April 2003 Archives

One of the great things from Etcon (or etech) was the reawakening of the threadsML discussion, though it was more like discovery for me.
ThreadsML is an extension of the normal RSS 1.0 plus dublin core and other cleverness.
Essentially the premise is to take already structured data like mailing lists and email and use the meta data to do clever things with it, like relationships and ownership.
A few pointers, Ben Hammersley's post on Eric Sinclair's notes on Ben's talk. Marc Cantor also posted a similar set of notes, but with a bit more background detail.
There are lots of notes and history in this quicktopics threadsml posting, which is ongoing and a great place to get up to speed on the issues behind threadsML.
There is a specification for threadsML, the related ENT and all sorts of other things in the QuickTopics thread. Ben Hammersley's book Content Syndication with RSS is probably a good idea if you are not familar with RSS, certainly helping me.
One of the key questions is if you are going to relate all this knowledge, how do you represent the underlying information. An ontology is one way of doing this. A few years ago I was looking at this area, whilst I was researching at the University of Nottingham, I got a bit stuck in the ontological mapping of knowledge for web search, so doing it for a more structured domain makes a lot of sense to me. I'll dig out some notes and blog next week, off to Venice this weekend. It does remind me a bit of the Hypermail programme from Eric Hughes (?) at EIT, as it takes the regularity of email and adds to it, hypermail made webpage, threadsml will make connections.
It is good to see that the people who run JoDI have a article this month on ontologies. M. Doerr, J. Hunter, C. Lagoze; Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration, full paper in pdf.
I'm certainly hoping to be looking at this area in more detail in coming months.

Found this interesting article on website security from Security Focus, via Macintouch.
It poses a range of good questions for users and creators of website login systems. Good reading if you are developing a web application.

Today I had a great time taking part in the Spencer Tunick installation at Selfridges in London, it involved getting naked along with 500 other people and becoming part of a series of four installation art pieces which Spencer Tunick then photographed.
Article from BBC news on the event, plus a video clip from the BBC.
UPDATE: I've posted my photos of the event. Some press articles, Daily Mail including a gallery. The Daily Telegraph have a report of the event and a personal account. The Guardian had a slightly bitter piece entitled Keep Your Tunic On, a fully clothed installation piece in Brighton. end UPDATE
UPDATE 2 I've changed some of the text on this article to better reflect what I took part in, after converstation with Spencer Tunick. It was an art installation, rather than a purely photographic event end UPDATE 2.
If you were at the event, please leave a comment below.
What follows is a narrative and a personal account of the event, plus my reactions to participating in it. Some knowledge of the internal layout of Selfridges might help. The event was due to start at 8am, so I got up early and headed down to the train station for the 7 am train, to experience early morning Sunday London. On the platform I noticed someone who I sometimes see commuting to work, I saw her again on the tube to Bond Street. Then she ended up beside me in the queue, we did the British thing and studiously avoided getting to know one another beyond the vaguest pleasantries.
We queued for about 45 minutes from 7:30, the queue getting longer by the minute, I noticed that there was a cap on the number of 500, I think they eventually turned people away, certainly the queue went right round the block. the participants ranged from early 20s to in their 60s, with roughly equal male female split and probably the bulk early 20s to late 30s.
I took a few pictures of the queue and whilst waiting inside to get ready, but decided that people had come to be photographed by Spencer Tunink and not me, so took none of people partially clothed.
Once inside we waited sat on the floor on the first floor in woman's accessories, with our plastic bags for our clothes. After everyone filed in, around 9ish, things started with a few announcements and congratulations, plus some pronouncements "no socks", "no jewellery, but piercings are okay". Then "get your kit off" and after a fraction of a seconds hesistation, 500 people were naked in less than 90 seconds. From sat and clothed to stood and naked in almost a race with the last wearing a garment the loser. Quite an odd experience and quite interesting, all sorts of body shapes and sizes, I've never seen so many naked people and it is a surprisingly freeing experience, once someone has no clothes on, many differentiating factors disappear and you are left with sex, colour and age.
The first installation was in the cosmetics aisle, a long wide walkway in which we all lay tightly packed together, between the booths for L'Oreal etc. We lay down right against one another, but there was still a sense of personal space and politeness. The main feeling was amusement and only a slight air of embarrassment, which disappeared very quickly. Three cameras worth of film later we were on our feet and told to look at the counters in a somewhat disinterested manner, the contrast being between our naked form and the cosmetic industry. Lots of laughter and quite fun, people really starting to get into the whole experience. I'll get a print of one of these two, depending upon Spencer Tunick's favourite, in a few months time.
There was a bit of looking at one another and even a bit of chatting about other people between groups of friends, but when you spoke to someone eye contact was very carefully maintained at neck level and higher. It was not a sexy experience, in fact it felt quite matter of fact, probably because it was such a public environment and the scale of it making the interactions quite general, almost like the nudity wasn't an issue.
The third location was on the escalators, I ended up right at the bottom, so could see all the people on their way up, but only got to see the image from the artists point of view on tv later. On the flights of the escalators people were tightly packed three to a step, it was quite a dramatic sight, a real physical presence. On the floor, it must have looked like we were supporting this rush of humanity up the stairs, it must seem we are climbing out of the frame.
We were shot in two different ways, both standing and also leaning with our heads touching or resting on the back of the person in front of you. The scene was shot from both looking face on and from behind. I've seen more images of this one than of the others and I really like it, it is a strong image, the serried ranks of people on the stairs give a real impact of the numbers that were involved.
Men and women were then seperated, the women did a setup around the word "undress", which is a piece of artwork which decorates the lingerie department. I've only heard descriptions, but I've heard it was like a fallen over school photo.
We were back downstairs in the woman's accessories, waiting whilst the woman's setup happened. It gradually became quite a boisterous occasion, with plenty of random converstations whilst we waited. This whole waiting as a group of men could have felt a bit odd, men usually needing a good excuse to be naked, like a gym shower, but the euphoria of the day made everyone very talkative. The atmosphere was heightened when one of the participants fetched his video camera and ran half way up a flight of stairs to get 200 odd naked men to record a message for his wife "Hello Maria". She didn't know that he was in Selfridges, so is in for a surprise.
By the time that Spencer came down for the final setup he got a rousing welcome from us, which I think he was a bit taken a back by. He quickly setup and organised us to knee on the floor or on shiney metal boxes (which I later discovered are used to display handbags), I perched on a metal box and crouched down on my knees with my head against them, bum facing away from the lense and hair towards. This was a little cramped and rushed, as time was starting to run out, as Selfridges needed to prepare for opening at 12. Spencer was having to work quickly, then a film jammed, and was fixed and another 3 films later it was all over with the words "that's it, come back next time".
I might consider another one, he does a different range of nature shoots, I think that one urban or architectural one is enough, but it was really good fun.
I felt that the whole experience was fascinating, quite liberating and enjoyable, but certainly a collective experience. After getting dressed most people headed up to the 4th floor cafe for a drink and a chat, groups of now less anonymous strangers sitting drinking tea together discussing their immediate reactions to the event. I think that this must be one of the more powerful effects of the shoot on people, you have the oddest converstations about nudity and how you felt and what it meant. It has also get me thinking about the representation of who we are and how we are depicted. Plus a desire to go out and buy clothes, I bought jeans and a jacket within hours.
One interesting theme is the anonimity of the art work, the locations are not really identifiable and the lense doesn't pick out individuals. For the participants mostly we become different people when we are naked, the green jacket or red shoes disappear and hair colour is the only salient feature to persist. I doubt I could pick out more than 20 of the people who were at Selfridges, if I saw them in the street. It has also given me a sense of the variety of the human form and how one person can essentially use it as an artistic medium.

The title is one of the most frequent questions asked in work. There is an interesting article in this Saturday's Guardian on the dangers of over the counter (otc) painkillers and the possible addiction to painkillers that afflicts three percent of people in the UK. It is a well written and argued case for more control in otc painkillers, they are far too easy to obtain and we take them for the slightest pain or sniffle, the advertising makes such a strong case for not suffering or slacking. Several years back I took neurofen on a daily basis as prescribed by my doctor for RSI, now I'm intolerant to them, I get a mild allergic reaction to them, I tend to be more careful with respect to medicines these days and ask why am I taking this or being offered it and what are are the side-effects.
The article raises several other interesting points about addicition to codeine and the recurrent headaches that some people get from overuse of painkillers. it also comments on the difficulties in getting support for getting off addiction to legal drugs, no-one wants to admit that they are addictive, so you must pay to attend rehab yourself. For paracetamol there is an additional concern. The effective dose for 50% of the population is quite close to the lethal dose for 1% (BMJ article 1, BMJ article 2), yet the pharmaceutical companies are loathe to to introduce drugs containing an antidote to overdosing, as it tastes bad, makes you sick and costs more.
An interesting article that raises an interesting issue that affects most of us, have you got any paracetamol with you today ?

The Register report on Westminster council offering a wifi service in Soho. Initially it will be for council workers only, but will become a payfor service for public usage later in the year. Quite cool and an interesting wrinkle on the starbucks, you can use it in our cafes option. Being able to use it in public places, like parks and in other shops will be great and I'd definitely consider paying, despite thinking consume.net is a great idea. London is quite a disparate place and getting reasonably consistent coverage in central London for a flatfee per month would be great. Single venues even bundled together are to widespread, free access is great but patchy, blanket local area sounds cool.

Congratulations to Ben and Mena Trott, who are SixApart, the people behind Moveable Type which powers this site, have got funding and are launching a new hosting service called Typepad. Ben Hammersley got the scoop and wrote about it in The Guardian. TypePad will be perfect for those people who want to blog, but want more than blogger offers and can't be faffed with setting up their own server or learning linux, it should make for less geeky writing and even more widespread RSS feeds too, (I've already got 111).
Though as Tom Coates notes, there is a new blogger coming. Screen shots and a preview are linked from the site.
Finally NetNewsWire should be public beta 1.02 next week, look at the end of the post. Congrats to Brent for getting the award too.

Joi Ito met Brian Behlendorf and helped Brian get blogging and get a blog. Like Joi, I first met Brian virtually via the sfraves mailing list in 92/93, though it was more wistful than real, as I lived in Belfast, rather than sunny California, still good parties in Belfast though. Brian is a great guy who I've met a couple of times, first at www94 in Geneva, then at the Paris www5 conference. He was integral in the early apache server work too. He is an avid mailing list user, something I have been in the past too. Mailing lists are a great form of community, very strong sense of community from them, much more so than many web communities I've been part of, blogging is pretty good as it retains the two way capabilites and can range over a wide variety of topics, unlike mailing lists which tend to be unitopic. I realise that is a sweeping generalization, but you get the idea.
Also, Esther Dyson now has a weblog, entitled release 4, covering the stuff she can talk about, I think it will make interesting reading, like her books.

O'Reilly's Emerging Tech is happening in Santa Clara and from it several interesting forums have sprung. For some good coverage, read Jason Kotte's ETech, one of the best amongst many good reviews. David Weinberger is good too.
Many to many is a weblog co-written by Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, S

If you want to save hedgehogs, which after all do eat slugs and snails, then avoid any slug pellets which contain metaldehyde, which kills hedgehogs too, as well as other small animals. I found this in the Londoner, which is the free paper from Ken, more proper London stuff at the london mayoral website.

Summer is now finally making itself known and we've had our first barbeque, for me the natural drinking partner for the summer are cocktails. The best guides I've found are the sauce guides, which are a straight forward guide to making good cocktails, like you might get in a decent cocktail bar, like lab bar in Soho, London.
The sauce guides cover how to make these and great things like the bramble, champagne cocktails and jamican mules, which are much better than russian ones , essentially swap vodka for dark rum. The sauce guides cover what to use and how to mix it, plus a short review and a bit of history, plus a photo of what it should look like. Their recipes work and make tasty drinks, the emphasis on fresh ingredients and being precise with measuring so you get the balance of sweetness right. They also recommend different spirits to get and what toys to buy. The website needs a decent searchable interface though, as there are over 1000 drinks in the book, which is 7 quid and updated quarterly.
To make many decent cocktails, like the sublime bramble, you need an ice crusher, Braun make a decent one which is part of a food processor, order it from amazon. The reason for an ice crusher is so that the alcohol is kept cold in a glass, which is tightly packed with ice. If the ice is crushed then less of it melts as there are no gaps, you can see this as the outside of the glass gets covered in condensation.
My perfect martini, take cold gin, usually gordons export and noilly prat vermouth. To make one martini take two shots of gin and about a quarter of a shot of vermouth, sometimes a little less and shake with 3-4 fresh ice cubes for about 5-10 seconds, and then pour into a chilled martini glass, chill the glass with ice and water, then dry with a glass cloth. To make a gibson add a black olive, to make my current favourite add a splash of brine from some olives and you get a dirty martini.

I'm doing something interesting on Sunday, this was at the end of the invite, more on Sunday

Thank you for wanting to be a part of my art!
I could not make my work without you,
so I am extremely grateful for your participation.
This is going to be a great, beautiful, new experience!

Last year they were lovely, simple chocolate and ice cream, now they are sweet sickly caramels and peanuts

very sad, the new ones are far too sweet, bring back simple choc ices

I've realised that I've not been posting recipes, like I thought I would be and I feel a bit bad about this. So some recipes will be forthcoming this week.
However to cook you need to be able to chop and to chop you need a sharp knife. I've spent a few years working out how to use a steel and I think I've got it now. The trick is that all the guides tell you how to keep an edge, but if you neglect your knives badly enough then you need to know how to get an edge in the first place.
To keep an edge hold the steel in one hand and then draw the blade of the knife from the point to the hilt quickly back along the steel. You need to do this on alternate sides, left then right then left, otherwise you build a false edge.
If you've neglected your blades, then you need to ensure that the steel is firmly held and essentially do the same thing. I usually put the tip of the steel on the top of a block, but you could use a countertop, it need to not skate about, then you slowly draw the blade back left and right in a similar manner, but you need to press harder. Placing the tip of the steel on the countertop gives you the ability to press hard enough.
UPDATE: Photos for this howto on flickr, finally.
Buy a new Kitchen knife, I like Sabatier and Wusthof, of course you'll need a sharpening steel, all from Amazon UK.

From The Guardian, via nettime, Naomi Klein on the war and how this is essentially a US led privatisation of Iraqi assets to US ownership, through official and proper channels via distribution of rebuilding contracts and services. She argues the case for the Iraqi people in the face of the multi-nationals attempting to make a buck on the back of "free iraq".

I caught up with Stuart Hughes' blog, he is the BBC producer who lost a foot in northern Iraq, he has now had his cast removed and is recovering in the UK. His blog is good funny reading, but also sad and shocking. The number of mines in the world is really quite frightening, 110 million in the ground and the same number stockpiled, it costs at least 100 times the amount to remove the mine as it does to deploy it. Then you have otherwise intelligent people working on self protecting mine fields, like they don't cause enough damage already. Dozens of people, many children will die or be injured from the mines already in Iraq, they kill more children as they are smaller.
The Mines Advisory Group are actively clearing mines in northern Iraq, they hope to raise enough money to clear the rest of Iraq and other places.

Just got this amazing image from nasa, of a bubble of air trapped inside a water droplet, on the unbent stem of a plant, really quite simple, yet wonderful.
Looks like more fun than the digging clay and taking down ivy that this bank holiday has entailed for me. I've been gardening, having a barbeque, visiting family, climbing and more gardening, quite fun really and no blogging.

A few things are happening at the minute in my life. I've been to various marches against the war, I've been writing on my blog and I've been reading more widely. The combination of these things is leading me to discover an aspect of me, which I'd been missing.
Growing up in Belfast it is difficult to be involved with the normal political left vs right positioning. Everything is tied into religion, so I didn't do politics very much, though wished along with my parents that the mainstream parties would setup in Northern Ireland.
Seven years later I have been through the end of the tories and infatuation with new labour. Politics is getting more issue based, now there are plenty of issues to look at, from environmentalism to antiwar to the globatization debates.
I have found the activist within myself, I'm not quite sure what has triggered it in particular, but it is a good thing. stop esso is a good place to start.

The loss of our cultural history during the looting of Baghdad is appalling, this is were we first wrote, had markets, invented numeracy, time astronomy and many other important discoveries.
I've been in a delimma thinking about the people being killed compared to the books and artefacts burnt or destroyed. One being the destruction of people, the other the destruction of the history of civilization. I've come to the conclusion that, in time, the immediate pain of the thousands of dead will pass and the lasting memory may become the loss of our collective history.
At the weekend I read Robert Fisk in the Independent who wrote powerfully on the loss of our cultural history. On Monday a representative from the British Museum was talking on the Today programme about the need to preserve what remains and pointing out the cleaning up is the worst thing that can happen. The teams of conservators will try to put the broken artifacts back together. Pictures of the damage from the BBC, Baghdad National Library burns and pictures of the looting of the museum.
Jeremy Hedley writes on antipixel about the lack of care that the US have taken over this issue, he links in a variety of sources showing that the US army had been briefed numerous times about this. Good writing, worth reading, the comments below debate the american involvement or lack of it.
To see some of the kinds of things that were lost, have a look at the BBCi History Mesopotamia gallery. Quite a reasonable amount of artefacts from this period are in the British Museum, they have an online Mesopotamia exhibit.
Powell has offered to repair damage, but it is tragic that it happened in the first place. A dozen American tanks would have protected the libraries and the museums, but they rather show off to the world's press outside the Palestine Hotel in a fashion rather after Nero.

Looking back to highlight my friend Vic's funny post on inappropriate mobile phone mispellings, obtained via predictive text.
I've found that she has explored the contents of her bag and posted the results, it reminds me of the boing boing article from a while back on the contents of your pockets, I'm more of a bag person rather than stuffing lots in my pockets.
So, my turn:
Apple Powerbook G4 15" 1Ghz
Willowfield Designs vertical slipcase for powerbook
3 books - Reasons to be Cheerful (about half way though)
The Tipping Point (to read in work or when I finish the above)
Cultural Studies (to read in work, my new area of interest)
stopesso stickers
sunglasses and case
glasses and case
notebook, A5 in size
20G external firewire drive in jiffy bag
bag full of cables and power adaptor for PBG4
two pens, one blue and one black
luggage labels for Delta (silver) and BMI (blue)
migraleve tablets
cold and flu tablets
L'Occitane handcream in metal tube
Driving licence
Little A-Z west end london foldout map
receipt for TV repair for £96, with phone number for me to chase them
last issue's MacUser CD
two first class stamps
another smaller notebook, sort of 3" x 5"
my and headphones
a USB bluetooth adaptor
seldom used clipon camera for t68i phone
my securID fob for remote email access
nivea lip care tube
old copy of TimeOut
Amazon receipt for 6 books for £95
no camera, as Lucy has it
fluff
all in a podsacs super teardrop rucksack with a anti-war button badge on the back.
Not really sure what that lot says about me, maybe I carry too much stuff about. It does vary a bit in terms of magazines and books, but the core is laptop, glasses and something to read, plus the small light stuff that never gets taken out.
Sort of marks me out as a product of western civilisation, I'm sure it varies a bit in the rich economies and then there is a sudden break when you move to the poorer economies. Where I expect that food and tools of your trade predominate and there is less commuting and less possessions.

   
Another two images I've taken in a last few days, spring is here all the leaves are starting to unfurl. Sadly, I missed the magnolia near my work though, they are one of my favourite trees, beautiful flowers on bare branches, then the leaves come and drown out the flowers, still perfection for a few days.
Picture on the right is Charing Cross through the new leaves on the alder (?), the other is of course horse chestnut at it best, when they are small and delicate, though really an excuse to play with the macro capabilities of my new camera.
Looks like it is going to be a lovely warm week in London too, in the 20s most of the week...

Last week I was walking back from lunch and was noticing the longer views that you can see because it is getting brighter. It made me notice something I've thought about before, if you look above the first story, many cities are really quite lovely looking, the corporate brand is smeared across the ground floor only. Have a look at these photos, taken in 5 minutes on the Strand, more on the No Space theme from No Logo, which is a good read if you haven't seen it yet.

I'm still marching against the war, why? This war has throw Iraq into utter chaos and those that caused it are not taking their responsibilities seriously. The looting, killing and destruction of the people and fabric of one of the oldest countries in the world is a tragedy. Something I hear again and again is "did they even think what would happen afterwards", clearly they didn't think very much and now expect the UN to tidy up after them.
If you marched in February you believed that war was wrong, it is still wrong, "our boys" are safe now, so look at the sad state that is now Iraq, look at Afghanistan, where even Kabul is not safe one year later.
This war was wrong, we cannot let this happen again.

Today I was in the UCL Waterstones bookshop and took advantage of being in a real bookshop to sit in the comfortable chairs and find a good book to help be get to grips with some of the issues running through my mind, I found Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, by Chris Barker. It is an undergraduate introductory book to the subject. I decided that cultural studies was the right area to start mining for knowledge. Review when I've read it.

Good article in The Guardian by Julian Barnes on what next now the war is over. He analyses the pro and anti war viewpoints and discusses the reasons to keep protesting. He asks good questions of both sides and has some interesting quotes.
There is another march tomorrow, I was undecided earlier in the week, but reading this article and being inspired by reading Mark Steel's Reasons to Be Cheerful have convinced me that now is not the time to stop. I do not want Bush and Blair to think that doing this again to Syria, Iran or North Korea is wise or acceptable.

Recently I've been on a shareware spending spree over the past few months, so haven't spent a fortune, but I have bought some excellent software. I thought I'd make some notes on
Interarchy 6.1 great file transfer software, I've been using this for years and upgraded to 6.1 recently. nice reliable and fast.
MoveableType 2.6 superb software that manages this website, very happily paid for this one
NetNewsWire 1.01, I reviewed this and actually bought it whilst I was reviewing it, as I liked it that much. It is a RSS newsreader, using it you can read the headlines of dozens of sites in a few minutes, rather than visiting each in turn.
BetterHTMLExport 2 handy for publishing sets of pictures from my new camera from iPhoto. It has a templating system that I'm intending to investigate soon.
Vuescan 7.6 scanner software that drives a myriad of scanners that the manufacturers haven't bothered to write MacOS X drivers, also works on linux and windows too.
iChatStatus fun way to tell your friends what you are listening to etc
clutter recreates the cd clutter you used to have on your desk and is now in iTunes, grabs cd covers from Amazon and puts them on your desktop.
Sony Ericsson Clicker very cool app to show your windows using friends to prove that Macs are great. It lets you remote control all sort of applications via script triggered from your bluetooth phone.
soybo exploring this, but not really had time yet. It lets you turn applications into webservices which you can drive from other devices, taking an application centric approach to remote access.

Many years ago in late 93 I started listing mac internet software on a website at my old university. I provided links to software and wrote short reviews of the products. Sort of my selection of the mac products out there, like mosaic 1.0 etc. Making lists like this nearly 10 years later feels a little strange, but quite nice.

Matt Webb, who writes Interconnected, has pulled together a range of interesting figures on the approx 150 people group size that we are happy with. He references an overview of the tipping point and a gradation of different sizes of society, by Jared Diamond.
More on this later, once I've digested it a bit better, I had written a longer entry, but realized it was a bit woolly. Call this one, thoughts held over for later.

Stuart Hughes is a BBC producer who was injured by a landmine in Iraq, he is blogging his recovery from losing his foot. It is moving and powerful writing, giving his experiences there prior to the landmine and then his reactions to being injured and subsequently operated on.
He is planning to campaign against landmines, which is a natural and appropriate response, one I support wholeheartedly.

Axiomatic by Greg Egan is a collection of short stories, encompassing a wide range of themes from questions of identity to strange attractors. Some stories I particularily liked are

• The Moat, racist tensions in Australia form the background to a story about a lawyer who deals with emigration law. His pathologist partner makes some odd discoveries in a rape case, which lead to questions about the idenity of the attacker.
  
• Closer, two lovers try to get a deeper understanding of each other, they experiment with different methods of being one another.
  
• The Hundred Light-Year Diary, you can read about the future from your diary and see what happens in your life with surprising results.
  
• The Caress, a policeman finds a dead academic with an odd pet in the cellar.
  
• The Infinite Assassin, drugs induce space time disturbances in the world, the assassin is sent to stop it each time.
  
• The Cutie, a man obsessed with having a child buys a kit to make one.
  

His writing is good and he comes up with powerful visions of the near future. There is a strong scientific element to the writing, but also several stories that question what is our identity and how others relate to us, often involving machines to transfer us to another virtual place or ensure we can live on in different forms.
Sparkling stuff, lots of ideas and challenges to how we think life is and what it could become. His website is updated regularily and highlights new books and links to some of his passions and interests, such as the rights of asylum seekers, and odd mathematical visualisations.

Lucy and I escaped decorating and went for a walk in London, using the Time Out London Walks Book, Volume 2, we decided to walk through the west end and thought that following the life of Aleister Crowley would give an interesting element to the walk.
Following the Time Out guide, we walked from Euston down Grey's Inn Road, along High Holborn, down Long Acre, through to Old Compton Street and then along to Old Bond Street and down through to Victoria via St James's Park. Each place was related to Aleister Crowley in some manner, either through the Golden Dawn group or because he lived or dined there.
Despite having a new digital camera, it has still taken me four days to get these posted. I have been decorating since Monday and Tuesday, which is a small excuse. The photos are on gavinbell.com.

Like virtually everyone else I've been watching the fall of the statue of Saddam in the centre of Baghdad, one of the things I've liked is the Arabic custom of disrespecting people by kicking or hitting with shoes. The video of Iraqis hitting pictures of Saddam with their shoes is delightful, people even stop mid-stride and take one shoe off and smack him in the face and start walking again.
Hopefully this will be the end of it and the possible battle in Tikrit will dissolve and calm will be restored with an Iraqi led government by the summer.

I've been thinking about the different styles of blog writing and their differences from other writing styles, such as journalisim or academia. Partly as a reaction to the James Moore vs Andrew Orlowski discussions, see also Joi Ito on this topic.
I was discussing it with Anno and she mentioned comonplace books or scrapbooks, as her analogy for weblogs. I think that there is quite a bit to that, but am interested in other areas too.
Various people have boldly claimed that weblogs are the new journalism, I don't agree, journalism has several differences, It has an organisational voice, it is edited, it is often news only in its focus. I think that there are some parallels with academia, given the liberal use of citation or linking. Kevin Marks noted that webloggers link to their sources and some have an idea of fair representation, I feel that this is probably due to the amount of rapid peer reviewing to which you can be exposed.
However sometimes it feels a bit like Radio4 or NPR and creating short radio documentaries, pick your new topic of interest write some stuff and link in your sources.
I guess it depends upon the style you write in, some a more lists of links, like old style homepages, others are more considered essay writing only posting occasionally. For me it is somewhere between essay writing and a scrapbook. There is also a strong element of collaborative authoring to weblogs, commenting and trackback features turn it into a distributed community discussion forum.
This leads to a couple of things, I can assess one particular person on the basis of their writing and I can get to know and trust even people who I have never met, it is stronger relationship than I might get via a mailing list. Euan points to Sébastien Paquet discussing trust. This trust helps build social networks and it is these networks that help to form some of the social capital that I've been disucussing in relation to the cultural differences articles I wrote earlier in the month. Ross Mayfield has an interesting analysis of social capital and how it relates to weblogs, showing that weblogs allow different levels of social network at different levels of scale, rising from collaboration to communication to publishing, he says that we are now in the network age, which I'd agree with. Certainly I get a slight irritation when some people don't have a blog, a bit like some people used to not have an email address or mobile / cell phone number. I want to know them better or what to have the same kinds of conversations with them as I can with others.

Found Indy Junior by Bryan Boyer via SixLog. It is a user configurable flash map creation tool, you edit an xml file to say where your travels take you, past, present or future and then upload the flash file and xml, plus the generated html, simple really and very cool.
This should make a map of our honeymoon trip to Chile appear, photos of some of the places we went to are here.


We went from London via the US to Santiago and then stayed for a few days in Valdivia, a small town at the confluence of two rivers a few hours south of Santiago. Then we headed to Osorno to get a bus to Volcan Puyehue, where we spent five days walking up to the volcano, across the volcanic plane to some springs and back. Absolutely amazing landscapes with snow overlaid on ash, creating wonderful zebra patterns.
Then we went to Punta Arenas and spent christmas there, and saw lots of penguins on Isla Magdelena. We then went to the Torres Del Paine and visited Campemento Britanico and Glacier Grey, we ended up pulling ashore a small iceberg, 5 foot across on new years eve. Then back to Santiago and home to London and being on honeymoon meant free business class upgrades virtually all the way...

I've just seen the video pictures of the injured people, wreckage and burning vehicles that John Simpson descibes in this radio interview shortly after the attack. A very shocking event and you can clearly hear how shaken he is in the interview, but he has amazing composure to keep going despite being wounded and having collegues killed beside him, transcript of event here.
I can't help thinking that this is what every bomb has been like for those people beside it from the countless thousands dropped. Regardless of whose propaganda you believe and given that many fewer people have died in this war compared to the previous, death is still death and this has happened all over Iraq, many times.
Hopefully this war will end soon and the coalition will do a better job of maintaining peace in Iraq that they have done in Afganistan.

tk meets new camera and wonders what it is...

Mark Pilgrim has an interesting application called new door , which based on what I link to from takeoneonion, works out other weblogs, which are similar in interests to mine, happily I already read quite a few of them.

I got paid for my reviews for Macuser and Macworld of NetNewsWire and Cleaner6. I bought a new camera, a Canon Powershot A70, (buy it on Amazon) to close the loop, I'll write a short review next week when I've had time to play with it.
It is lovely and sunny in London and looks like it will continue over the weekend. Some day I'll build one of these too, Backyard rollercoaster, from Mefi via Matt
I'm off to take some pictures...

I've been having some thoughts about the recent Agonist issue, see previous post. One issue that it brings to the fore is the power of google to promote the top of the tree, but something that might be interesting is the rate of attrition or drop out. During the google blogger discussion I think the rate was about 20% active users on blogger. From the stats of the major blog aggregators it should be possible to track the slower moving blogs, the ones that post very infrequently. Maybe this interest in failure is a British thing, but all the aggregators promote the most recent, the biggest or the most linked too. I think that the larger quieter majority are interesting too. From this kind of data we might get things like how fast is the blogging world growing and what might the size of the majority be, the people who are out of the top ten percent, your average MT or radio userland user. This is kind of related to an interest of mine in social usage times. see also blog times.

Andrew Orlowski writes in The Register about the ability of google, combined with the copious amount that bloggers write, to essentially rewrite history. The phrase "second superpower" was coined in the New York Times back in February, to describe the antiwar movement. James Moore a month and a half later wrote using the same expression and it has become a loose description of the blogging world and not really about the war at all, more of an idealist view of how the world might change. Andrew Orlowski's is a good article and well worth reading. Maybe if enough people read it, then the real origin of the expression might become more widely known.

Update: I discussed this with Euan and read Kevin Marks, from Thursday 3rd of April. these people have revised my opinion a bit. Orlowski makes some reasonable points, though he treats webloggers as a group. The main essence I took was not the Joi Ito or other a-list weblogger bashing, but the Clay Shirky power law effect. No-one writes good stuff each and everytime, but the power law means that what ever the topic those heavily linked people will float to the top, each time. Then the usually blogging habit of linking to one another fills the top 10 slots in Google.

This example shows the care that we are bloggers must take when we are writing, there have been several instances of slight misrepresentation recently. Ben Hammersley notes an instance of a blogger, the Agonist, passing off pay-for journalism as his own. This was first noted on metafilter. Too feel good about what we do should we take a closer examination of our sources, or is the write it, link it, post it impulse too strong. I don't feel that we need to do the check everything twice approach of real journalism, as mostly we are writing on our own and this blogs are our opinions. However fair attribution and correcting your mistakes is the least that I feel we (I) should do for our (my) audience, checking your sources would help too.

Being balanced about what we do in live means that hopefully this planet will recover from our excesses in the twentieth century. Vic reminded me about the future forests campaign to make your activities neutral in terms of your carbon emissions. Quite a few music bands and artists have become carbon neutral. To see how you fare have a look at the carbon neutral calculator, I'm a sinner for the number of flights I take.

Living in the UK means that I pollute the equivalent of 15 trees worth, just being here. The idea of the scheme is that you pay around £8 per tree to put yourself in balance. Seems like a good idea, a sort of voluntary green tax. The forests get planted in various places worldwide, from Scotland to Mexico.

Thought I'd post this map of the new East London line extension, as I've been meaning to do it for a while. The tube is coming to Forest Hill and to Sydenham - hooray. Finally I'll get to live on the tube and in South London =) well in 2008 if RailTrack Network Rail get their act together.

View map of new southern extension to East London line


UPDATE:, I've posted a new map in this article.

Some vaguely interesting notes about take one onion. Number of hits on the subscription file overtook hits on homepage at the weekend, I've registered with Blogshares for a bit of fun, turns out take one onion is worth $6500 =) So that is kind of cool. I'll break 100 posts this week at current rates, though moveabletype doesn't do deletion the post counter only increments, there will never be a post 75. I'm still having fun at this.

Lucy and I went to the Pockets exhibition last night, which was sponsored by Nintendo to mark the launch of the new GBA SP. It has been curated by Wayne Hemmingway and consists of four main areas. There is a literary narrative depicting the history of pockets from purses and bags to wraparound belts to real pockets, with some interesting discussion on the role of pockets for men and women. There is a collection of the pocket contents from nine dead famous people, including the diary of Malcolm X and Curt Cobain's plane tickets and receipts. There are a selection of garmets with different types of pockets, and older recreations of pockets from the Middle Ages, some film clips and a selection of modern gadgets from the 70s onwards. It is quite fun, but really only about half an hour of entertainment, luckily it is in the heart of Soho, so if you can tear yourself away from the gameboys then there is plenty of other things to do.

Mark Pilgrim has a list of peace blogging sites and via Ben Hammersley, an article from The Simon by Sarah Zanolini, which essentially says that protesters are a certain sort of person, but that voting *will* make a difference. Interesting read, but voter apathy is quite strong and the next elections are a couple of years off for both Blair and Bush.

The media focus is starting to drift onto what happens next, as well as starting to compare the current war to Vietnam. Apparently Blair is angry with BBC, Andrew Marr's reply is lovely "[the Govt is] angry that they can control where reporters go but what they cannot control is what they see". Other reporters, Henry Norr for the SF Chronicle are getting arrested and then suspended without pay, or sacked by NBC and rehired by the Mirror with Peter Arnett.

So what should the Stop the War Coalition do next, is another march going to make any difference? The next march will be in slightly less than two weeks time, so should have a good attendence, but even if it is 1.5 million, it'll be difficult to top the first march. I'm not saying stop protesting, but it feels like another march will get even less coverage than last time. What else can we do to show our feelings?

Sarah Zanolini notes in her article that every cause has a button or ribbon etc, she feels that they end up as noise after a while. I've still got a "not in my name" badge and I notice other people who have them, but like the last march it feels a bit preaching to the choir. I'll go on the next march, but I'm unsure if it is the best thing to do.

If marching is not the thing to do, then what are the other possibilities

• sit down protest
• lobby of MPs
• posters in windows

It gets hard once the war starts, things are either too expensive or too disruptive of people's lives. If you have any thoughts, please comment below.