I’ve started a new project with Richard Wilson, author of “Don’t Get Fooled Again” and Craig Lucas – it combines two of my favourite things: politics and skepticism. Basically we want to create a database of MPs and candidates for the 2010 election’s positions on issues that skeptics care about – that is to say, things like evidence-based policy, teaching creationism and that sort of thing. It’s called Skeptical Voter, and you should definitely take a look, and ideally sign up and support it.
I’m terribly excited as the pilot episode of my new podcast has just gone live. The Pod Delusion is a bit like From Our Own Correspondent, but with a sceptical/liberal/lefty/Guardianista slant. Have a listen:
Poor journalists. It must be a pain in the arse when a story breaks at around midnight, so you have to cut them some slack for, perhaps, not living entirely up to proper Woodward & Bernstein-esque journalistic practice at such an hour. Especially on a showbiz story…
Last night I went to the London Twestival – if you’re unfamiliar with it, it was basically a big party for people who work on and around the “Silicon Roundabout” and Nathan Barleys like myself to network, or in my case, come tantalisingly close from crossing the line of “stalking via twitter” into “stalking in real life”.
Of course, it was all an incestuous gathering of meeja types, PRs and techies, but it was all for charity, so everyone went home being able to live with themselves and sleep at night. And I had a great time.
All of the Twitter folks from the trendy start-ups were there, and there was even some old-media representation in the form of Rory Cellan-Jones, or Ruskin147 as we know him, from the BBC. I didn’t dare say hello though as I through a process of osmosis-like learning from the Twitter feed, I know about him to an almost stalker-like level. I know that he lives in… Ealing? I know he has a dog and a son who got into Oxford, I know he gets up early and goes for a run every morning, and I know his wife recently became a Dame. It’s almost like I’ve been going through his vitual bins.
I did however, talk to loads of excellent people, and saw many more whose “names” I knew according to the sticker they were wearing with their name on, but couldn’t place.
I had a chat with Gareth Mitchell from the BBC’s Digital Planet, and ridiculously, he recognised my face from my Twitter avatar. I said hello to the man doing all of the hard work on the Atheist Bus Campaign, who has been Twittering in the first-person as a personified bus for the past few weeks. Shell_uk was in a similar boat to me not knowing anyone there, as so to speak. Brilliantly, I got the chance to say hello to Annie Mole, who’s blog about the London Underground I’ve been reading for years – she was close to James Cridland, who I didn’t manage to pluck up the courage to speak to. I bumped into ParkyLondon, who produces a superb podcast for London nerds like myself, and just as I was leaving I traded business cards with Richjm.
Well, I say “traded business cards”. Frustratingly, the new business cards that I’ve ordered from ultra-trendy Shoreditch start-up Moo.com hadn’t arrived in time, meaning I had to resort to the “analogue business card”: my Twitter name scrawled on to a notepad I carry around for blog ideas (I genuinely do this). This slightly undermined the savvy-London-Hoxtonite-professional image I was trying to cultivate for myself.
One thing that was quite exciting was that it levelled the playing field a little and I was mingling with some stunningly important people in the industry. I got talking to a man who explained that his “job” was starting start-ups, and he’d started maybe 20 companies in his career, including things that I will have heard of – though he was hesitant to name them to someone like me. In retrospect I maybe should have asked him for some venture capital (or “VC” in industry-speak) for one of the most bizarre outcomes of the night: I seem to have accidentally founded a new .com start-up with Dave Hodgkinson, who ten minutes after mentioning an idea had already bought the domain name. It’s definitely a fast-moving industry. Whatever industry this is.
That was a problem I did encounter – I wanted people to take me seriously, and ideally, offer me money, a writing job and use of the company boat. So when asked what I did, or what my industry was, I made a point of emphasising that I was a post-graduate student – a metric cut above those tawdry undergraduates, before following up by claiming that I also “like to think of myself as a satirist”. This was secret code for “No one actually pays me to be a satirist but I’d like them to”. Even if they question my credentials I’ve got that plausible deniability – the “satire industry” doesn’t exist in any tangible way and there’s no satirists trade union, even though “we” do spend a lot time labouring in a pit of irony.
It was really excellent though – and to top things off, I discovered this afternoon that I’d won a years subscription to Spinvox in the raffle, thanks to @whatleydude.
For the next couple of weeks I’m going to be doing some freelancing at Tech Digest, writing about gadgets and tech and stuff like that. If you’re craving some fresh new James O’Malley material, here’s some links to things that I’ve written so far:
So check out TD, they’re really cool, and that’s just not because they might give me some money soon. They’re genuinely excellent – they’re letting me write like I normally do, but on their popular website!
I received a rather belated birthday present from my friends JD and Fundar (they’re nicknames, obviously), the other day. It was pretty impressive, as it was the punchline to a running gag started some eighteen months ago when we went to the Tate Modern.
They passed me a cardboard tube, and with some trepidation, I slowly opened it and unravelled what was inside. It was… it was… a print of The Snail by Henri Matisse.
This filled me with so many emotions. I was delighted that they’d bought me a present, but on the other hand, The Snail is shit. Look at it:
This isn’t art. It isn’t even a snail.
What really winds me up about it is the back-story – perhaps it’s excusable and almost is art if it has an interesting back-story, or is covered in all sorts of meaning and depth. But from the Tate’s own website, here’s an explanation of it:
At first sight it appears to be an abstract arrangement of vibrant coloured, geometric blocks on a white background. The blocks of colour are arranged in a loose spiral suggesting the shape of a snail’s shell. Instead of being painted directly onto canvas, the blocks of colour are made from pieces of paper that have been painted in a water based paint called gouache. The brightly painted paper has been torn and cut into uneven shapes and stuck onto a white paper background. The whole composition has then been stuck onto canvas.
In other words, Matisse has matched the artistic abilities of a child with learning difficulties.
Although at first sight The Snail looks entirely abstract, Matisse’s art was always based on observation of the world around him.
It’s a good job we had photography in the first half of the 20th century, as it means that nobody had to commission a painting to illustrate great historical events for prosperity. If Matisse was told to come up with a picture of the 1943 Tehran conference, historians might all think that Franklin D Roosevelt had a red square for a face, and Stalin had a crescent moon where his body should be.
Maybe I just can’t appreciate great art, as after all, my favourite work of art is Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Gray.
Why do I like it? What could be better than waking up every morning to see a ginger woman being beheaded?
Warning, if you think an IP address is a postcode in Ipswich, then this might bore you to tears.
I’ve got an incredibly important essay to hand in on Friday – and an even more important dissertation to hand in the week afterwards. So what have I been doing so far today? Quite possibly the most efficient procrastinating ever. Rather than concentrate on things that actually matter, I’ve been busy improving the Twitter feed on the left hand sidebar of the blog.
Now, aside from merely having the text of my latest Tweets, I’ve enhanced it – if I broadcast a live video to Qik, using my mobile phone, that will alert my Twitter – and now rather than just link to it, it’ll display the video in a flash video box so you can watch it on this very same page (there was no end of hassle involving having to parse a second Qik-specific RSS feed and regex out the variables and all sorts). I’ve done something similar with photos, that I can also send in to Twitpic with my mobile phone – if I send in a photo, it’ll now be shown in thumbnail form on the sidebar, with its caption if it has one. I’ve also added a text “glossary” that reads my tweets and if it spots any keywords (like “Adam Hart Davis“), it automatically magically changes it into a relevant link.
I’m pretty damn pleased with it all though – I thought that when I signed up to do an arts degree, I was resigning myself to a lifetime of technological ignorance, not even being able to grasp the simplest of gadgets, but happily, as it turns out, I’m still shit-hot at coding. Well, sort of.
What’s the point in all of this? Well, if you’re asking that question that you don’t understand what web 2.0 is all about – its about doing cool things because you can, not because they serve any practical benefit to the rest of humanity. Really – prior to the invention of Facebook, did you ever have a desire to play Scrabble online?
I’m going to London on Wednesday, so if you stay tuned to my blog, you’ll be able to follow my thrilling adventure in real time! Quite why you’d want to is, er, another question.
Assuming I’m not the victim of an obscure (and late) April Fools joke, apparently Richard Dawkins is going to guest star in Doctor Who. All Russell T Davies needs to get now is Adam Hart Davis and the Misery of Others to cameo and all four of my favourite things will be united at last.
Apparently Davies, who is pictured in the article dressed as a middle-aged Neo at the weekend, is a big fan. Which makes me wonder just how Dawkins will be incorporated into the show.
I think it’d be pretty good if Dawkins would become the new companion – its not as if the Doctor has too many after all. He could provide a level-headed rationalist counter to the Doctor and the villains they encounter.
He’d be great fun – he could sneer at any credulous villains who speak of what they believe, and demolish their arguments academically.
I guess the only downside it would prevent the Doctor from so wrecklessly ignoring the laws of physics and using his sonic-screwdriver to get out of every situation, because Dawkins would tell him that there’s no way it could work, and there’s no evidence to suggest it could.
I knew this graphic would come in useful. I’ve discovered yet more problems with T-Mobile. So as you might have noticed by my swish, new, popular sidebar on the left, I’ve got quite into Twittering. The thing that makes it excellent is that you can update your Twitter via text-message, by texting what looks like a UK Number – it starts +44 and isn’t a premium rate short-code or anything like that.
But paranoid that I am, I thought I’d just ring up T-Mobile customer services and double check that I’m not being charged a billion pounds a text. I read out the Twitter number to the man on the phone, who informed me that “+44″ is the code for “A country called U.K”. It turns out that I’m being charged 17p a time for a text… outside of my contract.
Apparently the number is in Guernsey, which despite looking just like a normal number, makes it totally different.
So I’m posting this more as a public service announcement, and in the hope that if I slag off T-Mobile on the internet they might try and win me back by giving me free stuff.
T-Mobile users, for fucks sake, don’t text Twitter!
Inexplicably, my family have put the Christmas decorations up really early this year. They thought they’d got it all done, with much of the living room caked in tinsel, and the tree put into place. Me though, being the most predictable person alive, decided to add a finishing touch to the tree:
![Album art for 005 Warped Tour Compilation [Disc 1] by Dropkick Murphys](http://jamesomalley.co.uk/blog/wp-content/lastfm_album_art/2005_Warped_Tour_Compilation_[Disc_1]^Dropkick_Murphys.jpg "Dropkick Murphys - 005 Warped Tour Compilation [Disc 1]")
_Noise_Conspiracy.jpg "The (International) Noise Conspiracy - 002-09-17: 9:30 Club, Washington D.C., USA")
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