2008 begins as an undesirably blank canvas. The natural reaction when faced with such a clean slate at the new year might be to contrive a grand set of resolutions, over-ambitiously clawing at physical, social and professional achievement to replace whatever it is that’s missing.
Lately I’ve somewhat failed at blogging. Not in a colloquial meme ‘FAIL’ manner, in an actual if-you-put-me-in-a-competition-and-judged-me way. The lack of activity in both redesign and writing would have this site reclassified as a holding page for some other Ben Ward who would later poach the domain name from my idle mitts.
This time last year — that’s March — I did something new. Annually, geeks of the web, film and music variety descend upon Austin, Texas for South By Southwest. 2007 was a blast; allowing me to meet a huge roster of new and wonderful people, whilst enjoying seven days in the sun and heat of Texas. It does wonders after a dreary British winter (I miss the days when we got snow). It’s replenishing, really.
For reasons I’ll elaborate on in a moment, I’m home from South By Southwest with two completely identical cameras. One of them is mine, the other… not.
After a slightly longer drafting period than I’d planned, my article Kelkoo goes microformatic has gone live on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
I’m considering scanning all the old family photographs. The question is ‘how?’
An excerpt from Smile’s online banking system.
Florence and The Machine is putting out her first single; ‘Kiss With A Fist’. I highly recommend you give it a listen.
At BlogTalk back in March and again at BarCamp London 4 last week I did a session on the foundations of Distributed Social Networking; a simple guide through the basics of describing ourselves and social relationships with XFN and hCard and how they can be pulled together to do some first-step but useful things.
This week’s issue of the excellent “Digital Web Magazine”:http://digital-web.com leads with an article I’ve written about Distributed Social Networking, published under the title “Portable Social Networking: Building Blocks of a Social Web”:http://digital-web.com/articles/portable_social_networks_building_blocks_of_a_social_web/
Apple have launched Me.com and are citing Web Standards whilst blocking users of Microsoft Internet Explorer. A shame then that there’s not a trace of web development best practice to found in this clusterfuck of a web app.
As may have been noted lately, I’m leaving the UK and moving to San Francisco this summer (sometime early August). To celebrate the fact, and try to engineer the opportunity to see Everyone I’ve Ever Known one last time, I’m declaring the weekend of July 26th and 27th to be Ben’s Great Getaway Weekend. Two days of festivity that basically consists of meeting up in some pubs, oscillating between said pubs and a nearby park, eating, drinking, and having a good time.
Has been regenerated on Pownce. Slllltttthp. Hmm, new teeth.
Talking about the importance of disclosure control in location-based applications.
Pausing before I move to San Francisco.
It’s the hardest thing in the world, seeing your mother cry. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, comes as the starkest reminder that what’s going on is a really big deal.
Eight and a half hours in the air takes the edge off the raw emotion of leaving. The mind settles down, you remember that the people back home are going to be fine and you return to your middle point; contemplative but with no bias toward sadness, happiness or otherwise.
Since I’m a failure at regular blogging, I’m pushing microblogging instead. At least then I can only micro-fail, and at scale you’re really just talking about some minor disappoint that can be solved with ice cream.
28 days after moving to San Francisco.
‘Its an odd thing being in two different parts of Middle America for a fortnight. Most of those who choose to come to America come to the wonder of New York, of Boston, San Fransico or LA, or to the Grand Canyon, the Cape, Florida or California. To be in Denver and, more particularly, St Paul and Minneapolis, is a salutary experience.
You feel it hard. America is living in the past, a past of consumption, fatty foods, garish television, weight reduction ads, depression relief pills, gas guzzling freeways and a dependence on splurging out 25 per cent of the entire world carbon emission totals.
Travelling bumper to bumper, rat race to the workplace for 50 minutes each way, six lanes of traffic clogging the freeway, with many more trails of such traffic glimpsed from the side windows.
Parking in vast multi-storey carparks that dominate the city centres, a short walk through massive yet inefficient security into great icy barns in which these conventions take place and are reported.
This sort of living, which huge numbers of Americans experience every day of their lives, is NOT the future. There is no soul, no touch with nature, no brush with fresh food or fresh air.
The sheer cost of maintaining a building at 15 degrees C when its 23 outside must be monumentally wasteful, and everyone of the skyscrapers, office blocks, malls and convention centres you see are up to the same stuff, freezing inside against a perfectly manageable temperature outside. Theres not a single opening window in Minneapolis.
Yet for the first time I have heard politicians on both sides at last calling for an end to Americas dependence on foreign oil. But there is still no clarion call for a Manhattan-style project to find alternative energy sources.
So yes, being here at this crunch moment in the life of America is, er, a kind of a treat. But you know something, you feel neither of these competing teams is offering a big enough vision for whats needed to change America.’
I’ve lived in my new apartment for 7 days so far. I just put in an order for a dining table and six chairs to go with it. Not sure they’re going to match quite right, but the table shape is worth it and could always be stained later.
One especially aggrevating passage in Sarah Palin’s RNC speech last week was this:
Thanks to !FatBusinessman, you can in fact still disable the ‘Browse By Genre’ list and ‘Link to iTunes Store’ arrows in iTunes 8, there’s just no UI for it in the Preferences any more.
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!Pownce Feature Request: Hype Machine music player integration for URLs please.
So today people at Yahoo are playing with Yammer — the ‘Twitter clone for business groups’ that won the TechCrunch50 yesterday.
I’ve taken to using Bazaar for most of my code. Local check ins for when I’m away from a net connection, and then a repository on my remote machine. In fact, though I’ve been rather lax in getting my most recent web server set up, it will, eventually, be running with each hosted web site deployed as a check out of the central repository.
Trying to get a handle on one of the reasons for my mood having dipped this week.
Surfing like it’s 1998. I’ve switched from back tabbed to multiple windowed browsing on Mac OSX.
Cyril Doussin posted on Pownce:
What’s wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally
If you find a naked person you begin to concentrate on the make-up of that person and yet you are driving.
These days you hardly know who is a mother from a daughter, they are all naked.
Hey San Francisco!
In response to Jeremy Keith on Pownce:
My idea of a proper role of a journalist is not to be part of the contest.
The scenario I’m trying to support is this: Rather than someone come to this site and subscribe via RSS just to the blog, they would subscribe to the lifestream. But, the lifestream would be built such that the content is relevant enough they don’t get irritated by its content.
Do you know anyone who has a Kindle? Now that I’m over here I’d like to see one. The perception from the UK — based entirely on photographs and John Gruber’s cynicism — is that it’s a ridiculous device. I’m unsure what to make of it really. I like tactility; I like books.
I cannot vote in this election. I’m a British man, I’ve lived in San Francisco for only a few months, but I’ll be living in this country for years, I hope.
I’ve arrived just in time to to witness the spectacle of a US election.
Not being permitted to vote, I’m just an observer here. But yet the result of this election affects me as much as any American.
I moved here from the UK, a country which has developed a complex tolerance and integration between multiple cultures, races and religions. Sometimes it falters and struggles, other times it forms a glorious melting pot of culture.
We — countries of the western hemisphere — defined the modern world and our reward is to have countries of diversity. Countries that attracted people of all races together and whose coming together makes for a better society, an outright better humanity.
Without a vote, I haven’t chosen a party. Whilst I know the history and the global influence of presidents from both parties, there’s no value in choosing sides.
As such, I can just observe and judge these politicians as people.
It’s with utter disgust, then, that I should see a man and a woman running for the highest office in the land, two of the most influential and powerful political positions on earth, and embrace hate as their aid in seeking election.
How can you knowingly embrace the politics of fear? How can you sit easily with yourself whilst carelessly throwing out the much-abused word ‘terrorist’ to provoke completely unrelated emotional reactions? Driving people to your cause through fear? That is terrorism.
This country is divided. And to see you allow a minority faction of the less progressive sections of this broad and vibrant society flare up in violent rhetoric, racism and untethered abuse is abhorrent.
If elected by my peers, you will be a president and vice president of people of every nation, race and colour. Not just the peace loving people all around the world, but right here within these boarders. In provoking hate toward large sections of that society, I do not understand why you would run for an office which represents them.
You have an opportunity to set an example of tolerance and maturity for the world to see, at a time when society is exaggerated as going wild. Instead you appear as manipulative and savage as some of your enemies.
On the presentation of voter breakdown in the United States, the division it perpetuates, and the fact that it’s horribly wrong and over-emphasises a party-political divide between coastal and central states.
However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy. The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit - in some people’s eyes - the idea of free-market capitalism.
Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.
To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.
To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.
I’m afraid if I add a post to twitter feature on my side project !adactio / @adactio will freak out because I NEED to ask for a password. — Leah Culver
In the end, I decided to move my Pownce notes over to Tumblr by hand. They have an API and all, but given that I don’t have much content here, it was a good opportunity to copy things over in a format that made sense, adjusting into Tumblr’s video/audio/quote systems where available.
And now for the thing I learned:
For years, tech critics like me have occasionally endured abuse from the Cult of Mac. If you write anything that even hints at a less-than-perfect Apple effort (like my reviews of, for example, the original Apple TV, iMovie ‘08 or MobileMe), the backlash is swift, vitriolic and heated. We’re talking insults, vulgarities and even threats. I’ve always thought that that vocal sub-population of Mac fans make up the world’s most watchful, most hostile grass-roots lobbying arm.
But now I see that I was wrong. There’s an even nastier one: the BlackBerry nuts.
| *[Alex Payne | How I Use TextMate](http://www.al3x.net/2008/12/03/how-i-use-textmate.html)* |
Quick how-to on creating a maintaining secure ‘private venue’ on Upcoming.
I’ve written an article for the awesome 24ways; Geotag everywhere with Fire Eagle.
On being laid off from Yahoo!, coping with it and the closure of Brickhouse, having a housewarming party and getting laid on again.
This raises serious questions about whether Channel 4 should receive an increased public subsidy for their programmes.
Today I got my replacement iPhone (1st gen) from the Apple Store. The earphone speaker had broken down, rending it rather less useful as an iPhone. Apple service was outstanding, I booked in, they ordered a replacement (going out of their way to find acceptable evidence for my returning the iPhone outside of the warranty period which expired a month ago). The replacement came within 48 hours, despite the Christmas holiday.