Canadian beer commercials, eh ? ).

[Actually, I did this last Saturday, it’s just taken me this long to get to write about it.]

While I’m not really plugged into what an iconic (happy, CG ?) part of life a flutter on the dogs was for the regular punters in the East End of London, it would be difficult to pass up the historic (and somewhat sad) occasion of the last greyhound races at the fabled Walthamstow Stadium before it closed its doors for good and made way for (yet more) boring and architecturally bankrupt London residential development.

So, I went down the dogs… to watch them burst from the traps for the last time.

And it was pretty great, despite the fact that, unlike the (ok, the one time) I went to the track and bet on the geegees and made a killing, I couldn’t pick a winning greyhound for the life of me despite using my time tested horsey method of picking by the stats in the racing form. Also, I kept thinking how much fun it would be to have other breeds race as well. Imagine a dachshund steeples for instance !

But the closing of Walthamstow was a bit sad, even for me, who it isn’t really a part of life for (and who hopes his grandparents, who would be quite disappointed, don’t find out about. Dog racing in general has been in decline for quite a while in England exacerbated by off-track high street betting (in every major street in London) and internet bookmaking. The Chandler family who runs the concern, and who originally opened it 75 years ago in 1933, claimed a loss last year of £500k which was unsustainable from a business perspective.

Still, it is always sad to see a piece of history go. Winston Churchill famously did his first address after the end of World War II from the stadium and it graces the cover of Blur’s Parklife album cover, was the set for films, TV, commercials and generally a stalwart part of the East End for its run.

After the last race, people burst out and starting running (the wrong way mind you) round the track and were joined by probably a third of the entire stadium before they started saying they were going to turn out the lights and lads and ladettes starting ripping pieces of the Stadium and tracks in order to have some memorabilia from this little piece of history (some of which I imagine are up on eBay already).

It was a very fun evening out and even with the losses, still worth it being there (but damn I wish we’d booked ahead for dinner and box seats). Pretty cool all round and even if you’re upset you missed it and want to contribute a bit to history and the memory of the place, there is a retirement fund for the those greyhounds that will be retired (rather than moved to the few other remaining tracks in the country) so that good, peaceful homes can be found for the speedy little puppies.

Another interesting side note is that the famous Walthamstow neon sign pictured here is apparently considered historic and therefore untouchable, so the new residential development, even in this downturn market of housing starts, will apparently be incorporated into the new design of the residential complex.

My brother is gettin’ old !

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Back in the day, before graphics replaced playability (though let’s face it, the Wii has brought it back), some of the best games there were… in fact, the only ones, were text based interactive adventures.

Not to over-romaticize them but some of them were epic and such a critical part of hacker lore that they’ve entered the cultural lexicon.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
> what is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Some absolute genius has brought these back with Parchment, a web-based Z-machine that is now online.

So, having seen a pointer to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I had to have a go again. I had forgotten how much fun it was.

Of course, playing HGTTG is scarily reminiscent of working for the large NGO I am currently working for and living in England. It’s blurring the line of what’s entertainment a bit. =<

>read mail

There are many pieces of mail. Most are from some computer company called Infocom which wants you to buy their games. Hidden underneath is an official letter from the local council, dated some two years ago and inexplicably not delivered till now, explaining that a demolition order has been served on your home. The date of demolition is today’s date.

(via Bambinos)

BoingBoing pointed to a great blog entry today from Errol Morris, the director of the amazing documentary The Fog of War (which you should really see if you haven’t. It did win an Oscar you know.).

Besides Powell’s now-infamous WMD photos of non-existent chemical weapons facilities that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, it also covers the photoshopped Iranian missiles photo that ran across a number of US newspapers (the NYT article even has my very favourite mock shot of the Iranian missile launch photos, the godzilla in the midst of the launch field).

From a course I took back in Canada on Anthropology and the Image (fascinating by the way and well worth the time and effort – note now that the course is called Visual Ethnography), I know that photography as a political weapon, even as a cultural weapon, especially with reference to people like the Navajo and Africans, was amazingly devastating in associating a set of negative attributes with a culture, but the amazing thing in the modern era (perhaps because of the ubiquity of photographs in general), is the commonplace manipulation of them, or their captioning to achieve desired political ends, whether those be supporting invasion, instilling fear or misdirecting attention. Got to be a good book or documentary in there somewhere.

But a great read. Hopefully, Morris is working on another fab documentary along these lines.

The interesting thing though, is that the fodder here for activists of all stripes, to increasingly draw attention to disinformation and political propaganda by mocking these things. For example, Worth1000-esque photoshopping contests coordinated with a photosstream on Flickr and just tagged with an appropriately complex tag to make sure interesting photos get surfaced.

via BoingBoing

Well, had a bit of a hard slog the last little while, so just reminding myself of a few important things. Great advice and a fantastic speech from The Steve.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. And don’t settle.

[OK, I did this last weekend actually, but only just got round to doing a little writeup on it.]

You do have to hand it to the Brit Museum.

Besides being one of the world’s premiere museums (I still prefer the Louvre), holding the Hadrian exhibit inside the Pantheon-inspired Museum Reading Room while speaking about Hadrian’s contributions to architecture is a self-referential masterstroke. While considering how he rebuilt Agrippa’s building and a still staple reminder of Rome’s ancient glories inside a room where you can look up and see how that Dome influenced the modern world gives a certain relevance to Hadrian’s contributions that a dry recounting of his life in other surrounds would never convey.

It does set the scene, much like the dramatic trailer video that starts off the exhibit does (and having Patrick Stewart do the voiceover is yet another brilliant coup) . Which basically reminds me of those line from the Princess Bride,

“Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”

Well, you get the idea, though it is very well produced. Like a trailer for a television documentary on the Beeb. And it does its job well in letting you know that this exhibit is going to be about the stories around Hadrian’s life, rather than the dry artifacts. Which immediately makes it a lot more interesting than the dry retelling of the facts despite the scandalous £12 entry price (since I’m a member, I got my friend and I in free though ;-) )

The incredible thing is how little is actually known of Hadrian except from a few scant sources, and how this exhibit was largely possible through recent discoveries in places like Sargalassos in Turkey. It goes over his achievements as architect, statesman (I love the cancelling of all public debts owed to the Republic to the amount of 900 million sestertii which provided an immense economic impetus to a moribund empire – How much would that be in today’s money ?), and military leader as well as the way he became emperor, and his marriage with a beautiful woman even while he had a male lover (only the British would dedicate an entire room of the exhibit to this, regardless of how the Antinous cult carried on after his death and somewhat competed with Christianity. We get it already. Hadrian was gay. Move on, please. Just about everybody was then, thanks.).

All in all, a pretty impressive exhibit, which gives you the storied impression Hadrian behaved differently, looked differently and acted differently, and came to power differently than any other emperor before or after him and provides a great base for wanting to learn more about the emperors and understanding the legacy of ancient Rome (and Hadrian !). Definitely worth the visit though I think the price is a little high, particularly considering BP is sponsoring this thing rather heavily.

One thing I really have to start wishing though of British museums in general. If you’re not going to allow people to take pictures in the exihibit—or at least openly disocourage it even if it’s practically impossible in this age of camera phones, and particularly of unique little bits of wall display you might have created which might represent maps of ancient cities, overlay of empires or other material which is going to help people expand their understanding of what you’re representing, please put this stuff online and get a greater understanding of your audience. I still can’t believe I had to snag a pirated video of the trailer off YouTube when the British Museum should have it up there already.

From former Riptowner colleague, Corey; post on the third approach to attracting the best talent you possibly can.

He’s got a point. It certainly is the number one thing that’s driven me to work at the places I’ve worked at. Those I’ve enjoyed the most, sweated the most for, and contributed the greatest to… well, that and the money… ;-)

Oh, and I should mention, Core tells me they’re hiring, and well, if he’s working there, you do get to deal with atomic monster wrangler number one, which is kinda cool (not to mention, their obvious lack of criminal record background checks… ;-) ).

Need a feel for the place before you send your CV screaming over the wall at them ? They even shot a little video with Stand Out Jobs to pimp for staff. Nice idea… I am so stealing it…

I don’t know what it is, but ever since seeing Macbeth with Patrick Stewart, my expectations of what I deserve to see when I go to see Shakespeare have been radically altered (yes, Jean-Luc starring in the direction in that play was that good ).

It’s not enough that someone throws a few interesting stage directions, or in this case a third dimension, to the production by putting Cirque du Soleil-esque netting overhead and allowing people to bounce down with bungees from overhead. There has to be an internal consistency to the play, an addition of something not seen before, a compelling take on its direction.

First off, though, the lead was absolutely fantastic even if he did have to spend the entire post-intermission running around in his undewear. And despite the addition of scatological farce after the intermission (and I did really love the way the intermission happened, with people being herded out, with the house livery screaming at them), he did an astounding job as Timon. Apemantus is also surprisingly good in his role as gadfly and critic of Timon and his Fool like ways.

And Timon is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s one of Bill’s problem plays, plays that his most serious scholars have difficulty reconciling with the rest of his works. It’s darkness suggests it being written around the time of Lear, but there is no record of it ever being performed. And in fact, some doubt that the bard wrote it at all. It is, nevertheless, an interesting, dark and satirical take on the subject of a man who gives away all to his friends and is denied by them in his time of need and becomes a misanthrope because of it.

But overall, the entire production, really seemed designed more for critics’ enjoyment than the audience, and the experimental takes on different parts of the play (the ersatz vultures, for instance) just kinda fell flat for me overall.

Still, worth it for the excellent lead and Apemanus and as always, good to see one of Bill’s irregularly performed plays showing the round wooden ‘O’ in any case.

Great little mini-documentary ? Teaser ? that needs a bigger documentary added to it even though the student who did it calls it a small graphic novel.

Reminds me of the book about the actual journey a tshirt takes from where it is manufactured to the time it gets to your bac