oh bella.  your a special girl.

in ten days time you will be five years old and your daddy will be super dooper proud of you like every single time i am when i see you.  as dad gets older and worries about a future around him you make all of that fall away and i’m left with a calming moment when i truly know what love is.

your such a warm hearted soul and mum and dad love you to pieces.  everyone says its hard to believe that kids have grown to (x) age but for me it’s not hard at all.  i’ve lived every one of those moment when your not near to me and i’m determined to always be a better dad.

incredible to think the things you’ll see and the people you’ll meet, i want to spend as much time with you as possible to teach you everything i know and learn together the things i don’t.  my father never really knew me like i know you and while i find that sad for my father it makes me more determined as a dad to be the one that invests in you as a person.

i love you princess.  not long to go before party tea!

-

this blog will soon transition to another service and provider.  it will be rocky and it will fill people with dread and upset that balance of the html cosmos.  personally, i’d chill and knock back a brewski and wait till the dust settles.  those awesome subscribers that invested the time to click subscribe i want you back.  you made me feel whole.  now, together.. let’s rock those funky beats.

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• Feel the Fear and do it anyway (attachedmummy.wordpress.com)

thursday morning.

heading out on the train heading in the general direction of london for a reccy before an event tomorrow. it’s been over a month since i have posted to this blog and a lot has changed and happened in that period. i’m not going to go into too much detail about the the last month because those are really separate blog posts and i’m pretty much moving everything of my digital presence at the same after hearing the news about twitter aquiring posterous and the general lack of seo improvements to the service in general over the last two years.

it’s a whole other post about outreach to the community who helped promote and build up the millions of userbase around the product. but they got their exit so they are happy, that’s how it works these days it seems – build a startup, get huge numbers of users, go to investors and vcs, do a big of voodoo magic, find a girl/boy and go to some vineyards and live the dream. while in the grand scheme of things that sounds awesome in my mind i feel a lot more outreach for the community could have been done.

at least when flickr went to yahoo we had a good outline of what would happen and luckily that service has not changed that much to me – something about the twitter/posterous deal does not me feel comfortable thou that the service will be around in a years time as it’s collective image is bought underneath the twitter borg cube. the users, suffer as a result. so chances are this will be my last blog post on this blog and i’ll be grabbing as much content out of the site and importing into the cms system i ran away from so much — wordpress.

i still don’t like wordpress but it has got better, plugins actually work and don’t take down the whole system now and things like cloudflare and using a cdn to offload some of the assets are making the experience speedy but the email posting system is a total suck. it really really, blows compared to just emailing things in like posterous can do.

i have found some half-way houses that i’m experimenting with using postie and the mobile application is not that bad and i’ve started a dialog with a developer of a blog posting application called marsedit about the different social capture services that i use to grab media when on the ground. let’s hope that can be improved over the coming months eh? when i say the last few months have been insane let me just say i think we have had more work, jobs and public speaking than i have ever done before — it’s been one job, one task and a massive speedup to my usual march activity of heading to southby and hanging out, i simply could not do that this year.

this is the year to establish some level of a base again and start to write out those memories and document the journey to here from there. because that was rough and it’s happening to people everyday. i’ve had to pivot my expectations about where i live and how i get there but i’ve been experimenting with lots of different routes and revenue streams that fit the ethical, responsive and speedy social media business assets i want to provide.

it feels a lot more fine tuned than it did at the start of the year when it seemed like another round of ‘let’s try this again’ it’s been great but scary to see my little girl grow up so quickly, so smart and beautiful and happy asking questions about life and just generally enjoying life and feeling loved — she’s got two parents who absolutely worship the ground she walks on and she is such a good soul to other children and people.

so, the mission is on people. and it’s only going to get faster over the next few months as i attempt to head over to the states (something i was not going to do this year) for a week long roadtrip and conference all rolled into one. i’m looking to secure more advocacy work for additional companies and start to get across about a full service social media lean startup utilising empty spaces.

so garry came in today to have a chat to camera about what fastfind.info was and so that people could put a face with a name and at the same time bought along this wonderful IPS/HDMI touchscreen monitor from dell that i had not even appeared on my my radar.  i had no idea you could get such a screen at around £200.

this starts to make the rattlr project very interesting.

these could become some of if not all of the screens for the rattlr project and combined with the raspberry pi boards our entry point could be a lot cheaper than originally thought which makes the overall package really attractive.  i think it’s about time to start process some thoughts about making our prototype a reality!

if you have not heard of fastfind it is an interesting development of finding information across nottingham and he has been rapidly building this over the past couple of months.  i really like gary and his work ethic and what he is trying to build here for the locality.  the fact that he has it running nicely on tablets, touchscreens etc is awesome and i do hope that i get to work with gary on a number of other projects and maybe become a preferred supply of audio/video elements to make his project a success.

i see the touchscreen service going down very well with the right people in the lifestyle and hotel arena here in nottingham.

Phil Campbell resident Andrew Reed has been working on a documentary about the I’m with Phil Campaign that he plans to use as a fundraising tool for the town.

The documentary will be screening at the George Lindsey UNA Film Festival on Friday, March 2nd at 9:00 pm at the Zodiac Theater in Florence, AL.  Admission is free, but seating is limited to about 100 people so arrive early to make sure you can get in.

save the date – 12th of March

if there was ever a time to watch me do something mad but cool and pushing forward in social media space with the eco, optimized edge i have been pushing forward on it would from the 12th of march.

on that day, i’ll take delivery of the smart fourtwo electric car for seven days as a trial in the hope that i can maybe raise some money to actually rent the vehicle and yet also at the same time, promotion, connect, network with and interview people while i’m driving around.  the plan is simple really.  i’m going to be spending my digital time mobile, out on the road for as many hours per day as i can testing out how well this electric car performs over the course of a week.

these are the things i’m pretty sure will be happening.. ..

streamed live
probably two, but maybe one.  i can definately do one on a stand in the car looking ahead with audio from in the car.  it could be two and at a total push it could be three.  but i have the connectivity, the knowledge and the technology to make it happen.

i’ll be using the cradlepoint mbr1400 for the first time and this badboy can have lots of usb dongles in to serve me up internet for me to stream with.

raising awareness of installation of charge points
let’s cut out the crap here, ideally i would love to be an advocate for raising awareness for businesses getting access to the funding help to put charging points around the east midlands for electric cars.  if there was ever a perfect fit for a project it is this one.

i need transport, eco as much as possible and i have a certain trip that i need to make three times a week at an awkward time (so no lifts or carsharing) and it involves an eco project at the other end.  it’s perfect.

i want this project to happen so i’m going to do what i can to see how many people we can get to download the pdf document and take up a conversation about providing a charging point for an electric car driver in and around the midlands.

testing 3g multi point internet with the cradlepoint mbr1400
i’ve been lucky to be blessed with the best sponsors, like really.  they are awesome.  it will be the first time out with the mbr1400 and i’m not even sure i can get it running in the car without some kind of converter block but i’ll work it out.  i’m pretty sure i can run a 4 way lead from the lighter socket and the draw for charging the phones and the router are fairly low.  we will certainly see how much power it will use from the onboard batteries and if that cause a great problem or not.

a custom website with videos and sponsors
i’ve not got long.  thankfully the website can be relatively lightweight will just being embeds and little blocks of refreshing content that i can include.  i’ve been secretly pulling together assets for the future streaming project anyway so i’m not starting from zero here.  i have a rough idea of the look of the site for the camera stream part.  it will require sketching out from inside my head thou and i need to move on that asap.

kickstarter (or other) fundraising over the course of the week
this will take the longest part to do and i’m not even sure if i’ll have time to push, get accepted and have all the things in the right place, i will for the ulule one because that’s nearly ready to go for the .tv student wordpress ten site project (yes, another part of the overall puzzle for social media deployment in nottingham but i’m going to push here.

i’m going to run two kickstarters for the ark project to see if we can raise awareness to getting funding for that and also another for funding for the car for the year.  if we can get at least the car funding for the year for the streaming project that will give us something to barter with for finding the five companies for finding the £5k from each.

surely, after this they will see the value of realtime social exposure – again, i need your help guys.  so spread the word, eco magazines, editors, social gurus, video people, streaming people.  dads that have daughters and must understand my pain of only seeing my daughter once a week.  ok, that was deep but it’s true.

getting to see my daughter three times that week
at the moment, when finances allow i get to see my daughter who lives about forty minutes away once a week on a saturday.  it’s never enough and i need my baby.  i love her dearly and these are formlative years.

i’m putting everything into this as those that have followed my blog over the last year will know.  having this trial will allow me to go and pick up ella three times or more over the course of the week.  i may even stay overnight locally to her and drop her into school in the morning to see how that runs like.

a ‘where has phil been’ tracking block
this might happen, all depends on if i can meet with my coder guy next week (that’s you dave) and we can pull something together, we have the code we just need to build it out on the site and make a cool little icon for the smart car.  i’m sure someone has one.

yeah, that’s quite an extensive list but i’m pretty sure i can get them things going.  i’ve got a tight timeframe from today until the 9th of march to make this happen and i have a lots of things happening before and after (TEDxNottingham anyone?!?) so this is tight.  i feel like this is another year for pushing the social media boundary of just what is possible these days.

the feels like a test bed to explore the idea of electric transport between nottingham and the ark and to test out the notion of charging and blogging for three hours while i wait for this car to charge (unless i go to a fast charger and then it’s only thirty minutes) – it’s going to be an interesting ride and test/trial and i’m super excited about the opportunity to make it happen.

the cosmos is just aligning for me on things at the moment.

i’m super thankful.  i need your social help thou team.  will you help?

Related articles

• North East has most electric car charging points (bbc.co.uk)
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• Electric cars step up a gear for 2012 (bfreenews.com)
• Vancouver to expand electric car charging stations (canada.com)
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• Revealed: There are more charging points than electric cars in UK as sales slump (tarpon.wordpress.com)

i mean, it’s worth documenting right?

after all, taking virtual gifting into the retail space makes a lot of sense.  the kids of the next generation have been purchasing virtual stuff for a good six to twelve months now so they can have new awesome virtual bits and pieces on the farm.  you did know that your kid had been buying that stuff right? – might be worth checking where the pocket money goes.

and so it makes sense to me.

virtual gifting for real world products.  episode one, the search for pubs with an overview and a catchup about our progress so far, next week i’ll be chatting too (and hopefully interviewing) a pub chain to see what they think about rolling it out across their pubs in the east midlands!

comments and gifting of beer for this video and post is heartily accepted.

so yeah, that’s been happening.

lots of mini video jobs per day doing reviews.  it’s nice because it fills in the time between other work and rushing around talking to people like a headless chicken.  between the wunderkit note, giving specs and ideas to coders and pushing away at all the other projects the studio space has actually started to work really well.

i’m very keen to move toward final cut pro x thou because it’s a half way house between imovie and final cut (even thou the oldschool kinda hate the new ui i hear) but i simply cannot run the software on my kit, the chipset and the graphic card are just too old.

hoping now that we have the new intensity extreme mobility box building out that we the ability to tinker and upgrade some of the more important systems – we need faster drives, better rendering speeds and dedicated boxes for offloading some of that work with a drafting, shoot and edit approach to the way the time we spend in the studio is used.

fiverr is certainly helping in maintaining a rythem but i’m getting some odd requests from time to time from that service i’ll tell you.

if you have not checked out my gigs on fiverr yet i’ve put together a fairly easy to read pdf with some of the gigs i’ll be able to blast out for $5.

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‘what’s the point’

that’s the quote that keeps on reverbing around my brain from last week when i went into a local pub here in nottingham to talk about virtual gifting, applications and basically bringing more income into your public house by tapping into the smartphone user on the move.  a new arena of clientale that is in a constant state of flux between home life, office life, work life and meeting life.

the ondemand, onthego and over there workforce of drop in, drop out and travel generation who are living digitally, organizing their lives between facebook and linkedin and getting those deals on groupon.

the most interesting sentence was ‘they want to see it rolled out everywhere first because they want to do it’ – i found this the most interesting thing i ever heard, what happened to innovation, balls and just having a go with this country? – why do we have to wait until something is broke, failing or so the numbers add up before we engage and empower the passionate people in our society?

have we really become a tickboxing society of headless engagement and no care for the customer that comes through our door to bring us money and keep a retailer in business, are we just drones to help you amass more wealth so you can look after you and yours? – what about the social component of getting to know the people that utilize and become cheerleaders of your products.  

is not beer about community and communal drinking, telling stories (in a responsible manner of course) and winding down, after your day in the office or some event between the more important events in your life?

fibrecamp does not provide video for everyone.  we provide a relationship first before we sell you a product.  we have to get along, our requirement for a relationship that works on a person to person basis means that we have the ability to cater around your needs instead of for your needs, to make the transition from unknown to product, one that delights you as a person at your core. we are not a faceless transaction – bosh, bang thank you very much out the door you go.

we want you to come back to us because you felt invested in.  your money, your time and the desire and vision you had delivered ticking all those emotional nuances that really exist and happen in business that nobody seems to acknowledge without coming across as some kind of new age hippy.  they are there.  they exist.

so, i keep chasing so that those who are good at marketing and can do the communicating of this vision to their bosses above them in the hope that they can see that this is not about them, that generation, it’s about next generation, it’s about all generations.  just because you ‘can’t see it working’ does not mean it’s not happening out there.

it’s not about controlling the message anymore.  it’s about listening to the messages that people are talking about – in realtime – if your not listening to them why do you expect them to ever want to listen to you more than just a transaction to service a need rather than an emotional investment in your brand that will see them coming back more and more – want proof? – use search.twitter.com and put in #nottingham to see the people, live now talking about nottingham.  that’s your customer base.  and your NOT talking to them.

roll on awesome chats next week with a variety of pub line managers.  i live in the digital realm, i do my money in the cloud, i work in the cloud, i live between moment of exchange of information in the cloud and now i want to be gifted beer in the cloud because i understand the way that my generation and the one below is is born into.

the ondemand, consume where we are nature of the purchase of our needs in the region we are presently in is the most eco, ethical approach to marketing and will give business a laser focus to service the one not just the many.

it’s not a case of when anymore, it’s how much and how frequent.  social media engagement is not a tap you can turn off once you turn, it’s about understand the metrics of the way a human travels about their day to day and being senstive to their needs.

scaling the engagement of the one to one is the way forward.

Related articles

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• Coventry News: Warwick pub raises £1,400 for paralympian (coventrytelegraph.net)

quicklinks | all my fiverr gigs (pdf) and my fiverr profile.

*update* that’s the last 24hrs and they keep on coming.  it’s really taken off and this is just the one gig and i have fifteen other gigs to sell too.

our studio fibrecamp was an empty space.

within we installed lights and cameras and computers that allowed us to talk to the outside world. the super fast fibre gave us a connection that made talking to the outside world faster if we could utilise it properly. we have not been able to due to lack of planning/resources from lack of funding and having lots of different digital directions to journey down which is exciting!

over the last six months i have become empowered by the notion of time-slicing. utilising a dead space, building the bare bones of a studio with what limited resources we have and creating advice and content from those spaces. i even have secured an advocacy that is my only source of real income right now. i’m not signing on, i’m not a burden on the dole or anything like that — i’m getting on with what i have access too.

yesterday i blogged about buddybeers, a great system for virtual gifting beers to your friends – i really support web apps that give us, the smartphone user the ability to travel in spaces bringing our digital social layer with us.

the ability not to worry about money, cards and cash and have these bartering digital tools in our pockets connected to our social grid that empowers us to communicate with the world really excite me because for the first time since i got into computers i can really see how living in the digital realm, in the clouds if you will can be possible.

as part of this fascination i have started to use fiverr again and have put up a suite of gigs that you can order from $5. now those kinds of jobs are not going to give me anything enough money to live on, even the basics — i would have to do a lot of those jobs just to get by with the outgoings and expectations of projects i want to achieve over the coming years but they are part of the equation of talking about slicing our day to day up into time slices where we wield social media making and the process they require.

that said, fiverr now has an extras service after you have done ten orders when you become a regular seller that allow you to charge for additional services bolted on to your original fiverr gig. this then starts to look interesting and attractive as a means to talk to those who might be unemployed and build a fiverr social campaign where they use the studio for those with a variety of talents to be virtual empowered.

i know personally that i have a number of jobs that i would love a joiner to do around the studio but i cannot pay that person top money — i simply do not have it. being able to barter your social grid is going to become more important the more our physical payment mindset is challenged and resources become squashed.

i have always wanted to rewrite the rulebook of recruitment, it’s broken and slow and needs a good kick up the backside. we have the tools, applications, frameworks and infrastructure to cause a revolution in the employment arena removing fax time sheets and waiting for payments for weeks to clear.

we have people wanting to work but they want to work in the way they want to. they have commitments that do not fit in with the native timeframe that we have always been used too. they come with different background structures and time-slicing seems like a perfect bridge to reactivate the unemployed masses.

i was not keen to look for another big paying job because it constricts my passion to chase, explore and empower in this new digital social frontier. it just does not fit the way i work, i work on different projects over different timeframes and between my entertainment. my projects and social grid travel with me during the day. i’m engaged to the social grid even when i’m not actually engaged with it through a keyboard.

time-slicing small amounts of time for a payment make sense to me. we have the ability to build smart, mobile applications that can collect gps location details, take photos and videos and audio feedback that would fit perfectly for mobilising the unemployed to do something.

fibrecamp has always been about optimizing a space and getting the most out of it but more than that it is about being a point of presence for the social media engagement of a local area. not just a studio with cameras and kit but a space to talk about costs, time frames and effort. what do those things look like in a digital realm.

i’m excited to see where this can lead to and it gives creditability more to the studio space popup media making facilities than having regular everyday clients in the local area.  this way i can speak to a global market place and offset days when the studio would normally be quiet.

the rise of the individual. .. social media making in effect

quicklink | buddybeers

(btw, i put my buddybeer usb zip here if you wanna see what i put on it)

i’m really stoked about the idea of working in the digital clouds with new ways of working that fits around the way you work.  i have been a nine to five kind of person.  i like a drink, i like to make videos and i like to engage with people that i think have a good idea and disrupt those ideas that simple do nothing for a community and loyality.

i’ve been having interesting conversations with daniel rose (@danielroseart) over the last few days about fiverr, a site i’m doing some gigs on that will make me five dollars (around a pint) for the work that i do on them if people order them.  we spoke about cost and value and about outsourcing things and losing the notion of time spent crafting our own art and skill that can be simple over looked when your selling in small amounts like these. 

i guess for me who had everything what i wanted and then to go to nothing of sorts i feel having a happy me.dm is much better to have some smaller regular different income streams rather than expecting to land the ‘bigger amounts’ – for me, it also changes the ethics of business, makes you reflect on time and what a moment means to someone.

as of recently fiverr also has the added extra of getting paid additional extras if you get to a certain seller level.  i really like this because it actually starts to look realistic for being a brand advocate that can ‘time slice‘ your content making skills for a piece of social video content that can be shared that can in turn drive interest, engagement and word of mouth around the web.

i was really super happy to see that buddy beers (@buddybeers) had recently release their iphone application and was very keen to give it a go.  virtual gifting but real world items, and one that i particularly love as it gets the ideas flowing.  beer.  shame then, that nobody supports this brand new service in this city.  so i had to change that!

what i like about the idea of virtual gifting a real world item is the notion of virtual tipping and paying it forward for people at towns and cities they have never been to before – maybe your a brand advocate working for another company and you interview a really upbeat and new company that just blows you away and the interview is awesome.  instead of them just liking it and saying thanks on social media now they can gift you a drink and your favorite please.  i like that.

so, i made a video for buddy beers.  in fact, i made a usb stick – fourteen of them in fact, with a bunch of documents they supplied, the vimeo video and two videos i made this morning – one introducing me and fibrecamp not to freak them out about social media and video making and the other show the other pubs that i’m going to be talking too.

i love the idea that some of my favorite pubs and places might start using this system and i’m very interested to go and interview each pub to see what was good (or bad) about the process.  i think this third party addon to retail business could finally swing the notion of at least customer loyal and start to cross that divide between regular and the nobody dropping in town looking to review your business.

i hope you guys like it.  please comment if you do.  feel free to reproduce the idea in your town and city i’m sure buddybeers would be super stoked to hear from you if you did!

right, so that’s fourteen usb sticks to drop off at each one of the places, i think i’ll do them in batches over the course of this week and see if i can get a good time before people get really busy.  maybe leave the stick to pick up later but i like the idea of dropping something of value to the owner rather than just a flyer.  this requires you physically put the device into a computer to read the files on it.

the usb sticks are left over from a sxsw trip i did for boxee – i had literally hundreds of usb drives that i bought back some 1gb ones with me.  they are getting repurposed well!

Related articles

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• How To Promote Your Business On Social Media (socialpeel.com)
• Social Media claims its next Prize – The Automotive Industry. (jacennedyconsulting.wordpress.com)

it seems like the longest time.

two months since we recorded anything really in the studio for ourselves we simply hit a place where work for the new year needed planning and well everything just got really hectic as an average december month does anyway.

we have been looking at a production schedule since we started our ‘space‘ at lace market house creatively wondering how we could position this idea of a social media studio rather than a ‘pay your money get your video space’ – the actual idea of an empty space creating social capital outside of the building but bringing people into the space really interests me how we connect our services, connection and working rooms into different mood settings in our brain.

it is great to be back making again and we are just putting together a few documents and ideas for a schedule for wednesday and friday each week so we can at least have a filming guide to head for.  we are starting with two days in case the second fibrecamp two starts to get busy and we are required more there each week.  starting with one day a week of course.

new things since two months ago are that cj is building an ammobox 2 with a variety of different equipment in it for her mobility and streaming on the go at various venues and i have been busy behind the scenes building (with a local coder) some interesting social tools which i’m coining ‘tsr’ like the old days of dos and the ‘terminate and stay resident‘ approach to having a process running has a faux background task.

we now have two kicker lights above each ‘set’ and started to fully utilize the ipads we have for countdown clocks and notes while we do our shows – we managed to get this one down to ten minutes and it will be a gradual process as we tweak things.  the elgato h264 hd encoder helped a lot too here and i’m looking forward to seeing how well the new macbook pro that cj has can cope with a thunderbolt connection via hdmi.

Related articles

• the flat screen has been installed @lacemarkethouse for .tv (fibrecamp.tv)
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• social media networking new year with fresh new studios and websites makeover (fibrecamp.tv)
• we need your help to crowd source kit for the fibrecamp studio (fibrecamp.tv)
• the audio technica pro45 arrived at fibrecamp today! (fibrecamp.tv)

friday lunchtime 12:33 in front of me i have two pieces of sushi covered in ‘devil paste’ as cj would call it and a can of jingo jango juice (lucozade energy — bad)

twenty four hours previous i had just finished presenting my new presentation about social media to a small room of around ten people – we had three speakers and i felt the day went extremely well.

it’s been quite the blur this week with two presentations, very different back to back with the NTU 3rd year students first and the nottingham business owners after.

the new users going out into the workplace and others looking at ways to communicate their existing businesses in a very managed social media way.

i put a lot of work into these two new presentations and they drained me a lot – the pay off thou is that i can start february with two presentations to do a voiceover with and stick up on the new website when i do the switch over.

this is a good thing. i’m also very keen to get the sponsoring project up, trying to raise an initial £400 to mobilise the .tv domains on the apple platform as a series of different word press applications that allows me the luxury of pushing updates across the whole network.

mildly frustrated that i have hit feb without transport and the ark but these things are sent to test me. at some point i have to sell a certain amount of my soul to the devil to get the funds or find the right people to invest in me to make it happen.

i’ve even decided about going to southby because of my passion to make this happen and that’s well not like me. it would have been my fifth year in southby and it is always fantastic in some trippy way. not this year.

i’d have loved to have gone and taken a lovely micro thirds with a lovely low light lens and just wandered around bar to bar documenting but i have to keep my eyes on the prize.

my daughter turns five in may. five years, i cannot continue to be flippant about her unknown future if i was not here. i’m always aware of my mortality after visiting the town of phil campbell.

which reminds me, i should be working on that website. crap, i’m gonna be busy next week..

quicklink | cleantech 1st event signup

i managed to catchup quickly with nick gostick from the new cleantech centre near the jubilee campus today and the home of fibrecamp II.  we got our paperwork so we are all set!

if your interested in coming tomorrow, still some places at £50 a head for half a day, should be an interesting group of people – small, but perfectly formed for a first event.

See the full gallery on Posterous

quicklink | blast out test on the bike on bambuser

finally had the cash to be able to get this mount.  it’s overpriced but i wanted to move forward on the idea and start the ball rolling with the bandwidth in a box concept for extra bandwidth for mobility for events and conferences.

the idea originally was to install two cameras and some heavy duty wifi connectivity with a stack of external aerials on the roof to drag in the cellular signals so we had a good solid constant stream but with lack of reception from car companies we started with what we have — a bike!

if you are a car company, leasin or otherwise we are looking for a smart car sized (electric ideally) motor that will do 10,000 miles in that year driving three times a week a rough total of about 400 miles a week.  you can send me a tweet with hashtag #transport in it to get some information back about what we are doing — just send that to my twitter account @philcampbell

we are happy to rent, lease or something from around £99 up to say £150 per month but we are looking to give it back after the year is out.  i simply have no use for a three year contract on car as i’m happy with using rail and public transport not having a car now for over two years.

anyway, back to the bike! – had a successful first stream out to the jubilee campus and the second fibrecamp premises.  i’m doing a presentation there tomorrow, i did one yesterday with the ntu students (i did it in css3 with impress.js to be flash) and so went to grab an interview with nick gostick on audioboo.

i’m not sure why the stream dropped on the way back maybe i caught something inside the case or something or the camera screen went off.  i need to do more testing to see what the problem was there and i’ve reported it to bambuser because when it dropped the connection after 45 seconds of starting recording (i did’nt noticed till i was nearly back to the studio) it stopped all together so i had no locally recorded video stream on the phone to upload as a complement after which was a bit annoying.

that said, i discovered a bunch of new tagging features on the website when i got back to the desktop that allow for timed comments on the video (see top picture) so that means you can jump to certain sections.  i have a plan about grabbing streamed event video and piping that to another service to do all kinds of things.  i’ve been wanting to get streaming again.  

expect more of this stuff now that i have the mount.  next is to build a decent lightweight mini bandwidth in a box (bag?) to see if we can improve on the speed and quality of the connection (wifi via cellular router with more redudancy involved) as we had it set on medium today — i’m also thinking that the new iphone4s with the new sony based camera will handle the low light better so i’m looking to source one of those badboys too.

a happy first test run thou.

morning.

it’s 11:11 on the saturday morning as per usual – i’m reflecting on a january that seems to have just raced by, at this pace we will be rocking up to december again!

i’m heading over to get ella this morning as my usual saturday morning trip over to burton, it’s actually the only time i actually wanna visit the place.

i guess you just get used to a place, in some ways nottingham has that effect on me sometimes. i’ve been spoilt from some of the places i’ve travelled across the globe and i’ve still got places to see.

still not got transport and that’s one of the most important things that is playing on my mind at the moment but the calendar is certainly filling up for the months of feb and march for work which is a ‘good’ thing.

january is full of reviewing and testing and speaking. i’m going to be reviewing the first year students work so far on prototypes of the nomad jacket on the 26th at the nottingham ntu and then on the 29th i’m doing a lecture to the 3rd year multimedia students about social media as they are heading out to the ‘real world’ to show their stuff.

some reality shocks planned there to be honest. early feb sees me doing a speaking session at the new base of fibrecamp two the cleantech building near the jubilee campus in the ng7 district regarding community building using social media.

i really need to come up with a plan for flight casing equipment, would be easy to drop in for a few days a week instead of having kit there permanent – i guess we could leave some lights there.

had a good meeting (lunch) with celialacy from lincuplive which is a 100+ person conference at the end of february in lincoln. i’ll be helping manage the student social media team of 12.

getting them into position and coming up with a plan to cover the venue as much as possible for a remote audience. i guess i’ll have to hire a suit for that then if we are getting the five star usual lincuplive treatment.

quite excited about that job actually. i’ve been busy trying to re-work some of my presentations for the 29th/2nd using a new presentation style using impress.js (it runs in the browser – certain browsers that is) which uses css3 transforms to move things around a canvas – it’s a bit of learning curve and could really do with a builder but once i have my structure it should be easy to duplicate that style for all my presentations.

i just need to see if it can handle pictures and videos like i want else i have to go back to keynote. i quite like not having to have plugins and such like and i’ve been thinking i can make some interesting infographic style videos with music and voiceovers – something i could spread on wistia, vimeo and youtube with transcripts too.

we had a meeting the other week about co-tender as well. an idea about working together on projects and stops the ‘kicking off tyres’ from people wanting web projects but have no idea what they should be asking for.

it’s a really useful (basic) service that will email all potential workers on the project regarding elements they can do on that project. i’ve yet to send out the first newsletter because i’m waiting on the lab-media guys to get back to me regarding the grid/widget – we will probably use that as the infrastructure of getting information back regarding a person.

i’m really behind on newsletters. i’m not really feeling the mailchimp template system i’m using at the moment, the campaign monitor one looks better to build templates with but then the features and layout are not as good as mailchimp. torn.

i really need to start bringing in additional advocacy work over these next few months to speed up the development of the 3×3/widget grid.

i really want it to be supporting about six api’s and maybe have something that natively works as a plugin for wordpress as well – to do this i really need to up the monthly payments to labmedia and at the moment on the income i have (which is not a lot believe it or not because of the way i live right now) it’s hard to get much done each month.

lastly talking about wordpress i have a stack of sites for the nottingham area that need themes but i’m not in the position to get them started by getting some decent woothemes stuck on them until they can start to bring their own cash in, as some one said the other week ‘until they start to wash their own face’ – i love that expression.

i’ll get a license for some themes over the coming weeks and start to plug them into buysellads and start to flyer nottingham to get the students blogging.

i have a plan. i have many plans

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• Nottingham’s workplace parking levy increases by 3.2 (bbc.co.uk)
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share your day with me – send your photos to instagram@kodakpulse.com

it’s a real shame that kodak has just filed for bankrupcy.

they just could not put enough great stuff out and move those optics forward, if you’ve not got the glass and the processes to put out equipment to compete against those other brands your always going to struggle.

a year or so back we worked with the social media team to get hold of a kodak playtouch and a 10″ photo frame (touchscreen) for storing pictures on.  as it has wifi we have the ability to send images to the photoframe via email which got me thinking about using the send to option via email in instagram.  

this is pretty cool because you can have your family members use instagram to save/send to social networks or just to a private address — as your on holiday you can be taking photos and sending them privately instead back to the photoframe back home.  maybe you can pick one of these photoframes up in the firesales to come for your family members.

the idea came about due in part to someone we know getting ill over christmas and suffering from a heart blockage and their partner approaching us to provide some kind of picture frame that would invoke memories of the lace market area of nottingham.

we would love to push this idea forward and i’d love to talking to a kodak social media team again or a distributor that has a number of these photoframes left to build a dynamic video wall of them that people can send pictures too from their mobile phones at events and conferences.

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it’s taken five years to get to this point.

by that i mean it feels that it’s taken me five years to be ready from a digital footprint space to be a brand advocate for technology and brands that i enjoy.

the .tv advocacy has been an amazing validation of blogging and being a videoblogger. more and more companies are realising that they need advocates out in the digital frontier and ontheground at events fighting their corner for actual real life usage.

every manufacturer is tightening up on r&d and development these days and companies/brands can be made or broken based on quality products and the background ethics of the business via social media channels in a moment.

we live in a realtime, on demand world with a customer, consumer base of people globally that demand devices, technology and elements that help us live our lives. the true power of social media elements to the engagement of people in all chains of a business are here. it’s allowing anyone to connect with a brand and visa versa.

my advocacy is quite simple. and that’s why it works well for me. it’s a paid blogger position that requires me to produce video media, blog posts or social network support as a remote advocate (read: almost a virtual worker invested in the companies projects and products) basically doing the things i’m already doing with fibrecamp but as part of a team of already well respected social media people who have been building up their own personal brands for the last few years.

i’m very keen to show some of the more dynamic cleantech, greentech companies in nottingham how to do the things i do across a variety of services so they can get their message out about the products they are working on.

it’s a really exciting arena – fusing together new technology, new ethical ways of working with technology that invests much needed thought about the ramifications of the devices they are making and how we use them.

this makes for really interesting video content for the realtime web and opens up a new fibrecamp space that we are very keen to move into and document — i’m hoping we can use our .tv advocacy to launch a cleantech .tv channel for the east midlands and nottingham area.

i think all companies that do business over the internet should have brand advocates even if just internal workers who have a clear outline of what they can do and say via social networks within the business all over the world in a digitally connected sense.

it’s daytime somewhere in the world and people want information about your brand, do you have the right operatives in the right location?

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• Companies urged to rethink social media strategy: study (vancouversun.com)
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lovely surprise today.

usha is doing some coworking currently at pcmcreative studios with cj working on her first website — on my birthday i bought us all some cakes.

today, after a suggestion of food (not presents because it’s collecting more stuff that i really have nowhere to put anyway) usha dropped off a simple container of homemade soup which was amazing.

it had everything, even a bay leaf (so you know it will probably be good) sitting inside it, i love presents like that and she even did a little drawing on the top.

i’m a sucker for food and graphics. thanks usha, it was fantastic. can we put an order in for soup once a week do you think?

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while wandering around the maritime museum in london we came across these microsoft surface style touch screens in wooden drawers.

it got me thinking about how a multifunctional device like a surface could be used in the ark as long as the power demands were not too severe.

having the ability to have the surface in a draw style layout that could collapse upwards for television/viewer and flat for ella or myself to use as a computer or monitor for connection to an ipad or desktop could really spark ideas of how to make things multifunctional within a small space.

i think that is one of the things that really excites me about optimising within spaces as it challenges to actually ask ourselves what we actually need. do we really need our houses and housing to have static set rooms laid out in a certain way?

i like the idea of being constantly engaging with the space moving and changing elements around, keeping me busy and charged up. mobile.

i’ll be exploring this more and even thou the microsoft surface is super pricy right now and obviously ‘microsoft’ powered the idea of a multi function platform that can be built into the ark walls/space really appeals.

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• Lenovo IdeaCentre A720: a Microsoft Surface for the rest of us (hands-on video) (theverge.com)
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i had to mention this story about the milkshakes because it proves the story about customer feedback and social media usage.

while wandering around the isle of dogs we decided on getting a coffee and headed into a local mall to see what food stores were at the top (i had been before when it had other brands there) after visiting reuters once.

we ended up going into byron for coffee (no snack/food as were still full from breakfast) so we were not model customers seeking awesome burgers.

we were shown to our table and we mentioned that we would only be staying for coffee. the place was not full but was buzzing and food was coming out at a fast rate.

we were seated near the food serving hatch and plates of awesome burgers and food kept coming to the side of us. we had a very attentive table server and he took our order of three vanilla milkshakes.

we were relaxed, chilled and nobody was concerned about the speed of anything – we had been walking so to be able to relax was nice, nobody was clock watching as we had not ordered any food.

what seemed like only a few minutes the server returned with some starters. some fantastic fresh salsa, chips and fresh guacamole (like perfect, as i like – tableside made styli) – dan looked at me wondering if it was ours.

as is normally the case when anyone puts food on a table i was straight into it. it was divine and not expected but a nice touch — after all we were only there for the milkshakes.

shortly after the starter the milkshakes came and boy were they awesome. super cooled metal containers with a US style milkshake. it was quite special (i’ll be back there for sure) and a total surprise.

at to this that i had tweeted a picture with my foursquare checkin and within less than 10 minutes i had a tweet back from @byronhamburgers asking me what choice of milkshake i went with and a follow up tweet about how much time he had spent ‘getting it right’ – the speed of engagement, the service and the quality of the product instantly made me invested in that company. right there.

people often ask about loyalty and return on investment with social media, for me it’s right there – it’s how i felt, it was about when i was engaged and it was about the heavy lifting the brand did to please me.

from seating, to friendly manner to order speed and the starters to offset any waiting time to the actual product we were served — every part is now lodged in my emotional centre for further investment in more experience with that brand.

. .. and the burgers looked amazing too. well done @byronhamburgers i had a fantastic experience and your speed of social media interaction sealed the deal.

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i looked up into the mirror and saw me. but that extra year rolling over did so in a very retro old alarm clock feel. it felt clunky, slower and with a light dusting across the typeface of the digits.

one year closer to the big forty. i’m quite aware of the things that need to be in place and where i need to be and i’m still caught in the trap of waiting. but i can’t wait. i feel my daughter can’t wait either.

so what do i do to push things through faster, to get transport and get the ark, what do i need to do, how do i pass sponsors and hit go. how do i just pull this together. keep going? – head down, driving forward. yes, of course.

living outside, off the grid between the lines is tough, very tough. everything is a balancing act based on a system that does not support a lifestyle that is digital. you still need paper, addresses and verification.

i’ve made progress. but i need to go faster, quicker and harder. i need to get to my first destination. and i need to put everything into it. i miss ella when i’m away but i also need that space to reflect.

i wondered how excited ella would be spending a weekend in london with me looking at all the wonderful sights and sounds that our capital can contain.

sharing those moments with friends this past weekend woke me up to make sure i get on with the archiving of the moments i have had for the last five years online.

oh and i have to make that will, everything that i do have i must leave to my poppet. she’s the best thing i think i’ve ever done in my life.

she started swimming lessons this week, i bet she enjoyed it. she’s a real poppet. i miss my baby, i don’t miss not have the opportunities and do hope that sam has everything she needs in her life now.

for the first time in a very long time i feel that i have found a happy medium that allows me to now build on the foundations that i have been laying.

now it’s time to build the house.

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See the full gallery on Posterous

sorry i’ve not been blogging as much this first part of january but i have been quite busy with behind the scenes planning and work on a number of projects like i mentioned in my last video.

this past weekend we were in london for three days and we all had a wonderful time in greenwich, london. we were literally over the other side of the river near the isle of dogs where i used to host gameservers with clanlife. it was a bit of a flashback.

it was great to hang out for the weekend with dan and cj and we had a weekend of food, walks and films with a healthy dose of photo walking in between. we even managed to get sherlock holmes in at the pictures.

normally my start of the year involves me working through the christmas period and hitting the ground running but the new year and relaxing christmas made the first week hard to get into especially due to most people not going straight back in around the 5/6th like normal.

i’m back into things full steam (stream?) now however and lots of dates and events in the diary for the next few months. next up is transport and ark progress are really on my mind.

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we love the new wistia super embed.  seriously, it’s awesome.

ok, sure i’m bound to say that because i’m kind of an unpaid/but paid in kind of brand advocate exploring and using their service instead of posting my content on services like vimeo or youtube (although i’ll be using youtube for traffic/money generation this year in some areas unless wistia partner with someone regarding monitizing content streams – think blip.tv,boxee, settop box) and actually i really like the system for clients — having a web secure system for showing clients potential drafts is brilliant.  it’s a real highlight.

please ignore the jerky quality in the video btw, it was really a test on something that i’m working on that i explain below, we were streaming over wifi and it was supposed to be a test that ended up being an hour catchup video! – i’m hoping that the super embed can be expanded to also include a block underneath that has either a jump bar or something similar to jump to timed comments in the video (reading this wistia?)

the above video embed is one of the new super embeds – you can customize so many features to do with how the embed acts and looks within your website (even call out url at the end which works really well – i wonder if they capture the click rate on that for the stats view?) the feature i’m currently looking at however is taking the admin chat comments (the logged in user on bambuser doing the stream) and piping them into the wistia api as a .flv conversion of the archived video stream after an event, conference (i.e ontheground event) – once on wistia i’d like to automatically take the bambuser chat commands and put them as timed comments for jumping to different sections in the video.

what is even nicer about this arrangement is that we can also build in an element of triggering for a transcript if we are recording and streaming live for a client on the ground like i hope we will be doing for audiences europe this year (crosses fingers) – it means we can have the embed and the video all tagged when certain presentations start or interesting things have just been said, piped over to wistia, tagged and embedded into a blog for offline viewing by those that never made it to the live stream. 

having those additional timed markers opens up lots of other interesting areas which we are currently experimenting with similar to the old rezpondr system i tried to build a number of years back with a difference this time, more lightweight less db management and with layers onto of the ui and experience that allows you to do actions with the media you have pulled together.  other people do this in some apps i have seen but they are dedicated applications with gobs of money thrown at them.  we are building something a bit more homebrew.

i’ve met with some local phonegap and full fat ios developers to discuss my options and how these things work and which way to go with it.  right now we are looking at creating a webapp and wrapping that into a phonegap chromeless browser style applications to get on the appstore that we give away for free that queries my content to start with.  i expect this will take a few more months of development to get it to the place i want but it opens up the ideas i have about social media and advocacy develoment throughout this year.  oh, and i’m aware it’s time sensitive. another year and this stuff will be on your television.

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i hate the system.  

the system works for a certain type of person that the system wants you to be.  it’s a system built on frustration ultimately because it’s designed for a style of person that conforms to a mold that someone assumes is correct for everyone.  it’s been broken forever and we only ever patch it when things get messy.  the shitstorms comes and the cracks are filled yet we never really ever add in more clauses for people that might be in different places in their lives.

the system only ever accounts for the average.

at the moment my only means of getting any money is via paypal.  i have a paypal access card and right up till the latter part of christmas i could luckily purchase presents and have a decent christmas for me and my daughter and some close friends — a marked improvement for my down state and my humous and pitta bread christmas of 2010.

i reached the limit of the access account and therefore needed to provide information so they could ‘verify’ my account.  seems your allowed to have a card sent out to the commercial address i was and allowed to ‘spend’ but when you hit the limit they impose restrictions.  i get it, that’s fine.  i understand.  i got no update, email or text from paypal when i had hit any limit by the way.

after realising that i needed to provide two pieces of information i sent them my passport and my driving license which i had forgotten has got my old address on so could not be used.  upon trying to update my driving license it turns out i cannot use a commercial address for my driving license (i.e the lace market house address) and it has to be residential.

i don’t have a residential address, i don’t have a proper home.  i’m moving into an ark ‘project’ for a year and after that will probably go off the grid.  how do i get transport if i have no ‘home’ address to give for insurance etc.  now, don’t get me wrong here – i get it.  we need to know who you are, so your accountable for your actions, id and tracking and insurance and all that stuff.  i get it.

but let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a minute.  your homeless, the state that says that they can help you cannot because it’s got no money or resources to give you — or you simply don’t want to TAKE from the state like i do, i have no desire to add to that problem or number of people unemployed, i’d rather use my skills to built up my social network, my group of people i like to work with and volenteer my skills in turn for bartering services.  it’s worked for me for the last four/five years.

how does a homeless person wanting to get back on the so called society ladder get to that job? – how do they use transport, even public transport if access to money is impossible because they don’t have a bank account — you can’t get a bank account without an address.  those people that want you to work with them but are fifty miles away that want to give you a job but you can’t get there but they want to pay you with BACS and no longer do cheques.  

we are every single day leaving people behind with our obsession for more, for the big next thing, the short term happiness furfillment and then you have the cheek to moan about the state of the way the world is.  people are fuming, angry and distrustful of our fellow men and woman because of the circumstances you have allowed us to get ourselves in with the promise of the now, the now based on the terms you set for those that don’t play your game of mental illusion.

where being snide, shady and corrupt is applauded and seen as a career move up a ladder where everyone sings from the same sheet not causing any ruffles in your little happy group of brainwashed yes men and women pandering to your ideals.  it’s not just about cash being in the wrong places in society it’s about those corrupt and manipulative people that have gorged on those that helped build your society in the first place.  cryptic forms, super small fonts and the promise of the never never.

yet, here i am.  living between the cracks, still striving ahead, making the best of what i have and utilizing the talents for technology and social change.  something that you will never know about because it does not fit into your ideals.  i can fly to foreign lands and help rebuild towns, i can go on your national wide radio stations and educate you about the things you want to know about and i can be more determined to help my fellow man than you will ever understand out of the idea that it needs to be only focused on how much money you can make of them in doing so.

i’m not going to change you.  you would’nt know how to change even if you could.  your too entretched, your too far in the game – backing out now would be showing weakness to your peer group of people that subscribe to your scripture.

. .. and so my quest goes on for the search for a way to have an account on the grid but working the way i want it to work and to find transportation that does not require me to have my DNA sequenced and me to pretend i actually enjoy your car dealership upsell crap.

new year. new tyre. new energies.

so how’s your transition going into 2012? – doing alright?

for the first time in a very long time i actually had a really quite relaxing week off at christmas instead of just powering through it.

i’ve not really enjoyed that level of gorging and relaxation for quite some time. i felt also how easy it would be to just be comfortable with my lot and keep maintaining that but my mind is wired differently.

getting on the bike has been a blessing, picking up that energy again and biking alongside the canals of nottingham has been fantastic.

i can see myself doing that every other day when the weather is good. i’ve also got a subscription with the gym that i need to maintain when i’m at the lace market fibrecamp.

at this very moment i’m sitting in the sneinton secret cafe, just had an amazing bowl of cauliflower cheese soup (in fact, i’m on my second bowl – it’s good ok?) and an absolute bargain, having the bike to blast out on from the studio back into sneinton is great — i tried carrying down the back of the studio and while a faff it is possible to do it, i’m not confident enough to leave it anywhere with a lock on it.

very much in reflection mode at the moment but quite aware i’m on the edge of change — i’m in the process of arranging some transport to get between lace market and the jubilee campus (which is the new fibrecamp II) and the ark location, i have to do some serious chasing and conversation tracking during january about the current state of sponsoring for a project i’m just dying to get into.

although me and ella had a few occasions over christmas to be together it was simply not enough and it pulled on the heartstrings alot, i set very high goals for myself and it can be frustrating when things like money, transport slow me down when i know i can do so much with those additional assets.

i’m very much of the mindset of head down and crack on in these first three months, we have a raft of birthdays that we need to get done and dusted (ie. enjoy them and take time out) so lots of stop and starts to this month but i’m expecting by february we will be in complete full flow.

new logos and branding should mean new versions of websites and i need to come up with a concept for the multiple fibrecamp studios.

covering different areas of industry with popup media studios should prove a useful direction change for what we had at lace market house which was simply a base to see what worked and what was needed over the course of that year to get to that level of quality.

telling the story of social media through iteration via the use of the word, the aural and digitised lens world is a way of connecting the analog with the digital worlds we fall in and out of.

my enthusiasm for change not just for my own situation but for those that i interact near and far on a daily basis has been given a lift by those that have empowered me to get to this stage in the past year.

you pulled me from a place that nobody should have to live in for very long — remembering to build on the year before, the things you put in place, being consistent and improving your messaging, notifications and sharing the wealth — be it mental, money or love.

take 2012 and make it yours. it’s about time right?

morning.

sorry i’ve not blogged for a week or so but i’ve been a bit head down with the end of the digital advent calendar and making sure i had all that finished up in time.

was quite a drain on the brain that, but worth it. another block of work, daily videos that i can talk to potential future clients regarding daily content retainers.

currently sitting on the cardiff train at five to eleven listening to norah jones with a one though process in my head — seeing my daughter and having a fun day, which actually is quite a challenge, had a few lovely bottles of wine last night.

so my christmas came and went and it was everything i enjoy about serenity — dan and cj went to their folks respectively and i just did nothing. opened one present, made soup and just had the moment chilled out day.

christmas is a nice full stop on a working year but i can only do it for a few days before i have to be up and out in the studio or working, planning or sketching — those ideas just keep coming and existing projects need organising and pushing forward.

that’s not to say that my mind is all over the place because it is. i’m thinking about transport, housing, ark project, studio and money to actually get ahead rather than maintain.

i dislike just maintaining a level of normality, i always want to push myself to do more. life is too enjoyable not to be present in it.

so christmas day two with bella today opening presents and generally having a textiles and sticking and gluing kind of day with her. expect pictures and videos in the usual channels. you know she is my little star.

then i actually feel like getting straight back into work, the redesigns i think and structure of the show output are really important things for me to start concentrating on as well as the widget and coding things i have going with labmediauk.

very keen this next year to push forward on the shows and building up some more advocate work from other companies, i think a lot more businesses will start to come online with social media, i just hope that they realise when they start it looks lames if you stop.

very keen to get some kind of housing early on in the first quarter of 2012 and i’m absolutely desperate for some transport to get me over to the ark location regularly until we hear news of any funds release for the project.

hoping you all had a fantastic christmas, i’ve been watching and looking at all your path and instagram content over the last week seeing you enjoying yourself. that’s awesome. glad you had an awesome time.

oh, not sure if i’ve really posted about it that much but we are coming to the end of the digital advent calendar for the month of december. if you haven’t seen it yet you might pick up some good tips in it!

you can check it out at http://watchdottv.fibrecamp.tv or subscribe on itunes if your that kinda of connected digital kittah.

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The GreenTech Business Network would like to announce the launch of the Nottingham CleanTech Centre (NCTC), the first incubator in the region dedicated to accommodating and supporting start-ups and small companies involved in clean technologies.

exciting!

something very close to my heart is the merging together of social media, ethics, technology and enviromental issues.  we have the ability to make our voices heard, the ability to do the right thing by the products and services we offer and the technology processes advancing and superlative speeds that we can make subtle changes to the way we engage with our enviroment.

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my whole ark project is focused around what a single person can do not only to live more sustainable but redefine what a new fresh life looks like whilst still utilizing technology to improve the relations and contacts around us to be able to live in a digitally connected world with those assets around us with the internet doing the heavy lifting between it.

indeed the ark will use a lot of technology but in an optimized way, it will look at power and need over want, utilizing elements of the cloud to interact with at a glance without too much thought of taking time out to focus on the creation of the content but more of a virtual intergrated element of my day to day life — taking social media and using it as a barometer or social ping to the people that lie between the studio and the off the grid enviroment. 

so it fills me with great pleasure to be in a potential hub of startups who are using clean, green technology focus to build out products, systems and ideas.  for me, it feels like a bit of a nirvana space and makes the last year of rounding out ideas with fibrecamp one the catalyst leading up to this new space.

what makes 2012 more exciting is the possibility quite quickly of fibrecamp III located in ghent in belgium as a european headquarters and makes spreading the idea of hyperlocal media based studios servicing the five or six blocks around it’s area a real interesting hot pot of digital outreach with the businesses being more than just a partner graphic on a website.

it sparks regular interaction bringing down the potential ‘head down desk’ mode i see from so many companies when it comes to building out services.  sharing, in the business space is as much a requirement as it is for the social realtime world we live in.

i have a really good feeling about the cleantech centre in nottingham, we are going in at ground level, at the rebirth of a space and a refresh for a building that is already bought, it’s owned — it’s not rented or has potential of being problematic — it’s a blank canvas of sorts with the potential to foster some fantastic green tech stars of nottingham and the midland arena.

best of all we get to help them understand the world of social media and create media around some of the exciting concepts and processes these green tech companies have which will obviously feed a foundation of topics for the ark project in 2012.

it’s a perfect fit.  we can’t wait to get started!

Related articles

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• Invest in Nottingham train officially unveiled (rail.co)

i’ve finally got my hands on the mbr1400.

at the moment i’m still waiting to find a uk power supply that can give it 12v at 1.5amps as the power unit that it came with was a stateside psu.

the mbr1400 is a great piece of kit for many reasons. the big ones are that it can run five devices for cellular connection, one of if not the best unit for enterprise class redundancy and failover.

utilising these five device connections will enable me to run 3 x usb dongles (the hope is hspa+) on a variety of different networks (the big four in the uk) to really nail the coverage in areas where wireless might be patchy on one network the others may overlay and cover it.

the other two pcmcia slots are for expresscard devices. i’ve got some stateside cards that would work with the device but would not work in the uk – the satellite and network does not work over in europe. useful when i’m stateside thou as long as you can re-activate the devices with a provider.

other powerful features of the device are the ability to have twin ssid networks – i’m presuming you can do levels of traffic management here – for instance i can see myself having one wireless network for just twitter and status updates to a variety of social destinations where as i’ll allocated more bandwidth to a locked channel for our video stream when mobile – very useful.

i’m yet to really play with all the features and to see what it truly possible but if it’s anything like the phs300 or ctr500 like i have used before i should have stacks of different features to go through.

the idea with this router is that it will built into an explorer case, a reinforced injection moulded case that can withstand lugging about with onboard power, internal wiring for external aerials on the outside of the box and maybe some kind of SPOT messaged internal location tracking for where the box is.

the aim of the bandwidth in a box is to provide venues with dropin, long throw wifi cloud networks that have a level of redudancy and utilize the latest up and coming super fast hspa+, 4g and future lte level style mobile networks.

i kinda hope that cradlepoint make pushes towards allowing you to bond all the connections into one fat pipe with failover that is fast enough that it does not effect a mobile video stream. we will have to see how it holds up on testing. ..

currently have one hspa+ dongle to test with it and as soon as i get the power unit i’ll be giving this a test drive at the start of the new year between nottingham and the national forest.

watch this space!

shock. horror. our seeds are growing.

as a part experiment (and shot in the dark) i bought some planters to show ella the process of putting seeds in soil to try and grow something so that we can plant these over to a bigger grow bag and get into the flow of actually doing this as a daily nurturing process.

i’ve been flat about talking about the ark for a while due in part that to get that dream project of the ground means that we are in the hands of the people with the money and financial years start at weird times — this one being in january.

personally i think it’s going to drag and drag so in my mind i’ve repositioned myself to try and earn, work towards more advocate work, more video and more studios in the hope that someone seems me as a digital asset to assist them and their business yet still keep me at arms length.

the problem for many is that i am the square peg that does not fit into the round hole of everyday corporate life. i’m not going to big something up if it’s crap, i’m not going to tow the line, i’m always going to innovate and disrupt. it’s in my nature.

feels good to be able to show ella how plants grow and fills me with excitement for the future about growing and cooking food at the ark thou.

i have visuals of me sitting in the ark overlooking the little lake with ella sitting at the wooden table drawing, all wrapped up with food that i made on the open fire/bbq we have, her smiling and happy with that moment in her life.

and contentment overflowing me as i sit proud of my achievement of doing something constructive and good, by bringing about a level of calm into our lives.

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good morning!

it’s 8:34 am and i’m speeding home from the first of many christmas meals and parties. i spent the evening in exeter last night for the #tweetfellows christmas meal and gather. lovely food, great company.

wanted to get back into blogging this morning and tell you about some tinkering i did last week with the cradlepoint phs300 wireless hotspot router that i’ve had for well over a year now.

i upgraded the firmware (a download you can apply to the modem to give it the latest and greatest drivers) to test to see if it would support the latest hspa+ modem that three has out.

the new modem now has a much faster startup time and supposed faster rates than previous models — they say on the box 40% faster, why they put these numbers is beyond me. it’s a stab in the dark and pointless.

in testing however i have found that especially in nottingham that the modem initialises really quickly and that i got some great upload/download speeds – really surprising for a mobile modem, enough so that i think you could do some really fairly decent streaming with it.

i’d heartily recommend that if your purchasing some kind of dongle or mifi for christmas that you look into the hspa+ modems — if you have coverage you’ll get a great speed bump.

i’m expecting that three will roll out more hspa+ across the country during 2012 and will only get faster. it’s a good time to start dabbling with the ‘bandwidthinthebox’ stuff again.

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it’s been playing on my mind since i got back from ghent as to what it was we actually i felt an affinity with while we were on the ground.

at first i thought it was just the structured way our train journey and route seemed effortless as we boared the eurostar and headed through the channel tunnel delivering us into europe.

i then thought it was the welcoming team at the other side having a focused tech crew pulling together the venue and equipment effortlessly, but it was not either – after all we have teams exactly the same in the uk.

maybe then, it was the brown bag of gifts in the hotel room with 3d glasses, chocolate bunny and a card detailing where the venues were for the next few days – nah, not that.. nice touch thou.

ok, i know it has to be the bandwidth then – a venue with 100 mbit screaming fast connectivity enclosed in a 364 room building that has an incredible history attached to it. well, that did start to perk my interest in the building i guess.

wait, i’ve got it. it was the moment on the tour of the building that segments of the story of the building and how it makes money and builds community and sells a shit ton of amazing beer in the process. well, yeah that was all good too.

but that was not why it left an impression on me so much that i took a part of it home with me. no, it was something more — something that i needed to reflect on.

so it seems fitting as i’m heading at velocity towards birmingham that i start to think about travel, journeys and presence again. and of course it’s in this moment that it hits me.

it left an impression because that structure was built on an openness of the people of ghent to put on a show, to expose the beauty of how they live and what they care about, that they embrace communication, stories and history with passion.

so.

i look back on nottingham and wonder how a city such as it can be twinned with ghent, where are the similarities and what have i learned as an outsider dropping in from a digital community tool provider?

it makes perfect sense why graduates and students leave places like nottingham after they have trained, the lure of the city life is not enough because the future planning of the digital city is restrained.

where as the city of ghent is heading full steam to make their city centre spot a digital hotbed building on existing library people traffic figures in 2015.

the frank and open nature of the management company regarding the venue was refreshing and a massive departure from the closed loop and seemingly stilted approach of the nottingham city council.

we have fibre in ducts around notts, some rented to bt and connectivity to do some amazing things but until the right money finds the right places nottingham is always going to stagnate in the startup culture stakes.

ghent however, well. that’s a different story – i see an explosive of creativity, digital culture and historic storytelling as they transition into the digital frontier.

and i’m gonna be there to watch.

so for this blog post i thought i’d test out blogsy. 

gotta be honest i’m a bit freaked out that i have to be online to get to my camera roll? – that’s just weird and the actual swapping between writing and rich text side is strange as well.  i’d prefer to see a better version of the image instead of the thumbnail mode that i currently have.

anyway, back to the point – goodies! really chuffed this week to receive a number of things including my swagger from watch dot tv which is this amazing quality bag with the .tv logo stiched on the front. great bag, beats carting around using the picnic bag that i had to resort to after the kata bag zips had failed me.

in fact i’m still waiting on a replacement.  what started out as a really flawless customer service experience via email has dragged on a while now and i would have expected to have seen the replacement bag by now.  i love that bag.  it would complement this one actually.

also provided was a kodak playtouch .tv branded camera and a bunch of tshirts for the advocacy. it felt good to receive a bunch of ‘advocate’ empowering elements in the post i have to say, especially as i was expecting it too be the mbr1400 cradlepoint router, so a nice surprise.

i’ll be talking about the router in another post probably after this, i cannot really go into too much detail about the admin and setup yet however as i’m waiting on a power supply to be sent out to get it going — came with a stateside one.

it’s been a busy month and i’m still not finished with the digital advent calendar, i’ve got a bunch of blog posts to write on my trip down to exeter today and i’m hoping that four hour window will provide me with the headspace to write them.

i’m started blogging so that’s a good thing, currently speeding towards birmingham new street to swap over trains to catch the 13:12 to plymouth. hope your enjoying the digital advent calendar, i know some of the posts have been a little bit weak but trying to get the blog posts done, the twitter posting scheduled and actually recording the videos between getting prepared for christmas and new year (especially after not getting vlomo november finished) is a bit of a challenge, some of the ones after christmas day thou are pretty good and i’ll be putting some effort into the installing a blogging platform for your .tv domain.

thanks go out to jane and her team for being so efficient and a pleasure to work with on this brand advocacy — i’m really excited to see what 2012 can bring with this project and is a good base to get out what it is that the fibrecamp studio spaces can do for popup, dropin and run and gun web video media making as part of a busy working weekday.

watch out for some exciting news tomorrow about the second fibrecamp base in nottingham that is popping up near the university — it’s a perfect fit with the ark/greentech projects we want to be engaged with next year.

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before i went away i managed to record an interview with josh russell (@joshr) about a project that he is working on that brings twitter a kind of ‘breakout’ chat layered on top of the twitter homepage in the bottom corner.  a simply login/auth with twitter is all that is required and anyone that is using the twitter.com homepage and who has authed will be shown as a chat box bottom corner.

this is quite useful if you have no other chat clients running and want to maybe carry on a conversation away from twitter after receiving a few tweets (twitter is not a chat client right?) i find myself sometimes thinking that being able to ‘step aside’ for a bit more of a chat without having to rely on those twitter clients to provide me with IM details a really useful asset.

i’ll be interested to see where this goes.

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the big softy.

before he went away i asked alex about the little mini mission and surprise he was about to undertake flying out to the states to get engaged (to be married i presume!) to his sweetheart of two years. they are very much in love, seriously – it’s painful to watch (kidding!)

it does restore the faith in that people can just bond and get along and look out for each other without the material assets of everyday life confusing each other – just wanting to be with each other and support time spent together.

it’s kinda sweet.

i’ll be giving ella her mummies ring when she’s a little older.. .

behind the scenes those desk wizard ninjas over in somerville, boston in the united states have been busy beavering away at all things code and gubbins to bring us wistia users a new player embed that also does some amazing heavy lifting behind the scenes.

for instance, this player is super smart that when you hit the full screen button you automatically get served the higher quality HD version (if one is available) and even has smart traffic management knowledge (first seen with the swedish boys from bambuser – heart those guys too) depending on your internet connection.

ok for those not knowing what it is i’m trying to show it’s basically that the player has had a face lift in the ‘information’ department of the player.  that is however, half of the story.

i’m expecting a raft of pushes before the christmas session and i’m sure the wistia boys are up to something in the studio before they see in the new year.  it’s hard to believe that this time last year i was heading my way over their to see them.  it’s crazy it’s been a year already.

in that time i have seen nothing but regular, constient release cycles and dropping the ‘awesomesauce’ hammer every so often to wake us all up — the service has been really bulletproof allowing us to do some really nice moving and shaking in the showyou app world when it comes to subscribers and viewers.

if you have not experienced an enterprise class video host yet i suggest you take a trial run of the wistia service and you’ll see what exactly it has to offer over services like vimeo (which i still use for my vlogging btw) and youtube — for doing social media video with clients it is a must and the super private viewing before you make live has proved really popular with everyone we have worked with this year.

as for video seo, check out the transcription services that wistia offer increasing your video seo massively by providing you with all the text that has been spoken during your video – the pricing is perfect and you’ll find your website getting more traffic once you open up all that media to the likes of google.

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a few months back when i had problems with my connectivity in houston airport stateside i let boingo know about the issue and they were great in getting back to me about it via social media (twitter) engagement.

as part of a freebie for the month of december (so we could truly see if it was worth the monthly/yearly payment) they gave us an access account that we could use between locations that supported boingo.

we used the boingo login (as a third party provider option) effectively at brussels train station and ghent station without issue and it was a really useful interconnect actually — checking in between points is always good, especially if your travelling alone and need to update family back home.

if you are travelling alone i heartily suggest you give path (now at v2) a go because you can do a lot of private sharing of your location and media between your family members — saves on the expensive phone calls to say you have landed that’s for sure!

i never actually used the boingo application which i should have really to see what kind of coverage they had around the city.

i guess i would have needed a net connection before that however to get the potential places back, would be better if those were on the phone.

you can also see from this picture on this blog post that i used my witopia vpn to lock and secure, encrypt all my mobile data comms, i suggest you do this if your posting a lot of social media from public wifi systems.

as witopia has a lot of vpn services dotted around the globe i also added the local belgium vpn provider to give me speedy local access instead of connecting to america and sending things over the pond for them to come back again!

thank you boingo for giving us that month long access test account, it seems that the european networks are super speedy in comparison!

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sitting in section 16, seat 88 being shot at velocity back to my own country, through a tunnel under a channel of water – we do build some splendid things between all the failures i guess.

when things run properly if fills me with a renewed adventure spirit to explore the locality and engage in a less ‘frustrated with the way’ i encounter the world normally — stupid, slight things that nibble away at your focus and lay a foundation of frustration.

as we near the end of 2011 and i find myself in a different place in my life where i was over a year ago, in fact i was travelling back from boston after a previous year of pain, self inflicted in some ways of 2010, that was a hard year.

it’s important to position yourself away from the things that drag you down and don’t allow you to be the best version of you that you can be — not only do you miss out those that you encounter never get to see your true value, passion and skills.

throwing myself into a different way of living has been a blessing and a different change in mindset. i met many people over the last few days that thought i was mad not to think about how i would be when i would ‘retire’ – how would i live, what would i do.

but you have to understand, it’s not about me. i’m done, i’ve been to and seen some amazing places and i’m sure i have a few more to come yet but it’s about ella now — making foundations for her life when i’m not here.

and i’m not talking money — who knows what money, status and success looks like in a digital always on demand world that we are living in, what’s her digital frontier look like in the next ten years based on our last five? – intense right?

giving her some foundations and knowledge to get the most of her life on this planet. making preparations for an unknown and unpredictable future maybe the difference between being agile and smart enough to shift to the places she will be needed and what she intends to do to fulfil her wants for her life.

sigh. much progress this year, lots more to go, it’s all in place, a need of finances to cerment things down but i intend to work my ass off and build the things i think those new brand advocates are going to need as the social media arena explodes in business over the coming year.

so, one more week to go really. ..

christmas parties next week and more trains, i’m hoping they are on time and efficient as this one, the eurostar has been a pleasure to ride on and gave me time to take time out and reflect on my ever changing life direction that i have seemingly allowed my sub conscious to take the lead on!

next week, transportation finally and back over to the site of the ark project, exeter and antenna christmas party mashed together in seven days.

after that gym all week as i crash into shopping and christmas day itself with poppet — really looking forward to that, my little girl is going to be five next year. wow, that blasted by.

this time last year for christmas day i was sitting in the studio with the electric fire with humous and pitta bread for lunch (cj and dan had gone to see family) at least this year i’ll be able to upgrade the lunch!

now time to let this train take the strain of the kilometres between lille and london, quick lunch turnaround and back to nottingham. let’s hope our trains are on time so i can go and get my princess.

wish she was with me in ghent this week, she will love the place – all cakes and waffles, i’ll be taking her back there next year for a week i hope (getting an airbnb) so she can see for herself!

have a great weekend!

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• Illegals can exploit loophole to get in to UK on Eurostar (telegraph.co.uk)

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just got on the 10:03 from ghent train station heading back towards brussells to get out midday eurostar train back into london and then another train back into nottingham — i’m hoping if we get back on time that i’ll be able to go and get my poppet tonight as well.

so, dead time! – i’ve got thirty minutes to put together the blog post that i’ve been trying to write since i got here. this was the final job of the year and this pretty much means after next weeks christmas parties a relative downtime and allows me to take ‘timeout’ and space to be able to throw together the new layouts and designs for the .tv domains and projects.

so this job was really awesome on so many levels — firstly the eurostar was a dream to brussels and changing onto a train for a small thirty minute journey away once we go there was super easy.

literally access to ghent and what appears to be the digitally connected heart of beligum only half day away. after getting on the wrong tram (4) instead of the number one we went on a bit of a tour around the city the wrong way around.

fun thou and we got to see the sights — we still made the 4pm venue reccy thou and we were greeted by the theatre team who gave us an audio feed from the desk, fast 100mb wired internet and any other help we needed.

it went super smoothly on the setup side. after setup we checked into our hotel, dropping bags, tech and kit back only five minutes away from the vooruit building. straight forward again, relaxed and easy to find.

after dropping bags we head back to a meal, chat and planning meeting for the next two days with peter and annemaie before getting a guided tour as a group of the 20,000sft building that had three hundred and sixty four rooms.

an immensive building and access points through the whole building, a massive undertaking but it worked flawlessly. the bar seemed to be a popular area with people writing journals, posts and doing general laptop work on the free open wifi network — with proper management it can work.

to give you an idea how popular this venue is they have two six thousand litre containers which get refreshed at least once a week i think i heard — they get through a lot of beer, which is not surprising because it is so good!

next morning we woke early and made sure we were ‘ontheground’ around 8am to get prepared for the day. we had a few problems with audio and cjs laptop overheating through the day but we swapped it out for the next day which ran without problems — the audio feed was brilliant which really lifted the video.

as this was a cultural event crossing in social media, applications and processes and new technology i found it a cultural gap that people were less happy to be recorded and talk about their projects and process.

flemish people seemed very private people and after asking i was told that they really want to get to know someone first before they open up (wise if you ask me) but they still have reservations about ‘putting things on the internet’ which i kind of get based on how the culture interacts with each other.

ghent has a really relaxed but focused attitude and a vibrant opening accessible hipster scene feel to it, people are very interesting and really open about how things function and work.

it was refreshing to see how communication companies worked here and got on together, i saw striking similarity with nottingham but felt back home in the uk we had too much ownership and fixed thinking.

during the trip i used path and foursquare a lot and was looking around for places to eat at, everything was really close together and relatively easy to find — i even found a local pr/communication/social company that was close by that we dropped in on and had coffee and basically told each other what we were working on.

i’m really hoping we can take things further and have a fibrecamp european office in ghent. the twinning of the cities seems a perfect route to develop this on.

having a studio space that we can spend a week at a time in ghent using am airbnb place to relax for the week in the evenings in and get to know the locality and local startups would be a great way to have european content for our fibrecamp bases back in nottingham.

i’m really excited about the prospect of having out fibrecamp ‘popup’ mobility concept used in this way. i’m absolutely certain that i’ll be back to ghent, it does seem to be the digital heart of belgium and seems like a lot of super fast connectivity would be best used by some fast producing rapid social media types like me if i was based there for a while.

with the explosion of connectivity increasing and transportation to foreign lands becoming efficient and speedy, changing your scenery to allow time to reflect on your life actions and future proofing the ability for my daughter to learn another language and try that out live is quite exciting.

guess i need to start learning the language right? want to put a big shout out to cultuurnet of belgium for pulling together the venue and making us feel extremely welcome.

the next one is in april in barcelona which sounds really exciting i do hope we get drafted in for that one, i’m sure fibrecamp will have really moved forward by then and my ark project should have been realised and in full flow.

check out audienceseurope.net for more details and to join the ning website for updates – global cities, local audiences – next event is the 19-20 of april 2012 in barcelona. hope to see you there!

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green cross hatched poorly formed instagram fields of crops parade by in a defiant race to the sky intersected by giants holding skipping ropes of power delivery

deltron beats rip the time space grid of my emotive connection with the outside world of movement now transported to digital mind memories of abstract chords and lyrics that massage the grey matter to focus on my destination.

tannoy man initiates his voice macro for new clients and old weathered food cart potentials, ever met joe bloggs — the duplicator is on overload.

the armoured men of the country are now replaced with strong armed sentry metal monsters while processing radio waves to disrupt the geo location target information of the local bee divisions.

the march of so called progress is a misguided drone device designed to scratch the midguided itch of a relic aged thinking.

traversal forward into an everchanging future focused by packets of uncertain delivery masked by predicable wants data cultivated from our inability to understand choice over privacy — paths matched and processed, crafted pathways of herding – geo locked, debit tracked and social standings processed.

taking our own personal digital virtual pet of discovery through the various switchs, cables and interconnects of an engine devoid of human need for love, passion and contentment on our daily exchange with the lands across which we trespass with each click.

how will you reach out to me when your power is weak and your sentinels of discovery forbid you parlay with your upgraded life ui.

stay nimble and lean, look towards the blues for signs of darkness and prepare your sanctuary for the world below the radar. pack the treats into the mech and get your power online for your own virtual death blossom.

my race for the moment is nearly run, i now enter into the digital iris game of acknowledgement as my signature and radio footprint is catalogued and provided to ambient segmentation engine.

charge your backups, maintain that local hud to life and open up those low retina isos on your interactions dear digital bedfellows today.

because this moment is on repeat until the archival process is complete.

decrypted & signed,
dm of the fundementals.

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there are a lot of reasons to love a venue — the ambience, the seating, food and drink and the general look and feel.

but injecting character and community is an ability of the clientele that a venue serves. as nottingham is a very provincial city you do find a lot of hipster and well to do people frequent this popular venue.

that’s not a slight btw, that’s just an observation and to be fair it adds to the charm. from the quirky evenings of pub quiz to the lunchtime soup of the day blogging trips we normally do i have a real spot in my ‘city’ life agenda for places like the malt cross.

you must check out the food, the sweet potato fries are killer and they normally do homemade soups that are to die for and are super warming and filling.

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yay! – go go bloggers of the world.  i love blogging.

i use the internet like a big sticky yellow postit not for my thoughts and inventions, intentions and splenations (shakes head, ran out of sensible words – sorry) throughout the day.

i’ve been loving flattr for a while actually and i wanted to see if this was the one that might take off so it’s good to see a little campaign kicking it off.  i really should look into flattr more clearly and review it in a video as part of my december advocacy.

feel free to ‘flattr’ me today if any of the content i post on this blog, or this one, or this one and maybe that one is worth anything to you or helped you out in anyway.

like someone who had a very old face to me once said.  ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’

load of old pony but i like the sentiment.

totally weird moment happened to me after writing this blog entry when i used the calculator on the website to work out what i could have earned by blogging by now.  pulls up a small car! – i really need a small car as well for my ark project!

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good morning! – 08:19am here and i’m still at the house waiting till 9 ish to head over to the dentist to get myself all booked in and checked out.

while i have thirty minutes of deadtime i thought it might be useful to pull together a little checklist of how i get into conference mode with the ammobox — the box of kit that i take with me to every event i go too.

we are heading over via euro tunnel which is a first for me and i’m really looking forward to that, i think we have to change at brussels onwards to ghent where we will head from the station directly to the event.

in that space we usually reccy a number of things including the wifi, wired connection and making sure we have an av feed from the sound desk for the laptop.

europe conferences are often a different beast than stateside ones and depending where your going it’s probably advised to get a mifi unit (i love xcomglobal myself) and share that with all your other devices.

the most crucial element for me when ‘ontheground’ is power backups, the less time i have charging kit equals more time i can interview people so making sure everything is ready to go is crucial.

we do have a boingo account to use in airports and wherever we can find an open spot with boingo support so it’s not all bad and we can use a bunch of offline media making tools and push later (or until we get to the conference itself and their wifi) so it’s not all mission critical.

as both myself and cj are going we have two roles why at the audience europe event. one is event streaming with a line out from the sound desk for the audio and social management of the online twitter conversation.

for myself mingling with people in and around the crowd findings out why they are there and what they are working on. collecting the stories.

normally i would take a set of pre made cards with me to ask more people while on the ground but this event is spread over the week so we should be fine to get a bunch of audio, video and blogs about our findings over the course of the time we are there.

it’s also enough time to get to know the people who are there and to create mini tweetups each evening after what will be really engaging sessions with some fantastic speakers lined up.

i’ll be putting up some kit packup videos as part of my december #watchdottv advocacy and you can see them slow released daily over on http://watchdottv.fibrecamp.tv – daily slow released onto itunes too!

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i tested this out about two weeks ago but i’ve only just gotten around to telling you about because well, i’ve been elsewhere. mentally.

to be fair you would think the staff are two in the nottingham mcdonalds when i asked to make payment with the contact less payment system — after all they did have a great big stonking banner on the wall to suggest they did it.

appears you have to hold your card up to the screen to get it to scan and you have to hold it there for about ten seconds. the operator on the till has to select the option for contactless and then your done.

no pin, just a press/pass up of the card to the reader and your done, i think it would have felt more futuristic and ‘painless’ (not that typing four character was painful before) as a transaction but it does alert me that it’s more about the transaction for the operator than the user.

not that your not normally fully ready to commit to purchasing something when you have ordered but i feel that the thought process that you have when you prep to get your code ready and do the ‘transaction’ might be taken away in other settings.

imagine being seated at a ‘digital’ table in that you can order things without the extra level of checking and authorisation, i’d constantly have to make sure i didn’t leave my card around by mistake – we do kind of lose an extra level of security that we had before.

overall thou aside from these issues i really like nfc technology, i feel better applications for it aside from purely billing will come out thou — loyalty for instance for venues would be massive and could be an instant way of automating social media for a venue.

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just a quick post really about a recently flashed (updated firmware) cradlepoint phs300 i installed at the secretcafe in sneinton.

marsha, the owner of the cafe had bought a supported modem for the phs300 i was sponsoring the space (through cradlepoint) with and i had to update the modem to get it working.

what surprised me thou was that this modem claimed to be 40% faster and support the new hspa+ standard — something believe it or not that was fairly new to me. i had not been keeping my eye on the ball about updates to the data cellular network side recently.

turns out that hspa+ *IS* really quiet speedy, the bootup time from cold was super quick and the upstream and downstream although weak in that part of sneinton was working and felt like home broadband.

i was really happy that she had a new modem as i had wondered if she could really get more than a handful of people through a mobile connection but with the turnaround and latency of connections and loadtimes reduced it should make for a speedy connection for most.

i’ll be looking into hspa+ a little bit more closer. now, if only cradlepoint would send me that mbr1400 out we could do some epic load balancing and fallover testing to see how five devices work on one router!

hey cradlepoint, how about it?

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it’s the simple things in life.

good chat, good coffee and freshly cooked different foods daily bonding people together from the locality around open conversations — a decent cafe space in sneinton finally (now with wifi!)

i found out about the secret cafe through cj (@pcmcreative) about a month ago as we went along on friday evening to show our support, record some interviews and take a few photos.

fast forward a month and last week i just finally got around to installing the phs300 cradlepoint wireless router in (as part of my community project that i never started a year ago) — see the blog post after this one for more on that.

with mifi up and running i spent a few days there last week for lunch and had some great soups, salad and tartlets but more so conversation. it was great to hear people being upbeat and realistic about the near future.

doing something to change their current course in life, inspiring through doing with a can do attitude towards running a space to serve people a meal for a reasonable cost — we even had some dropped off to us on friday which was awesome after a few pints at antenna.

you can find the sneinton secret kitchen down trent road near the st christopher church (it’s next door) you can’t miss the sign really on the railings.

the space runs from wednesday to friday from 9:30am (i think) till 2:30pm (might be 10:30 i forget) and food is normally ready around 11:30 ish for those looking to just drop by to see what’s on that day.

i’m really hoping that it goes from strength to strength there and that more non-profit ideas and services come together there for the whole of the community.

great work marsha for getting it going!

i have to say for someone that about two years ago absolutely hated qr codes i’ve really taken to them now they are able to be scanned quicker with the latest devices we now have access to.

i personally find redlaser a really good application for doing this.

i had my custom code designed by james random who is based here in nottingham.  they normally take around 3/4 hrs to be done and need a bunch of constant tests and tweaks to get right.  they really do stand out well thou.

i’m just getting a moo stickers book full of them — bombing time!

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just wanted to give a quick shoutout and headsup to my stateside friends today who are enjoying a day of thanksgiving later on today with their family and friends.  if any of you are travelling to get to see family please take your time and keep safe.  i know the weather in some parts is looking pretty crazy.

as for me, today is another packed day here in waking up nottingham, england — much to be done today, recording all the videos for my blog posts i was writing all yesterday for my advocacy!

happy thanksgiving!

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just finished the frontend of the new v2 of the ipad app (in conjuction with kukuapps) to allow for people who are in a hurry to just scan the qr code (may have to replace that current one with a custom one when we finally push the final – james random is working on a custom one for me) to get a master list of everything i have done since 2005.

i’m constantly able to update that qr link content because i’m using something called multiurl which allows me to put more urls and content instead of just one link.  i’m tracking that qr code with bit.ly pro and a custom cname which gives me really granular control over that qr code via the api – got some interesting ideas forming for that actually for another project.

we are aiming to get this pushed to a brand new developer account on the apple appstore.  i’m probably gonna stick a price of 69p on it just as an experiment.  i’m working closely with kukuapps as they roll out new versions of the codebase they are working on.  ultimately i’d like micro payment options within the app for me to record content for you (ie. ordering of reviews etc) and push notifications in some way – not sure how they look right now.

it’s coming together thou, just gotta work on the embeds now and stick the html code for those embeds into the cloud.  this version of the app will also allow you to get direct to the livingark project content instead of us pushing another application just for that.

let you know when it’s ready!

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ugh.  posterous had eaten this post.

so, thursday this week i took an early morning train ride (4hrs) down to exeter to meetup with a new development team that i’ll be working with called lab media.  we already have started putting some code together for a widget style plugin for posterous that we aim to actually roll out for other blogging platforms.

thursday evening was all about my second time at @oddfellows pub for the ‘smartphone’ pub quiz, a contest involving using smartphones and tablets to find the answers to the digital style pub quiz.  the game was invented as a reaction to a guardian article regarding people using pocket devices to cheat in the conventional version of the game.

this involves scanning codes and using a variety of applications on the mobile phone to find the answer actually using the internet as a resource and helper.  each team has to pick a name and each team has to tweet the answer – the person running the contest then runs a search and scan on the team name for the correct question number hashtag and the answer.  the first to post the correct answer then wins.  easy.

i shot a little video that i’ll be able to edit when i get in the studio in the next few days and i’ll update this post with it and retweet when it’s done.   i took a bunch of photos as well and i really loved using the canon 550d (thanks @chrisrowe) and the 50mm that i borrowed from @davidbaird for the last week or so.

had fun, looking forward to bringing this to nottingham!

i’m on the train heading back from an evening with my daughter in the play centre and so my mind is pretty scattered right now but i feel this title needs explaining.

being a videoblogger, consuming social media and seeing ‘those videos’ on youtube does not make you someone that brands want to work with.

advocates, movers and shakers, people with a voice often build things, they establish a routine, they want to share and be vocal because they have something to share or say, they are not just sharing video — they are making it.

i’m constantly confronted with two camps — those who ask me why i take photos of my food and why do i make so much pointless content about nothing in particular.

sharing the life around me and those that want to make digital content but are scared that people are going to point and laugh and judge them because they do not have the skills of steven spielberg out of the gate.

if your not life confident then chances are trying to do that on video or audio are gonna come across straight away, your reviewing yourself, judging your own actions and defining your audiences reaction by not investing in that voice.

focus there, everyone is awesome at something and i’m pretty sure if you shared it you would find others that you naturally gel with.

i’m in the middle of videoblogging month at the month, as i’m typing this i’m annoyed with myself that i’m not filming in a stealth fashion to get some decent clips for todays video that i can cut together in the morning early before i get on a train to go to exeter.

a good day for content and videoblogging awaits tomorrow. i know i have a voice and sometimes i filter it because i feel my environment is not right, so i change it.

i move and find another space and atmosphere to work from, to look at things from another perspective instead of being annoying that things are not working the way they should and it’s me.

it kills creativity and the passion to do anything — then you hit that frustration loop. get it out, get it done — even if it’s shit be annoyed with yourself afterwards.

do not count views and comments, use that camera, make some stuff – your bought the damn device because it was a cool device, it had a great camera and it’s sitting in your pocket or your constantly checking tweets for the next quick buzz hit.

stop, think — what do you wanna communicate. what’s something you wanna see. tell me, share it. make that content. and don’t watch it.

find your digital voice from doing what might be mundane and make it one of your talents and assets to assist you when things are a little less awesome in your life.

lift your mood and those around you — start a digital conversation you can bring into your daily analog life with that super computer you have in your trousers.

go create young skywalkers.

seriously, what the frack is that car park at the station all about?

are we really promoting more people to drive to the train station, or use the train station as the point that you bring your car too THEN get a train. really?

i mean don’t get me wrong here. i think the outside of it with the sharp lines and different colours is interesting but i’m absolutely blown away about the size of this carpark.

surely it would have made more sense to utilize part of the carpark to push an electric charging location and car2go kind of system?

maybe it could have a bike system where people could rent out bikes as soon as they arrive into nottingham – those could then be dropped off at a variety of different locations across the city.

if each of the bikes had some kind of intergrated gps, check in system that would help for the social media side of talking about the bikes. just saying!

waste of money if you ask me.

last night i managed to catchup with all my vlomo videos for videoblogging month. i scraped together all the bits of content i had running around just to make ‘it up’ to the date.

it’s amazing how fast you can get behind when you allow things to slide — funny how it took someone in my social grid to motivate me to get back on the ball! november so far has been rapid and continues to be so.

i missed my daughter so much this weekend that just had to go over to burton today to see her, really any longer than 7-10 days and i’m literally aching to go and see her — she fills me with so much happiness and gives me a much needed grounding as to why i do the chasing about i do.

exploring new horizons and possibilities to make a concatenated effort to be who am i yet bend around her wants and needs as much as possible as a father.

i’m not prepared to duplicate and replicate any more text book examples of failed relationships and one person family ideals. i aimed for the life reboot and i’m getting it. once the ship has sailed you have to just keep maintaining that life tiller.

sorted out my doctors this morning, got an appointment next monday to get a health check out and so i have a better place to get prescriptions and inhalers more easily – seems the head cold is shifting away from my head and moving to my chest a bit.

i’d rather have it there then causing me to be vacant in the thinking department. as for workload, i’m stacked – lots of video all of a sudden needs doing and it’s right in the middle of my fibrecamp redesign and client work is increasing.

was good to sneak in a video testimonial with don turner yesterday — we will be improving the message a lot on fibrecamp over the course of november and december.

managed to get my backpack all ready to go in the studio for tomorrows earlier train out to exeter – i’m going over to formalise things with lab media, a bunch of guys who have graduated and are out there in the ‘real world’ of web design and coding websites.

we both have similar needs — they want to get their name out there and work on some cool stuff and i need coding pieces done with a variety of different apis so we are getting together to discuss the elements and blocks of work that we might do together.

it’s also a really good excuse to go to oddfellows again for the #tweetfellows exeter twitterati meetup and film some of the game as it’s being played on a better camera so we can make a proper little video out of it.

back on friday evening, then over to get bella again on saturday morning and play day until lunchtime on sunday and back to the studio after that.

it might be constant but at least it’s progress and not mulling over what could be. i’ve also got a smattering of other projects, requests and mini tasks in the pipeline for next week already.

one big project in december and then i can start to kick back a little bit.

promise.

i had a full day in front of the machine yesterday making video.

i realised how slow my mac pro had become yesterday when i was editing 720p hd footage — it’s antique and upgrading my camera and mac pro must become the next thing i get sorted out in the studio it really needs a speed boost!

managed to catch up with videoblogging month however and i’m gonna be taking my camera out and about with me today as i’m doing trains and seeing ella later.

good times.

See the full gallery on Posterous

phew that was a fast weekend turnaround.

travelling down on the train for a few hours into london and then back out (eventually – long story) to east grinstead to see a good friend that i’ve know for about five years.

it’s hard to believe that it’s been eighteen months since we last saw each other — time moves pretty fast when you have your head down focused on making things happen in your life.

seeing jason again and meeting up with a group of friends (old and new actually) was great and i was flung straight into a new project in which i was assisting with various media assets for this fast moving new project.

i always love going to jason’s and fit snugly in the warmth of the fantastic family home they live in with great energy and wonderful children that love to cook and paint. it’s inspiring and is driven by love.

being able to walk across the village to a friends house to discuss projects and change up and down the pace, changing scenery are the life nuances that give me the ability to refuel my life energy.

moving forward, engaging conversations and fantastic organic foods around creative people with focus and energy really are a fantastic lift. it’s like going to denver and taking in the thin air for a week.

i’ll be going up and down the train tracks of this country over the coming months now starting with exeter again this coming thursday.

the dead time i get on my train trips is just enough to pull focus on the things that i want to get done that fit in so nicely with the things that my clients ask for.

progress. it’s called progress.

this thursday we spent an afternoon with costumes, jewellery boxes and the father and daughter of lucy locket making video content in fibrecamp.

it was their first session in the fibrecamp studios so we all needed to find our feet as to how the videos would turn out. lucy was super focused and told a really good story that work really well in a rotator of clips in a wistia playlist.

we also did a session on the sofa area talking about the ethics of kids cosmetics and the testing procedures that they do in labs.

for the first time in ages i was really pleased with the relationship of us and the client — it’s the kind of video engagement relationships we want to foster at the studio.

the story of what a business does for me is really one of the most important elements of how i interact with one and ultimately how and what i purchase from them.

a very quick edit on friday morning before grabbing the train at lunch to london but i’m looking forward to playing with the videos and editing the intros and outros to put the finishing touches on the content.

every so often — i need one of these.

i get all chesty and wheezy and i find myself in a position where i cannot sleep because i can hear myself rasping.

i blame it on lack of exercise, getting bigger from eating the wrong foods en masse and my focus on my work instead of myself — topping that i kept putting of getting another inhaler.

so boom, woke up at 1:30 could’nt get back to sleep, sat up in bed till 4:00am – decided to get up and watch jerry springer (ugh) and went into the studio at 6:00am

realising i had to do something i took a walk around to the 24/7 walk in NHS building near BBC nottingham where they gave me a prescription to get one. luckily!

also i now have an appointment at a local nhs doctors near the train station to get myself registered as they are taking people on, got to find a dentist too for some work there too.

yeah, it’s not a great look right?

a week of stuffed nasal nose, on the back end of exhausted running about jumping on planes, trains and then switching back into studio mode.

first wednesday of the month bought about tech startup of the year with about five companies pitching to a panel with their ideas.

i had never heard or seen of any of these people before and although some of the presentations ticked all the boxes of what a company should do i never felt any of them had substance.

maybe i’m just critical because i’ve heard some really strong and solid pitches for ideas and funding to a panel before that made sense straight away and were innovative and disruptive — stuff i like.

anyway, like a drunk victor meldrew i sat on the digital sidelines tweeting about some of the startup pitches drinking a red raboso which was lovely.

got a lift back to the house with dan and cj and went to bed at twelve. i woke three hours later to stomach ache. cutting sharp pain which made me sit upright.

within a minute or so i felt faint and an overwhelming rush of heat and energy — that kind of reaction you get when you want to be sick.

and this is where it gets really cloudy, i’m pretty sure i headed towards the toilet but the next minute i know i felt the pain on my face and i fell to the floor creating a loud bang.

cj knocked on the door after hearing the bang wondering what the heck had happened and helped me get patched up downstairs — i completely gapped what happened.

so yeah, nursing this head gash at the moment and my eye is a little bit bloated up because of a little cut above it so i’ve been feeling a bit sideways.

kinda reminds me to take a time out and slow down a bit. take stock, be aware of actions and snap decisions and to reflect often.

head down — crack on!

it’s been a crazy few weeks in the fibrecamp studios — and that’s before we even think about getting new equipment sorted out.

this last week we managed to get the second set of lights in for shot two. shot two being the sofa area where we originally did most of our initial catchup shows from.

the lights are not perfect yet but they are good enough — the next thing however is to get another intensity blackmagic card installed into the computer and a second hd camera.

after that, it’s a multi mixer for the audio and we should be set for twin ‘sets’ to do a live streaming show of some kind. it ties in with some news about upgrade fibre.

but i’ll leave that until it happens — watch this space.

over the past five years i’ve been trying to piece together just what it is that makes making throw away content so valuable — weird turn of phrase right? after all why would you make ambient content (that has context from that moment in time, in the place it was captured) that has no real value to the majority.

what actually is it that people do not get about social media channels that stop them actually making and resort to just shouting into the digital ether — education, apathy or maybe wrong technology usage.

for me, sitting here on the 11:11 cardiff train to get my princess i’m transported to a blog post about context and why people do not understand how the things you post digitally can be blown out of context if they were received in the wrong place, without explanation or without knowledge of your rational behind your comment.

in everyday life our normal organic face to face conversations are laced with lots of subtle nuances – that might be passion, delivery, straight facts — a whole load of emotional and yet important factors as human that we live and adapt to every single day – we go on what we feel is right for that moment but built on years of discovery and fact checking in our daily lives.

the things we see that we either assume, hope or live through. as friends you get established with each others skills and talents but also we find out what we are bad at, these get discussed a lot – a lot of ‘wish’ and ‘hope’ infused conversations in which we want to change our predictable actions – to change the trajectory of our lives and those indirectly of the ones we love around us.

we are all on a constant self discovery journey. applying context to social media for me is the hardest part of making any kind of response in a digital form – be it a blog post, a video or a picture – those bits of digital media exists across the internet, accessible to the world of the connected.

how is a stranger reacting to your content?

are you allowing a method of communication back to you or are you just curating your message and output for your own ends, are you overlaying context, transparency and values and constants to the way you engage with the digital world when you talk to the world. i constantly see old methods of working, magazines, advertisers and sales folk trying to use social media marketing as an additional toolset to literally blast one message at random times of the day in the hope that they can snare people to use a place for a discount — i see no relationship engagement, it’s just give us your money, sheer traffic in the hope that someone will bite.

some things to maybe consider.

network building and purity
i’ve spent a lot of time over the last five years building up a collection of people who follow me and my digital life due in part to the things i’ve communicated (or not) and what i’d like to think are valuable projects and disruptive thinking rooted in never forgetting my routes in to the world wide web – how that first modem, the struggle and difficulty of uploading, downloading, community and sharing was then and how far we have come.

don’t be the noisiest dude in the pub
seriously i get it, having a pop about something that doesn’t live up to the promise is never good (i’ve lost a lot of relationships this way!) it’s all very well being the one with the loud voice on the web getting companies to react and adapt to poor quality of service but you still leave behind a seed of annoyance that you have created more work in FIXING it for someone somewhere.

sure we want things to be right but hey give a shit while they fix it eh?
self servicing your own vanity through social media channels that you got a resolution plants a digital context seed in other places you might not expect. it may come to bite you back in the ass if you did’nt provide enough context as to what was happening at that time.

give me a reason to give a shit
seriously why is that 20% of that product any good, what do you know about the company/person – what are their values, are they selling it because they are struggling, got a sale on or want to replace stock, are they then giving away any of that money to help charity — what’s the story, engagement and give me context about who, what and when, don’t use your social media channel like a rusty blunderbuss – i want targeted, time sensitive notifications that are relevant.

the story of the guy in the airport
i’m still trying to remember his name/twitter name (if this is you please get in touch!) but one particular flight from birmingham to newark in the states involved me arriving with a box of video equipment after a very tired red eye flight. i tweeted a tired ‘i need coffee, sorting out my box tweet’ out (with geo data of the shuttle station) and fifteen minutes a guy i have never met came up to me with a smile on his face and two coffees.

it was like an angel from the coffee world had been presented to me. my first reaction was panic and privacy (something i always tell ladies to do now is to check in when they leave a venue instead) because here is me sorting out a box of kit and ‘internet strangers’ know that i’m doing it. as it turns out, he saw my tweet after scanning the airport ‘who was around’ – pure chance and he was following me already for the last few years, enjoying my blog but NEVER commenting.

i was blown away and reminded that in life people will lurk behind the scenes until the conditions of connection on a comfortable basis exist. this was his. to top it off, he did’nt even have a passport to leave the country — he was dropping of his wife to fly.

so what am i trying to get at by all this. .. what is digital context to me?

my network does not expect me to send them random things that have no meaning to them or do not do what they perceive to suggest they do. i’m not going to talk about something that has no value, has a gimmick or is an obvious plain desperate attempt to ‘throw more traffic at it’ – it’s like shooting cowpats with a shotgun, sure it’s fun but ultimately it’s a waste of shotgun shells.

i’m constantly thinking about context, why i have the access to the services and tools, people and life journey i have had so far — maybe then because i’ve questioned, disrupted and ‘told people what i think’ offline face to face and then allowed them see my digital life is one and the same.

truth is, we are not awesome all the time — we have moments of interest and those change as we move through life and the digital plains, in those moments we want our engagement to suit.

and you’ll never know that if you keep spamming the web with stuff you think i want rather than the things they need.

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the difference between good quality cases for your devices is pretty massive out there but i think i found the one that gives me the protection i wanted for a ‘clumsy always breaking things when i need it’ kinda person like i am.

at first i was a bit annoyed as buttons did’nt seem to go in the right place — helps if you get the case on the right way around, i never read instructions. no wonder the home button would not work — and i was just deciding if to take it back and change it with the otter box whick looked as equally has hardcore in protection. glad i haven’t – this thing is fantastic.

not only does it protect the screen but all ports are covered with dust covers as well which makes for a very secure case. the kickstand is nice in that it will be either upright or just elevate it enough to be able to view it while having the keyboard to the side which works perfectly — i’d like a bit more of an angle thou, i have to crane over a little to view it but it’s certainly better than it being flat on a surface.

in vertical mode it acts like a photo frame, & works really well. i had the choice between the otter box and this military spec griffin case – the only thing i would say is the otterbox seemed like a better solution for run and gunning because this has port covers over everything — i had not even considered protection for these, but i’m glad i have them now.

i’m going to have to decide if i’m gonna snip those elements out and put them in when i’m travelling with it, maybe put them in a bag/pocket otherwise i might forget, mic input might be covered plus the speaker on the back is also covered — it’s a really well thought out case in terms of making sure anything getting in but i’m considered it might impact actually media making — guess i’ll find out over time.

like i mentioned it’s a hardcore military spec so it’s got that splash cover on the screen, dust proof and everywhere is covered up to protect it from getting anything in the sockets. feel like i’m a little restricted in using it as a media making machine like i mentioned above — certainly feels safer than having it slide out of a silk bag and smash.

you just get used to the wonder of how slim the ipad2 is and then you go and add more size to it by sticking a case on it. i kinda like the way it felt before and i guess it’s just the adjustment period of getting used to the extra weight and protection it offers — i have no time for trips to apple stores for more replacements anyway.

after a week of using it i can tell you the advantages of having the extra protection, the screen cover and the port covers allow me to throw it into a bag and ‘not worry about it’ – when i want to make media i simple open up the slots and sections on the back — the front camera is still a bit fuzzy thou at the moment with the plastic screen that’s part of the protector.

i’m tempted to cut that camera element piece out to make it clearer to see out of the front camera. i use the front camera quite a bit on instagram and as it is makes things a little bit fuzzy on the shot.

well that hit me like a ton of lead.

it’s november then, that illusion month that stalks you like a rabid david blaine of mystery that vanishes quicker than the thirty days it had planned.  everyone is rolling out videos, supposed thirty seconds but i kinda missed the mark on that one.  i’ll try to do better, i promise — expect random thoughts and true videoblogger spirit(s)

and i thought i was going to have a css/html kind of month.

lovely to see you all again.  go go, search out the mystical #vlomo11 over there and over here too — people actually making video with a camera, finally we all remember why we bought the thing in the first place.

i feel this november may become rather twisted.

what a shit day.

felt like a passenger of life today, really needed to hit the ground running this week, must pick three jobs and do them each day instead of chipping away at each.

totally unproductive — i did like thirty minutes of work getting some buttons to match two sites that were bugging me. i really wanted to work as well but i just could not focus.

as per my last email you can see i have a lot on my plate but today was just a non event. trying to get a new lightweight template together for shows pages is my thorn in my side at the moment.

i’m sure things will be better once this cold lifts but it’s really taken a lot out of me — this combined with gym, lack of sleep and overloaded workloads of things to do before the new year is stretching me from all angles.

need to break through the barrier.

it’s been really busy for the last month — flying over to sxsweco, doing a live stream at the local nottingham trent university for eco fashion and sass brown and then taking three days off up to exeter for the likeminds conference.  feels like my feet didn’t touch the ground.

so, what’s happening where.  let me spend a few moments to give you a bit of a catchup and plan for the next few months.

transportation
i’m still looking for that elusive car rental, hiring for twelve months – it seems that nobody does twelve months and i’m having a hard time finding the right lease company to work with – ideally we would find a car leasing company that wants to wrap the car with their message and we drive, stream and feed into their social media campaign for a year with our live video streams that would run from inside the car — i’m still looking.

turning ideas into products
anybody who knows me or follows what i do will know that i’m an idea factory — they fall out of me like digital waterfalls and over the years i have had to put the brakes on with what works and what does not.  recently i have found four main things i want to work on and my multitasking mind seems to be able to chip away at them.  recently i met a

bunch of guys from exeter who i gelled with straight away and could see that their were at the starting point of business – i remember those days.  they are twin team, lightweight and lean and ready to go.  more on developments on that as they unfold.

preorder sales of the nomad jackets
the jacket preordering pages are up on ulule.  we are offering the first ten jackets an exclusive price of £250 for the first batch to raise interest — the next £300 and the final full price of £350 for all future orders.  get in quick if you want the better pricing.  we are working on v3 of the jacket in november (jamie contact me!) and are looking at a better finish, better ventilation and finally that fabric qr code.

double stitching and finishing of the final product also need review — the packaging side has taken a bit of a backseat but we are considering lots of recycled products turned into holdalls and bags for your unique jacket.

fibrecamp upgrades
we need a new mac pro, it’s getting old — so old in fact that final cut x will not install on it because the graphics cards are antique.  my rebuilt macbook pro has a new hd but cannot have the latest lion os on.  it’s time therefore to start upgrades.  the studio space itself has been a bit quiet over the last month as i’ve been away and we need to move towards a more standalone operation that does not require me to be managing it.

we have a carpenter (finally) coming in to put our side table in so we can start to do courses within the space.  new sets of lighting and cameras are currently being looked into as well.

ark progress
we have a new date of january 2012 — it’s a long story but this money that was supposed to be there never happened and so other sponsors needed to be sourced, it’s been a long time coming but we do believe now that things can happen.  we have got this far it’s just getting the production schedule together and ticking boxes.

i’m really ready to get going on it all but i really need transport so i can drop in weekly at conkers to talk about the site and help out where needed.  i even had a conversation with a guy recently that has a satellite truck in nottingham that might be useful to do some ‘ontheground’ live streams from the forest.

charity work has taken a hit
so with everything that’s been going on for the last three weeks it’s been hard to commit to anything really in the charity arena which is frustrating but to be expected.  kinda feel i’m waiting for them to have some people step forward from the spread out offices to at least try making some content that we can get together on and brainstorm what works and what does not — when the side studio table is made in fibrecamp that will make a difference because that means we can bring people over lunch to do some training in the building — hands on.

watch tv brand advocacy
this has been going well actually, it’s actually really good for me getting on top of schedules — having that constant monthy note taking format from recording tweets that i’m putting out with the watchdottv hashtag on to videos and blog posts that i’m writing about and it was great to go ontheground at wearelikeminds to capture the vibe in terms of how people are applying video to there business.

building and redesigning themes for fibrecamp.tv
this is the thorn in my side at the moment, i’m trying to get fibrecamp.tv up (brand new theme) that will be simple enough that we can make a similar device that works on the ipad and has all those whizbang features of being able to spin the device left and right.  i’m also in the process looking at the fibrecamp show pages which have never been quite right.  it’s all getting a bit of a makeover.

ontheground work picking up
as i mentioned above the ontheground work has been crazy – i was in austin, then at the ntu back in nottingham then headed on a train down to exeter for three days, i felt like i was living out of the ammobox for those three weeks.   i feel i have november to get things together now.  four weeks flys by, especially at this time of year.  before we know it christmas will be upon us.

seriously no wonder people dislike all things wifi, internet and slow speeds.

while my hat is tipped firmly tipped in the direction of wifi companies that provide a free period of bandwidth for ‘passing through’ briefly checking in and email scanning digital travellers like myself, the speed, quality and resolution of issues in a timely manner by some of these companies leaves a lot to be desired.

my frustration set in when i had gone over the 40 minutes free that houston international give you to use on the web.  for love or money i could not get the ipad2 working on the service at all.

i signed up for two different packages, the cheaper $4.95 one and after that another for $7.95 – both of these allowed me to login on the website but for me to actually get on the web i needed to have downloaded the boingo application AHEAD of time of me going in the airport!

for someone that does not use a mobile phone i realise i’m a rare case but even if i did the last thing i want to do in the airport is talk to someone on a phone – i’m just not that kind of customer. i use email, twitter and social sites to talk back to companies, you need to have methods of listening in those areas too — you are after my money after all right?

have to say, kudos for support for paypal.  that’s pretty much how i get any funds these days right now so that helped a lot — even if you did take two amounts and not give me the services i wanted.

i did get those payments back in a timely fashion via paypal thou.

so, my suggestion to fix this problem in one masterstroke — work out how to give us limited access to the app store or work on some kind of temporary system of udid sending so we have a temporary application that can be updated once online.  i realise that it’s messy but here i was sitting in the airport trying to get on the wifi and being told that i needed to download your app from the appstore when i had run out of complimentary wifi access to do that.

should i really need your application to get online?

the other thing that needs to be said about boingo wifi in at least houston international was that it was super slow, like i ran a speedtest and everything and while that might have been giving false postives because the firewall is locked down so much it was a terrible experience and needs resolution.

these companies moan about ‘the numbers are not there’ and the ‘mainstream’ are not using these tools and devices to do things on the web, well perhaps if you spent a bit more time on the maintainance and the backhaul of the connectivity of these hotspots in airports you would start to see the numbers going up.

you can’t shoehorn a system into an airport and walk away from it, it needs regular monitoring and someone needs to be on hand to deal with situations, you should be leaving free passes and voucher codes with some of the airlines so that people like me who were a rare case could have gotten on the internet a bit longer to download your app.

because of my experience, i’ll probably never use your service.

i’m a brand advocate you lost simply because you left me with frustration and angst that i could not get the work i needed to do out to the world, you have all these potential brand ambassdors sitting in airports around the world everyday, i’m sure by now you could have invested a little bit of that money into some kind of social media strategy. 

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i’ve been wanting to write this out since it was floating around in my head while walking through the mall.

i was recently in austin, texas for sxsweco – on the last evening of the event i went to mohawk, drank too much whisky, hung out and had fun then stumbled home with a smashed ipad2 screen. gutted.

next morning i set about to find the nearest apple store and found one in barton creek about thirty minutes away on the bus. i took a ride out and took it in, they scanned the back of the ipad, nodded and wandered off coming back in what seemed like minutes with a brand new ready to go ipad2.

to say i was chuffed was an overstatement, i doubt very much you would get that kind of service in the uk – they would want a receipt, your first born and probably one finger left in trust before getting the big band of keys to unlock the ‘vault that should not be opened’

seriously, service in the uk is a dirty word – we would have so many much happier people if we had a level of service on par with the states – many reasons, not enough time to explain them.

anyway, after i had it set back up and collecting my data (gotta love the cloud) i noticed i had two emails from apple – one about the genius booking, one about the replacement ipad as an invoice.

that’s when it hit me, why does’nt apple do a third email that tells me the route/journey of my smashed ipad. where does it go, how far does it travel, what landfill did it go too or did it get repurposed.

apple would do well to tell the story of the broken ones and maybe look at giving them to local schools at discount with a few geniuses for the day to show kids how to repair things instead of a world of replace not fix.

anyway, rant over.

i spin around after getting up from reinstalling all my applications to see what can only be described as a food mecca of every kind of food you could want to consume.

more interesting to me was that i was on a very tight budget and hungry and instead of just heading in for the best deal from one of the many stands i was thinking about that ipad, about consumption and ultimately waste.

as i walked past each brand i noticed the sheer amount of food that was being prepared, stacks of chicken sizzling away and drinks the size of my daughter.

at the front of every one of these businesses was an employee handing out free samples of the food they were offering on the stand.

by the time i had walked down the row of ten shops i had pretty much had a meal from every kind of corner of the earth. in fact, i only grabbed a sushi meal to go downstairs shortly after that cost around six bucks.

if your semi-homeless, reasonably clean and can afford a few bucks at least to get on a bus you can quite comfortably live on the food freebies that they give out in the shopping malls.

how do you even enter into a conversation about waste and consumption when food is so readily available. it’s only when we truly have none will we actually look at what we have.

and by then, it’s gonna be too late.

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i had to write a mini review for this place because it was just perfect for my needs for likeminds.

major highlight run by a lovely couple who on arriving resolved a weird situation with booking.com and some kind of email fax problem rapidly and without fuss.

the room was fine, the toilet and shower area a bit shoe horned in but it worked, it was fine really, i’m not overly fussy with things like this – it was warm, dry and had a roof!

best thing for me was that breakfast was included and i made full use of it for three days while i was there. the full english breakfast was great and cooked perfectly.

i noticed that they were not listed on either gowalla or foursquare so i made sure i put them on – guesthouse was literally just five minutes walk away and exeter st davids was probably about ten minutes away.

i’ll be using them again for sure.

quicklink | pic courtesy of harry duns

after the initial day mind melding with the location, limitations and aspirations of the crowd i was starting to find my feet at the venue and get into a flow.  it’s hard to be ontheground recording videos for other projects and taking in the event sessions without thinking about segways, coffee & power and what venue to go at lunch.

with my concerns about the lack of lunch vanishing by the day and thinking what actually a great idea it was to get people walking about the city — it was this over a chat with the local owner at oddfellows (a brilliant pub btw) we were talking about conferences, discount and hyperlocal ‘chatting to each other’ that seems to not happen.

it would have been great to have had a voucher/set of for each venue that could be tweeted or cashed in during lunch or evenings at a smattering of venues – i’m sure lessons learnt for next time and if i was exeter council i would be looking at linking conferences together and pulling resources in these difficult times.

the conference centre itself was very well organized and it was great to see so many team members on the ground dealing with the crowd – everyone did a fantastic job.

some of my favorites were chris-barez-brown, molly bedingfield of global angels, gabrielle laine-peters (who told a great heartfelt, end to end story), andy middleton from the do lectures, jack russell, delphine remy-boutang (who did a great explanation about ibm involvement in social media) and both james whatley and molly flatt who did great work with the immersive i went too.

my most enjoyable part however was getting to know the exeter twitterati who were a really really warm and welcoming bunch of folk who have the most awesome digital pub quiz game played over twitter which we are hoping to spark interest in nottingham.

we are even making arrangements to get rob up to nottingham to do a mini version for a friday social at antenna hopefully before the mini december mediacamp on the saturday.

captured a bunch of different videos over the three days i was on the ground at likeminds and i did my best to throw a bunch of the videos within this blog post but expect another blog post with questions i asked for my brand advocate work that i’m doing with watchdottv to be up later on today.

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so, likeminds. a conference in exeter with a variety of different speakers, sixty five i believe at this event, immersive venues and lots of social media avatar loving.

i turned up relatively early and managed to get into the event to reccy out where everything was, first speed tests showed quite bad internet, turned out that BT had not upgraded the wifi so people were only getting the wifi code ‘if they needed it’

this got me worried because most events are about getting things out there for people watching remotely. it’s the number one rule apart from having good coffee and biscuit supply.

smartly thou they were making sure that they had enough for the live stream which after doing my own speedtests i was surprised they could even do that. still, it was smart to only give out to a few people to make sure that had some bandwidth supply.

the wifi aside, scott and his team (lots of them) were doing preprep for audio, pa and getting all the initial speakers to go through the motions of how their presentation might unfold. great prep.

the venue itself has a nice layout with an upstairs overhang looking down onto the floor. this worked great and some of the presentations from the first day were good.

i was a bit confused at lunch when there was none, basically you had to serve your self around town but they did have a great little map with your lanyard of a variety of locations and breaking out to different places with different people – just don’t go to zizizi – so rude in there.

in hindsight maybe i’m expecting a lot for £95 for a day but i did expect some kind of snack so i loaded up on biscuits instead. it was good to show exeter tourism how something bigger like this would work enabling places around the city to expect customers – they really should have put together deals for the conference and used QR or other codes to really hammer that process home.

the process of lunch to 2pm works really well, that two hours is a perfect time to get to know people while having a snack and the general vibe was really good, lots of people here to connect. lots of likeminds.

i managed to get about five interviews with people for my watchdotv mission and i’m expecting to get a stack more today, i’m having a few issues with my xlr input in that the sound is quiet so i’ll have to post next week after doing some post processing to jack up those audio levels.

looking forward to another packed day today now that i’ve found my feet!

NOTE:
it’s was actually 9:20am on day two that i’m writing this, i got in quite early after a few pints in the pub after the event and passed out until 4am which is when really i should i have started writing this instead of last minute!

phew, what a busy one.

prepped the ammobox and the nomad jacket has everything ready to go, tickets are booked and the kit is ready.  i’m heading out in under an hour to grab a train up to exeter for wearelikeminds till friday afternoon.  it’s been a rollercoaster ride over the last few weeks with events and conferences in and out of the country and it looks like it’s not going to stop until december time.

in the middle of this as i was packing to get my ammobox kit ready for an ‘ontheground’ event i found the time to do some video media for my brand advocacy for watch.tv (verisign) about how to be prepared as a brand advocate for a conference.

i made six episodes covering the prep, tech, process and applications which i’m hoping you will find useful.  i’ll be releasing these our via our fibrecamp channel on showyou (which btw, if you have not checked out yet – download from the app store) once we have our feeds problem locked down and submitted the projects rss feed.

for now you can get them in this playlist embed.  just start at the top and let it play through each section – a little bit of information under thirty minutes about how to prepare, what kit to take and a little bit about the nomad jacket and how that helps me as a media maker on the ground get the interviews i need.

firstly, the image above is not the ‘freedom tower’ box.

at the moment i’m having all kinds of problems with iphoto11 and it is just locking up everytime i try and open it.  i’m going to go through all my applications briefly this morning to update them just in case something in the last update needs a certain app to function properly.  in the bug report i’m seeing errors with 3ivx so i might need to explore there.

anyway!

so while in austin, texas recently for sxsweco i bumped into day two of the occupy austin movement and met a guy(s) who were operating the ‘freedom tower’ a big box with a ups power unit connected to some clear modems, various breakout boxes and a cradlepoint router.

Oct 7, 2011 | Source: Keek.com

out of this box rose a metal scaffold style tube with six antenna aerials facing in different directions giving both 2.4ghz and 5ghz range coverage.  i recorded three little interviews with a guy that was help run it on the day providing occupy austin with connectivity for the site.  i did ask if they have the plans up but it was a recent build.

Oct 7, 2011 | Source: Keek.com

the missing link for my own ‘bandwidthinabox’ was the ups – i had never considered to use a computer ups before but it makes perfect sense.  i’m not sure however if it should be a two man operation.  i’d prefer to make a more streamlined one person unit that can be pulled along – on top of the existing ‘ammobox’ we had but i need to look at some lightweight cooling if i go that way.

Oct 7, 2011 | Source: Keek.com

it was great to meet someone that was thinking about multiple carriers and cellular drop in hot spot boxes.  i’m sure this area is going to explode in the next six to 12 months.  i’m really interested in learning a lot more about mesh networks too.

now if only cradlepoint would send me that mbr1400 i would have a go at building one myself – maybe i’ll point them to this blog post!

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everything is like someone stuck the fast forward button down on the VHS player (remember those) and the rented videotape from blockbuster is forwarding to the end of the tape instead of getting it ready for the video store for someone else to watch.

the last ten days have been a bit of a media blur, i did get some time to reflect for a moment during my time in a less crowded austin in the first five days – that was pleasing and between the interviews, whisky of the final closing party and the smashing of a week old iPad 2 screen (later got replaced at an apple store thankfully) it gave me a nice contrast from the sxsw event that happens in march every year.

i’ll not be at the next one in march 2012 so it was nice to get my austin fix.

i spent a few hours at #occupyaustin where they even had a ‘freedom tower’ for getting their message out over the web with a free and open wireless network setup for the people ontheground at the event.

returning eventually to the digital nottingham fray (after getting stuck for a day in houston) we go straight headlong into a streaming event for the nottingham trent university with sass brown – it goes well and we deliver what we promised – everyone happy.

then i lift my head up from the frenzy of activity and it’s friday, picking up my bella i have her for a really short period of time this week before she has to go back to mothers for a birthday party back home – it was never enough time, but it was something and boy did i miss her.

after returning back to nottingham saturday afternoon i found myself ‘ontheground’ in the market square of nottingham to see the base of occupy nottingham take shape and i started to grab some pictures and video content of the initial marches and talks from members of the peace camp.

it’s great to see that they are still there today and i’m sure they will be there for the duration over the coming week(s) and then the dilemma hits me.

do i get in a tent, put things i’m working on hold and not give this my full social media support – torn between support role and rebuild my current circumstances – i wonder how many other people want to support these occupy events but can’t because they need the income of their current jobs yet they feel they are towing the line in that role.

it’s the thing i’m constantly exploring the most, how do you define that happy medium – how do you earn, learn and share, it’s a balancing act that’s for certain.

like this week, i’ve been invited along to a really cool event with some incredible speakers that could shape some of the projects i want to do in the studio space during 2012.

we are like minds is happening in exeter this week – i’m rarely invited or have the situation to be able to even attend something like this, kinda like a TED for england.

i’m behind with a lot of tasks for this month for existing clients and development of fibrecamp all because i had that week away and another three days this week would have compounded it i think i can catchup tomorrow and tuesday before i go.

kinda still wish i had a webcam vantage point setup in the market square thou, i think the more web output we do the better to support their efforts.

why do i support #occupynotts you might ask (you might not even know what it is – do look around at the global occupy events) well for me it’s about the absolute mess of the financial system and the lack of trust for the banking system.

Occupy: Nottingham from The Grande Pois on Vimeo.

the issue is a very complicated one for sure but for me it does come down to the future job market and life that my daughter is going to lead.

it’s gonna be hard to prepare her for a uncertain environmental one (cue the ark) and if finances, global markets and the cost of foods are going to be effected we need to think more dynamically about the world around us.

i realise that there is no silver bullet for the circumstances the world is in but while we continue to bury our head in the sand and hope for the best we risk our children’s futures – opening up the conversation to the wider world and not just taking it anymore means tough decisions and action to make changes.

we the people now have a global media stage with us being the voice of our generations. we bring with it the ability to educate, to formulate and to engage in conversation around topics that we can work together on to make things happen.

support your local #occupy in whatever country you are in – just at least go down and have a listen to what some of the people ‘ontheground’ have to say and then do your own research on the networks and info hubs that you trust and do your cross referencing.

you are not just your social network account. you have a voice, learn to make it sing digitally.

v5.0 was a bad update.

but we don’t really care because we WANTED it. when we want something, if it causes a bit of pain we talk about it with others and then the apathy of expectation kicks in when we just take it on the chin, we have become used to things failing. like the planet for instance.

we can’t through money at something that does operate on the proposal of money, we have to make a mental shift away and check ourselves why we need to consume new stuff.

so iOS5.. . sure, it’s got all the bells and whistles that we were wanted but we didn’t need it taking out the content on our devices and in my case i have a problem with my iphoto11 crashing every time i try and load and import.

i’m in the studio on a sunday wanting to play catchup mode and my productive mac experience is waning at the moment – it’s hard to remember the time when windows was like this all the time.

i guess i’ve got used to apple normally picking up the ball. on this occasion they have dropped it. like everyone in the world of apple i’m sorry for the loss of steve and his fight against cancer, that’s a given.

so let’s not make this about steve and the wonders that gentleman bought to the digital world we frequent these days. he made computers do the heavy lifting and gave us devices that just worked.

so what went wrong with this push..

testing basically. developers have had iOS5 betas for months and months so they could integrate features and be ready for this new push no doubt but it’s up to us as the users on this occasion to take the hit.

in the grand scheme of things i guess they have gotten away lightly in that we can restore from backups but i’m hearing more and more from people how they have lost contacts and media.

that’s not good enough – especially when your talking about iCloud. at this moment in time i’m sitting looking at an iPhoto 11 issue with importing pictures, i try and enable iCloud in the app and it crashes.

basically, my productivity tool is acting like one. it’s always at the moment that you need something to work does it decide that it’s time to eat the digital dust. i’m really happy to have notifications.

i’m glad they have it baked in like that, but really did we get so used to not having notifications (ok, i used boxcar/push anyway) when other platforms did, was it really hard for apple to drop that walled garden for us to be notified about our actions in our social grids? and this is the triple whammy for me – integrating twitter.

i could go down many avenues with this but i really think that apple did not think this through. are they testing the capacity of twitter, trying to break them or trying to admit that finally twitter is actually going to stay around, do they have vested interests in it – who knows, who cares.

for me the problem lies in the fact that millions of people that were not on twitter finally find it baked into settings. i’m not adverse to more users and more people using a platform that i frequent a lot i’m just surprised that apple pushed all these things at once.

i actually find it quite arrogant that we have this expectation that well, it’s more data we can test to see if our scaling is working just to then release a sodding iPhone 4s which nobody can actually activate around the same time!

and now that the world of the crackberry is in the toilet we can expect a bunch of trackball pushing obsessive sms types filling up the iMessage tubes with streams of material.

at least when they were on their own network we had a bit of breathing room. we need independent networks, we need different options.

i for one personally do not want one cloud solution, it has to be multiple methods of input on different carriers to different servers and different clouds – while we are at it let’s start really looking at optimising those heat bearing servers and server centres and stop pushing cooling air around.

rant over. you failed me today apple.

See the full gallery on Posterous

everything is like someone stuck the fast forward button down on the VHS player (remember those) and the rented videotape from blockbuster is forwarding to the end of the tape instead of getting it ready for the video store for someone else to watch.

the last ten days have been a bit of a media blur, i did get some time to reflect for a moment during my time in a less crowded austin in the first five days – that was pleasing and between the interviews, whisky of the final closing party and the smashing of a week old iPad 2 screen (later got replaced at an apple store thankfully) it gave me a nice contrast from the sxsw event that happens in march every year.

i’ll not be at the next one in march 2012 so it was nice to get my austin fix.

i spent a few hours at #occupyaustin where they even had a ‘freedom tower’ for getting their message out over the web with a free and open wireless network setup for the people ontheground at the event.

returning eventually to the digital nottingham fray (after getting stuck for a day in houston) we go straight headlong into a streaming event for the nottingham trent university with sass brown – it goes well and we deliver what we promised – everyone happy.

then i lift my head up from the frenzy of activity and it’s friday, picking up my bella i have her for a really short period of time this week before she has to go back to mothers for a birthday party back home – it was never enough time, but it was something and boy did i miss her.

after returning back to nottingham saturday afternoon i found myself ‘ontheground’ in the market square of nottingham to see the base of occupy nottingham take shape and i started to grab some pictures and video content of the initial marches and talks from members of the peace camp.

it’s great to see that they are still there today and i’m sure they will be there for the duration over the coming week(s) and then the dilemma hits me.

do i get in a tent, put things i’m working on hold and not give this my full social media support – torn between support role and rebuild my current circumstances – i wonder how many other people want to support these occupy events but can’t because they need the income of their current jobs yet they feel they are towing the line in that role.

it’s the thing i’m constantly exploring the most, how do you define that happy medium – how do you earn, learn and share, it’s a balancing act that’s for certain.

like this week, i’ve been invited along to a really cool event with some incredible speakers that could shape some of the projects i want to do in the studio space during 2012.

we are like minds is happening in exeter this week – i’m rarely invited or have the situation to be able to even attend something like this, kinda like a TED for england.

i’m behind with a lot of tasks for this month for existing clients and development of fibrecamp all because i had that week away and another three days this week would have compounded it i think i can catchup tomorrow and tuesday before i go.

kinda still wish i had a webcam vantage point setup in the market square thou, i think the more web output we do the better to support their efforts.

why do i support #occupynotts you might ask (you might not even know what it is – do look around at the global occupy events) well for me it’s about the absolute mess of the financial system and the lack of trust for the banking system.

Occupy: Nottingham from The Grande Pois on Vimeo.

the issue is a very complicated one for sure but for me it does come down to the future job market and life that my daughter is going to lead.

it’s gonna be hard to prepare her for a uncertain environmental one (cue the ark) and if finances, global markets and the cost of foods are going to be effected we need to think more dynamically about the world around us.

i realise that there is no silver bullet for the circumstances the world is in but while we continue to bury our head in the sand and hope for the best we risk our children’s futures – opening up the conversation to the wider world and not just taking it anymore means tough decisions and action to make changes.

we the people now have a global media stage with us being the voice of our generations. we bring with it the ability to educate, to formulate and to engage in conversation around topics that we can work together on to make things happen.

support your local #occupy in whatever country you are in – just at least go down and have a listen to what some of the people ‘ontheground’ have to say and then do your own research on the networks and info hubs that you trust and do your cross referencing.

you are not just your social network account. you have a voice, learn to make it sing digitally.

v5.0 was a bad update.

but we don’t really care because we WANTED it. when we want something, if it causes a bit of pain we talk about it with others and then the apathy of expectation kicks in when we just take it on the chin, we have become used to things failing. like the planet for instance.

we can’t through money at something that does operate on the proposal of money, we have to make a mental shift away and check ourselves why we need to consume new stuff.

so iOS5.. . sure, it’s got all the bells and whistles that we were wanted but we didn’t need it taking out the content on our devices and in my case i have a problem with my iphoto11 crashing every time i try and load and import.

i’m in the studio on a sunday wanting to play catchup mode and my productive mac experience is waning at the moment – it’s hard to remember the time when windows was like this all the time.

i guess i’ve got used to apple normally picking up the ball. on this occasion they have dropped it. like everyone in the world of apple i’m sorry for the loss of steve and his fight against cancer, that’s a given.

so let’s not make this about steve and the wonders that gentleman bought to the digital world we frequent these days. he made computers do the heavy lifting and gave us devices that just worked.

so what went wrong with this push..

testing basically. developers have had iOS5 betas for months and months so they could integrate features and be ready for this new push no doubt but it’s up to us as the users on this occasion to take the hit.

in the grand scheme of things i guess they have gotten away lightly in that we can restore from backups but i’m hearing more and more from people how they have lost contacts and media.

that’s not good enough – especially when your talking about iCloud. at this moment in time i’m sitting looking at an iPhoto 11 issue with importing pictures, i try and enable iCloud in the app and it crashes.

basically, my productivity tool is acting like one. it’s always at the moment that you need something to work does it decide that it’s time to eat the digital dust. i’m really happy to have notifications.

i’m glad they have it baked in like that, but really did we get so used to not having notifications (ok, i used boxcar/push anyway) when other platforms did, was it really hard for apple to drop that walled garden for us to be notified about our actions in our social grids? and this is the triple whammy for me – integrating twitter.

i could go down many avenues with this but i really think that apple did not think this through. are they testing the capacity of twitter, trying to break them or trying to admit that finally twitter is actually going to stay around, do they have vested interests in it – who knows, who cares.

for me the problem lies in the fact that millions of people that were not on twitter finally find it baked into settings. i’m not adverse to more users and more people using a platform that i frequent a lot i’m just surprised that apple pushed all these things at once.

i actually find it quite arrogant that we have this expectation that well, it’s more data we can test to see if our scaling is working just to then release a sodding iPhone 4s which nobody can actually activate around the same time!

and now that the world of the crackberry is in the toilet we can expect a bunch of trackball pushing obsessive sms types filling up the iMessage tubes with streams of material.

at least when they were on their own network we had a bit of breathing room. we need independent networks, we need different options.

i for one personally do not want one cloud solution, it has to be multiple methods of input on different carriers to different servers and different clouds – while we are at it let’s start really looking at optimising those heat bearing servers and server centres and stop pushing cooling air around.

rant over. you failed me today apple.

quicklink | sign up to my sxsweco newsletter

greetings!

finally got around to pulling together this brief interview with scott wilcox, the chief technology officer for the south by southwest festivals in austin, texas.  sxsweco is a brand new conference that is spaced six months apart from the main interactive, film and music one normally held in march when it’s complete bedlam and it’s like watching all your favorite avatars wandering around.

i’ll not be going to southby in march next year (i know, scary right) because i have the ark project taking off in january so it was the perfect time for me to go to the first sxsweco event and at the same time take in that slice of austin to get my fill for another year.  i’m going to miss it like crazy and this would have been my fifth year but the ark project is much bigger than any conference i could go to.

i went to make some connections with a variety of different people and ended up in the press room talking to scott.  this was a highlight for me because i wanted to get across about the ark project and the possibility of streaming a wide/internal shot into south by southwest from across the pond from the heart of the national forest into the hallways of southby.

connecting the two sxsw events together by using technology and using me as the link – i’ve been to both events and the ark project is a groundbreaking year long project from someone that uses technology but wants to tell the story of creating/consuming energy off the grid but living within the digital cloud.

i’m pushing out a newsletter in a few days time, do sign up to get the details as they hopefully expand – we still need a yes from scott and others to see if we can make this happen – i think it works on multiple levels from the sustainability message of streaming the video over, a view inside the ark and the surrounding area of the national forest and yet with a tech flavour.

we even might have a satellite uplink for it.. .. more on that soon. .. 

quicklink | sign up to my sxsweco newsletter

greetings!

finally got around to pulling together this brief interview with scott wilcox, the chief technology officer for the south by southwest festivals in austin, texas.  sxsweco is a brand new conference that is spaced six months apart from the main interactive, film and music one normally held in march when it’s complete bedlam and it’s like watching all your favorite avatars wandering around.

i’ll not be going to southby in march next year (i know, scary right) because i have the ark project taking off in january so it was the perfect time for me to go to the first sxsweco event and at the same time take in that slice of austin to get my fill for another year.  i’m going to miss it like crazy and this would have been my fifth year but the ark project is much bigger than any conference i could go to.

i went to make some connections with a variety of different people and ended up in the press room talking to scott.  this was a highlight for me because i wanted to get across about the ark project and the possibility of streaming a wide/internal shot into south by southwest from across the pond from the heart of the national forest into the hallways of southby.

connecting the two sxsw events together by using technology and using me as the link – i’ve been to both events and the ark project is a groundbreaking year long project from someone that uses technology but wants to tell the story of creating/consuming energy off the grid but living within the digital cloud.

i’m pushing out a newsletter in a few days time, do sign up to get the details as they hopefully expand – we still need a yes from scott and others to see if we can make this happen – i think it works on multiple levels from the sustainability message of streaming the video over, a view inside the ark and the surrounding area of the national forest and yet with a tech flavour.

we even might have a satellite uplink for it.. .. more on that soon. .. 

morning!

lovely day. hardly feels like i’ve had ella for any time at all in the last 12 hrs but i picked her up and as soon as she was her i’ve dropped her back again – she does have a 1pm birthday party however.

me and sam spoke briefly about having bella for one day in the middle of the week as well. it’s something that i’ve been wanting to do for a while but it really depending on transport.

chcland throw me a curve ball by suggesting that i get a vm transporter t2 instead of an iq or smart car. after much consideration (ie. about 12 hrs) i’m on the fence about which to go for.

the camper van would be a perfect backup incase anything goes weird in the ark or we want to get away for the weekend to the beach or something – it’s pretty darn slow however.

so… back to the point of this dead time blogpost i heard yesterday that an occupy nottingham style event was happening in the market square today. i’ll be wandering around that area to see if anyone turns up – i heard it was a worldwide ‘occupy’ day but i’m not sure how well that works if people only do it for today/tomorrow.

to be fair i think they need to be a lot more clear about demands otherwise it’s just going to turn into squatting sites around the world.

while i agree with this annoyance about being the 99% how do we transition those that have ‘dug’ into there ‘birds nests’ of gobs of money.

i’m still very much in a transition from losing everything due to lack of education about money and the recession and i’m building up the passions, projects i want to work on.

i have been looking at some scary figures in the last few weeks however about 16-24 year olds and that 25% of them are unemployed, this is a scary figure and something we need to address rapidly.

something that i hope that fibrecamp, ontheground training and the rattlr project can in some way help with – after all a lot of it is not about money but training how to use these new range of free web2 style tools of the internet.

point and shoot training.

morning!

lovely day. hardly feels like i’ve had ella for any time at all in the last 12 hrs but i picked her up and as soon as she was her i’ve dropped her back again – she does have a 1pm birthday party however.

me and sam spoke briefly about having bella for one day in the middle of the week as well. it’s something that i’ve been wanting to do for a while but it really depending on transport.

chcland throw me a curve ball by suggesting that i get a vm transporter t2 instead of an iq or smart car. after much consideration (ie. about 12 hrs) i’m on the fence about which to go for.

the camper van would be a perfect backup incase anything goes weird in the ark or we want to get away for the weekend to the beach or something – it’s pretty darn slow however.

so… back to the point of this dead time blogpost i heard yesterday that an occupy nottingham style event was happening in the market square today. i’ll be wandering around that area to see if anyone turns up – i heard it was a worldwide ‘occupy’ day but i’m not sure how well that works if people only do it for today/tomorrow.

to be fair i think they need to be a lot more clear about demands otherwise it’s just going to turn into squatting sites around the world.

while i agree with this annoyance about being the 99% how do we transition those that have ‘dug’ into there ‘birds nests’ of gobs of money.

i’m still very much in a transition from losing everything due to lack of education about money and the recession and i’m building up the passions, projects i want to work on.

i have been looking at some scary figures in the last few weeks however about 16-24 year olds and that 25% of them are unemployed, this is a scary figure and something we need to address rapidly.

something that i hope that fibrecamp, ontheground training and the rattlr project can in some way help with – after all a lot of it is not about money but training how to use these new range of free web2 style tools of the internet.

point and shoot training.

christ it’s been a busy week.

i’ve just managed to finish the brief edit and external sound bind of the interview with scott wilcox – the cto of sxsw itself.

it was good to get his viewpoint on the way that sxsw has scaled over the years and how they are improving with technology over the years to meet capacity.

talking of capacity i feel very close to it at the moment. after getting stuck in houston on monday and losing a day because of the weather it really put my week out of sorts.

that said, we still managed to do the reccy and ontheground event at the NTU and that all went super fine. having a super organised team helped and doing a reccy before hand as usual.

i’m now off to pick up my bella chella from burton, sitting on the train trying to fill in my dead time. i’m still behind thou but i did get my business cards all into mailchimp from last week in sxsweco which was a task i wanted to get done and dusted.

i’ve still got a stack of media to be making tomorrow for verisign and to catch up with the webperiphery release cycle on fibrecamp – stack of redesign work to do on the show pages as well.

it’s finding the time. ..

christ it’s been a busy week.

i’ve just managed to finish the brief edit and external sound bind of the interview with scott wilcox – the cto of sxsw itself.

it was good to get his viewpoint on the way that sxsw has scaled over the years and how they are improving with technology over the years to meet capacity.

talking of capacity i feel very close to it at the moment. after getting stuck in houston on monday and losing a day because of the weather it really put my week out of sorts.

that said, we still managed to do the reccy and ontheground event at the NTU and that all went super fine. having a super organised team helped and doing a reccy before hand as usual.

i’m now off to pick up my bella chella from burton, sitting on the train trying to fill in my dead time. i’m still behind thou but i did get my business cards all into mailchimp from last week in sxsweco which was a task i wanted to get done and dusted.

i’ve still got a stack of media to be making tomorrow for verisign and to catch up with the webperiphery release cycle on fibrecamp – stack of redesign work to do on the show pages as well.

it’s finding the time. ..

good catchup with everyone this morning.

we will try to get back to the soundcloud format for next week but i’ve been away for the last week or so and i’m in full on catch up mode at the moment.  listen closely for the web url, and details of all the people who were here this morning.

sorry, i’m stacked else i would link everyone up.

good catchup with everyone this morning.

we will try to get back to the soundcloud format for next week but i’ve been away for the last week or so and i’m in full on catch up mode at the moment.  listen closely for the web url, and details of all the people who were here this morning.

sorry, i’m stacked else i would link everyone up.

(sorry about the poor audio quality in the interview – lessons learnt)

today the team of myself, pcmcreative and ian dearman media were in an ‘ontheground’ capacity to document, tweet and garner attention for a fantastic talk about eco fashions from sass brown. we managed to get a brief interview before the session started about her travels, book and views on where sustainable fashion is today.

after the interview we shot some pictures with sass that she may be able to use on her website or facebook pages and we like to get this rounded media package on a half day or full day ‘ontheground’ project.  i thought they came out pretty good actually.

See the full gallery on Posterous

after our little photo shoot we managed to get access to the lecture hall and setup, we had already done a previous day reccy so we had managed to sort out the IT requirements for connectivity and a wired connection for the stream.  we ended up using wireless microphones from ian dearman media who was with us on the day because we could not really sort anything out with the AV team in time.

we had a few complaints about the screen in the stream but this was out of our control.  i had initially assumed that the wooden blinds on the side window moved but it seemed they are fixed and cannot be used as blinds and the AV team had already found the best setting they could for lighting and the screen.

See the full gallery on Posterous

we think that the projector screen contract and throw of the picture could have been adjusted but we were not able to get access to the projector controller or any help in improving that picture.  i should mention that we used flash media encoder in case we got any drop outs but it was absolutely perfect.  the audio in this stream was a really excellent thanks to ians sennheiser microphones we used.

NOTE | no audio until 8 minute 30 seconds

overall a fantastic first outing for the new triple pack team in the form of myself, pcmcreative and ian dearman media working together on providing the ontheground live stream and after meeting a gentleman called ken this week we might have access to an outside satellite truck for those normally hard to broadcast locations that we sometimes get asked to go on.

if your a nottingham business and your looking to live stream your event with full social media coverage for under a £1000 for the day do get in touch as we have the perfect solution for you.

(sorry about the poor audio quality in the interview – lessons learnt)

today the team of myself, pcmcreative and ian dearman media were in an ‘ontheground’ capacity to document, tweet and garner attention for a fantastic talk about eco fashions from sass brown. we managed to get a brief interview before the session started about her travels, book and views on where sustainable fashion is today.

after the interview we shot some pictures with sass that she may be able to use on her website or facebook pages and we like to get this rounded media package on a half day or full day ‘ontheground’ project.  i thought they came out pretty good actually.

See the full gallery on Posterous

after our little photo shoot we managed to get access to the lecture hall and setup, we had already done a previous day reccy so we had managed to sort out the IT requirements for connectivity and a wired connection for the stream.  we ended up using wireless microphones from ian dearman media who was with us on the day because we could not really sort anything out with the AV team in time.

we had a few complaints about the screen in the stream but this was out of our control.  i had initially assumed that the wooden blinds on the side window moved but it seemed they are fixed and cannot be used as blinds and the AV team had already found the best setting they could for lighting and the screen.

See the full gallery on Posterous

we think that the projector screen contract and throw of the picture could have been adjusted but we were not able to get access to the projector controller or any help in improving that picture.  i should mention that we used flash media encoder in case we got any drop outs but it was absolutely perfect.  the audio in this stream was a really excellent thanks to ians sennheiser microphones we used.

NOTE | no audio until 8 minute 30 seconds

overall a fantastic first outing for the new triple pack team in the form of myself, pcmcreative and ian dearman media working together on providing the ontheground live stream and after meeting a gentleman called ken this week we might have access to an outside satellite truck for those normally hard to broadcast locations that we sometimes get asked to go on.

if your a nottingham business and your looking to live stream your event with full social media coverage for under a £1000 for the day do get in touch as we have the perfect solution for you.

it’s great to get followed by venture people when your away at an eco conference telling people about your studio space, the ark and the nomad jackets.

i know, for a fact that with the right mentor and the right green savvy investors onboard i could rejuvenate a section of our teenager and adult population with the rising race towards social media.

i have made a suite of different ideas that alone could with the right investors make income from within six months. it’s not a gamble. i’d not be burning through lots of cash in the hope of something coming out the otherside.

the fibrecamp studios are a concept to build sustainable spaces to cater for people to use a coworking space as a media drop in centre – connecting up those local businesses in a five block radius. i’d like to have 4/5 of these self sustaining centers around the country (uk) in the next few years.

the nomad jackets are the gear for your social networking task force on the ground to service your event, brand or services in a remote or hyperlocal capacity.

my ark is an acknowledgement that it cannot be just about me. it’s about the potential future proofing of an unknown future. how do you do that? – by teaching and showing the old ways of how to eat, cook, live and create your own energy away from the world we currently know – enabling my daughter to be at least prepared to adapt to a world that is potentially ravaged by weather, climate conditions and scarcity.

and this blog, this blog me.dm is about finding that happy medium – using digital tools communicating your happy medium, not going large and not thinking small or apathy. utilizing digital tools to shape the world around you and yet notify how you did it.

assumption in an always on demand, realtime world is a dangerous thing – especially when that system grows so big and built on such frail infrastructure can be damaged so easily as we head into a digital assets world.

for me, investment is not just always about growth and success, it’s about doing the right thing by the right people at the right time. investing in people who can deliver and can inspire has so much social gain that if your doing it well.. .

.. money comes naturally.

it’s great to get followed by venture people when your away at an eco conference telling people about your studio space, the ark and the nomad jackets.

i know, for a fact that with the right mentor and the right green savvy investors onboard i could rejuvenate a section of our teenager and adult population with the rising race towards social media.

i have made a suite of different ideas that alone could with the right investors make income from within six months. it’s not a gamble. i’d not be burning through lots of cash in the hope of something coming out the otherside.

the fibrecamp studios are a concept to build sustainable spaces to cater for people to use a coworking space as a media drop in centre – connecting up those local businesses in a five block radius. i’d like to have 4/5 of these self sustaining centers around the country (uk) in the next few years.

the nomad jackets are the gear for your social networking task force on the ground to service your event, brand or services in a remote or hyperlocal capacity.

my ark is an acknowledgement that it cannot be just about me. it’s about the potential future proofing of an unknown future. how do you do that? – by teaching and showing the old ways of how to eat, cook, live and create your own energy away from the world we currently know – enabling my daughter to be at least prepared to adapt to a world that is potentially ravaged by weather, climate conditions and scarcity.

and this blog, this blog me.dm is about finding that happy medium – using digital tools communicating your happy medium, not going large and not thinking small or apathy. utilizing digital tools to shape the world around you and yet notify how you did it.

assumption in an always on demand, realtime world is a dangerous thing – especially when that system grows so big and built on such frail infrastructure can be damaged so easily as we head into a digital assets world.

for me, investment is not just always about growth and success, it’s about doing the right thing by the right people at the right time. investing in people who can deliver and can inspire has so much social gain that if your doing it well.. .

.. money comes naturally.

it’s been six months since texas saw any rain, they are going through the most terrible drought right now. i felt i had bought some uk rain with me when the heavens opens while out doing the grocery shopping with my friend sarah.

it’s rained, thunderstorms cracked and the sidewalk and brush sucked up the water like a vacuum. some concerns about trees actually splitting because of the sheer amount of time without water.

my flight from austin to houston was pushed back all day, i arrived into houston in a blur, crossing time zones and confused by gates – i had missed my flight to heathrow.

so had others, in fact i stood in a line for two hours with everyone else who had missed connecting flights because of the weather. my feet were hurting – i was fighting tiredness of spending a day in an airport.

after sorting out a free hotel for the night and being told to always carry $50 for emergency i was given a free hotel for the night, $20 of food vouchers, a freshen up pack and sent on my merry way to find the shuttle buses for the hotel.

that was at 10pm last night, it’s now 10:20am monday morning and my flight is later on this afternoon. i’m using the time to catch up on blogging and thoughts. the weather system really hit home about traveling in the future and the delicate balance we constantly live in via mother nature.

so, gonna try this flight again today – let’s just hope the weather holds out, rain and thunderstorms are said to be happening again later today.

props to the continental team at the service desk in houston (some up since 5am) that hung in there and dealt with screaming kids and old folk and brits like me – i’m pleased that i didn’t have to sleep on the floor of the airport!

it’s been six months since texas saw any rain, they are going through the most terrible drought right now. i felt i had bought some uk rain with me when the heavens opens while out doing the grocery shopping with my friend sarah.

it’s rained, thunderstorms cracked and the sidewalk and brush sucked up the water like a vacuum. some concerns about trees actually splitting because of the sheer amount of time without water.

my flight from austin to houston was pushed back all day, i arrived into houston in a blur, crossing time zones and confused by gates – i had missed my flight to heathrow.

so had others, in fact i stood in a line for two hours with everyone else who had missed connecting flights because of the weather. my feet were hurting – i was fighting tiredness of spending a day in an airport.

after sorting out a free hotel for the night and being told to always carry $50 for emergency i was given a free hotel for the night, $20 of food vouchers, a freshen up pack and sent on my merry way to find the shuttle buses for the hotel.

that was at 10pm last night, it’s now 10:20am monday morning and my flight is later on this afternoon. i’m using the time to catch up on blogging and thoughts. the weather system really hit home about traveling in the future and the delicate balance we constantly live in via mother nature.

so, gonna try this flight again today – let’s just hope the weather holds out, rain and thunderstorms are said to be happening again later today.

props to the continental team at the service desk in houston (some up since 5am) that hung in there and dealt with screaming kids and old folk and brits like me – i’m pleased that i didn’t have to sleep on the floor of the airport!

ha! – the vanity app!

that’s what i’m calling it because i cannot think of a better name for it right now and i’m only saying what your probably thinking about it.

kukuapps (nottingham) approached me before i came out and asked if i would be a brand advocate for their ipad application which is like a super lite flipboard style information turning app.

we only had a few days before coming out so lucy pulled together something quickly that might work that we could iterate quickly and i could feedback once i got back on. it worked out pretty well.

one of the best things about doing apps building and iterating ontheground is using something like testflightapp to push apps really quickly to get version feedback from those using it in the field.

while i was in austin for instance the team managed to push a version with a video embedded into the app that i managed to install and sync all from my wifi connection without having to sync with a machine – it’s a boon for developers, they just need your device udid to be able to push apps to your device.

people seemed to like the quick flicking nature of going through my four major projects and were very interested in the ark and the jackets. i need to do more work on my blog to pull that into categories when i get back.

as for the application i’m hoping that i can work with the kukuapps teams to add some much needed features into the application so i can grab someones email address, also utilizing the ipad2 camera to grab feedback about each page would be brilliant.

i’ll be talking to kukuapps about a more advanced app when i get back that can have a few lightweight dynamic elements that i can charge for in the store.

the ark really needs an app just for it alone – pulling a variety of content from different services that i have tagged under my accounts.

right, i’m sitting here in austin waiting for my plane to houston unable to push this out because i gone through my thirty minutes of allocated time – time for lunch.

ha! – the vanity app!

that’s what i’m calling it because i cannot think of a better name for it right now and i’m only saying what your probably thinking about it.

kukuapps (nottingham) approached me before i came out and asked if i would be a brand advocate for their ipad application which is like a super lite flipboard style information turning app.

we only had a few days before coming out so lucy pulled together something quickly that might work that we could iterate quickly and i could feedback once i got back on. it worked out pretty well.

one of the best things about doing apps building and iterating ontheground is using something like testflightapp to push apps really quickly to get version feedback from those using it in the field.

while i was in austin for instance the team managed to push a version with a video embedded into the app that i managed to install and sync all from my wifi connection without having to sync with a machine – it’s a boon for developers, they just need your device udid to be able to push apps to your device.

people seemed to like the quick flicking nature of going through my four major projects and were very interested in the ark and the jackets. i need to do more work on my blog to pull that into categories when i get back.

as for the application i’m hoping that i can work with the kukuapps teams to add some much needed features into the application so i can grab someones email address, also utilizing the ipad2 camera to grab feedback about each page would be brilliant.

i’ll be talking to kukuapps about a more advanced app when i get back that can have a few lightweight dynamic elements that i can charge for in the store.

the ark really needs an app just for it alone – pulling a variety of content from different services that i have tagged under my accounts.

right, i’m sitting here in austin waiting for my plane to houston unable to push this out because i gone through my thirty minutes of allocated time – time for lunch.

See the full gallery on Posterous

i kinda fell across this.

someone back home said i should probably ‘drop’ in to the occupy wallstreet like i’m some kind of unlimited fund traveller that could just ‘hop on a plane’ over to nyc.

i’d forgotten that these occupy events were starting to sprout up all over. it was kinda of a good feeling for ‘the people’ to be showing a presence in austin about it.

while i was there i met a guy that told me about the ‘freedom tower’ system – a mifi enabled tower with both 2.4ghz and 5ghz aerials attached to a pole with a massive ups in the bottom powering the routers and kit.

elsewhere i saw guys on the street side shouting at people driving foreign cars, saying it was ‘foreign junk’ – i smiled. whatever you make think about america they are very proud of their country. i think you would be hard to find a person that is not proud of the country they live in.

it’s just most of the time, the ‘people’ are pissed with they way they are treated and how the system ‘does’ them over. i was interested to see lots of people wanting to take roles to put a structured approach to communicating those annoyances.

fair play to everyone who is in ‘occupy’ mode – i personally think those not in the corporate world and not in jobs should all be out making their voices heard about their stories.

we are in a golden time when the social media message and storytelling is a brilliant way to amplify your wants and needs – the mainstream media need something more creative to do as well so it’s a perfect story piece for them.

i’d like to think that we can as the 99% of people have an input on what we see as fair but i do very much feel trying to break down the barriers that seem to be in place protecting those at the top of the money tree hard to break.

i think we all wish that people do the right thing by people. i think re-energizing our local communities, extracting the good out of people and enabling them with a ‘what have you’ approach is the only way forward.

the money seems gone from the system, the financial system seems to be in tatters constantly and people everyday are battling between the gaps. on top of this the environment is taking a constant daily beating adding to the mix.

it’s certainly made me think about what i want the ark project to project outside to the wider world. the conversation about how we consume, creation and share are ultimate aims.

as for the people on the streets, on the web who are fighting against those corrupt and squandering your tax i applaud you. please maintain your clarity and your level headed approach and keep documenting your distain.

we are all now the media.

See the full gallery on Posterous

i kinda fell across this.

someone back home said i should probably ‘drop’ in to the occupy wallstreet like i’m some kind of unlimited fund traveller that could just ‘hop on a plane’ over to nyc.

i’d forgotten that these occupy events were starting to sprout up all over. it was kinda of a good feeling for ‘the people’ to be showing a presence in austin about it.

while i was there i met a guy that told me about the ‘freedom tower’ system – a mifi enabled tower with both 2.4ghz and 5ghz aerials attached to a pole with a massive ups in the bottom powering the routers and kit.

elsewhere i saw guys on the street side shouting at people driving foreign cars, saying it was ‘foreign junk’ – i smiled. whatever you make think about america they are very proud of their country. i think you would be hard to find a person that is not proud of the country they live in.

it’s just most of the time, the ‘people’ are pissed with they way they are treated and how the system ‘does’ them over. i was interested to see lots of people wanting to take roles to put a structured approach to communicating those annoyances.

fair play to everyone who is in ‘occupy’ mode – i personally think those not in the corporate world and not in jobs should all be out making their voices heard about their stories.

we are in a golden time when the social media message and storytelling is a brilliant way to amplify your wants and needs – the mainstream media need something more creative to do as well so it’s a perfect story piece for them.

i’d like to think that we can as the 99% of people have an input on what we see as fair but i do very much feel trying to break down the barriers that seem to be in place protecting those at the top of the money tree hard to break.

i think we all wish that people do the right thing by people. i think re-energizing our local communities, extracting the good out of people and enabling them with a ‘what have you’ approach is the only way forward.

the money seems gone from the system, the financial system seems to be in tatters constantly and people everyday are battling between the gaps. on top of this the environment is taking a constant daily beating adding to the mix.

it’s certainly made me think about what i want the ark project to project outside to the wider world. the conversation about how we consume, creation and share are ultimate aims.

as for the people on the streets, on the web who are fighting against those corrupt and squandering your tax i applaud you. please maintain your clarity and your level headed approach and keep documenting your distain.

we are all now the media.

i don’t think i’ll every get over the sheer amount of product in shopping centers in america. well not just in america but the amount of product in general we have in supermarkets.

how much does go to waste? – why have we never done anything to address that dead time problem when you do go super market shopping? – we push these shopping trolleys around sometimes in a blur pulling things that spark at us from the sidelines between the coupon codes.

what if you had a tablet based unit in the trolley, making suggestions after auth (maybe qr code or something) about what you should be eating based on your other information on your diet, weekly workout and upcoming birthdays etc.

add to that row awareness, food discounts and leaderboard social updating i think you could really take that shopping experience to the next level and communicate in a multitude of ways – both sales advertising, eco and well being.

notifications – it’s the key to doing something in the space your at right now.

i don’t think i’ll every get over the sheer amount of product in shopping centers in america. well not just in america but the amount of product in general we have in supermarkets.

how much does go to waste? – why have we never done anything to address that dead time problem when you do go super market shopping? – we push these shopping trolleys around sometimes in a blur pulling things that spark at us from the sidelines between the coupon codes.

what if you had a tablet based unit in the trolley, making suggestions after auth (maybe qr code or something) about what you should be eating based on your other information on your diet, weekly workout and upcoming birthdays etc.

add to that row awareness, food discounts and leaderboard social updating i think you could really take that shopping experience to the next level and communicate in a multitude of ways – both sales advertising, eco and well being.

notifications – it’s the key to doing something in the space your at right now.

it’s been a different trip to austin this time around. less people, less buzz and not as noisy with a bit of time to wander and chill into the city.

i had a few occasions to use public transit this time around and found that the 100 flyer from the airport was a super easy experience – and it cost $1

on top of this i bought a weekly travel ticket for $9 that gave me unlimited travel for the whole of the week while i was here – trust me i used it!

at the closing party at the mohawk i accidentally let me ipad2 slip out the bag smashing the screen badly. using google maps i was able to not only get a route but also date overlaid on cost and when the next bus was!

i’ve never seen this integration back home yet, probably because we don’t allow people to mashup the data – you really do change the metrics of public transport when you have it on demand.

i took a bus out to the barton creek mall apple store and they not only swapped out my ipad2 they added an extra key on my keyboard.

that is when thou i encountered the food mall and the insane amount of different food stuffs on offer – see my other blog post coming up about that after my occupy austin post.

it’s been a different trip to austin this time around. less people, less buzz and not as noisy with a bit of time to wander and chill into the city.

i had a few occasions to use public transit this time around and found that the 100 flyer from the airport was a super easy experience – and it cost $1

on top of this i bought a weekly travel ticket for $9 that gave me unlimited travel for the whole of the week while i was here – trust me i used it!

at the closing party at the mohawk i accidentally let me ipad2 slip out the bag smashing the screen badly. using google maps i was able to not only get a route but also date overlaid on cost and when the next bus was!

i’ve never seen this integration back home yet, probably because we don’t allow people to mashup the data – you really do change the metrics of public transport when you have it on demand.

i took a bus out to the barton creek mall apple store and they not only swapped out my ipad2 they added an extra key on my keyboard.

that is when thou i encountered the food mall and the insane amount of different food stuffs on offer – see my other blog post coming up about that after my occupy austin post.

oh, i forgot to post this yesterday from the food truck area i was around looking at that shipping container.

i’m an absolute sucker for anything with ‘kebab’ in the name. it’s deep rooted in my dna, i might need to have this removed from my dna at some point!

oh, i forgot to post this yesterday from the food truck area i was around looking at that shipping container.

i’m an absolute sucker for anything with ‘kebab’ in the name. it’s deep rooted in my dna, i might need to have this removed from my dna at some point!

p687.mov
Watch on Posterous

i went to a very awesome little food truck yesterday – i couldn’t quite get over how fully kitted out the kitchen was and the fridge area looked.

the pricing of things was a little more expensive than the average fair but you can expect this from the ingredients and quality they offer. i was interested in the shipping container more than anything but the food was a double bonus!

i was served by christoph terrell and the food was absolutely first class. you can find the food truck on 6th & lamar with the actual main business offering at the Triangle.