Oblomovka

2002-06-10»

Woah. I'm still a little in shock over XCOM. If you can measure success by numbers, we did extraordinarily well - over 1000 people turned up. There were queues outside before eleven, and they had to stop people from coming in for a while in the afternoon.

I've been wanting to be a part of something like this ever since I dragged Lee Felsenstein for lunch years ago, and talked with him about putting together all the different tribes of geekdom. It was a little unsettling seeing it take off so close to my face, though.

At the end, Dave and I did one of our standard schticks we've done at previous NTK Live shows. It felt very different. Those older shows were pretty clearly meetings for fans of NTK - and this was something much much bigger. Who were these people banging on about an ASCII e-mail when there were giant BBC Microcomputer art-robot video installations machines ridden by WiFi-wielding teenagers dressed in clothes they'd made themselves out of origamid loyalty cards to talk to? Even Dave, who (with the excellent mute posse), pretty much single-handedly organised much of the show, seemed a bit dwarfed by the magnitude of what he'd done. It was all about five times bigger, and ten times weirder than I'd ever imagined it to be.

And of course the irony is that I was rushing around so much, I didn't actually see much of it. If want to know what it was like, check out the coverage by Cory and Tom Coates and Neil McIntosh. There are some photos too!

2002-06-08»

So I'm late up writing the dumb jokes that I'll use to cover up our usual poorly planned, dazzlingly executed (or vice versa) Happening, The Festival of Extreme Computing. As usual, Dave explains it all much better than I ever will, in this terrifying Guardian dump of his current mindstate:

It is forward-looking too, but focusing on innovative uses of existing technologies instead of just "buy another upgrade and your life will be better". As Orwell put it, "he who controls the past, controls the future" - clearly a big fan of the Terminator films.

Sorry about the interruption in services. I'm currently recovering from one of those nasty bacteria-laden infection things that killed off all the martians in War of the Worlds, but has so far left me with merely an ongoing fever, an inability to concentrate for more than thirty seconds, and a strong tendency to begin every conversation with "Oooh, I'm very ill, you see".

It was worth the wait though. Look! Picture of a really old TV licence!

We stumbled on this because Cory was chortling at the modern equivalent sitting on Manar's desk we're both staying at for XCOM. You need to pay a small annual tax to own a TV in the UK, a fact which most North Americans generally find terribly amusing. The tax goes to fund the BBC, which is free for all, has no advertising and charges no subscription.

Actually, this older forebear is not a licence for owning a TV, it's a licence for building one. Which makes me think of my father, who built his neighbourhood their first television, and put it in an box that used to hold oranges. And built me my first computer when I was eight, and put it a cardboard box, with a hole cut out for the keyboard, and plugged it into a ready-made television, and lifted me up onto his shoulders and carried me into a new world.

2002-06-04»

The NSA is running "loose lips" ads in military magazines and as posters in military facilities. More pictures #1, #2, and #3 (shown), and #4.

This is the first time the NSA has ever commissioned an outside ad campaign, said NSA spokeswomen Marti Mercer. Like all aspects of budget for the ultra-secret NSA, the advertising campaign's cost is classified.

Very early attempts to analyse the structure of Simmish, the language of the Sims. Not very detailed, but I appreciate learning the canonical spelling of "Dis graw is fredeshay".

A lot of birthdays coming up: Ditherati, NTK, and Netscape 4.0 are all five, osil8 is six, Zeldman was seven. And Mozilla, hopefully, will be either zero, or too many years old, depending on how you look at it.

Things that should have an RDF feed, number one.

2002-06-03»

Dorodango! The shiny ball of mud that kids (and cheating adults with electron microscopes) go crazy for!

Onion prefigures future: Meg's fall from vegetarian grace leads ineluctably to I Desperately Need Bone Marrow.

BrainHeart is the strangest magazine I read these days. It's a glossy Swedish magazine funded by one of the big Euro wireless venture capital firms. It has this crazy aspiration to be a muddy mix of Wallpaper*, Red Herring, Fast Company, Wired, and What Mobile?. All the articles are written in a eurojetsetting Scandlish intonation: perfectly grammatical with a plodding sing-song quality. "Let's assume that we would like to take a wireless tourist tour through Stockholm's 750-year-old Old Town, Gamla Stan. What would the tour look like?", begins one rip-roaring read. Every cover has a man and a women from the endlessly dull business world of Swedish telecoms, wearing these perfect clothes, perfectly photographed in perfect settings. The articles are all about building telcos "with brain and heart", but it's mostly just "wouldn't it be great if we could all be nice to one another, and guess how many Kronor I just spent on my new headset?". I can't put it down. I haven't been as simultaneously revolted and fascinated by a publication since the rise of the Mexican Death zine. Get a BrainHeart subscription for free, and share my confusion.

I've rather foolishly hacked DeadHorse (this site's PHP blogging system) to cope with multiple entries in one day. It was a bit of a struggle, frankly, but it works - although the entries within a day are no longer in reverse chronological order, which ain't the blog way. DeadHorse's design is collapsing under the strain. I'll have to refactor it, which if previous experience is to go by, means migrating it from PHP to something a bit less clunky.

update: Oh, it does work. I was just writing backwards. Excellent.