Category: Musings

Art for art’s sake

Ah, you just gotta applaud the antics of that lovable rogue banksy. This time he’s been sneaking into major New York art museums and hanging up his own work. I first became a fan of his intellectual grafitti/stencil style down in Melbourne, home of prolific outdoor stencil art galleries. Good to see he’s going from strength to strength.

Had a weird synchronicity moment last night. Went down to the galaxy diner after my photography class where we had a long conversation about an abortive hiking trip in Wales to Bron-y-aur, the cottage where Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote most of Led Zep 3. Stepped out to see what was on at Irving Plaza next door and turns out it was Robert Plant. Go figure. Just reminded me I need to be more on top of the local concert scene.

But they might be useful!

Today I decided to work in my local coffee shop, fix in the ‘burg, rather than in the office. The reason for this was simple – I get more work done when I’m not at work! Now why is this? You’d think a coffee shop filled with people would be more distracting, sometimes full of very cute distractions, but somehow it isn’t. There’s something very relaxing about a mass of people just getting on with their own thing around each other who have minimal reasons to interact. That and the phone doesn’t ring all day for other people in the office of course.

Anyway, I was so productive today in amongst all the madness that I found time to move all 1500 odd emails out of my main inbox into sensible folders – a handy thing to do given I’m sitting on top of three major projects at the mo. It was pretty astounding some of the topics of conversation from a year ago, sometimes exact duplicates of conversations I had last week, others completely off elsewhere.

Of course this still means I have umpteen thousand emails floating around somewhere in my filing, it’s just that they’re not in my inbox. The whole packrat gene runs strong in my family – with G’ette being the only one to have apparently gotten over its siren call. As for me I still have boxes of crap here (after only a year of being here), back in storage in England and at my godparents in Melbourne, Australia! I know it will be useful someday…

Join gmail! No, wait – don’t!

Yesterday I noticed that Google had added a ‘Click here to join Gmail’ link to the front of their site. This is a change from their registration invite process to date, and indicated they were ready to go out there full steam. However today that link has disappeared and the front page of Gmail has no ‘Sign up’ link visible. Strange.

The original Gmail signup model started by offering invites to people on Blogger, a recent Google acquisition. This invite, which I took up, gave a select group of people of controllable size access to the site so Gmail could test itself. All being well, as it seemed to be, they went onto the next step – giving everyone on the site three invites they could send to their friends. This I duely did, inviting a few folk along. Then a bit later, three more invites were added to the bundle, for me and the people I’d invited. This carried on for a while, with varying lengths of time between new allocations of invites. Now I have a bundle of 50 invites sitting there should I choose to use them.

What’s great about this model is that Gmail knew at all points in the process how many people could potentially sign up. There was never a ‘big bang’ release risk for them. Obviously this doesn’t work for all new systems but it makes a lot of sense, especially when you look at sites like fotolog that were constantly going down under the weight of new members (mainly from Brazil for some reason) and having to put in place premium charges suddenly. The other benefit of this model is that you’ve acquired a great net of connectivity between people, of the kind that friendster and others would kill for.

With this new open registration offering to anyone and everyone Google is obviously almost ready to go completely out in the world. Wonder how many people they got onboard that made them take off the offer so quickly?

The algebraist – iain m banks. Iain M returns with another Sci-Fi epic, this time not ostensibly set in the Culture galaxy, but in a similar future environment of dispersed humans (a and r) and many other races. The main storyline revolves around Seer Taak, a researcher into the almost eternal Dwellers who live in large gas planets all over the galaxy, his quest is to find the location of a mythical set of hyperspace portals that noone knows about except the dwellers. In the background is the usual set of wildly imagined Banks characters and races, a galaxy spanning war and the strange vein of comedy provided by the dwellers themselves. Banks has always suffered from a flaw in his Sci-Fi writing, in that it is either full of wonderfully detailed characters and interactions (Player of Games), or classic Sci-Fi schlock plots with amazing concepts (their names escape me because they’re generally not so memorable). Unfortunately, aside from the sections involving the intimate following of Taak’s adventures with the dwellings, a side jaunt into a childhood trauma and an initially fascinating but ultimately dull ‘villain’ the whole book falls squarely into the last category. There is a lot of good, interesting writing in there but it’s surrounded by the backdrop of a boring old galaxy filled with bureaucracy and long journies with lots of soul searching. Maybe that was a dramatic device Banks employed to increase interest in the one on ones with Taak, but I don’t think it works. The first half is a struggle to get through, the last half is definately the best, but the resolution is trite to the extreme and ultimately unsatisfying. Not one of his best.

You’ve been Google’d

So after a bit of cajooling Google has decided to let me back into their search results. I’m now back to page two on a search for ‘matt hobbs’ after being relegated to nowhere on the first 12 pages of results!

So what caused this temporary disappearence? Especially since I’d been in the top three results for a while? Well it looks like Google took offense at my hidden CSS description of myself that said ‘Matt Hobbs’ a lot. So I took that off and asked them nicely to stop blacklisting me and they did. Ta Mr Google.

Of course being Google, rather than warn you of your mis-deeds you just disappear from the results. Luckily for me the few people who read this know where I am, but imagine if I was a business advised by someone to use that trick to get better results? A very scary prospect indeed that makes you realise how tentative awareness is on the web as a whole.

Meanwhile, in other news, I believe I’ve now finally recovered from my trip down to CTIA in New Orleans last weekend. Great fun, lots of free booze industry parties, some dodgy incriminating photos and a greater awareness of the mobile space and how people within it act (especially when drunk). Wish I’d stayed down there longer – as it really made me realise I need a holiday!! This was also brought back home when I realised it’s been a year to the day since I got back from Thailand after over a year of travelling round the world, and hence over a year since I’d last been diving… time to rectify that.

And I was like…

Just found this great site called Overheard in New York, buzarrely while I was trying to find the times Fix coffee in Billyburg opens (gotta love Google sometimes). This has now inspired me to add a set of New York related links to my side bar in honor (no ‘u’ intended) of the city I live in.

Sunshine on the N line

Did my first trip on the N/W line in Queens today on the way to Seth’s brunch party. Very nice indeed. After Queensboro plaza the line is all above ground about 20m above the road, and with today’s beautiful spring sunshine the effect was stunning. This has made me realise I need to go travelling round some more random New York public transport routes, such as the Manhattan ferry, to experience more sights at a human level.

After brunch I decided to walk back along the bridge to McGuinness boulevard, taking some photos with my ‘new’ second hand Nikon ME Super. This new purchase is the result of a three year enfatuation with the camera ever since I first played with Ann’s – it has great weight and is perfect for the black and white class I’m taking at SVA. Have to say it’s been very strange going back from digital again and especially learning to do proper printing. Overall the course has been great and I’m learning loads which is helping all aspects of my photography. Wish I’d done it sooner!

There’s a mouse, loose about dis house

Very strange alarm call this morning… A cute little mouse had decided to get into bed with me by my feet which I guess woke me up. The poor little thing was resting at the end of my bed, so I took a photo in case it ran away. It didn’t. So I took another. Still not moved. So I put a box over it, and then moved it into a bucket. Still not much movement apart from breathing and whisker twitching.

At this point I started getting flashbacks to my childhood and trying to rescue half eaten mice from our cats. No cats to blame this time, but my gifts of lovely leicester cheese ($9.99 per lb) and water were rejected. In fact when I came out of the shower, involving not a little contemplation of a suitable name for my new pet, the mouse had obviously decided it was dirty and had had it’s own bath.

Sadly by the time I’d finished dressing the mouse was not looking at all well. My experience as pet minister kicked in as I administered the last rites and gave it a full state burial in my trash. Sniff sniff.

Sweet words of spam

The mighty Yahoo spam filter, knight errant to protect the sweet chastity of my inbox, has turned into somewhat of a poet today. Witness the beauty:

Such pharmaceuticals — small monetary value!
Rolex in $150 ? [visitor]
Fresh magnify your phallus solution!
Re [21]:
sent C1ALL1S, C10NAZEPAM; V1C00D1N, V1AAGRRA. C0DE1NNE, MER1DI1A, CI0NAZEEPAM
Equivalent drugs — dinky cost!
up-in 20-minutes
up-in 20-minutes
We must afford the delight of holding the superfine

Wow. I can almost hear William Shatner reciting this beat style.

Infinite Blue*

Just came across a great quote from Blake that I wanted to share:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ chinks of his cavern.”

* With thanks to Mark for that