I thought some of you might be interested in watching 12 million monkeys – a quick hack lj link watcher I put together by accident (damn, I *really* need to do my tax return).
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
In other news, I bought some chairs. Anyone want to come around and play board games sometime, now that I’ve got seatage to accomodate you?
A real and painless beauty I remember as a kid
Last night was Rockabaret at The Cobden Club, for dewdropsglistens birthday.
I didn’t quite know what to expect, we had to email our names onto the door list before arriving, which meant that entrance was a little slow because they had to check everybodies names at the door. Once inside, it was up the main staircase, with its steps at just the wrong distance apart for my feet, to the grand hall.
What a fabulous setting, part theatre, part ballroom, but much more extravagent than most places I’m used to going, there is nothing extravagent about the Camden Underworld.
The night is a mix of DJs sets and cabaret acts, much like Haus der Dekadenz in Tokyo (which I wrote a little about), only in somewhat less shabby surroundings.
Highlights of the evening included: “There should be more period costume moshing”, Ukranian Gypsy Punk (which I’ve heard before but hadn’t figured out what it was) and “I know what would be perfect for my act…a giant ostrich with a head controlled by sticks”.
…and finding that Tim and Michelle (? I’ve forgotten her name aleady…damn I’m useless) drive an MR2, and *absolutely love it* (“Its not stupidly powerful, its only a 2.0 turbo”), which is a tick in its favour as and when I need a replacement for my laguna.
Gratuitous link for the purposes of testing a feed
Book review: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
I like Gibsons writing. This book took me a little while to get into, but by the time I did I found it an absorbing read. It is quite a departure from what I consider his normal work, being set more or less in current time. It follows the life of Cayce Pollard and her attempts to find the creator of a work of art being posted piecemeal on the internet. It is full of paranoia and digs at modern marketing methods.
What really got me into it though, was the description of her few days in Tokyo, which pretty much captured the feelings I had in the first few days I was there, but expressed it way better than I ever could.
Who should read this book? Everyone. Especially if you like Gibson.
(2007: book 2, week 3)
Linkblast
“And that was how I accidentally killed my last girlfriend”
“Indicators of truth which blinker in symmetrical poetry with the rhythmic glare of thy undercar lighting”
GSM Scanner Project – Request For Comments – this looks like a project by enthusiastic but slightly clueless people, or, at least, people outside of the mobile phone industry.
If a radio station were a car crash, bad and wrong, but so so compelling. Includes facial exercises and a plea to a kidnapper and a retaliation to whoever posted that awful wasp joke.
…and if car crashes had an RSS feed (slightly disturbing myspace death list, they’re all car crashes or fights about drugs)
Todays revelation is that not everybody knows that the electricity companies use a Radio 4 sidechannel to broadcast metering information. I thought every techie knew that, but the only reference I managed to turn up in a(n admittedly brief) web search was AMSS – the data rate isn’t high, 46 *bits* per second.
Does anyone know any more about such channels, and what kind of information gets broadcast over them?
Linkblast
MOC Car factory – what do you do if you’ve got too many mindstorm lego sets?
I’d like to complain about your choir…but thats probably not in the spirit of it. Helsinki is particularly fabulous for the choral take on ‘the nokia tune’.
And if you’re in a band, do yourself a favour and make a better website than this, three layers of random flashing things with scrollies and links that don’t do what I was expecting.
Book review: The anatomy of buzz by Emanuel Rosen
“Creating word-of-mouth marketing”
This is an interesting book, written (or at least published) at the height of the dot.com fiasco it takes a look at the way some of the ‘new economy’ was marketing itself. There is an element of hubris to it, that this new way has eclipsed the old way of doing things.
There are a lot of good examples, including things like Trivial Pursuit, which although is something I quite hate (I have a head full of trivia, but its not the same kind of trivia they put into ‘mainstream’ games like that, pinout for 16450 anyone?) is also something that clearly had an incredible momentum behind its marketing, it got into a huge network of people who were interested in a fairly light socialable game which would not take too long and involed talking to each other.
There are also plenty of good ideas about how to get yourself noticed in a world of reducing attention spans and more noise.
Who should read this book? Anyone who is trying to get a message out to the world about what they’re offering, especially high tech things in the modern world. Our marketing department.