Category Archives: What I’m doing

overheads

January 29, 2009 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Just a few imperfect thoughts about thinking too much.

The Overland Project

January 17, 2009 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Back in Mayfair this week, just round the corner from the squat…

We went along to the opening of The Overland Project, an exhibition by Sara Haq based on her trip last year overland from London to Thailand. She and Michael Chaplin reported on a blog and via twitter on their way, but the Alexia Goethe gallery in Dover St is hosting a show of a selection of the thousands of photographs she took during the trip.

The gallery was absolutely packed upstairs and down- but I caught a couple of minutes with Sara out of the private view frenzy to hear a little bit more about it all.

Download mp3 (2.5MB)

What I'm doing

Temporary School of Thought

January 6, 2009 Lloyd Davis 5 Comments

Here’s something Tuttle did for me.

Last Friday, at the first, select, meetup of the year, I got a tweet from @jjsanderson saying that a friend of his was trying to get in but couldn’t find the back door. Typical stuff for me on a Friday. A moment later, Vinay Gupta came up the stairs giggling. It seems Vinay giggles a lot. I suspect it’s probably an important part of his persona as Swami Havabanana too but that’s a story for another day.

So we get talking and it turns out he’s into providing yurts in developing countries; hexagonal yurts built out of 9 rectangular panels (six sides, three cut diagonally in half for the roof) of whatever you might have to hand – a hexayurt if you like, in fact that’s what he likes and it’s his twitter handle.

We get on well, we all have a good laugh. He and @debbiedavies hook up with @jjsanderson over video skype on his acer aspire. Another tuttle win. And so later on I follow him on twitter and check out his blog. Lots of yurt and overseas development stuff. Then on Sunday I see that he’s pinged the Tuttle blog with a post. While he doesn’t say much about his Tuttle experience but he does talk about going to a squat in Mayfair and what’s going on there this week. And then he posts some video. Oooh. Nice. Interesting.

Now I’m back at work really but I’m taking it fairly easy so I resolved to go along today and tomorrow and see how it’s rolling. It’s rolling. I missed the laughter workshop I’m afraid, but got there just in time for a lecture on Polish History (that’s of Poland, not Mr Sheen) which included a participative play about a king who got eaten by mice. I was an uncle, one of three, who were poisoned and out of whose rotting bodies the mice came. Bloody typecasting!

Then we went into another room (it’s big, it’s a bloody big Mayfair townhouse this squat, with servants staircase and everything) for a juggling workshop. Workshop leader, forgive me if I’m wrong but I thought your name was Jacob – could well be but there did seem to be lots of Jacobs – anyway, you got me juggling more than I’ve ever done before, thank you.

Then it got too cold and late and I needed to do some y’know grown-up stuff so I said my thank yous and buggered off. I’ll be back tomorrow when Vinay is giving a talk on erm…. yurts I think.

So yeah, it is in a squat and all of the people there looked suspiciously as if they were at least half my age, but they were all very very friendly and nice and genuinely interested in finding stuff out.

Here’s some juggling:

What I'm doing

processing…

January 5, 2009 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

I’m drawn to processing It reminds me of my earliest programming – there was a limit to what interesting things I as a 13-year-old could find to do with text on a command line but when displays got just that little more sophisticated you could make pictures. Pictures out of lines and dots. Joining dots to make lines. Turning pixels on and off. Making graphs of mathematical functions. And then there was colour. Wow – 8 glorious shades of colour.

With just a little learning and lts of time for experimentation you could do a lot. Now though it feels like you’d need to know an awful lot in order to make something pleasing. And now that I can display full colour, hi-res photographs on my screen, photographs that I took seconds earlier on a phone with it’s own hi-res display (!) the old stuff doesn’t quite feel as satisfying.

I think I need a good project to get my teeth into, somewhere we haven’t been before. Maybe this isn’t the programming environment for that kind of bold experimentation, or maybe there’s something that this sort of simple graphical programming has been waiting for.

What I'm doing

Oral his-stories

January 5, 2009 Lloyd Davis

We like to talk, don’t we? At least some of the time. Chatting, telling stories over and over in different ways and with different embellishments, all the while helping us to work out who we are and who we’re not, what we might choose to be or do next. But also who we’ve been, who did what, what’s been done (or tried) what’s been talked about before and so what’s fun to talk about again.

I’ve found this history bit interesting in online communities. It’s not as important to some people as it is to others but I often find myself playing the role of reminding groups of what was said before and why, as a reminder of where we’ve been together, why we took certain decisions together or else to help out a newcomer who’s repeating the mistakes of the past, going down a real blind alley.

I was reminded of it when coming into contact with some of the “old-time” seesmicers at LeWeb. It’s only a year since the peak of seesmic for me, but a lot of what we were talking about is lost. And I noticed this at the time that as the community grew quickly there were a set of first behaviours or topics that were obvious when yu were new. But because seesmic didn’t have an inherent way of recording what we’d learned, the understanding and the rituals and traditions that came about could only stay alive as lng as the people there were willing to keep talking about them and reminding each other of them. The traditions were loosely held, it only took a few people to make up a new tradition and for a few people to leave for a once fiercely guarded tradition to be discarded.

There were many reasons why my seesmic activity tailed off, but one of them was that a greater proportion of my time was spent on watching new people go through the initial phases and I was left either waiting for them to catch up or spending my time helping them to catch up more quickly. Less time for me to be creative and just enjoy the flow.

There sees to be a difference for example between talking to people at Tuttle about how it all started and what I think of it all, between that and the tangible stuff on the web that you might find if you were bothered to research it. Does that mean I need to write down more of what I say to new people every week? Or has the saying f it been enough, are there enough people who know the story in rder for it survive without any other effort? Or might that lead to a distorted story? Is it important? Is it valuable? What would be lost if it were forgotten? And what is the definitive story anyway? Is there one? Or is it that my version is dominant because of my role and repeated attendance?

Dunno.

What I'm doing

wordpress.com support for flickr video

January 5, 2009 Lloyd Davis

oh, thank you.

How to embed Flickr Video on wordpress.com

What I'm doing

audioblogging again

January 3, 2009 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Realising that it’s 4 years since I first bumbled into podcasting, I’m overcome with a zealous need to return to the form.

So I got myself a new recorder (minidisk and linux no play nicely) and went for a walk.

Everything is easier these days except, well, y’know, finding something interesting to say.

I see, for example, that wordpress.com now provides a handy shortcode that displays a player:

but here’s a link to download if that’s the bag you’re into. And it should turn up in the RSS giving a surprise to those still subscribed through iTunes or some other podcatching mechanism….

What I'm doing