meish dot org: life, unfolding

I know the first rule of blogging is “never apologise” but I’m sure one of the other rules is something like “keep it up” which I have been woeful at doing recently - the terrible timing, so soon after my celebratory tenth blogiversary postings, was noted and probably deeply significant.

Lots of travel, lots of stuff happening at work, lots of really lousy things happening with regard to our housing situation (synopsis: After seven months dangling at the end of a property chain last year, we finally gave up on the place we were buying and found somewhere else with no chain. All progressed well until the owner of the house we were just about to exchange contracts on suddenly changed her mind about the sale which meant we, having given in our notice on current (rented) flat, were very nearly about to be homeless within weeks. We’ve sorted it out now, thankfully, and the hunt continues, though we are surrounded by boxes which I can’t bring myself to unpack just yet.)

So here’s something approaching content: I’ve been quietly making galleries on Flickr for a while. Here are some of my favourites…

(What big eyes you have)

(Lone tree in winter)

(Migraine-inducing carpet)

Read the rest of this entry »

I missed the actual tenth birthday of this blog/me blogging but I can’t let a milestone like that go unmarked, can I?

Originally started as a place to store and share links, this blog gradually became a place to playfully interact with the world, and over time that turned from introspection to exploration of the world, media, experiences and ideas. I don’t think I’m alone in that kind of journey with blogs.

I am immensely (unreasonably, perhaps even pathetically) proud of having been blogging for so long. I can say confidently that I was in at the beginning, when all this were fields. I was here before many of you young whippersnappers who have gone on to eclipse me, and blogging, and the web entirely in their success and influence. I don’t put my early involvement down to canny prescience about the way the web was turning so much as an inevitability given my proclivity for tinkering with web things, my early academic and personal interest in communicating online and my inability to shut up. Blogging and me; it was only a matter of time and technology before we found each other.

I was there. I remember the start, and the hype, popularisation, commercialisation and ubiquitisation which followed. I couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but my blogging was to introduce me to dozens of interesting people, influence others to start doing it too, cause interesting opportunities (and worrying situations) to develop. Blogging has become part of what I am, what I do. I blog now for the same reasons I did in early 2000: because I can’t not tinker with and publish to the web.

Ten years ago, I was embarrassed to mention having a blog in polite company, because it was so difficult to understand - not just what but why. These days, even both my parents have blogs. It’s not a weird niche oddball geek thing anymore. It’s so normal it’s almost passé. Good.

Read the rest of this entry »

….just another day.

This year, like every year since 2001, show you care about people (not profits) by sending an anti-valentine.

Added bonus: it makes people smile, not throw up in their mouths.

(Now even easier to share via [social media experience of your choice])

Because I’ve been asking people to sum up their year in just a few words via The Mayfly Project since December 2000, I’ve been able to look back at the last decade of Mayfly entries (via the Internet archive as well as prodding old sql tables until they regurgitate their goodies) to see how things have changed, and what’s been notable or characteristic in each year.

Some observations:

I talk a lot about love. That’s good. You can tell when I met the lovely P, because everything changed.

I talk a lot about work. That’s partly because whatever I do for a job ends up being somewhat all-consuming. That’s both good and bad (in a stressy unhealthy way).

I travel more than I thought. Or rather, the moments of travel are significant when remembering a year. You can see the unfolding of years on a map.

I used to worry more than I do these days. That can only be good.

My 2000:

Started blogging. Found a groove. Found friends. Much laughter with flatmate. Secret squirrel at work. Living a London life. Good.

My 2001:

working, moving, flirting, lightning, loving, loving, windows painted shut, frustration, illness, love, islands, work, worry, enormous stress, but love throughout.

My 2002:

New beginnings - excited yet anxious. Irrational worries. Learning about control. Usual work stress: need something more. Changing, growing. Home = Love.

My 2003:

Stress, moving, noise, mistake, moving again, hotness, swimming in a warm sea (twice), confronting illness, lifestyle revolution, promotion, onwards, together.

My 2004:

Chilly walks, wedding, work, sea swimming, view of Africa, anxiety, old/new job, driving lessons, cat, more love than ever.

My 2005:

Adopted cat. Passed. Conquered London, England, Scotland, Wales. Took many pictures. Drew on many whiteboards. Became increasingly creative/neurotic. These attributes not necessarily connected.

My 2006:

Frustration, uncertainty, idiots, “just a bit longer…” Meanwhile, focused on photography, windswept places, friends, cat, love, decluttering. Resolved not to wait. Bollocks to them.

My 2007:

Goodbye old, hello new job. Commuting underground, overground, mind wandering free. California dreaming. A series of hospital waiting rooms. Profile building. Camera shutter clicks.

My 2008:

Lots of killing time in hotel rooms in interesting places, as well as meeting nice people. Had operation. Worked hard. Created things. Pondering move.

My 2009:

Didn’t buy a house, but tried (repeatedly). Still trying. Travelled a lot (mainly for work). Embarked on a significant journey. Enjoying it.

This blog, as I’ve always said, is a record of life, unfolding. And nowhere more-so than in the flight of each year’s mayfly.

The reminder a couple of weeks ago that pioneering blog publishing engine Blogger was launched ten years ago got me thinking.

I’ve been blogging for nearly ten years now - since it began with a W - and being involved with something from the beginning, plus passionate (and sometimes despondent) about its potential and usage in the years since means I’ve had a lot of time to watch and think about how it has matured and been used. There are certain things which we can now look back on and consider milestones in the development and maturing of blogging - like how the media responded to it, how people embraced and used it and how it penetrated mainstream web usage over time.

Likewise, Twitter.

Like blogging (which I started doing in January 2000, and used Blogger to publish my blog from April of that year), I’ve been using Twitter since relatively early on - my earliest update via Twitter was in November 2005. I’d link to it, but
a) it’s in my private/personal account (@megp) and
b) all my archived tweets (pre July 31 2009) have disappeared, as experienced by many others in this thread on the Twitter help forum.

It’s actually that help forum - and the appalling petulant and rude manner in which some users are addressing Twitter staff - which got me thinking more specifically about how, in so many ways, the timeline of the Twitter story mirrors that of Blogger and early blogging. Both have seen similar patterns of early usage and behaviour and adoption by certain functional and social groups, and both have learnt - the hard way, sometimes - about technical and social scaling issues as well as being a playground for emergent behaviours and activities, and all the fun and challenge that comes with that.

This isn’t an attempt to demonstrate that startups and new technologies are subject to many of the same pressures and reception issues - that’s been clearly documented and brilliantly expressed in Gartner’s Hype Curve. Rather, I wanted to explore some of the striking similarities in specific situations, movements and experiences in the early days of both micropublishing and blogging, from the perspective of an early settler and long-term resident of both of these strange and wonderful new(ish) countries.

So here’s something I’ve been working on for a little while: it’s a very approximate timeline of the activities, patterns, behaviours and reactions experienced by both Twitter (/micropublishing) and Blogger (/early blogging) during their first few years.
Read the rest of this entry »

A friend shared a link to the Freaking News celebrity photoshop contest with me the other day, and in case you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look. Basically, people have taken images of celebrities and then rotated their bodies while leaving their faces in place. It’s a little difficult to explain, but have a look at the examples in that link and you’ll get the idea.

Of course, everyone looks a bit weird, but the truly worrying thing is that some celebrities - Dennis Rodman, Elton John - actually look pretty good (or at least naturalish) with their faces on upside-down, if you can cast aside any lingering questions about what freakish accident might have caused them to end up thus afflicted.

So of course I had to have a go myself.

Aside from realising that it makes many of my male friends look like crazed Amish (above), or have heads that eerily work both ways up (below), I also discovered that even for a photoshop doofus like me, it only takes 5-10 minutes to do a passable version, and another 10 or so to polish it if you really must have it completely realistic (well, as realistic as a person with their face on upside-down can do, at least).

And here’s how you do it…
Read the rest of this entry »

I needed a new table in my study for crafty projects (sewing machine, somewhere to use cutting board, dedicated place for framing etc) but I quite fancied something a little bit different.

Coincidentally, our old road atlas was falling apart (and out of date), and I cannot bear to throw away a map, even one as pedestrian as that, so I thought I could combine the two creatively….

So yesterday while the football was on I nipped to Ikea and bought a plain boring 100X60 tabletop, and today I took advantage of the sunshine today and decamped to the back garden with a few bits and pieces and got to work.

And in case anyone wanted to do the same, here’s what I did and what I learnt.

Read the rest of this entry »

This collage of web 2.0 logos should be pretty familiar to many people by now. It’s been knocking about for a few years, ever since the whole Web 2.0 Koolaid (what’s the British equivalent? Ribena?) started flowing.

During that time, I’ve seen it printed out and stuck up on the walls of companies and individuals, appearing in about a million blogs, and it should almost go without saying that this image gets used endlessly in presentations at events about the social web, or web 2.0 technologies, or the changing face of business in the last few years, or design and UX in the new web.

In that context, it is usually accompanied by sentiments like “Web 2.0 isn’t going anywhere” or “the social web is real and growing” - using the sheer quantity of Web 2.0-type offerings starting up in 2005ish as an indication of how much they were shaking things up and changing the game. Dare I even say shifting the paradigm? ;)

Anyway, having been professionally involved in one of the companies featured on the original logo collage, an avid user of a handful of others and a casual user (OK, I registered a username) for a whole bunch more, I’m as aware that the web 2.0 landscape has changed as you are.

So having recently been confronted with this image in a presentation (used as being indicative of current reality), I thought it was time that it was updated.

I present these updates without reference to or predicting the demise of web 2.0 or social technologies or anything like that. Just to be a bit more accurate.

The image below reflects which of this original set of companies have vanished or ceased trading, via the highly scientific method of searching for their names and clicking about until I could find reliable information about them.

The most reliable method seemed to be to go to the original Techcrunch (or mashable) hyping of the new service in 2005ish, and then follow the link to the company. If the link is kaput, then so is the company.

More than you thought? Or less? Certainly some of the daft names (and business models, and ideas) have dried up, but others remain, and still more have sprung up in their place, no doubt.

It’s also worth noting that there are a handful of others listed as alive on this diagram (or rather, not crossed out) which are, to put it politely, dormant or dwindling if not actually dead.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s my lovely sister’s birthday today, and she’s far away. So please hop over to her site and wish her a happy birthday.

(I made her a silly card - my first experiment with stop-frame animation. Pretty chuffed with it though obviously Wallace & Gromit have nothing to fear)

I’m not a hugely crafty person, and I’m rubbish at finishing massive projects (no time!), but I can’t resist tinkering with things, and I’m a huge map fiend, so I came up with a little crafty project a little while back that even someone with limited crafty talent (i.e. me) would be able to manage: a cross-stitch version of the tube map.

My love/hate relationship with public transport is well documented which made this even more attractive. But if that wasn’t enough, my reasoning was this:

1. It’s all straight lines
2. and blobs for the stations
3. and easy angles
4. it’s already laid out on a grid structure
5. Beck’s simple graphic design means it uses set angles, thicknesses and colours
6. Instantly recognisable, even without any words on it
7. I live in London and take the tube every day
8. It’s just mindless enough to be able to do without full attention i.e. while watching a DVD box set or something on telly

So, here’s how I did it:

1. I got a tube map from the TFL site
2. cropped it to the central zone (basically zone 1 + a chunk of zone 2)
3. in photoshop, erased all the station names
4. still in photoshop, increased contrast
5. used mosaic filter to transform image into 5×5 blocks
6. added a 5×5 grid over the top
7. blanked any squares with partial colour in them (this meant shifting some stations slightly to the left or right)
8. simplified the pattern by filling in boxes with block colour (e.g. stations)
9. went to local craft/knitting shop and selected some embroidery silks based on tubeline colours (not exact, but I can live with approximation)
10. sewed a purple perimeter border which looks decorative but which actually made it easier to count off stitches inside the grid
11. annotated a printed version of the map, with square counts (between stations, for example)
12. started in the bottom right hand corner with the H&C (pink) line and then worked my way around the map, line by line
13. I left all the stations until the end

So here’s the pattern, in case anyone else wants to have a go:

And here’s the (nearly) finished result:

For reference, it’s roughly A4 size, using 14-count Aida fabric (which I got from John Lewis).

It’s not perfect - there are some small counting errors in there, so I had to get a bit liberal with some of the joining angles, especially towards East London, and the stations are a bit square - but it’s not bad for a freehand thing, and a first attempt.

All in all, I’m pretty chuffed.

You can see I’m in the process of adding a border to it, to secure the edges, and I’ve still got to fill in the Thames before I can frame it or turn it into a cushion, but it’s too nice outside today…