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Apollo 11 landed at Tranquilty on this day 36 years ago. Moon.google.com commemorates it nicely.
It’s taken a while this year for there to be a ‘sound of the summer’, but for me it’s got to be Hard-Fi’s “Hard to Beat”: poppy, danceable, tough, rough and sweet – with an obligatory reference to ‘rocking the city‘:
Can you feel it?
Rocking the city,
Ah yeah,
Straight out of nowhere-ness,
Like a fist,
Can’t resist you, oh no
Winner.
I appear to have broken things.
Look! Over there! The Goodyear Blimp!
Fixed. I think.
“Next on Discovery Channel: ‘When designers try to use .htaccess’“
I’ve just managed to fairly painlessly import five years of writing into wordpress. Lots of pictures are missing though, and I’m not sure I have copies of them. Also, the effortless import process brought in all my typepad categories – which has created a librarian’s nightmare in the sidebar.
I realised this month that I will have been working on the web for 10 years, and speaking my brains at /work for 5 of those. No wonder I’m knackered.
0wnzored “Start The Week” this morning.
This week’s edition has been a cracking listen – with the good Dr. Miller taking over the interlocution from Andrew Marr, effectively.
A great exchange with Laurie Taylor, on the death of, well, Death in consumer society – is topped by a quote during a discussion around George Pendle’s book about John Parsons and early rocket science – on why rocketry attracted occultists (Parsons, as well as co-founding the JPL, was a leader of the O.T.O.!) and iconoclasts in the early 20th C:
“The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about – into it, vacant minds expand…”
Very, very good.
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As an addendum to the previous post – although there appears to be little written on blogs about TED Global, there are a whopping 254 pictures tagged as TED Global on Flickr.
The attendees, while too engrossed to write, were still able to snap away… Including this one of extropian anti-aging beard-king Aubrey De Grey on a punt!
I’ve become so used to being able to read about conferences and events online via the flying fingers of bloggers, that it’s a mild shock not to be able to find anything from TED Global in Oxford.
There have been a few reports by actual reporters, especially on the talks by big hitters like Dawkins, but little of the warp and weft of the threads of an event which the unstructured event notes of bloggers excel at capturing.
By coincidence I ran into Jyri, who had been in the UK attending TED Global, while waiting for my my flight back to Helsinki.
We spent the flight back chatting – and he told me that people with laptops had been asked to leave the front rows of the TED audience, as their LCD-bathed faces were disturbing the illustrious speakers.
How quaint!
In fact, all of TED seems like a quaint throwback to the mid-1990’s – from the lack of blogging/online participation to the wildly hubristic theme (‘Ideas big enough to change the world’) to the $4k price-tag.
Of course, all these factors are connected – the lack of online participation, the high-concept theme and price tag adding to the allure of the conference equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
And, all this of course, is just sourgrapery from someone incredibly envious of those who could attend – and someone who rather enjoyed the mid-1990’s…
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Jan Chipchase, a colleague of mine in user-research at Nokia has started a new blog called ‘Future Perfect’, wherein he posts snippets of his experiences travelling the globe studying the use of technology.
Jan has a great eye for the unexpected detail in the everyday, which makes him fantastic to work with as a designer, and will be fabulous to read has his blog develops.
From this post on the culture of mobile phone repair shops in India (where he took the excellent photo above):
“a lot of the hyperbole surrounding western hacker culture makes me smile compared to what these guys are doing day in day out.”
“Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.
I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.
In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.
They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”
“I suppose this will just click more locks on the manacles of the “security state”. The tedious bag checks, citizens treated as potential criminals, the erosion of the civil justice system, queues and paranoia, the compulsory carrying of ID cards. We’re all now guilty until proven innocent, and especially those of us who look like strangers, who look like people who think differently. Higher suspicion means higher anomie and higher stress. The delights of the high density city are displaced by the stresses and (still largely imagined) dangers of the high density city. The high density city is always poised delicately between heaven and hell; this tips things over to the hell side. And yet I still believe in the utopian potential of big cities.”
London, ten years my home – and soon to be home again – got hurt today.
For what it’s worth, my thoughts go out to those who have also been hurt or have lost someone.
One reflection from far away in Helsinki, and quite a selfish one I suppose – that I’m glad all of my friends are wired-for-context through things like Flickr, mailing lists, moblogging, community sites or posting their status on their sites.
I have a folder in bloglines called “Friends” which reassuringly filled up with “I’m OK” blog post titles through the day.
Glancing at each other across all our little networks that lit up with “I’m ok, you’re ok” – the basic transaction, the best thought.
Petafloptimism 