All posts by Armand

Personal

Grosse Pointe Blank year

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This year marks the 10th year anniversary of my leaving school. There’s a reunion and all, and I’m trying to make up my mind as to whether I go.

On the plus side, a lot of what I went through falls into the category of “crucial, formative stuff” that’s made me who I am today, and I am very fond of a few of my peers and staff there.

On the minus side, the half dozen or so friends I had at school may or may not be going, and I didn’t have a lot in common with the remaining 100 or so folk in my year. Every encounter I’ve had with them since then has been very amicable… but, y’know, do I want to throw myself into a context where I (at least 10 years ago) categorically did not fit in?

Have any of you gone to these reunion things not knowing many people well? Did you have fun? Did you tell people you were a professional killer by trade? Were you at school with Minnie Driver?

Incidentally, it’s also the 10th year since I matriculated at college and I have no ambiguity about that party. I’m going in with bells on. But then — I see half of those friends on a weekly basis.

Postscript: TEN YEARS man. TEN YEARS.

I can’t find the “ten years” scene on YouTube so this will have to do.

Internet, Technology

IPv6, Twitter, and leaving the lights on

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Saw this video whilst scanning through anecdotes of Twitter’s uptime on its blog.


Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

Interesting not because I think its a particularly useful application of Twitter to turn lights on and off, but because of the growing chatter around ‘IPv6’, a technology protocol understood by few people outside the networking but that will come to have more relevance as the Internet carries on its ongoing march.

Essentially, every Internet connected device there is has a unique address. In your case, it may be your broadband modem, and every other machine connected to that shares that IP address. This IP address under the protocol we currently use, IPv4, is a unique identifier of that device and takes the form of four three digit numbers separated by full stops. For example, 222.129.228.110. The upper limit on each three digit number is 255, I think due to some relationship between the way the protocol works and hexadecimal base.

What’s happening thanks to cheaper and cheaper technology allowing connectivity, more and more advanced devices supporting connectivity and the general all-around goodness of Broadband is that people have more and more devices they’d like to enable as unique devices on the Internet. You might already monitor an IP CCTV camera remotely, or login to Slingbox, or want to use Twitter to turn your bedroom lights or oven off.

Gradually, as these requirements grow we’ll use up the 4.3 or so billion addresses IPv4 allows and we’ll really need everything to switch up to IPv6 – which supports trillions. There’s been limited imperative to move over to IPv6 in the past as people genuinely haven’t been able to understand why they would every need more than 4.3 billion addresses. Well, the maths has gotten a little bit easier to understand thanks to growing ‘net penetration and an understanding of how we can use the net in different ways that makes things like giving a light bulb an IP address useful.

Which is pretty cool, from where I’m standing.

NB There’s absolutely no need for the light bulb in question here to have its own IP address, but it is the principle I’m talking about here, people. Sure, it’s just massive geeks doing this stuff now, but Facebook just had geeks on it for a while and look at it now…!

Gaming

Playing the averages

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I went to the Grosvenor Victoria, a casino on the Edgeware Road, with James on Saturday. It was an interesting thing but I think I’m done with live poker for a little while.

Reasons being:

1) I don’t have the bankroll to play the averages. It may be a winnable game in the long term, especially as so many of the players don’t seem to really know what they’re doing, but you need to pay the rakes (an extortionate £3 per half hour for the 50p-£1 table of £25 NL holdem) and cope with what happens when the cards don’t come in. Which they didn’t at all on Saturday.

2) Poker’s fundamentally not that social a game. You’re trying to edge out your fellow players and part of that involves giving very little away about who you are and what you’re doing. I like the social aspect of the game played with friends and this neutered some of the fun for me.

3) I still haven’t worked out how to play cash game poker. It’s a very different beast to tournament poker which I vaguely understand after reading the Harrington books and 200 odd tournaments on Pokerstars, not to mention the odd live appearance at the (soon to be defunct?) Gutshot.

4) I don’t like the absence of women from the game. It’s somehow understandable from online poker (I guess you notice less), but the fact that the only women in the Vic were waitresses, cashiers, dealers and masseuses lent a slightly unnatural air to the evening for me.

Still, it was an interesting experience and definitely distracted me from the awfulness of Indy.

Gaming

Fire Emblem

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I finally finished ‘Radiant Dawn’ on Wii yesterday. It should have been on DS. It makes no sense on the Wii, even less so due to its completely random and arbitrary plotline, which I think may have been the result of an experiment involving monkeys and typewriters.

The things that happen when Amanda goes away.

Film, Technology

Cisco on Innovation

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Cisco is a client of mine, so you know.

I don’t ordinarily write about clients at the weekend. Pretty much never, actually. Buy we’ve been working on a cool project with a man called Ian Kennedy at Cisco, and I spotted that Ian Forrester had been involved with the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle last week and caught Ian K’s talk on ‘Open Innovation’ on Blip.tv.

Much interesting insight. Ian Kennedy’s a very smart guy and if you’re interested in the ongoing development of technology (well, everything really) in the UK and how one of the very big, very innovative companies in the world is approaching it, have a view:

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Update: Turns out Ian made it onto Sky News this weekend too, talking about future collaboration and meeting applications, amongst other things.

Music

Finding similar music… if you like acoustic/rock

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Last.fm is wonderful – it helps me find the types of music I like based on my previous listening and on what people I know like. But it’s not that helpful for some of the bands I’ve been listening to lately.

Urusen, friends of mine, inexplicably unsigned, don’t have a lot of associated listeners. Neither do the guys who did Once, a wonderful soundtrack my brother introduced me too. The Rushes, a band who’ve covered Waterloo Sunset (it’s beautiful, really wonderful) for French Film‘s closing credits, don’t have enough similar bands either. Powderfinger, who Tony introduced me to, do a great acoustic version of Sunsets. Most of their music is much rockier (which I like too, but doesn’t fit my bank holiday Monday mood).

So I have to resort to the old fashioned way. I have to talk to people about music, find gigs etc. Which is fine, and fun.

…but I wouldn’t mind if someone developed a social music app that didn’t just analyse the metadata of the song, but the tone, character, mood etc. of the song itself. A kind of intelligent version of the Moodlogic application I used oh-so-long ago would be nice.

Music, Personal

Songkick – find local gigs from bands you like

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I was an early tester for Songkick, a social music application that scans your musical tastes and finds you local gigs to buy tickets for. A friend introduced me to a founder of the service who invited me in, but it is now open to all.

It’s awesome. I’ve become determined to be a little less middle aged and do more fun stuff like this mid-week and so the emails recommending gigs all around London from bands I already like? Fantastic. It probably wants integration with Last.fm so it can draw on historical listening patterns rather than just what you’ve got in your database (I have a lot of crap music I really ought to delete/archive)…

That said, I haven’t got around to booking anything yet. Maybe I’ll start with the next Urusen gig in a couple of weeks…

Film

Indiana Jones and the Kindgom of the Crystal Skull: be warned

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(Reposted from my Flixster review).

There are so many thing wrong with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. Here are some of them.

1) Shia Lebouf
2) That whole thing with the Fridge. Really.
3) A “space between the spaces” ship. Seriously.
4) Shia Lebouf again.
5) Monkeys
6) Ants
7) Tarzan Lebouf
8) Gunpowder magnetic drift
9) Rocket sleds
10) Generic Stalinist supernaturalist baddies
11) Shia Lebouf
12) Steven Spielberg’s penchant for leaving no loose ends or any ambiguity about the happy ending, and the new franchise…
13) …except insofar as the rules don’t apply to non-white characters and (obviously) Communist baddies, who all end up with a bullet in the chest or an exploded brain.

They should just make a proper film version of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and keep Shia Lebouf well, well away.

[Blog append: there are some brief, entertaining, familiar Indy moments. Stuff with the hat, the whip and some wisecracking. But really, not enough for 2.25 hours in the cinema hoping, dear god, for less exposition].

Media & Marketing

Musicals

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I’m off to see the LoTR musical tonight (through, no less, a Lastminute.com 50% discount offer), so was amused by the below viral which was forwarded to me today.

Very fun. Great idea. Well executed.

Update: LoTR musical was ok. A little too camp for LoTR and a little too fantasy adventure for a musical, but some of the songs were pretty strong and the experience as a whole was lots of fun. The staging was very creative, too. I have ordered the CD.