Category Archives: Life

30 Days of Music

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Shamelessly cribbed from Matthew and Mark – let’s just call this attempt number 765 in the long, long series of me trying to establish a regular writing pattern. Oh yeah, the newsletter, I’ll pick that up again soon.

Thing is, whenever I’m writing something, I’m overcome by massive self-doubt – that what I’m doing is self indulgent, irritating and so on. Twitter is, for some reason, probably the only exception to the rule, and yet most likely to be the most irritating. Anyway, with this series of blog posts, I’m going to say this up front – I’m giving myself permission to be self indulgent. This is an exercise for me, primarily, with the hope that others might find it entertaining too.

Matt was worrying that he was writing too much about himself, and not enough about the music. With the greatest respect – have you seen the categories (below)? Each trigger is pretty much a shot across the emotional bows, so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the music as a stepping off point for something more personal. That’s what I’m planning to use it for. Yes, there will be some discussion of why I have a particular emotional reaction to a song, some attempt to describe its’ musical mechanics, but it’s also an opportunity to tell a quick story, a snapshot of where I am now.

Music has always been a big part of my life. Playing and composing, much less so – brief excursions into playing the recorder, violin, keyboard and guitar aside. But every commute is soundtracked, music is everywhere for me. So much so that the security guard in my previous job, when asked to identify me, called me ‘the bloke with the headphones’. My tastes may be more mainstream than most – if I offend you with my populism, I’m sorry – it’s just a stepping stone for something else.

I’ll do my best to post on consecutive days. The most difficult part, I fear, will be nominating a single track – but it can only ever represent my reaction to the prompt that day. Which makes future iterations of this project even more interesting, I hope. So, here we go.

The categories are:

day 01 – your favorite song – Sometimes (Miami Horror)
day 02 – your least favourite song – Just a Little (Liberty X)
day 03 – a song that makes you happy – Don’t Falter (Mint Royale & Lauren Laverne)
day 04 – a song that makes you sad – Exile Vilify (The National)
day 05 – a song that reminds you of someone – Robin The Hooded Man (Clannad)
day 06 – a song that reminds of you of somewhere – Suzie (Boy Kill Boy)
day 07 – a song that reminds you of a certain event – Map of the Problematique (Muse)
day 08 – a song that you know all the words to – Breaking the Law (Judas Priest)
day 09 – a song that you can dance to – Disco Down (Shed Seven)
day 10 – a song that makes you fall asleep – Agent Orange (Depeche Mode)
day 11 – a song from your favorite band – Enjoy The Silence (Depeche Mode)
day 12 – a song from a band you hate – Aqualung (Jethro Tull)
day 13 – a song that is a guilty pleasure
day 14 – a song that no one would expect you to love
day 15 – a song that describes you
day 16 – a song that you used to love but now hate
day 17 – a song that you hear often on the radio
day 18 – a song that you wish you heard on the radio
day 19 – a song from your favorite album
day 20 – a song that you listen to when you’re angry
day 21 – a song that you listen to when you’re happy
day 22 – a song that you listen to when you’re sad
day 23 – a song that you want to play at your wedding
day 24 – a song that you want to play at your funeral
day 25 – a song that makes you laugh
day 26 – a song that you can play on an instrument
day 27 – a song that you wish you could play
day 28 – a song that makes you feel guilty
day 29 – a song from your childhood
day 30 – your favorite song at this time last year

On Web Design

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I’ve been thinking a lot about work, recently. Probably too much. Since January, things have been pretty hectic, and as we approach summer, it’s our yearly review. Time to take stock and think about the year just gone, and, more importantly, where I’m going, and what I want to do.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what motivates me, what gets me interested – what made me want to get involved in all this in the first place. I can code, and I have some Photoshop skills. Looking back on my childhood, I realise I’ve always been into what we’d now describe as ‘the Media’ – I was always creating newspapers and magazines; my brother and I recorded details of our lives on countless cassettes, I remember vividly compiling fictitious TV listings. I spent probably four years as a Youth Leader, creating activities and often doing, well, ‘Pervasive Gaming’, probably.

But the thing that has caught my imagination since I began full time work was always the innate feeling that there was something new to be discovered. Some new way of making something fun. At the end of the Siemens Graduate Scheme that I was fortunate enough to win a place on, I summed up my career ambition thusly: “to make a significant (positive!) contribution to the Media Industry”. Wishful thinking, I know. But it’s still a mission. And so when I discovered the simple, poetic beauty of the Semantic Web, that’s been it, for me. I know it’s not perfect, there’s a myriad of things we haven’t solved, and may never solve. But not to try them? Not to experiment? Not to create, and have fun? That would be a waste.

And so, it always comes back to job titles. Again, they are, of course, not so relevant as what you actually do. But it’s always struck me that the term ‘web designer’ has pretty much become a synonym for graphic (and possibly interaction) design of, and for screens, accessed by the Internet and the Web. Not that there’s anything wrong with that role. So much of what we call UX is incredibly important and has a rightful place in an organisation. But it’s not really web design.

As I said before, I can code. I can do entity-relationship diagrams, I can do your standard business analysis techniques. But the pleasure I seek isn’t in designing elegant code (though that does, I admit, hold some sway). Nor is it, frankly, in designing visual or interaction masterpieces – important as they are. I don’t want to design database structures, either.

What I want to do is design webs. Web. Design. That’s what I do. And I want to do it in a way that is creative, that brings Web Design in to the realms of drama, entertainment, comedy, sport. Elegant Web Design. That’s what I can do. My material is the Web. It’s URIs, it’s hyperlinks. It’s creating on the Web, just as much as creating a physical thing. So yes, that’s what I want my future to be. Someone who designs Webs – helps others to design them, and creates Webs of literature, of art. That’s me.

 

UPDATE: I know it’s passé, but a trawl for inspiration and direction came up with this (relatively famous) diagram by Jesse James Garrett. And you know what? The definition of Information Architecture doesn’t sound that different from the above, really:

“Information Architecture: structural design of the information space to facilitate intuitive access to content”

A Scrapbook

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Hello,

Just a quick note to say that recently I’ve started a Tumblr blog, which I’m using to collect quotes from various books I’ve been reading, quotes that hopefully give a fresh & intriguing insight into ways at looking at the Web. Mostly so far, unsurprisingly, it’s a batch of quotes from Marshall McCluhan, but I promise to widen my scope pretty soon…

Anyway, thought I’d provide a link here and in the blog roll, so it’s a bit more visible.

08-09

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Be Seeing You – by Olivander, via Flickr, Creative Commons

Review of the year/resolutions time. 2008 was a mixed year, which is pretty much a description for most years, I would guess, given the length of time that makes each one. Nevertheless, as part of one of my resolutions which I’ll discuss later, forgive the slightly self-indulgent ramblings within this review of the year post…

Highlights of 2008

  • New flat – in April I finally moved into a place of my own. Far enough away from parents to do my own thing, but close enough so that I can still go round for meals and washing (only semi-joking!). It’s one of the things that we get used to and take for granted, but given how frustrating it was getting waiting for the whole thing to get sorted out, actually moving in, and being here now, is a major step.
  • New job – another thing that is linked to one of the Lowlights, unfortunately, but again, worth it after everything. When I was in the pre-GCSE year at school we had to write a page describing ourselves and our futures. In that, I mentioned that one day I would like to work for the Beeb. I’m really happy that after two years of being so close, and yet not quite being in there, it’s all fallen into place. But just as I had planned my place of work back then, there’s still a lot more I want to do, and hopefully 2009 is where it will all start kicking off.
  • Doctor Who – Yes, I know I go on about it constantly, but the 2008 series was probably the best since the show returned in 2005. A couple of middling episodes, of course, but when the average episode is so ruddy good, the special episodes are amazing. Stand-out moments that left me with a huge grin on my face – the final moments of the first episode, Partners in Crime; the sheer madness and twisted imagination of Steven Moffat’s Silence in the LIbrary/Forest of the Dead; the sublime RTD penned Midnight; the final moments of Turn Left; and the vast majority of the season finale. David Tennant was of course, very good, but it’s fascinating to wonder what’s going to be next – and with Moffat in charge, we’re in good hands. As an aside, it’s probably no coincidence therefore that RTD’s book ‘The Writer’s Tale’, wins my award for the most inspirational book I’ve read for a long time…
  • The Collins and Herring Podcast – Like most people, I guess, I can’t remember exactly what got me into them. I think I started from the beginning, I don’t know how, but now I’m addicted. Of course the quality varies wildly from episode to episode, but that’s because it’s not trying to be anything more than it is: two blokes sitting in a loft in Shepherd’s Bush, discussing the week’s events, insulting each other, and looking things up on Wikipedia. Brilliant stuff.
  • Then there’s also the standard things, like comedy and music. I can’t be bothered at this precise moment to give an exhaustive list of my favourites of the year, but this was the year that I discovered Green Wing, loved Screenwipe, the IT Crowd and Peep Show; on the music front, Bloc Party, MGMT, Cut Copy, James Yuill, The Last Shadow Puppets, Black Kids and Pocket Satellite. The latter being a band involving a friend, so I’m excited to see what the new year holds for them.

Lowlights of 2008

  • Job issues – Obviously not going to go into much detail here, but there moments during the year where I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do come the end of October, and even what I could be doing during the summer, when it almost threatened to derail my birthday weekend. But luckily it all got sorted in a flash in the end, and I just hope that the economic climate doesn’t have too much of an impact in the near future.
  • Delays on the flat – The original plan was to have been moved in by the end of January 2008. That never happened, and as the year went on, with no final confirmed moving in date, the frustration grew. But again, in the end, it was all sorted out – I just wish it could have been sooner.
  • Smashing my iPod – Something a little less serious – the dangers of having a hard floor – a simple slip of the hand, and the hard disk was shattered. Let’s hope that the latest incarnation lasts more than a month into the new year…
  • Not writing/blogging/practicing/performing enough – Given the two main lowlights, which took up the majority of the year, my efforts to break into the world of stand-up, writing, blogging and even learning the guitar, all reached a sticky end – basically because I didn’t practice enough, and didn’t really have my heart fully committed. Hence…

Resolutions for 2009

  • Blog more – I’ve always been terrible with diaries, but hopefully I can take a leaf out of Richard Herring’s ‘Warming Up’, and blog more often. I think the next two resolutions will help on this as well…
  • Learn more and contribute to the Semantic Web – as per my last post, I hope that I can make a real contribution to the efforts of the Sem Web community this year. I’ll be continuing my experiments and learning with fictional content modelling, and with great and inspiring people at work and beyond, hopefully this will keep me writing.
  • Write more comedy material – I’d like to do more stand-up, but I still think that writing is more my main thing. I’m going to apply to City University’s Writing Comedy course, and I really want to commit myself to putting effort into script and sketch writing.
  • Make more of an effort to discover new music – I have an eMusic subscription, and consider myself to be a bit of a music fan, but looking at my Last.fm chart of the year, it seems my listening is still pretty much mainstream. I’m not a fan of those who automatically slate mainstream music – it has played an important part in my life, I’m not going to dismiss it now, but I’m keen to expand my horizons a bit more. Oh, and do what I can to support the efforts of my friends in Pocket Satellite. I’d also love to do more DJing and learn the art of mixing and mashups.
  • …and finally – having bought Wii Fit on the twisted logic that it’s cheaper than a subscription to the gym, I think it’s about time that I started to use it regularly…

Right, that’s about it. I’m off for some lunch. Happy new year, everyone!

Coldcut @ Electric Proms ’08

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As I write this entry, the first fireworks of the year are going off outside. “Bang after bang after bang after bang”, as an accomplished broadcaster once said. On Saturday night I went to the Roundhouse in Camden for my first Electric Proms concert – Coldcut via the Radiophonic Workshop. My brother and I got there early to pick up the tickets, expecting to only be allowed in for the DJ set, rather than the discussion beforehand. Luckily for us, the discussion had been delayed by half an hour, and we managed to get in for that as well.

I won’t bother describing the event in great detail, you can find all the info on the Electric Proms website. Saying that, though, one great thing I’ve just uncovered via that link is a minute by minute record of the gig from Twitter. As an aside, that’s one of the cool things about Twitter, from my experience – conversations between work colleagues that might otherwise go unrecorded, including examples of collaboration and idea-building, are preserved. Equally, live experiences which, unless ‘taped’, will eventually be forgotten, can be preserved in some fashion here – including, crucially, the emotions and feelings of the people experiencing the event. (I wonder – what about supplementing the football ‘minute-by-minute’ feeds on matchdays with Twitter feeds as well as 606 comments?)

The DJ set itself was quite good – it’s sometimes hard to ‘get into’ a gig when it’s material you don’t recognise, hence the best part of the performance was when they re-mixed the Doctor Who theme (it got the best reception from the crowd, and it’s a shame that it wasn’t longer, in this fan-boy’s opinion). It would have been interesting to have included more voice sampling in a similar fashion to ‘Doctorin’ The House’ or ‘More Beats and Pieces’, but I can understand why they wanted to concentrate on Radiophonic Workshop material.

Other than that, the night consisted of a house party in Willesden Green, where the floors consisted of a large bed of autumnal leaves, everyone wore increasingly bizarre hats, and Bjork was on the stereo. Not much more to add, I suppose. Oh, and today I started work as an ‘Information Architect’ at BBC Audio & Music, the experiences from which, I hope will inspire me to write future blog posts.