Flightradar24
I’m addicted to playing with this little website. Next time you look at a plane leaving contrails across the sky, bring up flightradar24 and find out where it’s flying to. It makes me feel ‘augmented’ in a way, like my senses now extend to the Internet.
Cancers of the food pipe in Britain have doubled in men over 25 years
Humbrol Beginnings
On the short walk between my house and the corner shop there is a downstairs bay window of a house that always catches my eye. Instead of a widescreen telly or a pile of kids’ toys stuffed into a corner there’s a simple desk, a telephone and a green craft project cutting board. Occasionally on this board there’s a plastic model kit of a car or something being constructed.
I’ve never seen who uses this desk, but it’s hugely appealing to me because of its simplicity. I like to imagine the circumstances where you could sit at a desk, just making Airfix cars while you wait for a very important phone call. Perhaps the owner is a semi-retired professional model maker and tests out the new products. “The new Ferrari 458 is a disgrace! The sprues are huge and the runners indistinguishable from the parts. Good Day.” Perhaps he’s like Jean Reno in Nikita or Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction: When an underworld murder goes wrong he gets a single call and arranges clean up of the scene with a squeezy bottle and a few J-Cloths. Or a spy. Maybe he’s a spy, deeply embedded in an Oxford college, leaving clues in the Oxford Mail Suduko grids. The most likely suggestion so far has been, disappointingly, an operator for The Samaritans.
I should aspire to this simplified workspace so I can concentrate on what I do, rather than what I could do.
![Outsourcing. The scourge of the technology employee. You’re a resource and you have a cost and a value. When the cost/value ratio slips lower than someone else in the world is offering there’s a chance you’ll be outsourced. Or rather your job will be outsourced and you’ll be redundant.
There’s been a trend in the last few years with micro-payments and flexible web-based communities to outsource things like programming projects or customer service to somewhere cheaper and do the bits that add value yourself.
I decided I could outsource procrastination. Let someone else read Twitter and look at the Glum Councillors or visualisations of oil spills overlaid on Dorset, the Chimpanzee Riding on a Segway or latest liberal outrage at the latest Daily Mail moral outrage. The cost of paying someone to do this for me would free me up to do amazing things like invent the modern-day equivalent of penicillin, or design and build a viable alternative to the combustion engine, or even just learn jQuery.
Instead I sit here pecking away at the links like a chicken noticing some more delicious seed has been dropped into the hopper. A twittering catflap, a brilliant bit of human beatbox, some tit on a mountain bike jumping off a ledge, and suddenly I’m gone again for twenty valuable minutes I’m never going to get back.
Thanks, Internet. Your fault entirely.
[*picture credit unknown. I’d very much like to know whose it was though]](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l7v2iqVKLo1qzn3x8o1_400.jpg)
Outsourcing. The scourge of the technology employee. You’re a resource and you have a cost and a value. When the cost/value ratio slips lower than someone else in the world is offering there’s a chance you’ll be outsourced. Or rather your job will be outsourced and you’ll be redundant.
There’s been a trend in the last few years with micro-payments and flexible web-based communities to outsource things like programming projects or customer service to somewhere cheaper and do the bits that add value yourself.
I decided I could outsource procrastination. Let someone else read Twitter and look at the Glum Councillors or visualisations of oil spills overlaid on Dorset, the Chimpanzee Riding on a Segway or latest liberal outrage at the latest Daily Mail moral outrage. The cost of paying someone to do this for me would free me up to do amazing things like invent the modern-day equivalent of penicillin, or design and build a viable alternative to the combustion engine, or even just learn jQuery.
Instead I sit here pecking away at the links like a chicken noticing some more delicious seed has been dropped into the hopper. A twittering catflap, a brilliant bit of human beatbox, some tit on a mountain bike jumping off a ledge, and suddenly I’m gone again for twenty valuable minutes I’m never going to get back.
Thanks, Internet. Your fault entirely.
[*picture credit unknown. I’d very much like to know whose it was though]
Kitchens of Distinction
We’ve finally exchanged contracts on the house and we’re having to make grown-up decisions like “what kind of kitchen extension do we want?”
I got Google Sketchup out and watched a shedload of tutorials. I still didn’t really understand it until I’d built our new house several times, each time somehow misaligning the walls by 1 pixel or filling in the entire sky when I just wanted a wall.
Eventually I got the hang of it, and these are the results, which I’m quite pleased with. I actually enjoy sketching them on the back of envelopes, a skill I inherited from my grandpa, but I have to say that changing the viewpoint on a piece of paper takes somewhat longer than on a computer model.
So when are you coming for dinner?
Some photos of our wonderful Mia. There’s a massive gap where she once was.
Sitting on the Sandbanks to Purbeck ferry, remembering all these things from my childhood.
Bracknell
Bracknell Forest of toy houses,
sticky notes, sticky traffic,
hub & spoke, stop, start.
Heart of concrete, high-tech solutions for everything but pleasure,
and a gap where the weather used to come from.
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