22
May
2011
H+ Conference in Melbourne
I’m going to try to get down for this. It looks like it’ll be interesting!
9
May
2011
space hacking
As my 200th post I was going to write some stuff about ethics and dolphins, but Wikipedia has already done the lions share of the work so it’s left me feeling rather unnecessary. I was considering this as I came up the escalator at Town Hall station today (my legs are tired from a long walk yesterday so I didn’t feel like walking in). I was on the right and walking up the steps behind all the other karoshi who were doing the same, trudging hurriedly towards our desks. When I got to the top the girl in front of me stopped, did a sharp right turn and headed off to the ticket barriers; this made me stop and presumably made the person behind me stop. This sort of blockage never really stops anything, but acts more as a constriction. This sort of constriction seems to slow down the flow of people through the station, which reduces the station’s efficiency. (If you assume that the job of a train station is it’s obvious one, i.e. to move people about quickly, get them from where they are to where they want to be by making the journey from their entry point to exit point as time-short/distance-short as possible.)
23
Apr
2011
Going off paper?
Once upon a time the only ones glued to their phone screens in public were spotty teenagers playing snake. I suppose I got a glimpse of the future on the Tokyo subway a while ago with everyone glued to their screens reading the news (I presume, it was all in Japanese).
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts on my phone through the gReader app. Even in short journeys I can knock off a couple of posts, and it feels like I’m actually participating in things as they happen. (I’m aware that this is an illusion, but it is one that I’m happy to maintain.)
So the phone screen is a good place for short form essays and journalism, and at fist blush it seems that it works for long form too. I’ve been reading Gulliver’s travels through the Kindle app, which has actually been surprisingly easy. The screen makes the columns a good width for reading fast, and the page turns are easier than turning an actual page. This means that I can put the phone on a table, hold my head in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, and read.
The ability to condense a library of books into one small space is pretty cool, as is the ability to look stuff up in a dictionary or on Wikipedia. I’m not wild about having to buy books that I already own so that I can read them this way, it seems that the payment for the IP has already been made, and that the actual cost of providing the content must tend towards zero. However there are so many free classics available that it will probably be a while before I’m hooked enough to fork over any actual money.
I’ll update in a while about what I thought of the experience, but I don’t think that it’ll be too much of a competitor to ‘real’ books in the near future, but in the longer term, probably!
31
Mar
2011
SG2011
There is a lot of activity here in Copenhagen, I’ll update more about it soon when I’m a little less frazzled, but I think that this might well be the moment when the change in attitude towards real data that seems to have been building momentum in the industry actually forms into a ‘thing’!
22
Jan
2011
Major study – for those with a lot of patience
There will be a version of this available soon in a massively reduced format, but for those of you with a penchant for punishment, or perhaps just an unquenchable interest in my ability to drivel on for a hundred pages, here’s my Major study in all it’s pdf glory!
