Category Archives: Culture

Culture, Technology

Chris Anderson and me chatted!

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That was pretty exciting. I didn’t really expect to enjoy tonight’s geek dinner as much as I did; don’t know why, I guess despite being a geek in many ways (for many years) I’ve never really done the “going to an event where I know no-one” thing. Actually, maybe that’s not surprising if I’m describing myself as a geek…

Highlights: Tim B from Info Age was there, who I’ve been speaking to for the last couple of years (mostly about Cisco as, well, I work on their PR), and was good value, as was his ‘not really a geek’ friend Dan (who likes comic books, and is therefore a geek ;)).

The pub, on Holborn Viaduct, was an interesting experience.

The chat was good – although there were some… unusual personalities at play, met a couple of cool guys who were doing interesting things (business cards from Azeem, Jon, and San), good conversations with Tim and Dan as well, and actually managed to (a) ask a question and (b) follow up with Chris Anderson himself afterwards, which was cool.

More on specific chat shortly. I’ll definitely go back for more dinners if Ian gets more good speakers – Ian and his wife, Sarah, were great hosts and did a good job getting us all corralled (even if it was slighly hard to hear Chris during the talk itself).. . and am sure there were others who contributed to making the evening a success.

Culture, Internet, Technology

Geek dinner

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I’m going to my first ever Geek Dinner tonight; it’s with [[Chris Anderson]] of ‘Wired’ fame – he’s got a theory called ‘[[The Long Tail]]’ about how, in and amongst other things, markets and media are evolving from a few mass media, products and services into — thanks to a largely Internet powered world — a mass of niche media, markets etc. There’s a great, and very confusing, quote from Amazon in the Wikipedia article about The Long Tail which might serve to give a practical example of what that means.

I think the Geek Dinners are a great concept, and they seem very popular (at time of writing, there are 72 comments to rsvp, despite the fact that its on a Friday night) — so if anyone has an interest in the topic that’s reading this, please do come along and keep me company. I’ll be the one in the corner who doesn’t know anyone ;).

Culture, Film, Internet, Media & Marketing, Personal, PR

Like shot from a sling

Arvind’s company officially launched this week, to a chunky piece in the Guardian, amongst others (loads of peeps I know seem to have been in the guardian this week).

I’ve mentioned before that Slingshot Studios is specialising in all-digital film production – and Arvind’s working with some cool folks, on some interesting looking projects (from the little I’ve seen). I imagine more will go up at the Slingshot blog (in due course).

I’ll be speaking to them at some point soon about blogging and movie making — will need to look into quite how successfully people have used blogs to market films of late — but the if the paridigmata that are the King Kong and Superman Returns blogs is anything to go by, I suspect film-goers do want to hear things straight from the movie makers mouths (although those examples are arguably atypical ;)).

Culture, Current affairs, Personal

England vs Ecuador

Anyone who knows me will tell you quite how bad I am at watching or paying any attention to sport, but have been getting into (bits of) this world cup. Never mind that my sweepstake draws were universally appalling (one of my golden boot strikers didn’t even make the squad – Ewerthon) — I have at least been watching the England games when I can. Saw the first one in Sardinia, the second in NYC, read the live commentary to the Sweden match (depressing as it was) on my train back from Heathrow. Today I watched the Ecuador match with friends in West London.

And it was exciting. And I was getting involved. And – its pretty cool. I can’t afford another time-absorbing hobby (and don’t think I’m that interested anyway), but it is fun to kind of share it with my (almost all much more interested in football) friends – although a few of football fans in the room did not appreciate my stating the obvious (“damn, that was close” on the Ecuador shot in the first 20 minutes). Alan Hanson, I’m not.

Anyway, come on my adopted nation, ENG-ER-LAND! Bring on the quarter finals — oh, and don’t worry Daf, I still support Wales for the Rugby ;).

Culture, Personal

Life narrative

I know there are some other [[Scrubs]] fans out there who will, like me, feel considerable empathy for JD’s internal narrative. I certainly spend a disproportionate amount of time gazing into the distance, introspecting about one thing or another.

Not quite this:

It was a dark and stormy night. Armand, clad in a tasteful Cowboy-Bebop style shirt and tan trousers stood on the top of his apartment block’s short set of entry stairs and prepared to brace the biting wind that infiltrated London like the a gust of… well, something cold

But more:

Do I really want to have that tub of Chinese food for lunch today? I’ve resolved to be healthy, I should get a salad. But I’m ill, and it tastes soooooo good. Sod it, Hong Kong café it is…

That said, since I’ve started being more… diligent about transcribing my unique brand of observational humour and insight here, I’ve started blogging in my head. It’s faintly disturbing and probably overwhelmingly geeky, but I quite enjoy the structure this blog gives my thoughts and the outlet for my puns it provides. It’s one of the reasons I carry around a small black notebook (as I’ve mentioned before)…

Is it just me?

Culture, Guestblog, Personal

Terrible experience at the National Theatre

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After work today I skipped down to the South Bank. The English were all out in their summer gear. Not a jacket or a brolly in sight. I scowled at the lot of them, and headed into the giant cement legomonster that is the National Theatre. I collected the tickets and found a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc at the bar. My mood got even better when the pinstriped one arrived, swinging his red man-brolly, complete with glossy wooden handle.

The play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, is listed on the National’s site as ‘…the clash between two cultures leaves thousands of unarmed Inca troops slaughteres and sparks and intense battles of wills between the sun-god and his captor…’ You can see this in full at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk. It was like a badly animated cartoon. The ten pounds I’d paid for my (extremely good) seat seemed an exorbitant amount to have to sit through it. Simplistic, unsophisticated, completely cringeworthy dramatisation. The Inca god spoke in a similar style to Ken Brannagh’s Benedict in Much Ado about Nothing, diguising himself from Beatrice at the masque.

The pin-striped one and I made our exit at the interval and wandered up the bank, delighted that we’d escaped safely.

Next time I decide I want culture, am so picking up Jilly Cooper’s ‘Wicked.’ You can find it on amazon.com by searching for Jilly Cooper, legend.

Culture, Film

From cult to mainstream

Was having a conversation with siblings a couple of months ago about how things make the leap from cult to mainstream – for example, Spider-Man, the comic – largely cult. Spider-Man, the movie – definitely mainstream. Some don’t succeed – the Hitchhiker’s film, much as I enjoyed it, was clearly one of those that failed to break the ‘cult’ barrier.

The X-Men are a trickier. Have they brokered the divide into the mainstream with their recent set of films? I think they did with the first two – but the third suffers from Too Much Source Material – the writers clearly got confused as to which of the universes they wanted to draw upon.

See, I really enjoy the little jokes they bury in the film for fans to enjoy – but when character development is stunted (as it is for Colossus in the X3, for example) – it becomes that much harder for non-fans to understand the emotional subtext in key scenes.

I can’t say much more without spoiling the film (and it still doesn’t open for a couple of days!), but would be interested to hear thoughts on other films that have successfully bridge the gap between cult and the mainstream and what made them successful.

For me, there are always two components – solid character development and a simple, believable plot – and by ‘believable’ please don’t assume I mean realistic, I would never ask for that – but rather one that passes its own laws of internal consistency. Like Mr McKee, I’m not a fan of deus ex machina…

Culture, Technology

The evolution of the mobile

So, was thinking about this the other day (because that’s what I do sometimes…); I’ve lived through four paradigmatic design concepts for the ‘chic’ mobile phone of the day… in a little over a decade.

In the early 90s, my Dad’s second ever mobile phone was a Motorola Micro-Tac, a chunky beast that was a predecessor of the clamshell phone. It weight about a metric tonne and had the aesthetic appeal of a wet brick, but hey – it was early days for the technology.

Next (after dozens of bland, conventional, soap-bar shaped phones) was the Matrix phone; chalk one up for Nokia, that was one good bit of product placement. I had that one for a year and absolutely loved the button that flicked the mouthpiece down.

But the two latest trophies belong to Samsung, as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to ignore the Razr, because clever though it was to make it thin, and metallic, its fundementally a clamshell phone, the award for which I think goes to this phone (or a close relative, can’t quite remember the model number). It was one of the first generation of colour screen mobiles (Tom had one until quite recently), and was very cool. Samsung marketed it heavily and think they did well with it.

The next chic-phone, and victim of a range of imitators at the moment is the new slidey form function.

Wonder what’s next – hopefully no more failed concepts like this Nokia. What do I have? None of the above – I prefer function over form these days, and love my SPV c600….

Culture, Technology

The knowledge economy

Have noticed lately a few mobile and broadband providers seem to be looking to lock in their customers for longer contracts – 18 months at a time. Much as this makes sense as a customer retention strategy, can’t imagine it will do anything other than nark consumers off… Certainly I’ll avoid it unless they promise me very, very good incentives (and I’m confident of their customer service levels).

On the other hand, it does mark a decline in the great acquistion drive for ‘new’ technologies — after an astonishingly short period of time. To reach saturation point in the market such as you’re already competing for each others customers at this stage – bravo, the knowledge economy is practically here.

Of course, the digital divide hasn’t been crossed as yet – there’s still a large minority of the population who don’t have access to the latest and greatest services; what’s to be done about them? Well, hopefully we’ll see some government investment and some regulatory controls pushing to make Britain an information egalitarian state [sic], even if the Tories do win the next election. That would make an interesting (if particularly geeky) episode of Yes Minister.

There is an interesting piece on Silicon.com that speculates that an information economy will only truly be driven by all pervasive, ultra fast broadband… there’s some truth in that (although I’m not sure if 1 Gbp/s is it!).

Books, Culture, Music

Heggles

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I bought John Hegley’s Family Favourites CD the other day, having seen him perform a few years ago (at a show my brother was reading at). Some might call that a delayed reaction, I call it… measured.

Great as it is, I am somewhat disappointed. Primarily because the great music-comedy-poem-thingy that is Luton Bungalow sounds very different on the recording to how I remember it – at the gig I was at, he sang:

“In my Luton Bungalow…. low… low… low… Luton Bungalow!”

On my CD he simply sings:

“In my Luton Bungalow.”

Which is clearly a poor substitute, although I’ll admit this story loses something in the telling. But its a fantastic disc, and he’s a fantastic man: I’d recommend it to anyone.