This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
Great wi-fi, cool music, hot coffee in London’s West End
Just a quick plug for the Cafe in Ray’s Jazz Shop within Foyles in the Charing Cross Road.
Excellent coffee, great atmosphere, really cool music and a guy behind the bar who doesn’t really mind having his picture taken, I’m sure.
Plus free wifi for customers – way to go Ray! (contrast with Borders over the road who have a money-grubbing Starbucks wifi place on their first floor)
[Update] Well the guy didn’t say anything, but the woman (in black behind him) wasn’t too keen on me taking her photograph and popping it on my weblog without asking her permission – so I apologised, I forgot that I wasn’t really in a public place – another lesson in online living learned.
Podchef – is there no end to the variety in this man’s life?
You are privileged enough to get to hear me go through my paces with Quick Lamb Curry, a midweek special, ‘cos I’ve been sick off work but back to bouncing by this evening.
An accompanying picture set is over on flickr.com
Mmmmmm…..smell that chilli and coriander…..
Oh yes it is….or is it?
I just posted a comment on one of the threads around the Google Autolink debate, thusly:
“Is there another way of looking at this? It seems to me that the debate has only been framed so far in either…or terms, ie of the web either being read/writeable or read-only whereas actually it’s been both for some time. Some bits are information served up that could be enriched in any number of ways. Some bits need to be kept sacred. Some bits need to keep the original intact while comments and modifications can be added in an explicit way.
Would it be too complicated for those people who are happy for their content to be ripped, mixed and burned to insert some sort of flag or licence (heard this before somewhere?) in their html that allows for that and for those who wish to only have their stuff read and perhaps re-presented in an aggregator to have a different kind of licence?
Then if I get really pissed off with Dave ‘cos his content doesn’t get “enriched” in the way I like it, I can raise it with him, and he can ignore me if he wants to or change if he wants to – isn’t that a more grown up conversation than “This is evil!”, “Oh, no it’s not!”, “Oh yes it is!”…. ”
My gut is with Dave and Scoble on this, but I have this nagging feeling that saying “Autolinks is bad for the web” sounds too much like “P2P is bad for the recording industry”
Be alert… your country needs lerts
I’ve been using these inkernets for more than ten years now, so perhaps I’m a bit jaded and not in the target audience, but I can’t actually see anything of use in the UK Government’s launch of ITsafe.
I do think there’s an important point here that Government has still not realised that authority is not its right in this space. Authority comes from having something interesting and useful to say, not from being able to legitimately use a crown as your logo.
And the presentation is so naff that it undermines the central aim, which is surely to build trust. This site says “We don’t know what we’re doing, but hey you will trust us anyway ‘cos we’re the government” Another pointless bit of public spending.
F-
Podwalk 006
Right, no pictures, no music, just more sound of some nutcase, wandering around London on a Sunday afternoon.
Starting in Piccadilly outside the RA, I walk through Piccadilly Circus, up through Soho, along Oxford Street, across Tottenham Court Road and along to the British Museum.
And now….
for something completely different. I have some more podwalk material in the can, but it needs chopping up into digestible bits and there aren’t any pictures grrrr….
So for a Sunday evening chortle see what you think of this.
The Stanford Law Professor and first post suck syndrome
Lessig is podcasting … in his own way. He reads aloud from his latest published work in Wired – a good piece on public funding of wi-fi – but the fact that he’s “just” reading it gets a lot more comment than the content of what he says.
He does explain up front, on his blog, that it’s an experiment. I hope the feedback doesn’t put him off trying something more adventurous. I’d love to hear him thinking aloud. Dave has shown (though other examples are rare) that one can still deliver a well-structured thoughtful argument in this medium and I think that this is way more powerful than something that was “finished” before it was started.
Podwalk 005
A shorter one this week, with not so much walking. Well plenty of walking, but within a small area. Podwalk 005 starts with a busker at Bond St tube station before heading off to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park on Sunday 13th February.
I didn’t have my camera with me so there are only a couple of crappy shots from my phone on flickr, but the material (when you can hear it over the wind) is so good, that I’m going to try this location again but armed with better equipment.
Enjoy, leave comments, e-mail me or leave audio comments at lloyd dot davis at gmail dot com.
The Apprentice – UK Style
Just saw the first instalment of the UK version of The Apprentice. I didn’t see very much of the Trump original, but from what I did see, our version (with Sir Alan Sugar in the megalomaniac [err… shurely giant of modern commerce] role) seems a little less theatrical but the format comes through, although the board room is lighter, funkier and well a bit more 21st Century than the US show.
What doesn’t change is the testosterone (among women probably even more than the men) and the parade of egos puffed to bursting point.
What I don’t get is why any of these bright, motivated, sales-matic people want to earn a (six-figure) salary working their balls off for someone else – why aren’t they doing their own thing? What has Alan Sugar got that they want and why on earth do they want to put themselves through this humiliating and painful process?
In terms of general dynamics, it’s going to be interesting to see how the male/female split works out. It was really interesting how the women took longer than I expected to start gelling as a team, there was much more prickliness and arguing than among the men.
It’s clearly a big risk to volunteer to be project manager for the first task. Those that did have probably made some enemies for the rest of the series. Also, I don’t know how much this was because of the editing, but there were team members that I didn’t see do anything during the task. I do think it’s remarkable that Miranda, who panicked and started selling at a loss just after lunch, without discussing it with anybody, managed to talk herself out of getting fired.
The small things that tickled me were the excitement they showed when they went off to the luxury accomodation, giggling and thrilled – they had arrived but also the way that the swagger that pervades the whole group turns to pathetic displays of mock humility when they face up to the man who put AMS into Amstrad!
I’m hooked though. I want to know how the tasks are going to progress. And I want to see those egos bumping and bashing and smashing into each other, and then grovelling for a place in the next round.
Perfect Path 