Someone made wikimapia…what I want to do now is to hook into that from my mobile phone, but I get a ‘The application is running out of memory’ error when I try it, I guess google earth is too big for my phone. Maybe I need to disect the protocol a bit to try to find useful things in it….or perhaps have a proxy somewhere that translates locations to ‘interesting things in proximity of these coords’. The next step is to make it transient, such that it starts recording a history of things occuring at a location.
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Its wrong to wish on space hardware
Thats something I’m going to miss about living this far north, even now the sky is a beautiful graduation of shades of purple and blue, with a chink of near daylight in the northern corner, the moon halo’ed in the atmospheric diffraction, but also somehow very much in focus.
One day I will live further north. Of course the danger is the winters, they get awful long and dark.
But for the moment I’ve got my medium-term bright new future to look forward to. I pick up the key for my new flat on Monday, from which time I’ll be spending more time south of here rather than north.
This morning I was trying to catch the tube to Earls Court – I was waiting on the blue line platform, they were having signalling problems so things were running a bit slowly and there were a lot of people about. Finally a train arrived, and we all started piling on, there was quite a push but nothing very out the ordinary for a busy rush hour with signalling problems.
Suddenly the girl in front of me starts violently waving her rather extensive bottom around, which seemed a little unhelpful given quite how crowded the train was, I was being pushed by the people behind me and so push a little to try to get her to stop being obnoxious. Next thing I know shes shouting at me “CATCH THE NEXT TRAIN. YOU! CATCH THE NEXT TRAIN”.
Confused, I got off and walked away, I know when I’m not welcome. Well, sometimes I do anyway.
I think what happened was that I’d managed to brush her behind with the corner of the book I was carrying, which she had assumed was me attempting to feel her.
Of course everyone else on the carriage will have understood her to be a victim and me to be a perpetrator. And there is nothing I could do or say to change that view.
What they can’t see is that I hadn’t noticed she was anything other than a person who was standing their ground a little more than they should in the face of a rush of people, nor that even if I were the sort of guy to go around feeling girls bottoms on crowded tubes that neither her, nor her particular bottom, were in any sense attractive to me anyway, nor that it was the kind of incident that was going to spoil my entire day.
Which has made think a little about stereotypes. Clearly she thinks of herself as the kind of person who has a nice bottom, and that it was reasonable to read things into something which was actually an innocent action – I was lifting my book to chest height so there wasn’t a chance I would accidentally touch someone inappropriately, it just happened that the push of the crowd was a little stronger than I’d anticipated which meant I was a little closer to her than I expected.
The stereotype is of woman as sex object. And man as (ab)user of that sex object. If you have such a strong belief in yourself as a sex object, you can project onto others a strong belief that they are abusers of that object.
Now I can’t sleep.
Someones just pointed out the Guildford festival line up….which makes for interesting reading. Highlights include:
Wonderstuff, Lightning Seeds, Gary Numan, Stranglers, Billy Idol, Sparks, Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain, Hayseed Dixie and Blue Oyster Cult.
And given I’m going to be in the area it would seem something of a poor show not to go along. Who else is up for it?
I’ve uploaded some Practical Mechanics pages. Theres still more to come. If you’d like better quality scans let me know and I’ll send ’em over.
The househunt succeeded yesterday. I found a place in Leatherhead, I’ll be moving in a couple of weeks assuming all the paperwork goes through without trouble. Its a slightly unusual place. More details once everything is sorted.
Love will tear us apart again…and again
I always thought that drum machine was up to no good
thoughts from honeysuckle bottom
Well, a bit north of there, but they are thoughts. I’ve just been to view a building site. Admittedly it is convenient for the station but i’m not sure that makes up for it. Then they tried a bait and switch by showing me a larger flat beyond my budget claiming they couldn’t find the keys for the one i was interested in. Ho hum.
Hello Kitty wedding…will it last?.
Doomed, I tell you – its the end of the world as we know it (warning, crackpot theories based on extraterrestrials communicating through crop circles)
Book review: Selling the Wheel, Jeff Cox & Howard Stevens
This book is a whirlwind tour through different sales techniques appropriate for different stages of a companies (or products) development. It is built around a tortured analogy of inventing wheels, developing them to be used in different ways, until finally they hit the FMCG end of spectrum.
Some of the ideas are nice, we follow a couple through from their initial invention of a new device through their first, failed, attempts to sell it, with advice coming from a guru and inspiration coming from actually attempting to do the things he suggests and understanding why he says some of the things he says.
Its just a shame theres so much ‘presentism’ invading the analogy, if you’re in a time when wheels are new I’m pretty sure that drills wouldn’t have been invented yet, and that travelling salesmen wouldn’t really have existed in the way they do now. They are, of course, devices to make the advice relevant to todays markets, as seen by the authors.
There is a value in this book, but I don’t think its appropriate to the part of the tech industry I’ve ended up in. Of course, looking at it the other way around, one of the agents yesterday tried a classic ‘closer’ style close attempt (get some interest going, then place a definite time limit on the offer, “theres someone else interested in this property, if you move quickly you can get it”….similar to the way that ‘sales’ work in shops), which I deflected without even thinking about it. I find that style disconcerting, and often get angry when I notice I’ve been sold something with it. Unless, of course its something that I actually wanted, but mostly its not.