Culture

Emperor Norton reigns supreme at the Jewish Museum

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emperornortonMy brother regularly diversifies from his role as a movie producer to try his hands at other things – that’s what you get if you have the brain the size of a planet, and a work-rate as fast as The Flash.

This time, it’s a play: “The Emperor of America" -  based on the life of Emperor Norton I, a South-African/British immigrant to the US in the heyday of the American dream. Losing most of his money on an ill-fated set of investments in rice imports, he loses part of his mind – but the story that follows is a charming one of delusion, romance and sympathy as Emperor Norton makes his declarations, befriends a local journalist (One Samuel T Clemens) and charts out the remainder of his life.

There’s a read-through at the Jewish Museum in Camden on Thursday, at 8.30pm. Do come along if you are in the area, keen on this sort of thing generally or actually know something about Mr Norton – the play is funny and tragic in equal measures and entertaining in the extreme, regardless of my obvious bias.

Personal

Considering Android and the Samsung Galaxy S2

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Actualizar Samsung Galaxy S2 a Android 2.3.4 GingerbreadTom’s last shopping recommendation saw me acquire my now much loved Macbook Air. Now he’s sporting a Samsung Galaxy S2 and I’m – for the first time since I went over to the iPhone platform – considering Android once again. The screen is beautiful, the camera remarkable, the replaceable battery convenient, I think there’s pretty much parity on the Apps that I use over on Apple’s platform. Of course, I’ll have to buy some of them again, which is a pain, but the migration process would be painful for anyone for a while…

That said, the Galaxy S2 is a new phone, and my iPhone 4 is coming up to 15 months old, so I’m going to wait and see what happens when Apple makes its announcement on the new phone at the end of the month. Some of the new rumours are promising (although very unconfirmed) – nice ‘retro’ curved design, larger screen… we’ll have to see.

It’d have bad knock-on implications on my status as a Coolsmartphone.com iPhone blogger, so that’s obviously going to be a consideration! :-)

Cars

Rally experience

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Ford FiestaLast year some friends clubbed together and bought me a rally experience for my birthday.

As my birthday comes around again this year, it occurred to me that I’d failed to book it in, an error I’ve since remedied. I’ve never done one of these things before so am looking forward to the trip to Silverstone in a  couple of months time to power a Ford Fiesta through some dirt and mud. I imagine, however, that I’ll be moderately terrible at it – my friends have always commented that my go-karting skills resembled someone driving a Mercedes-Benz whilst not in anything approximating a hurry.

But hey, maybe that’ll look good on a rally track….? Or not…. Anything I should particularly aim to do, petrol head friends, please tell me.

Social media

The Facebook experiment

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Facebook.Given the open-ness and superior sharing controls of Google+ I’ve started the process of thinning down my Facebook friends list – this is partially an attempt to regain some sense of personal freedom for my "private" space on FB, and partially out of consideration for the contacts on my friends list inundated with my endless blog posts and photos of my daughter on their news feeds.

I’ve ‘unfriended’ about 20% of my list (I’d considered just moving them to a ‘limited view’ friend status but didn’t really see the point – the people I’ve unsubscribed have had very little interaction or conversation with me for some considerable time now), and we’ll see if anyone notices. I am hoping others fed up with me will unfriend me themselves – as my friends list crept upward I had a sneaking suspicion – which I’m sure will be justified by minimal re-adds – that I wasn’t as popular as Facebook was intimating.

Anyway, I sincerely hope I haven’t caused any offence and will happily get back in contact with people who so desire it!

Sport

Kite flying

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kiteA few years ago, on one of our first holidays as a couple, I bought my lovely wife a sports kite. This summer – we finally got it out of the pack and into the air. It was a thing of surprisingly intense exhilaration and speed, cutting through the air with extreme prejudice as Amanda maneuvered it through the strong seaside breeze down the South Coast last weekend. I entirely failed to get the knack of keeping it aloft, despite the coaching efforts of our outdoorsy, engineer friend Matt (as opposed to our lanky poker-proficient friend Matt), and even Amanda and Matt managed a couple of dramatic, high-velocity ground impacts.

Definitely a Fun Thing, though, and a repeat outing will need to be had. And in a break with tradition, that’s actually a picture of our kite in flight!

Observational

House hunting

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West Witterings - ChichesterIt’s important to dream. On our annual jaunt to West Wittering to stay with our infinitely patient and generous friends, we took a walk down the street ‘hunting’ for that dream property (knowing that its a pretty unattainable distance for our income bracket).

The vast differences in style – from the uber-modern to the Bilbo-Baggins-esque – was astonishing. Virtually every single house we saw could have featured on Grand Designs at some point – although some of them would have earned derisory comments from Kevin McCleod…

It’s a nice dream…

Television

The Doctor returns

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Doctor Who: Let's Kill HitlerDoctor Who’s return was suitably triumphant and exciting, although as Tom commented to me in person at the weekend, bewildering interwoven with pretty much every episode shown in the earlier part of the season. The number of internal references is truly astonishing and perhaps an indicator of the show growing up, in some sense or another, or perhaps just appropriately intricate for the kind of passionate fans the Doctor attracts.

Time travel does give me a headache, though. I’m sure Doc Brown would agree.

Internet, Social media

Charlie Stross on ‘true naming’ – and Google+

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I hadn’t really considered the full implications of Google+’s “true naming” policy, but Charlie has the issues mapped out perfectly here.

To start with, as Patrick McKenzie pointed out in his blog last year (before all this blew up), programmers almost always get name handling wrong because there is no universal format for a human name.

Charlie goes on to point out a whole bunch of other reasons why this is a problem for Google and it’ll be interesting to see how they resolve it. The anti-cultural bias of the ‘True Name’ policy is very unlike Google, despite the (admirable?) goal of keeping the social network honest. But as Charlie points out:

Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It’s nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it’s to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they’re pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it’s not a real identity to them: it’s a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out… although of course, I’m still not quite using Google+ yet. It needs events, and more people I actually know, as opposed to randoms with no profile adding me, possibly expecting reciprocity.

As an aside, I’m still reading Charlie’s Rule 34 – took a break from novels to catch up on some DCU comics – and it continues to be awesome. Charlie’s mentioned a few AR overlays, a lot of tablets, a few 3D ‘fabbers’,  but no social networks yet – maybe, in the near future, we all forget our logins…

Culture, Travel

Local UK nerd days out

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Pike leaving the field of battle

I love this, from resident good science champion Ben Goldacre – it’s a map of nerdy days out, from miniature steam railways, “dead Victorian racecourses, decaying infrastructure” and the like – all things Ben loves. I’m not generally as passionate on the extreme geek front, but I love that people have done this, and will remember it as a reference point for interesting day trips when travelling the country.

Sadly there’s not much on there in my area, but I may need – in a break from my normally self-centred contributions to social media – to add the annual Old Basing Cavaliers vs Roundheads summer battle re-enactment. Whilst it may not reach the same spectacular heights it did in 2010 when the organisers spent a TONNE of council money on making it huge, every year the loyal re-enacters gather to fake duking it out. As anyone who saw Slingshot’s Faintheart may remember, this is a true Sport of Nerds.

Observational

Five rules of debating

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These apply to 1:1 discussions and not if you have an audience. If you have an audience, these rules can more or less reverse (depending on the audience). This list isn’t exhaustive.

  1. Confidence by itself generally loses out over evidence when all participants are equally reasonable.
  2. Not all people that seek out debate in casual conversation are equally reasonable.
  3. Don’t confuse prejudice with argument, and never make a personal comment part of your debate – you cede all authority.
  4. If you can’t resolve the debate in the cold light of sobriety it won’t suddenly make sense intoxicated.
  5. “Let’s agree to disagree” is a polite way of saying “I have no desire to pursue this conversation” and gives any participant in an argument the option to gracefully exit without giving up their perspective.

I’ve found myself in the position of defending people, products and positions I’m not particularly a fan of recently because people violate these rules in conversations with me. I’m not one to generally take a stand on random principles these days, but do find it hard to let totally unreasonable, unfair statements about anything stand. One of life’s little ironies.

Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.