… And i just got a knork with my chips, but they’re too hot to eat so i’m waiting for them to cool a bit.
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Wot nots fans. Imagine the beard and beergut for the full effect.
Just as the band came on stage a photographer with a huge nose leapt in front of me, peering awkwardly into his viewfinder.
Still, i’m not arguing with the surreal cross dressing punk description they were given.
Sparks at guilfest
To the guy in the little Peugeot who tried to road rage me on the M4 tonight…
…if you’re going to do that, first you need to learn to drive, then you need to learn what the limits of your car are.
The reason I slowed down in the first place was because there were some roadworks and I could see a lorry full of workmen had just stopped, there was a reason they’d coned off two lanes…they started getting out just as I was passing. So flashing me for slowing down wasn’t really particularly useful.
Then moving out into the middle lane to overtake me was a little premature considering that it takes me seconds to get back up to cruising speed while it takes you minutes.
And if you’re going to pull in front of me and slam on your brakes its a lot more effective if you pull in close and your brakes are better than mine, as it is I could predict exactly what you were going to do and had already moved into the next lane by the time you were slowing down, so I didn’t even have to bother with the brakes. All of which is a shame since it takes you such a long time to get back up to speed.
Oh, and the bright lights thing really doesn’t work, most modern cars have mirrors with some kind of antiglare mode.
Still, good luck with your insurance company – you’ll be needing it if you carry on driving like that.
Linkblast
…and a few more that escaped the last round:
Book review: War of the Worlds by HG Wells
It is interesting reading this book now that I’ve moved to the area in which much of it is set – the descriptions make it seem very much more rural than the sprawling commute belt I know.
While the story is familiar, from the Jeff Waynes version, the book gives a very different feel to the characters – for me at least – with many of them being weaker (as people, rather than as descriptions) and more broken in the book.
One of the important features is what is left out, there are big gaps in the narrative while the narrator is holed up in a tragic situation of some sort, there is also a somewhat uncomfortable ‘from my brothers eyes’ point of view for parts of the decay of London, which somehow doesn’t seems to fit into the flow.
I couldn’t help but thinking of the plight of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, there were certain parallels with the descriptions of destroyed parts of the city.
Who should read this book: sci-fi people, its one of the classics, and its a different experience to the audio version
I’d forgotten how nice the drive up the M40 to Oxford can be. Its a shame, then, that it was preceded by a queue on the M25. 25 minutes to move one junction, how do people tolerate that on a regular basis?
This years Venturefest was at the Said Business School, next to the station. I remember being intrigued by the building when I was living in Oxford, but never having a chance to see inside it. It attracted some controversy when it was first built, blood money buys some fairly fancy architecture – they seem to have taken a list of things that all the other colleges have and ticked all the boxes, theres a couple of quads, an amphitheatre, etc.
The conference itself seemed a little smaller than last year, but maybe it was just a bit more spread out – in my efforts to miss the traffic I missed a couple of the early morning talks. There were a few presenetations by companies seeking investment, who all seemed somehow doomed in their own ways, covering ground thats been explored before. But maybe they’ve got a new break on it.
Zigbee looks like an interesting technology, though I wonder about the wisdom of giving it a Hayes AT command set, easy to program for sure but most of us can handle HCI style abstractions without too much difficulty.
The highlight of the day was the keynote speech by Tim Smit, of Eden Project fame. Since I found out about the Eden Project I’ve been interested in the potential it has – it has always seemed like a very welcoming place when I’ve been there (admittedly only four or five times), built on a good set of values. And hearing Tim talking I started to understand why. He is a very disarming person, naive about business and project management, but not afraid to have a go. In some ways hes a bit of a hippy, but in many ways he’s not the kind of hippy I was expecting, he’s very pragmatic but within the framework of his ideals.
My respect for him went up while he was talking – and I already liked the things he has produced.
A worthwhile day out, though I was only amusing myself with the talk of hockey stick graphs and increasing ARPUs rather than actually getting involved in any of the business proper.
Linkblast extra
(Recovering from a couple of weeks on the end of dialup here is an extra large set of links)
Censored (worksafe)
Light-pick – imagine this mated with some POV writing, it’d only take a small accelerometer and bluetooth programability