Author Archives: Mark

A Place

As I mentioned in an earlier posting I got back from a short break in Croatia a few days ago.

It was my first trip there and I had no idea what to expect. My vague ideas of the Adriatic coast were based entirely on readings of Eric Ambler and Wu Ming’s wonderful 54.

The place, Rovinj, turned out to be beautiful and fun. Imagine a place like Venice only on a human scale and without all those flooded streets 🙂 Venice is a special place, we share a patron saint after all, but Rovinj felt like home. Or rather, like a place one would like to have as a home.

Some rough and random memories of the trip –

  • Driving through Slovenia while the England vs Slovenia World Cup game was on and listening to it on Italian radio where suddenly in the middle of the flow of Italian the commentator said ‘David “Calamity” James’ and the world seemed a smaller place.
  • Discovering Galerija Brek and a whole new use for old computer parts as well as Ogi and Dena (woof!)
  • Eating with friends outside a wonderful restaurant and watching in awed wonder as a huge fish was consumed with lots of spuds and laughter.
  • Wandering through the vegetable Market and buying tomatoes and soap while being reminded by the anti-fascist memorials of the terrible price people paid so that we could enjoy these simple pleasures.
  • The mad ice-cream cone which made the mundane, though delicious, into a stunning pop art confection.
  • Sitting in a terrace, laughing and telling stories.
  • The sound of roinking 🙂
  • Pivo and delicious paprika flavoured crisps!
  • The nice apartment owners and their lovely restaurant with wonderful pizzas and fun customers.

But most of all, the simple pleasure of time with friends. We have created lives for ourselves that seem to fill up with meetings and meetings and presentations and meetings and paperwork and meetings. It is so easy to fall into the trap of assuming that that is how life is, how fortunate then to have beloved friends to remind us that life is very different indeed.

The Continental Operand

The city was hot, the savage sun bleaching colour and sanity from the world. I sat in my office, cooling my heels and my head, sipping a long iced drink in front of an asthmatic fan which wheezed mournfully as it struggled with the temperature.

The phone rang, it was a bad line and the person on the other end sounded like they were gargling marbles at the bottom of a coal mine but I heard enough to pick up the word “murder” and an address out in Twotown. I gave the fan the last rites, finished my drink and headed out into the bitter heat. That was my first mistake.

Twotown was endless rows of identikit suburbia. Two’s prided themselves on their diligence and their commitment, aesthetics to them were what a doctor used to knock you out. I stood out like a sore thumb in their placid, orderly world. And I would not have changed that for anything.

I arrived at the address. It was a standard suburban house with a lawn front and back and a large garage taking up the lefthand third of the ground floor. What was not standard was the figure nailed to the garage door.

I parked and walked over to the small group who were gathered around the door and the body. A couple of photographers were capturing the scene so that sometime later jurors could lose their lunches as they saw what the human mind is capable of. O’Carroll from my team directed a group of uniforms as they kept sightseers away and searched the scene.

The body was that of a middle-aged man, dressed in a grey flannel suit, he was completely unremarkable save for the fact that he was nailed to the garage door, held up by large steel bars through his shoulders. He looked like a normal Two apart from that.

‘Not really the season for decorations,’ I said to O’Carroll.

‘Well he ain’t Santa, that’s for certain.’ O’Carroll waved one of the uniforms over and took a clipboard from him.

‘His name was Martin Dewson, he worked for the Corporation as an accountant and he lived right here. No criminal record, a wife and 2 children – all away visiting her parents for the last week, and no signs of a break-in or struggle. We are just waiting for the Coroner before taking him down.’

He held the clipboard out and I took it. I glanced through it and could see nothing in it beyond the life of a normal Two, definitely nothing to explain such an extravagant death.

Handing the clipboard back I looked around the scene, and paused.

‘Found something?’ O’Carroll asked.

‘Why is he wearing 1 black shoe and 1 brown shoe?’

O’Carroll smiled, ‘Yes, no self-respecting Two would ever do a thing like that. So is it a clue or a sign?’

‘It’s a headache.’

I stood back and looked up at the sky, there was not a cloud in sight so why then did I have such a strong feeling that a storm was coming?

TO BE CONTINUED

On Delirium

I had a very nice few days in Croatia – great food, great company, great scenery. And then I sprained my foot.

Not waterskiing or climbing or demonstrating Drunken Master style but by falling off a very low step. Oh the ignominy.

My foot swelled to twice its normal size, turned black and became very VERY painful. Fortunately this was near the end of the trip so I pottered around and took Ibuprofen and then flew home.

As I travelled home I started to feel odder and odder – feverish, faint …

I got home and collapsed into bed as delirium took hold.

As we all know, when we are ill our energy levels drop so our brain moves slower and we feel dumber – the dimmer switch on our IQ is turned down.

Delirium is similar but while the consciousness is dialled down suddenly random parts of our mind suddenly fire vividly into life!

I found myself not drunk texting but delirious texting. I sent weird texts to a number of friends – some channelling my 16 year old self, some announcing great revelations about the nature of the universe and at least one in Finnish – a language I do not speak. I can only apologise to the recipients and hang my head in shame.

The interesting thing about this for me though is the connection between energy levels, consciousness and sanity. I agree with Sartre, consciousness is always consciousness of something. It is like the old art of plate spinning – we can keep so many plates spinning but there comes a point when  it all comes crashing down.

I wonder what that means for our time poor, attention demanding lifestyle?

Writing small

I am writing this on my iPad Nano, otherwise known as an iPod Touch. The screen is only about 40 characters wide and perhaps 10 lines high. So perhaps the only appropriate form for blogging from the iPad Nano is poetry?

I wonder if Li Po would have blogged?

Rewired Culture – 27th March

Just launched the Rewired Culture event for the 27th March at the Guardian offices in King’s Cross.

What’s Rewired Culture you ask?

Well here’s the description and big thanks to the Rewired State crowd:

Rewired Culture

Britain is a creative culture. We have a vibrant developer community, a growing and active entrepreneurial base and a vast, rich array of culture assets. How can we bring these together to create new opportunities for data owners and developers? How do we encourage links between data repositories such as museums, broadcasters and the wider community like data.gov.uk or the “London Datastore”? How do we ensure that the exciting work already underway in a number of organizations is shared more generally, so even smaller bodies and SMEs can learn from best practice and find workable routes to market? What are the cultural content business models for the 21st century? How do creators, curators, developers and entrepreneurs work together?

Rewired Culture is a day long event on 27th March 2010 organized by DCMS which is intended to explore these issues and more besides.

Rewired Culture has two strands – the first is a hackday bringing together data owners, data users, developers and people with ideas to see what they can create in a day. This builds on the very successful Rewired State events held in 2009.

The second strand is a halfday unconference style event starting at midday and running in parallel with the hackday for data owners, entrepreneurs, data users and communites to discuss business models, funding mechanisms and challenges.

We will be encouraging constant communication between the two strands because by the end of the day we want the event to have come up with a number of projects that people want to take forward on technical or business grounds, preferably both!

These chosen projects will then be used as exemplars for the Chief Executives and Chairs of the major national cultural institutions, broadcasters and key figures from the creative economy. They will be used as both an inspiration and a challenge to that community.

Rewired Culture will be open to all and you can register at http://rewiredstate.org/culture#register. If you would like more information then read the FAQs or contact us at rewired@culture.gsi.gov.uk.

FAQs

What about IPR?

Rewired Culture is not intended to solve every issue around intellectual property rights, instead we intend to focus on freely available assets and where IPR is then identified as a showstopper we will capture that point and raise it at the later meeting of Chief Executives and Chairs.

Why should I give away my ideas?

Ideas only have value when shared. We want to encourage people to share their ideas about both projects and business models. This is an opportunity to engage with the wider community and test your ideas. If you then want to take them to market then we will cheer you on. The only IPR we retain is in the Rewired Culture concept itself – everything else is down to you, the participants.

What happens to the Rewired Culture Projects?

We are still working on this and will be testing them at the event but the current thinking is that we will support the shortlisted projects where possible with hosting and facilitation.

We are also looking at the idea of running a simulation where one or more chosen projects would be given the opportunity to work through a pseudofunding round complete with an industry mentor and real VC’s.

Who should attend?

The event is open to all. If you are a developer, interested in data use or reuse, a data owner, someone who has an idea for an application using cultural data, a member of a cultural institution, someone who relies on public or private data for your business, an entrepreneur, someone who is passionate about open data or access to culture, someone in education, or someone who has taken part in previous hackdays.

You can sign up for the developer strand, the business strand or as someone with general interest in the subject. And we encourage people to move between the strands.

Why Rewired Culture?

There are lots of great individual initiatives out there – the BBC/British Museum A History of the world in 100 objects is but the latest. But these do tend to be individual initiatives and we want to encourage a wider flowering of cultural data initiatives from a variety of sources – public sector, third sector, entrepreneurs etc.

How much will Rewired Culture cost?

Attendance is free. We will obviously be posting the costs of the initiative itself as part of our commitment to data transparency.

Idle Thoughts – Basilisks

I came across this interesting new campaign on the Weather Channel in the US which uses an onscreen QR bar code so you can just hold your Android phone up to the screen and it will take you to the website where you can download the weather applet.

QR codes are not new and have been heavily used in Japan for a while now. They have the advantage that you can just use something you already have with you – a mobile phone – to easily point at a poster, a TV screen, an article of clothing … to get taken to a website of interest.

As my mind works in odd ways I found myself pondering on what happens when we have augmented reality phones which are continually pointed at the wider world, how will we cope with a constant stream of QR codes taking us to all manner of websites?

And as we blur the distinction between human vision and the augmented vision of reality via mobiles and other personal technology, are we setting ourselves up for a world where just opening your eyes could leave you open to a viral attack?

What IT is for

It is now a week since the launch of a major game changing initiative which will touch all lives and change the technology landscape.

I of course refer to the launch of the new UK Government ICT strategy and Open Source. Open Standards and Reuse Action Plan.

Sorry, did you think I meant the iPad?

Ah the iPad, which should really have been called the iBlankslate given that it has become a surface for people to project their hopes and fears.

The iPad will destroy the personal computer, it is not for work but every other moment, it is overpriced, it is just a big iPod Touch…

So many views on something which has only be seen from a distance. My favourite is that line that the iPad is the machine for those who don’t use existing computers. I assume the advertising campaign will be “Are you dumb enough for the iPad?”

But there are some interesting points of connection between the Government ICT strategy and the iPad.

The ICT strategy is based around the dual pillars of a cloud based approach to system/information delivery and an Apps Store which provides a range of tailored and need-specific tools for working with the cloud systems/information. The iPad is based around the same model.

The ICT strategy seeks to tackle digital inclusion by not just tackling the user interface part of online transactions but also looking at how we can radically transform service delivery models to design needless complexity out of the service. The iPad offers the potential to tackle the former and could help us rethink some of the latter.

The ICT strategy, and in particular the OSOSR action plan, seeks to drive down costs and encourage SME’s/entrepreneurs/Third Sector to work with government by reducing the barriers to entry, facilitating reuse and shifting to a more agile business model where we are more about rapid collaboration and facilitation. The iPad … hmm, well is the iPad about less barriers to entry, more reuse and more flexibility?

My thoughts on the iPad are as idle as anyone else’s but I find it interesting to muse on the links between two groups wrestling with some of the same technological and business model challenges.

I shall return to this.

Whither Weather?

People might find these links to travel and weather information useful in the current #uksnow adventure:

UKOnline’s Travel Information Page

BBC Travel (London)

BBC Local weather (London)

National Rail Enquiries (when it is up!)

Met Office

Live Departures – Charing Cross

Live Departures – Victoria

Live Departures – Waterloo

Live Departures –Cannon Street

Live Departures –Liverpool Street

Live Departures – Kings Cross

Live Departures – Euston

Live Departures –  Paddington

BBC Travel Alert Twitter page

Ben Marsh’s #uksnow page

These sites tend to get a lot of traffic so if you cannot connect you may want to check the status of the site.

The Most Difficult Post Revisited

My thanks to everyone who commented on my post about depression. I am very touched by the expressions of support and understanding. I am thinking though the interesting and deep points people made and I will be doing a followup post soon.

Many thanks to you all, seriously 🙂

The Most Difficult Posting

I have thought for a while now about writing this entry as it deals with something very personal about myself and also feels deeply scary to write but I think it is important to tackle the issue as it is one of the last big stigmas.

I suffer from depression. To be more accurate, I have a medical condition which causes me to experience bouts of extreme depression and panic attacks. Effectively, my brain chemistry is out of kilter and without daily medication I am at the mercy of said dodgy chemistry.

I am fortunate that my condition is organic so responds well to medication.

Depression and related conditions are prevalent in our society –

A fifth of early deaths are related to mental health problems, compared to under a sixth for both heart disease and cancer.

At least 1 in 10 of all Scots are on medication for depression.

But depression is still surrounded by myth and stigma. A panic attack sounds almost trivial, but it is not. Odd that The Onion gives the best description of what it feels like.

Depression is a name given to a symptom which can have a range of causes. Sometimes it is like mine and organic in nature. Sometimes it is triggered by an external event such as loss or a public holiday where the pressure to have fun becomes too much and loneliness and despair kick in.

This time of year is particularly bad with a lack of light, a number of public holidays and often a lack of normal support networks all acting as potential triggers.

The key thing for anyone who experiences depression is to seek professional help immediately.

The BBC site has a good guide on the options.

If you are in the UK then check out NHSDirect.

My condition is with me for life but with medication and support I can live a normal life. I do not let my disability define me, nor should you.

This was a hard post to write but if it helps someone to find professional help then it will have been worth it.