The Blog




So was the US election a net win for the world's economies?
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My fellow Americans[1]. Vote early and vote often. And remember that John Dillinger died for your sins.

[1]In the sense that Americans are my fellows, rather than that I'm a fellow American.
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No cigarettes for one year and one day[1]. Hooray! That's no cigarettes, no tobacco, no nicotine, no patches, no gum, no nothing. Feeling vaguely proud of myself for that.

If you're thinking of doing the same, you'll know when its time. And when it is, I recommend going cold turkey like this rather than trying to paper over the cracks with patches or any of the other non-smoking nicotine delivery systems. It will be hell for 3 days. Hard work for 6 weeks and then a life time of trying to forget all the habits you've built up. It gets easier.

[1] We need a name for a year and day. How about a Guinea-fowl?
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Cocktail of the week: The Gin&It
Way back in the day, dry (french) Vermouth hadn't really made it to the USA, but the Gin was still pretty rough and needed covering up. So the earliest Martinez was a red vermouth and gin martini. Update this to the 21st century and what you have is a softer Manhatten[1].

40ml Gin (quality, tonight's is Sipsmith),
20ml Martini Rosso,
dash of orange bitters,
dash of Maraschino,
Shaken and poured into a cold martini glass
Fairly hefty orange twist, flamed if you can do it.

[1]Make a Manhatten as normal. Instead of the cherry, make it dirty by adding a healthy dollop of the brine water from a jar of olives and you've got "A Sandy". Boom-tish! Gotta love that Brit bad taste humour. If you're stuck in post-Sandy chaos, we feel for you, but hope you can still larf.
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Love the 1968 reference. "Under the datafeed, the beach!" Only 2 months till the omega point when the novelty curve goes vertical and the Mayan Calendar rolls over into the next aeon.
http://www.acceler8or.com/2012/10/dementing-augmented-reality-how-future-activists-will-break-people-out-of-their-digital-trances/

Recombinant Commentary[1], I haz it. Here's some more slogans from the 1968 Situationist International to toss over the wall like a mind grenade. 
http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm
Ne travaillez jamais. Sous les pavés, la plage. La Lutte Continue. 
Never work. Under the paving stones, the beach. The struggle continues. 

[1]Trying to look superficially deep by quoting from old stuff, but just ending up being deeply superficial[2].
[2]As used in a Grauniad review of Banksy[3]
[3]Like me, he should lurk moar.

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Oh, yes. A recently discovered physics paper that explains H.P.Lovecraft in terms of non-euclidean space-time geometries.
At last, science explains the physics in "Call of Cthulhu" >>
By Annalee Newitz Benjamin K. Tippett has a theory. The University of New Brunswick mathematician believes that he's figured out what, exactly, those insane sailors saw that night in 1928 when they......

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If you like Can's "Soon Over Babaluma", very early Massive Attack and perhaps K&D, you're going to love this. "The very definition of a hidden gem".

I love that music from 20 years ago can bubble up out of the aether after all this time.
The Quietus | Features | A Quietus Interview | "If I Hit You, You'd Feel It": Leslie Winer, Trip Hop's Forgotten Pioneer >>
Some say that Leslie Winer aka © invented trip hop in 1990 with her album, Witch. Now she's back with a retrospective compilation and Wyndham Wallace meets the reclusive former supermodel. Main pictu...

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Genius. One of my favourite critics interviewing one of my favourite critics. "Sharp Suits And Sparkle: Jonathan Meades On Acid, Space And Place" (by John Doran at The Quietus)
The Quietus | Features | Ten Songs | Sharp Suits And Sparkle: Jonathan Meades On Acid, Space And Place >>
John Doran plays ten songs to author, broadcaster and architectural critic Jonathan Meades in order to closer examine his unique perspective on life. All photographs courtesy of Martha Wailer

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While vaguely listening to some radio news, a sound byte stuck out for me about "tightening controls". Now it really doesn't matter exactly what controls, rules or regulations were being tightened or if somebody was calling for tighter controls. It just occured to me that we only ever hear about such things being tightened, never loosened. If our response to every (engineered) crisis is to "tighten" things we'll end up being ratcheted down into a straitjacket where we're not allowed to do anything.

Oh. Wait.

Everything not compulsory is forbidden.
[from: Google Google+ List of Activities for Collection PUBLIC]




Today I did the last part of my journey, cycling the length of one of Mother Thames's favourite daughters, the Lea (or Lee). I've also checked off most of Lea's nephews and nieces in the form of the major tributaries  Rivers Ash, Beane, Mimram, Rib (Quin), Stort; And the brooks, Bayford, Broxbourne mill, Spital, Small River Lea & Turnford, Wormleybury. With each of these, I've gone as close as I can to the source and then followed towpaths, bridlepaths or roads as close as I can to each stream all the way to where it joins the Lea and ultimately the Thames. 

At some stage to do this properly I should probably check off the rivers Moselle and Ching.  And at least the Cuffley and Turkey Brooks. There's also the Limehouse cut to follow. 

Today's journey was from Ware to Leamouth where it joins the Thames and back again with a diversion to Victoria Park and the Hertford Union Canal Cut. The catch was the NE wind behind me on the way down and in my face on the way home complete with a few minutes of driving rain. It's always a pain when the hard work is on the way home!

Details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Lea And an excellent write up of the paths and features from Diamond Geezer, here:
http://lndn.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_lndn_archive.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/sets/72157621790088657
River Lea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia >>
[edit] Etymology. The River Lea was first recorded in the 9th century, although its name is believed to be much older. Spellings from the Anglo-Saxon period include Lig(e)an in 880 and Lygan in 895, a...

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My Last.fm account has just clicked over 100,000 tracks listened to and scrobbled since I joined in 4 Apr 2004. I really think last.fm should give me some kind of prize! I did once interview for the job as CTO way back when they were in one room above a sweat shop in E London, but I don't think I was really up to it and didn't get the job. A couple of tickets to a club night in London or a cocktail in a Shoreditch bar would do nicely, ta'.

I never did work out how to reliably scrobble tracks listened to on the iPod so this is almost exclusively tracks played through Winamp.

I don't listen to the old stuff much any more, but I figured the 100k'th song should be something old and blue. So I picked out an old favourite from around the time when I first started listening to music seriously. So here's Uncle John's Band from the 1970 Grateful Dead album, Workingman's dead Grateful Dead - Uncle John's Band (Studio Version)


You can find me here http://www.last.fm/user/jbond

[from: Google Plus Public Activity Feed for Julian Bond]

I wrote a short PHP script to generate an Atom feed from the public posts to a Google Plus account. https://gist.github.com/3938374 Enjoy.

Google really ought to provide this themselves in the API. If you agree, please go here, vote for the request and add some comment 
http://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?id=139

[from: Google Plus Public Activity Feed for Julian Bond]




There's a certain irony here about a Techcrunch Community Director warning Google about the dangers of cross posting inherent in opening up a Write API for G+

So what is this post? A share is OK then, but not a cross-posted copy of the same thing! How about the link on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/drewolanoff/posts/294616453981067 or the like on facebook, http://www.facebook.com/drewolanoff/activity/10151140431388509 Then there's the cross post to Twitter https://twitter.com/TechCrunch/status/256862337720537088 

Cute, huh? And yet, there is clearly a need to make it easy to write once and flow at least a link and preferably a summary to other social networks to get the widest possible visibility and engagement with your intended audience. G+ could make this considerably easier if they produced an Atom/RSS feed of one's public G+ posts since there's already plenty of tools to import these into other platforms. It's such an obvious and pain free extension of the API that it's really quite extraordinary that it hasn't been done yet. Meanwhile, there's always drlvr.it 

Then there's the incompletely fulfilled promise of Friendfeed. There is a genuine need to automatically aggregate all the public posts from anywhere from single person in one place. We just don't want to see this in the main streams. Google is right to be very careful about if and how this might be implemented. It's tempting to suggest a sub-tab off the profile page but there's bound to be unintended consequences of even that.?

ps. Part of the reason for re-posting this is that it's apparently impossible to get engagement on the original post, or on any of the cross posts. The comment streams are now history that nobody is watching. I'm finding this more and more. Just as nobody seems interested in long form articles, It's becoming impossible to have long form discussion. Once the thread is a day or two old, it's gone. I think a big part of the reason for this is not actually about attention span but about the lack of tools to aggregate comments threads you contribute to so you can see in one place if new discussions or replies have been added.  

Drew Olanoff originally shared this post:
dear +Vic Gundotra, please please take your time on that Google+ API. cross posting is an epidemic and a network-killer. 


Facebook's Having Some Issues With Twitter Cross-Posting, But Nobody Cares. For Reasons. | TechCrunch >>
As The Next Web reported, users are finding that their Facebook status messages aren't being cross-posted to Twitter even though they've set up their accounts to do so. I first noticed this the other ...

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Excellent article. But the real gem is this comment on the link from victorvictorian. Almost impossible to quote individual sentences so read the whole thing.
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/12/hauntologists-mine-the-past-fo.html#comment-681137870

i think this state of our culture is limited. there will be a few years of this type of mass inter-pollination before new forms are born. we are in a transitional stage; moving from one type of communication to the next. there will be dead-ends and backwaters, panics, witch hunts, and purges. we are in an estuary moment, a confluence of rich waters where hybridization is the norm. my hope is that it doesn't all devolve into lifestyle choices and niche-marketing; that some degree of invention will win out before the vultures of commodification swoop in.
Hauntologists mine the past for music's future >>
Whether it's musicians pastiching multiple vintage styles in a single track, the endless cycle of remakes and sequels in cinema, or historical genre mashups in pop literature, our future is looking in...

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Gmail not echoing your own posts to Yahoogroups back to you. About 6 months ago or so I switched to using Gmail as my outgoing mail server as well as my incoming. I still use a local email reader. Now, I belong to and contribute to quite a large number of Yahoogroups some of which I run. It puzzled me that my own posts to those groups weren't coming back to me via the inbox. It finally got sufficiently annoying to research and at that point I discover that this is a known bug in Gmail and has been for getting on for 2 years. Your outgoing email is in the sent and all folders in Gmail. But when the email is echoed back to you by yahoogroups, gmail is not so helpfully just discarding it. Probably because it has the same email ID as one already in their database. This is just wrong, but clearly isn't going to get fixed. The work arounds are all abit messy because you have to use a different smtp send server to normal and/or a different send email address just for posting to yahoogroups.

What I haven't checked yet is whether the same behaviour happens in mailing lists hosted in googlegroups or mailman.
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One for the music historians. Where are the links between Hawkwind and The Clash? Hawkwind always had ties to the Westway end of Portobello road, Moorcock (with his house in the area), the Mountain Grill and so on. Motorhead was formed by Lemmy in Ladbroke Grove. Phil Taylor's girlfriend worked in Malcolm Maclaren's/Westwood's Sex in the Kings Road. Strummer lived in Ladbroke Grove. Mick Jones, Strummer knew and worked with Sex Pistols members. So really you have to think that in '74, '75 the Clash members must have known and to some extent been influenced by the older and previous generation of deviants.
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A message to The Boiler Room, Fact magazine and one or two others. Putting auto-start videos and music clips in your RSS feeds is anti-social. It's pretty damn annoying on your web pages as well. This isn't early oughties MySpace or late 90s Geocities any more. Please stop it.
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20,000 units electric bicycle sales in the UK in 2011 seems quite a lot considering that electric bicycles are quite hard to buy, maintain and get support for in the UK.

http://www.bikebiz.com/index.php/news/read/uk-bike-sales-slip-in-2011/013764
2nd
in bicycles sales, 7th in e-bicycle sales in Europe. Germany tops both.
Britain has the seventh largest electric bike market in Europe >>
UK may trail Germany and Netherlands, but holds a respectable mid-table position in e-bike table

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Bruce Sterling apparently has a thing for Simon Reynolds. He's gushing about Simon's latest article. I do like his comment though. "No one has new cultural ideas in this decade. They cost too much."
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/10/against_recreativity_critics_and_artists_are_obsessed_with_remix_culture_.single.html

The post-modern problem of the inability to break out of influences and create something new is a problem for us consumers and critics as much as for the artists. We seem unable to relate to new pieces of art without saying "that's just like that thing X did 10 years ago."

Meanwhile, why doesn't Wired's comments system work?

A Resident Advisor commenter has another view: http://www.residentadvisor.net/forum-read.aspx?id=208624 "What an absolute load of drivel. Masturbation with a thesaurus."
Musica Globalista: 'You are Not a Switch' by Simon Reynolds | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com >>
*Boy this is good. All other music critics should just copy whatever Simon says. Hey wait! "Simon says!" I made a pun or something! If I was willing t

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