a good show this week - and we think we fixed the frame rate problem. all we need to do now is get a better camera that we can white balance properly because our aging canon hv20 is really on it's last legs. we will still use it as a second camera because it's 1080i hdmi signal but we really have to get something new now. i've had it five years. that's good in video camera technology let me tell you! :)

so from this week, the shownotes. .

- ontheground at sxsweco
- ipad2 for using the video camera on the ground for interviews (keek) 
- awesome week in the lacemarkethouse lunch club (food by @yorkshiregirl)
- the ark project starts to look like start of 2012
- sxsweco planning and preprep
- wordpress .tv domain setup for nottingham
- tech on trial at the gallery of justice friday morning
- city bikes in nottingham needed
- cj is engaged with the audiences europe JOLT
- sutherland & barnett and brainstorming
- lucylocket ramp up their social media output
- using real names on google+

i saw this video from scott stratten on TED about three months ago.  it filled me up, i'm hyper sensitive at the best of times.  i've been living by this code for about a year now since i moved to nottingham.  i miss my daughter like crazy and only ever get to see her once a week - but things are moving and changing.  life is getting better, i can see a better tomorrow.  tomorrow will always come and it's up to us to make sure we put the variables in place to make that day awesome.

i'm still in that 'keep going' stage however that scott mentions - i'm aware of it, i know it's not healthy i know you have to be in the moment but be respectful of others sharing that moment with you.  

i think it's shaped the digital relationships that i have with people because of the way i reflect a lot on life.  a life transaction of any kind be it love, money, time should always be something that you take on board, learn from and adapt too - go with and reflect on.  not just keep going and allow the world to wash over you.  you should be engaged in the world around you instead of just marching through and consuming.

it's taken me a long time and i'm STILL learning how to do this without it being about me and what i want, or this dream of what could be.  you have to make with what you have and you have to make it now, do it and it's done.  then you spend time with your children - for me, that's ella.

it always will be, just ella.  just ella, i never want anymore children - it's her, she - the little girl and her soul and lovely nature - the reflection of myself and her mum and he warmth for life that powers mine.  when someone saves your life it's not simply a word of thanks - it's a continued reflective process.  

without my ella, i know.  for a fact - i would not be the person i am today - i will never forget, i will always invest my time, patience and knowledge in the hope that she enjoys her life with a fully rounded experience of what it is to be human, and for the time that i'm on this planet that she knows how much her daddy loves her.

scott stratten is not only really fucking awesome at navigating life, he totally understand what it is to love, learn and to give back.  you like him because he's the guy you would hang with because he's right.  you can be right too.

you just need to stop thinking about you and starting thinking about everyone else.

they say it's the energy you put out.

you put good energy out into the world and it will return to you.  i consider myself a fairly upstanding member of the community in that the work i'm trying to do is to communicate and become a platform for others to talk through.  like a medium then.  a digital spirit medium (me.dm) get it finally?

four months have passed by rapidly it seems but i feel that there has been progress - we are days away from having complete forms for matched funding and we do have money to get that product built.  we did win some seedup money and that is there, in an account - because i don't have one.  the fibrecamp space won it, so that's what it is for.

i'm still skint thou, more so because of the ending of the four months of working tax credit of £50 a week.  yes, i've managed poorly to live off it (not complaining when i had it) with train rides, food and entertaining daughter on the weekends.  i know that's more than some people have in the world and i'm respectful of that.  you stretch out your abilities, when things are good you barely reflect on what bad looks like or tighten the purse strings - you feel in some way the world owes you it for putting the time in, time served and all that.

so you see my reflection, my bouncing and the brain processes of putting progress, emotions and reality on hold some days is just the way i cater for things instead of falling down a never ending chasm chasing a mystical dragon as a white wizard of social media.  i know, that if i continue to follow that dragon sooner or later i have to fight it - and while fighting is all i have, having the right tools to be in the flight to fight mood requires prep time.

anywho.

i've just got back from a redial thirty minute session.  sounds like some kind of new form of relaxation technique but it was ringing the '3791' key sequence in the job centre in the vain hope that the reason nobody was answering was because like a muppit in the heart of stress town i had bashed the keys wrong in true homer savaloy fingers fashion.  it was not the case.

and that readers is when the grim kicks in, the reality that your there again, in the backwash of twisted turmoil between emotion discourse, money and fighting for validation to be a member of the working numbers.  that we require money to survive, we need our trinkets and to oil our souls with the very things that often add more pressure to a situation not best assessed.

i deserve a good job and regular money, i know this to be true because i help people indirectly brutal as it maybe to stop and think and believe and empower and that has a worldwide value.  i'm not asking sometimes for payment i'm just asking for your belief.  i never got through to the number, i sat there with the tones just repeating over and over waiting for my virtual tank from the matrix to pick up.

my tank however is probably named howard and he wears the same trousers he worn in the sixth form at school.  he drives a metro, the last one in existance and it is a off colour orange with a torn passenger seat with a fortnights worth of kfc memoriblia in the passenger footwell.  he's probably eating his pack of four sausage rolls from greggs (he only wanted one but that four pack looked a good deal) while i'm waiting at the end of this phone wondering when i might delight in purchasing greggs again to quell the gurgling beast.

i'll try again tomorrow.

quicklink | kickstarter

i don't remember the year. all i remember is seeing a bunch of hackers sitting around in a room talking about hacking on a tv channel streamed using realplayer.

that was the first time i remember pseudo tv. something so far ahead of it's time i felt i had stumbled on something so advanced that it could possibly not be happening.

back then, streaming video was a few options but mainly helix and the whole realplayer was where it was at - clunky little video streams and black websites with blinking tags. early netscape years.

i was a clubber back then, downloading music from a variety of sites, probably pre napster or around the same time (maybe direct connection days) i cannot remember to be honest. pre bit-torrent.

the years passed by and video streaming was always something that i was going to be interested in, that's why i used a lot of services since the pseudo days to see what worked.

i spent a year on operator 11 with my own show called thegravity and met a really interesting community but money ran out, the software was the best for doing interactive video chats but it couldn't scale as it ran out of money - spending all of it's money on a LA studio and over the top pricing of adverts and stings probably.

i found out that josh was the brains behind operator 11 after doing some crawling around the web at the time before he decided to chip to ethiopia. it was interesting to know about this guy but not actually know him.

imagine knowing of someone for a decade and using his software and ideas. you tend to have a familiar view of the digital world around you. they are there, in the background watching.

well he's back. and he's on kick-starter looking for $25k for his wired digital city. with only 9 days to go and only 7k raised i have to think that without some serious promotion he's gonna have trouble - which is a shame because regardless of how batshit he might have been, is now or how much money he might have spent badly (himself or through others) his visionary outlook on this stuff is first rate.

that said, he's done it before, is there anything new, do people who remember him trust him anymore. is it anything new. should they even bother pumping more money into it? - does that legacy matter now in this 140 character disconnected world?

i hope so, because regardless of what you think of josh and his actions - he made you think about the world differently. some of the main tech blogs know josh very well.

will they get back behind him or just be happy to remember the madness of the basement experiments of 'they live in public' and no see anymore value in his ideas.

i'd personally love to interview josh (if you reading this josh - dm_clanlife_uk) as i have a lot of questions to ask him as a fan and virtual advocate that followed him over that decade as he explored his digital decadence.

hope you raise the money josh! (and if you want someone to live in the city with you let me know)

p.s - i'll update this blog post tomorrow (mobile atm) with the quicklink for the kick-starter project for donations.

for the two evenings back at the hotel in russellville we always had a collection of phils around (we all stayed at the same hotel pretty much) to talk about the day and the weirdness that was being around a collection of people we had never met who shared the same name.

it was a welcoming addition to our evenings in the dry town of phil campbell (although not russellville where most of us stayed - even their was no pubs nearby just the ability to purchase it from walmart) to sink a few beers to reflect and converse about the days events.  i still remember looking at that childrens play area with all the metal work all twisted and fused.

i'm not sure how anyone forgets seeing something like that kind of scale of tornado.