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I’m realising that much of this feels like school trip reporting – we did this, then we went there, then we did this and then we went to sleep. It has been a bit like that but I hope I’ll be able to write something more reflective once I’ve laid out the bones here.
Day 7 was Sunday. This seems to have made the streets of Nice more busy, especially it being mid-August, what with sunday-trading being a mortal sin ‘n’all (it turns out – I saw it on the telly, I’m not going to research it further, find your own link, I’m on holiday – that this weekend was the beginning of sunday trading)
We started with the (predictable but still severe) disappointment that is le petit dejeuner – particularly severe given that I don’t eat bread or croissants or butter or jam and so was restricted to coffee. So I watched Ewan chew his way through a baguette and then it was back to the handy supermarket.
I’m having trouble now remembering. The morning was spent on the beach – I went for a swim and spent the rest of the time, really not looking at topless women, no really trying not to look, or at least, not to stare – trouble is, every time you look somewhere else, a new one wiggles into place. For example, the amply-proportioned lady underneath the red striped parasol in this picture promptly sat up just after I put my camera away.
The afternoon and evening consisted of food and catching up in my feed reader and going for another walk and some crap french telly in our room. Oh and getting bitten by fleas in the room too. Thanks.
Ah yes, I remember, the other thing was I went over to the train station to book the tickets and found that it being a Monday in mid August when lots of people are going back to work and school, there were no places on the train I’d wanted to get to Paris. In fact there were no places on any direct train to Paris on Monday. Or any obvious indirect routes. So I had to (well actually I was quite pleased to, it made for a nice treat after our hotel experience) get an upgrade to first class on a TGV from Marseille and we’d have to get the slow local train there first. I booked the Eurostar tickets back to London at the same time – it started to feel like we were near the end.
I’m in Europe, yes, I know we’re all in Europe but y’know, the bit over the sea. Day 1 of several zooming around the continent with Ewan, on trains. But to get here we flew first to Amsterdam. The security theatre including shoe x-ray had me wishing we’d gone for eurostar there as well as back.
I didn’t really notice how seedy Amsterdam was until we arrived in Berlin which is generally trying to be very smart and stylish. But yeah, day 1 – we flew out of Gatwick at 1.30 so arrived at Schiphol at 3.30 local time. Ewan needed feeding and we needed change for the ticket machine so had a little stop at Burger King before getting the train into Amsterdam Centraal. Our hotel was a little walk from the station – would have been littler if I’d been paying attention. Didn’t really take much in when we got there, just dumped our stuff and put the air conditioning on as it was getting muggy outside.
Went for a walk around the ‘hood to take the air and find some food. found some sex shops, ladies in their knickers and coffee shops along the way. Last time I was there it seemed the coffee shops were quite discreet, now however Amsterdam was under a thick haze of dope smoke and the multitude of other tourists doing that special slow tourist walk that infuriates me in London, but even more so when on holiday because I’m supposed to be chilling out about that sort of thing.
We had a curry and pootled about a bit more.
Back at the hotel we found that the a/c was making funny noises. Every now and then it would buzz, like a buzzer on a quiz show. But it wasn’t regular, so just when I thought it had stopped, it would suddenly do it again and make me jump out of my skin. Also we realised that the church next door really was ringing every quarter of an hour….
I went down to reception to talk about the air-conditioninug. “Which room are you in, shir?” said the clerk in his perfect Amster-Englischh “410″
“Oh yesh. The air conditioning does make a noise in that room, I found out lasht night”
“So what can we do about it? My son’s gone to bed and we’ve unpacked, I don’t want to move!”
“Well you’ll have to talk to the manager about it in the morning, oh and it will keep making the noise after you’ve switched it off, just not so often”
So I went back and switched it off and it was true, it continued to buzz just a little less often gradually. So we opened the window and tried to get to sleep. It wasn’t easy as I became convinced in my half sleep that someone was going to climb in through the window from the balcony opposite. buzzz. clang-ding-dong. silence. silence. buzz.
And then the headboard started making noises when I moved. A clacking sound that I first decided was the boy snapping his teeth together in his sleep and I thought it was more like a crocodile. Eventually I did drift off for a few hours but it wasn’t the best night’s sleep I’d had.
Oh dear this all sounds like a dreadful gripe. I’m actually having a lovely time!
By chance I happen to be in Birmingham on one of the evenings when the lovely Nick Booth runs his social media surgeries in the fantastic Fazeley Studios.
And I’m helping out by showing some folk how to blog and post pictures.
I’d only had fictional accounts of Bletchley Park until yesterday. I’m really glad that I took the opportunity to go up and sample it first hand for one of the StationX social media cafe events.
I first heard of Bletchley Park in 1986 when I saw the pre-west-end run of the stage version of Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing at the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford. It’s a hugely touching human story of course but also intriguing that so much was going on during the war that we had no idea about.
I went at some point around 1991 I think, to a Computer Conservation Society open day at the Science Museum and Tony Sale was talking about the prospect of rebuilding Colossus. Some people were looking at him clearly thinking he was bonkers, but he did it nonetheless.
Then I read Robert Harris’s Enigma about ten years later when I was in need of fiction to read just after my finals. It is fiction, it is a bit Ripping Yarns but it’s also thrilling and brings the whole story to life.
So I was not at all surprised at what I saw when I arrived yesterday morning. It was good to see Christian as always and Bill Thompson was there, recording some stuff for his Digital Planet show. Highlights were the ever growing National Museum of Computing with it’s mainframe room, new PC gallery and nascent supercomputing room with a stonking great CRAY YMP-EL sitting in the middle of it. Adam Bradley is working on getting it going, apparently. He’s 14.
Then we popped over to the mansion and a special treat to be allowed to see and photograph inside Station X itself, an MI6 transmission station, high up in the tower. I heard yesterday that the X is like the X in OS-X it just means Station Ten, rather than being anything particularly top secret, although of course it was, y’know, particularly top secret.
Another unexpected treat was the cinema and film projection museum. Real geekgasm material here, mainly because it was such a surprise to find it all in such a small nondescript building. Great place for a solobasssteve gig, I think. By the time we got to the reconstructed bombe machine, I was running short of time and blood sugar. But there’s still an awful lot more to see. I’ll be back.
One particular idea that Christian floated was to turn some of the derelict concrete buildings into a geek warren – make it safe, run in a big fat net pipe, add some soft furnishings and get some use out of the space again at least for a few years, with a use that’s congruent with the place’s history for housing the sharpest mathematical and computing minds.
And if you haven’t done so before or recently, chuck some money in the pot to keep them going.
We don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s all we can say. But since mainstream and broadcast news needs stories to keep filling up the column inches and rolling news hours, we’re seeing large amounts of speculation about what *might* happen, what effect we *might* see of pandemic swine flu and when that’s exhausted itself, we can have a wave of scepticism and cynical fun-poking at “over-reaction” while breathing a sigh of relief that it’s all OK.
This is all part of mainstream media’s schizophrenic stance on news and uncertainty. Swinging this way and that and promptly forgetting that today’s chip paper was the thing that they desperately wanted us to believe and buy yesterday.
Depending on your temperament, the effect of all this is either panic or complacency – neither states help you to assess the risk accurately or be ready to act if or when you need to.
It’s all helping me remember:
1. Thank God I’ve got a blog where I can say what *I* think today without worrying about it being taken as gospel, or worrying about anybody reading it at all. Also that I have so little invested in it that I can say half-baked stuff without fear of having it all taken away from me. I will probably change my mind tomorrow, but that makes me human, not stupid. I am comfortable (here at least!) with saying where I’ve been outright wrong.
2. I’m happy for my stuff to stick around on the web. Maybe it will be useful to someone today, maybe tomorrow, maybe sometime in September, maybe not (and for all values of “useful” including ‘finding some fat fool to have a laugh at’ and whatever I haven’t yet thought of)
3. There’s so much more we can do together than pass on information. We are not information processing machines and neither is this internet that we have made in our own image. We had the idea and carried it out, that’s all I wanted to do with it. So the movie below is released entirely into the public domain for you to do with it whatever you will.
4. The internet *is* for porn. Well, at least it’s for fun as well as for serious stuff. So that’s why, when faced with what to write or do about #swineflu I looked for something that would have more utility than playing aporkalyptic rhyming games (as fun as that may be)
I guess what I’m feeling about it all today is that we seem to be in a first mild wave that seems to be not as serious as we first thought, but if we are to Keep Calm and Carry On, isn’t it worth thinking about what we might do in the case of it getting worse, isn’t it a good time to have a good laugh now in case it all gets too serious to snigger at in a few months time?
We don’t know, none of us know, all we do know is that things can change very quickly and we forget what we thought we knew equally quickly.
In the spirit of this, if we get to a situation of serious pandemic, how might we act responsibly to protect others as well as ourselves? Are we mature enough to be able to think about that in time, recognising that if it gets bad quickly, we might not have much time to weigh up the evidence from research?
Well, one idea is the ultra-simple flu code proposed by Vinay Gupta and picked up this week by Wired. What I like about it is that it’s focus is not “How do we get away from The Infected” but more what can we all do to look after ourselves and each other.
Note: the code used here is v0.1 and subject to change – keep an eye on flucode.com if you’re interested in how it develops (or doesn’t)
So on Friday, I got lots of help from my lovely allthisandbrainstoo collaborator Debbie Davies and Vinay himself to make an alternative public information film based on the code, just to throw another perspective into the mix and approach a serious subject with a bit of silliness.
For anyone without a sense of humour (folk like that do creep in here from time to time), let me be absolutely clear, we in the UK are not in a serious pandemic situation at the time of writing and making this film. I am not suggesting that you have to go out and do these things today. Neither am I suggesting that you follow the code in exactly the way portrayed in the film.
So yes, It’s silly, as you might expect, and I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but our hope is that if you pass the video on, we might avoid passing disease on. Oh and kids, the bit at the end of the video is dangerous if copied at home – it’s just a joke, laugh at me, don’t try it yourselves.
PS the whole process of doing this was delayed a little because blip.tv wouldn’t transcode stuff nicely no matter how hard Debbie hit it with a wrench. vimeo on the other hand, seems to rock.
Just reflecting on my G20 experience last week and whether asking for the HG10 was the best choice. Yes. It was.
I just asked Colin from 1000heads when I saw him at the Oxford Tuttle to see if I could get a loan camera because they had run the HG10 trial that I was part of before and I knew it worked well for me as a combination video and stills camera.
For this gig, it helped me enormously that I knew my way around the camera already. And it works beautifully, it’s light but robust and to
demonstrate the quality as a stills camera, that pic above of Obama is at the full extent of the zoom, without a tripod.
As a video camera, I thought that I’d be mostly zipping around with my flip for interviews and using the HG10 for stuff that needed to be higher quality especially with zoom. It turned out that pretty much all the video I shot was with the HG10. This is because switching from video to still and back again is so simple so I just wandered around with one camera.
It meant that I had to be a bit more ballsy to stand up at the front with the big camera boys and a couple of times in briefings I was told that I couldn’t video and had to point out I was just taking stills. Minor hassles given what outputs I was able to get.
I could have done with some time to mess around with the colour balance for the video – a lot of it looks more washed out when processed than it did on the viewfinder – but of course I’d left it to the last minute to get it. I’ve blogged everything I shot, I think, but it’s all here if you want to compare and contrast. Make sure you check out the HD versions.
Also I should have remembered that I’ve switched over entirely to Ubuntu since I last used it and I had a moment of panic when I thought that perhaps I wouldn’t be able to get the AVCHD files transcoded without some serious linux-wrangling. As it was I wasn’t able to find the solution until after I’d left the Excel, but Handbrake is a great DVD-ripper and general transcoder (also available for Mac OSX & Windows, I believe) and once I’d had a little fiddle to get the settings right (using the FFMPEG codec rather than h.264 was the main thing for me), I just set up a big batch process to pump out .mp4′s
Big thanks to Canon and to Colin & Donna at 1000heads for facilitating the process – now what do I have to do to get to keep this baby?
I chatted with lots of people about my involvement with G20Voice and the G20 summit last week, but a few of them happened to be journalists who ended up quoting me in their pieces.
Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC dot.life blog was looking for the angle on how social media can be used to organise protest as well as report news:
Also among them is Lloyd Davis, a British social media consultant who told me that 25 years ago he’d stood on picket lines during the miners’ strike but was now a little old for that kind of thing. “They might say we’ve all been ‘captured’,” he told me, “but I’m interested in the issues here, and how we can organise our way through this recession or depression.”
Mr Davis and his fellow bloggers have had security clearance so that they can get into the Excel centre and attend the press conferences, which means there could be an alternative view of events from that provided by the mainstream media.
Laura Oliver on journalism.co.uk asked me more generally what we thought we were doing, of course I told her I haven’t a clue:
Yet while coverage has been opened up beyond traditional news organisations and platforms, the independence of reports from NGOs and other interested parties must be considered, Lloyd Davis, who is involved with both the G20 Voice project and the Reuters events.
“How do people like me get to report on thinks like this without getting some help from somebody – including technically?” he tells Journalism.co.uk
“I have been lent an iPod Touch, lent a camera by Canon to do some photographs and video – this enriches what I’m going to produce but in a political environment like this, there’s a question of patronage and sponsorship.”
There is an opportunity however to find new things to say other than the mainstream media, who ‘will already have got an idea of what the story is’, says Davis.
“I think there’s a gap to be filled in the middle that’s not mainstream media and the people on the streets. There are people being brought in to for some kind of semi-social thing,” he says.
“I have to admit we don’t really know what we’re doing. As usual as bloggers we’re jumping in and seeing what we can do.”
Then Lisa Devaney chatted wiith me on home turf at the Tuttle club and reported on her BrandRepublic blog and caught me rambling about what it all meant:
I saw Lloyd today following his exciting experience being part of G20Voice and got to hear his thoughts:
“What gets me is trying to understand what $1 trillion dollars really is, and how it will make a difference in our everyday lives. There is also a huge gap between the content of what was discussed in the communiqué planning, and how this information translates to ordinary people. The people at the top aren’t very good at communicating what the ideas mean to the rest of us and I think we need layers of communication to push through the concepts and better understand the complexity of what is happening. I don’t understand it all, and that leaves me, and others, to have to trust our leaders. But do we and can we trust these leaders? What also struck me is that here was a gathering of great leaders from 20 of the world’s leading economic powers, and not too long ago we were all in a tense situation of possibly killing each other. It is really important that we are at a point in history they were able to sit down and talk to each other about the economy.”
Last night, I was invited by Siôn Parkinson to speak at a meeting of a-frame a network that he runs with Maria Georka at the ICA. It meant I got to visit the posher bits of the ICA again, which was nice.
The brief was a five minute talk based around an object that inspires you – the same as the Figures of Speech format that I saw at the ICA gala last year. I looked through boxes of old stuff for inspiration over the weekend but in the end chose something new, something that was given to me last week and which I fully expected to have to give back before I left: my accreditation pass for the London Summit – which describes me as “Blogger”.
I had a comfy fourth slot on the programme. I was preceded by Tom Lucas from UKTV talking about a buddha he gave to his mum and humility; Toby Moores from Sleepydog talking about a microphone, loudspeaker and amplification; and Frances Croxford from Jane Wentworth Associates talking about a book of “Beautiful Writings by Latin Authors” which she picked up in a bookshop when she was fifteen. I was followed by Jonathan MacDonald who talked about the Cluetrain Manifesto and how it changed his life.
For once, I did some preparation beforehand, in fact I wrote out what I was going to say in full. So I thought I’d post it here to expose my pretentious waffle to a wider audience. This is what I said:
This is my pass for the London Summit 2009 – the meeting of the G20 industrialised nations held last week. The bit of it that I’m most proud of is that it describes me as a Blogger. And that’s what I am. My business card says Social Media Consultant or Social Media Tart or Freelance Subversive depending on which version you have, but the bottom line is that I use a variety of media to tell stories and publish them on the internet where other people pick over them. And last week I was doing that at the summit.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got there. How it happened to be me that was one of a few hundred people squeezed into a room up close with the president of the united states of america. And it comes down to telling stories with purpose, telling stories to make sense and learn about yourself and the world. No doubt that’s also how I stumbled into being invited to speak to you tonight. Because I believe that telling stories (and engaging in conversation about them) at this human scale, where you can see the whites of my eyes is something that’s going to be very useful to us in the 21st Century as we grapple with unprecedented rates of social, economic and technological change. Talking at this scale is a skill that I think we all need to learn again and practice regularly.
So there are four people who taught me the value of small scale story-telling and conversation.
The first was my mother. I would hear her tell stories over and over again. The substance of these stories were not earth-shattering, they were everyday stories of shop-keepers, milkmen and her at number 27. They were about everyday events and what they meant. Women are still telling these stories, making sense of their lives through conversation. “So he said and she said and I think there was a bit of, ‘you know what’ going on.” And I heard these stories get little tweaks whether we were visiting my Nan or my Grandma or Pauline next door but one or the Methodist Young Wives Coffee Morning. These tweaks and embellishments came as she gained insights and realised that some things were perhaps best not said. There were always one or two “stories of the day” that everyone was treated to and then a sprinkling of other subjects depending on the intimacy of relationship and the time available. I was a quiet little boy. I just sat and listened and took in every word.
The next person who taught me the value of story telling was Brian Dear. Brian taught me German from 1978 to 1983. Poor man. His first class started with him marching into the classroom, swinging his leg up onto the desk, pointing at his foot and shouting “Das ist ein Schuh! Was ist das?” waiting until someone whimpered “ein Schuh?” and then going on through various pieces of clothing and body parts. Once we’d mastered basic vocabulary and grammar our weekly homework was to retell a story that he had told us at the end of the week. He read it very clearly for us to write down and illlustrate. The stories revolved around a farming family from Bavaria. Bauer Bumm, his wife, two children and their pet crocodile Kroko. Kroko was the star of every story except invariably the ending came with him being hit over the head with an umbrella by Baeuerin Bumm – “Paeng!” which seems to be the noise made when you hit a crocodile on the head with an umbrella “Aua!” which is what a crocodile shouts when hit over the head with an umbrella. As we gained confidence we were allowed to add our own embellishments. The only things I remember inserting were references to Brustwarze, the German for nipple and the use of “Zimbabwe” as a swear word. I’m not sure how much of this sort of creative learning through storytelling and experimentation is allowed under the National Curriculum.
Ian Ricketts was much much quieter than Brian Dear. Ian taught me first on a course called “Character Building” when I was a student at the Guildford School of Acting. It was not supposed to have anything to do with improving the quality of my personal character although there was plenty of sacrifice, rigorous honesty and forced humility.
It was essentially a guided improvisation class to show us how to be part of a story by being truthful and surpressing our own needs to show off. It was about being. Being honest and true to your character and trusting that one needs to show far less than one thinks. That the truth is apparent to those watching. So from Ian I learned the importance of authenticity but also that you can’t help being a part of any story you tell.
And then I met Brent Work at the University of Surrey who introduced me, in his Information Strategy course to an American academic style of teaching through narrative and conversation. He’d sit at the front and tell stories in a gentle Garrison Keeler style and then we as a class would have a chat about it and it was up to us to pull out the lessons from him through discussion and conversation.
Brent also said something that really made me sit up and take notice and get very excited about the future.
In 1994, I heard him say “The job you have in 10 or 15 years has probably not been invented yet”
And he was right. The word “blogger” hadn’t even been invented. The world wide web was a year or so old and the I had absolutely no idea that my job would involve, in 15 years time, standing in a room a few yards away from the British Prime Minister and then the President of the United States of America (let alone the fact that the prez would be an African American btw) and then writing about it on the internet. Or organising an event at the Institute of Contemporary Art where ordinary people could ask questions of the President of the World Bank. My life seems odd right now, but from the perspective of 15 years ago it seems completely insane.
So what I wanted, in addition to telling you a story that helps me make sense of who I am and how I got here, what I wanted was to capture this transitional moment when “Blogger” (perhaps temporarily, who knows) became a legitimate category of attendee at a major international summit. And to let you know that I got there by doing not much more than telling stories at a human, personal level to help me and people like me understand our world and our lives.
Thank you very much.
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