Being a list of things which I’ve been meaning to write about here or elsewhere, but haven’t had a moment.

• New forms of storytelling
• The rise of the renaissance journalist
• Hotel life
• Why I don’t write much about work here
• Flickr video
• Personality blogs and the cult of the meme (pron: Me! Me!)
• On returning to Canada
• Agile development - the business/product owner’s perspective
• Being hobbled by technology
• Some new commandments for polite living
• Team operating agreements

Hopefully, by putting these out here in public I will be shamed into actually finishing one of these posts (currently on draft). Please feel entirely free to hassle me in the comments into actually completing one or any of these. It might just work.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of someone examining Dorothy Salcedo’s Shibboleth at the Tate Modern.

Sometimes we all feel like we’re in danger of falling into a hole in the ground.

I’ve just returned from a whirlwind trip to Canada (speaking at HICKTech in Owen Sound, Ontario) and Washington DC (visiting the Guardian America office).

Despite having flown into Washington Dulles airport and gone on to spend several days in Northern Virginia probably a dozen times or more over my tenure with AOL, I must confess that in all that time I only made it into Washington once - and even then only barely, for dinner in Georgetown. I had never seen the Whitehouse, Library of Congress, Smithsonian, Capitol Building, any of the monuments, and had no taste of the city, really.

In the last few days, I have compensated for this tragic oversight, and have the blisters to prove it.

Things which Washington D.C. has a lot of (based only on my limited experience)

• School groups on tours, in matching t-shirts
• Big white marble monuments
• Museums, mostly free (and also the Newseum: recommended)
• Hyperbole
• Smart twenty-somethings
• People in full military uniform
• Embassies (my hotel was next to the Senegalese embassy, and just around the corner from Poland and Peru)
• Free Wifi
• Escalators
• Concrete (especially in use in the design of the metro system roofs)
• Countdown crossings
• People who might be secret service or might just be very well put-together tourists hanging around major monuments
• Pollen
• Bus tours
• Political tchotchkes
• Tour guides wielding light-sabers (especially at night)
• Humidity
• People visiting from the midwest (and specifically, members of tour groups from Kansas who thought that being British meant I was some sort of alien and would not have heard of everyday idioms, and so insisted on trying out a stack on me over breakfast: “We have a saying, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’ - do you know that one? Oh. Okay, we have another one you might not know: ‘put up or shut up’. Have you heard that one? Oh. What about ‘elevator shoes’? Do you know what they are?” etc)

Things that Washington D.C. doesn’t have much of (again, based only on my limited recent experience)

• Water pressure. The showering experience leaves something to be desired - somewhat akin to having an old lady dribble over you. You’d think the capital city of The Most Powerful Nation On Earth^tm, which, according to the National Air and Space Museum, managed to put a man on the moon, would be able to manage to put a quantity of water at head-height. No wonder they’re so cranky.

Excellent news for photography lovers with access to central London: there’s an exhibition of photographs by Don McPhee on at the Guardian Newsroom in London (60 Farringdon Road, opposite The Guardian offices), running from last Friday, April 18th through to the end of June.

In case you don’t know who he was, Don McPhee was one of the photographers who really helped to define the visual style of Guardian news photography over three decades of working with the paper before his death early last year. If you’ve been reading the paper for a while, you will have seen his images, and I’m sure there are many you’ll recognise in the retrospective.

Most of his work was black and white, and he had an amazing eye for composition and delicate humour in his work. He was especially known for his portrayal of life in the North - something which was especially evident in his coverage of the miners’ strike in the early eighties, during which he produced iconic images, many of which can be seen in the exhibition.

I’m not writing this and recommending this exhibition because I’m a corporate schill shill (sorry for typo) and I work for The Guardian these days: I’m telling you about it because ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been inspired and moved and amazed by Don McPhee’s work, and the fact that I now work for the same organisation which used to commission and publish him is the icing on the cake.

This image of my teenage bedroom, taken when I was, I think, 14 or 15, reveals that (as well as being a bit serious and gothy and having a cold), I used to spend a lot of time going through the paper every day, cutting out the most striking pictures - many of which were McPhee’s work - and building an enormous collage, which eventually expanded to entirely cover my bedroom walls.

I was curious about how they were composed, intrigued as to how they told or related to a specific story or revealed a particular aspect of an individual or situation. It was probably my love for this body of photographic work and the particular visual vocabulary of styles it uses - documentary, juxtaposition, social observation, everyday, candid, striking - which has embedded in me a lifelong love of photography and taking photos myself.

If I can achieve a minute percentage of the creative results that Don McPhee managed, then I’ll be incredibly happy. I’ve got no pretension that I am a photographer, though: I just take photographs. But I’ll admit to being heavily, indelibly influenced by his work (along with others, like Martin Parr), and proudly so.

In any case, if you are in or around London in the next couple of months, do check out the exhibition if you get a chance. It’s free, a real treat, and well worth a visit (the attached cafe does a nice blueberry yoghurt muffin, too).

There’s an excellent gallery of the sort of thing you can expect within the exhibition, here.

More Don McPhee loveliness online:

• Working with Don: Whilst covering the 1988 US presidential elections for The Independent Brian Harris found his visual style changed after teaming up with rival press photographer Don McPhee of The Guardian.
• The Online Photographer obit
• Gallery of shots from his Manchester exhibition
• Maxïmo Park explain why they wrote a song about Don McPhee

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here recently: I’ve been variously

• in Istanbul, working
• working working working working
• in the Isle of Wight for Easter
• being a rapporteuse at an Ofcom/OII social networking conference (must write up my notes on that)
• in hospital being attacked internally with lasers
• lying on the sofa feeling sorry for myself (oh alright, and playing Lego Star Wars)
• working some more

What passes for normal service around here will resume at some point.

Or is this it resuming now? Very possibly.

In the meantime, I’m dealing with more spam being inserted into the footer.php of this site and I’m at a loss to know what to do. I thought I’d closed all the WP loopholes. Apparently not.

Speaking, as we were not so long ago, about unreferenced advertising homages to internet viral creative endeavours….here’s another one for the collection.

First, watch this new ad from Berocca.

People dancing on treadmills.

Strangely familiar? Indeed. OK Go did this to great viral effect not so long ago:

I know. Ad creatives in ripping off internet shocker.

<rolls eyes>

The other night, out for dinner with friends, we found ourselves discussing the perfect food. Not favourite food - that’s a different question - but perfect food, which works in a number of contexts and is flexible and suits all palletes. Cheese, we thought, maybe. Or pasta. Or even bacon.

But you know what we came up with?

Toast.

Toast and Marmite, originally uploaded by jovike.

Think about it:

• It can be a morning food or an evening snack.
• It can form part of an entire meal (beans on toast) or an accompaniment (soldiers).
• You can have it open-faced or in sandwich form.
• You can fill it with sweet things or savoury stuff
• You can fill it with hot things, cold things or a combination of the two.
• You can make it from a range of products (brown bread, white bread, ciabatta, etc)
• It can be prepared in about three minutes.
• It can be prepared by just about anyone.
• Oh, and it’s yummy, to boot.

I defy you to find another foodstuff as adaptable, quick and satisfying.

Honestly, the person who came up with the idea of baking bread once and then baking it a bit more? Fricking genius.

So here’s my perfect toast:

– Malted wholegrain bread, full size, medium sliced
– Toasted for 2 minutes or until slightly stiff and golden, just rigid on the periphery yet still soft and flexible in the central plains
– Removed from toaster immediately, then let to sit on the plate or counter for 30 seconds or so, to get rid of immediate heat (NB may leave a little toast sweat)
– Spread right up to the edges with spreadable butter, medium amount. The butter should not soak in to the bread immediately - if it does, the toast is too hot and the topping will stick.
– A light layer of Vegemite, smeared across the butter, to ensure the two tastes are mingled but not blended. You’re aiming for a mottled or marbled effect, not a light brown paste, here.
– Consumed immediately (eating crusts first) with a cup of tea.

Your turn.

While you’re thinking, here’s Paul Young singing about Toast in 1978.

This may well be the theme song of this blog.

From the top of the bus the other day, while stuck in traffic, I took this (rather crappy) image of a fish & chip shop on Gray’s Inn Road, and its Friday night clientèle.

Looking at the image later, I thought there was something familiar about it in a way. It’s just occurred to me that there’s something quite Hopper-esque about the scene…

Edward Hopper’s "Nighthawks", originally uploaded by glynnish.

Some of you who keep up with my Flickr stream will be aware that one of the things which crops up with alarming regularity in my camphone snaps is the misuse of apostrophes.

I am an apostrophe dullard: it’s true. I can’t help spotting them when they’re misused, and let me tell you it nearly killed me to write that headline up there. Seriously. I keep looking at it and wincing.

I classify public apostrophe abuse into three buckets:

1. Permissible Error
This usually means that the sign is handwritten, chalked or otherwise home-produced, and is generally an indication that the writer was in a hurry, or without English as a mother tongue, or both, and can therefore be permitted to make a small, apostrophe-sized slip once in a while. Classic greengrocer’s apostrophe territory.

2. Should Know Better
These are usually printed items which are created for a one-off, limited audience purpose. It tends to be that this usage is seen in charity shops, local church/school/community organisation newsletters and on the stand-up A-frame boards for independent delicatessens and sandwich shops. Most of these will have either been created by the proprietor or, occasionally, created by a signwriter acting under direct comission commission (oops!) from the owner. 99% of the time, it’s a plural error.

3. Utterly unforgivable
These are the real clangers. High distribution (vast print run - adverts, merchandise and the like), very visible channels (like billboards and television), otherwise high production values (design, or materials used) and - most importantly of all - very likely to have passed, in copy, design and approval stages, through the hands of several people, at least one of whom should have spotted the mistake. This is a quality issue, and is something that creative or marketing agencies (especially) are particularly bad at managing. Hang your heads in shame (and then get it together! It’s not that hard!)

After the jump, some other favourite examples of this latter type…

Read more…

A few weeks back, I attended a Flickr minimeet at the London Transport Museum and took a bunch of photos which you can see in this set on Flickr.

Now, the nice people from the LT Museum would very much like to feature a bunch of photos from the event on their site, and yet cannot decide which of the 680(ish) taken on the day (or rather, uploaded to Flickr from that event) should make it onto their site.

Which is where you come in.

I’ve written a blog post about my experiences at the museum over there on the event site, and I would be most obliged if you would chuck in a vote for one of my photos while you’re there. You can vote for as many photographers as you want, but you need to choose between a pair of photos for each person.

My pictures can be found on this page (and in context of the blog post about the day here), and they are, respectively “Live in Metroland” which is a carriage door handle from the heydey of the MetroLand exodus

and “Ducks”, a reflection of the museum architecture in a thirties-esque living room display.

Much obliged. x

For some reason, my phone suddenly decided to stop sending text messages this morning. It seems to have forgotten the Orange Message Centre number.

So I pop over to the orange site to find the number, and attempt to use the “fixing basic problems” menu to resolve it.

It asks a series of questions, and after each provides two choices: Yes this has resolved the issue, or No it hasn’t.

Are you roaming?

Do you have Line2 selected?

Do you have enough signal strength?

To each I answer “no, this hasn’t resolved my issue” until I get to one which reads

Have you checked the message centre number to ensure this is correct?

The message centre number must be correct in order to send text messages

This is, indeed, the problem I need to fix, but unfortunately Orange provide no way of actually helping me to fix it.

If I click “Yes, this has resolved my problem” I get a message saying “glad we could help” but if I click “No this hasn’t resolved my problem” I get presented with another potential issue (”Is the destination number valid?”) rather than any way to resolve the previous problem.

Please look at that screenshot and tell me how, from that information, anyone is supposed to know:
a) how to check the message centre number
b) whether it’s correct
c) how to correct it.

It seems that “fixing basic problems” is actually “diagnosing basic problems” with no attempt to actually fix them at all. I don’t want sympathy, I want a working phone. Most irritating!

(for anyone else suffering this predicament, I can recommend you find reputable and helpful orange network related answers elsewhere)