Blog posts

The third in our series of Ambridge Acoustic Revues was another roaring success. Noting the date, Rob had suggested we adopt a Day of the Dead theme and decked the building out in fine style. And for a special treat Garry created a fabulous puppet to greet people on the door. Jon and Phil, our usual house band, were off on tour with Beth Rowley, giving the evening a slightly different feel. Jez kindly stepped in on drums, and Foy Vance joined a couple of the others to lend some bass to their tunes. Hayley, Jon, Foy, and of course Iain played well, and all in all it was immensely enjoyable. We hope to have another one ready to announce in the next couple of days. ...

I’d listened to a few reviews and didn’t go into this latest Coen Brothers film with high expectations but having enjoyed every one of their previous films (except, perhaps, their Ladykillers remake) and considering myself a committed fan I’d hoped to see something the reviewers had missed. Or at least enjoy a riotous, if inconsequential, romp along the lines of Intolerable Cruelty. But no. Forty minutes in I was pulling out my phone wondering how much longer there was to go. Most of the time I just watched in disbelief as lines came and went that were clearly intended to be jokes but just fell flat. There was another hour or so before we could leave. It was quite a comedown after No Country For Old Men and I left with my faith in the Coens deeply shaken. ...

The Design Cities exhibition–running at the Design Museum until early January–has been on our list for quite a while and we finally made it along yesterday. The exhibition focussed on seven cities that the curators argued had in turn dominated world design over the past 160 years, and laid out a number of iconic items from each. It seems like almost every exhibition we’ve visited in the past couple of years has been dominated by chairs and this was no exception, but there were also a range of other devices from tableware to consumer electronics. ...

About eighteen months ago I compiled a series of reviews of Ruby on Rails plugins concerned with geography. I put together a comparison chart and posted it on this blog. It subsequently found a new home on a wiki, but lately that wiki has rarely been accessible so I decided it was time to move it all back into this site. You can now find the comparison chart at: /process/resources/rails-geo-plugins/ A few updates have been lost along the way as they were solely made on the wiki, but hopefully it’s still of use. Since I published the original reviews and chart my attention has wandered a little from the geo plugin scene, so please do flag up any new plugins, changes in features or fixes that I may have missed. I’m going to be trying to check through all the existing listings to update them but that may take a while, so comments here may well encourage me to focus more quickly. ...

Over at Netsquared.org Amy Sample Ward has posted another of their regular ThinkTank questions. This time around it’s: What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning? I’m coming in a bit late. There are some good responses appearing, such as those from Ashley Messick and Beth Kanter which offer a number of key questions to consider when developing a strategy for your organisation. The responses to date are summarised on the netsquared site. ...

A couple of years ago I wrote and released a Ruby on Rails plugin called loads_from_amazon. It made it relatively simple to populate a model with data based on an amazon search, and was very helpful in the project I was then working on. That project ended and I’ve not had time to maintain the plugin since. It was based on a clunky amazon ECS library and I kept meaning to rewrite it to sit on something more up to date, like amazon-ecs, but the time never materialised. ...

I don’t think I ever got round to blogging about it, but I really enjoyed Katie Chastain’s debut album when it came out a few months back, particularly for Nathan Johnson’s production work. Nathan’s been busy working with some big names but it’s good to see that he and Katie have had time to put together a video to go with her song ‘Snowshow’. It’s a lovely example of what’s possible with some home-made props and a single-camera shoot. ...

So far as I’m aware, there’s not been much to link a small street near Victoria with Lesotho, South Africa, and 47 countries. Until now. Thanks to a collaboration between photographer James Nachtwey/XDRTB.org and moblog.net one may emerge in the next few hours. Gaining (maybe even seizing) attention is key to any campaign. Connecting causes with play (tastefully, of course) is a great way to attract it and (if you can pull it off) mystery is a potent extra component. I’m excited to see what develops in the next few hours. ...

At dConstruct in Brighton last month Steven Johnson talked at length about his startup, outside.in, that collects together place-blogs to display aggregates commentary and information on a block, neighbourhood and city level. The site is US-only at the moment, which made it a curious presentation for a largely non-US audience. Their toolset for extracting geographical information from blog entries is impressive, but a number of us were talking afterwards about what the real value of such aggregation is for those who might already live in an information-rich or tightly knit neighbourhood. ...

Reading Chuck Klosterman’s Brief History of the 21st Century (via kottke) I was left wondering (as so often with future-fiction) how much of it is really about the modern day: A report from the American Medical Association expresses fear over the proliferation of news blow. “It appears,” the report concludes, “that prolonged consumption of news blow renders the user incapable of relating to any person not engaged with an identical strain of the substance.” Society is no longer separated by geography, culture, or language; humans now group themselves solely through the shared use of specific info drugs. A divide emerges between Americans on the West Coast (who primarily smoke news blow synthesized in rural California) and people living in the East (who snort a more potent strain developed in Baltimore). Over time, people in New York and Los Angeles find themselves unable to communicate about anything – they now understand the most basic building blocks of information in totally different ways. ...