For today’s #AudioMo I’m reflecting on a new book I’m reading, Cheryl Misak’s life of the philosopher Frank Ramsay, and why deep reading matters in these turbulent times.
#AudioMo – June 5 – A Public Centric Internet
StandardDay Five of #AudioMo, back on the boat. Another day, another recording, this one is less good quality audio but I hope the ideas are sound as I reflect on the nature of the network we all rely on.
#AudioMo – June 4 – Coffee on Mill Road
StandardDay Four of #AudioMo and I’m outside Relevant Record Cafe on Mill Road with a coffee and a sandwich talking about masks and plugging the new book @GearsForQueers which you *should* read!
#AudioMo – June 3 – Building Social Capital
StandardDay three of #AudioMo and I’m reflecting on the difficulties facing people at the start of their careers in a ‘socially distanced’ world
#AudioMo – Remembering Pixel Palace
StandardToday’s #AudioMo recording finds me on the roof of a boat thinking about cinema and remembering the Pixel Palace at Tyneside Cinema in 2008. As I was recording this Mark Cosgrove (@msc45) was posting his excellent meditation on the same topic – so listen to me, read him, and rethink cinema
#AudioMo – Watering the Garden
StandardPaying off our ecological debt
It’s usually dangerous to draw analogies between computing and any other field except possibly mathematics, because the way we do things in computing is so bounded by technical constraints, business models, and naive modelling assumptions that trying to apply our approach in other domains is either laughably simplistic or clearly unhelpful.
However as I reflect on the state of the world as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic continues to disrupt so much about the lives of so many, it seems that one idea from our profession offers a useful way of thinking about what we are going through.
That idea is ‘technical debt’: the cumulative impact of taking the easy path to delivering a solution instead of doing it properly that will one day be repaid, either by redoing the work as bug reports come through, or through lost data, lost effort and lost trust in the software.
The Day William Gibson Wrote Me a Suitcase in Cyberspace
Although he came up with the term ‘cyberspace’ in the early 1980’s, William Gibson entered a version of it for the first time on October 9, 1999, in a darkened room in Cheltenham Town Hall during the town’s literary festival. I know, because I was his guide and he told me so.
We had just come off the main stage after a discussion about his recently published novel ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, and I’d invited him to the festival’s online zone to hang out with me in LinguaMOO, a text-only teaching system where I had a virtual office.
After he’d signed some books we went into the computer room and he logged in as Bill_Gibson, chatting for a few minutes with members of the the LinguaMOO community, including the TrAce writing community that I was part of. He started off well:
Bill_Gibson says, “Hello, this really is Wm. Gibson, tho you won’t believe me…”
The Messy Edge of the Liminal Space
These are my notes for a talk I gave at the Messy Edge, a conference curated by Laurence Hill as part of Brighton Digital Festival 2019, at the University of Sussex on October 18 2019.
When My World Changed: Forty Years of Cambridge
I had just turned 19 when arrived in Cambridge in October 1979, with a full grant and a maintenance payment which meant it didn’t cost me or my parents anything.
I’d been brought up by my mum in a council house on one of the tougher council estates in Corby, Northants, and we weren’t in a position to pay fees or well-disposed to taking out loans and if it hadn’t been for the implementation of the Robbins Report I doubt I’d have gone to any university.
Find out about the Robbins Report
Corby was a thriving new town with a massive steelworks when we moved there in 1965, moving down from Tyneside with my mum and sister. One of my earliest memories is arriving in Brixham Walk, parking near a lamppost and walking from the road to the house in the dark. We lived there for the next fourteen years.