Pieces of a Man Think it. Do it. Be it. Embellish.

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Coinciding with his new biography, there's a Spike Lee feature on Radio 4's Film Programme (available until next Saturday);

As a new biography of Spike Lee is published, Francine Stock discusses the career of the African American film-maker with Kaleem Aftab, author of the biography, and to Gaylene Gould of the British Film Institute.

This screencast describes the lifecycle of a wiki page. It's about 10 minutes long and loses some focus in places, but it's worth sticking with. The topic is the heavy metal umlaut as used by Motorhead and Spinal Tap. It demonstrates how a few simple lines on the topic get edited over time to become quite a lengthy page with sections on different aspects.

It does a great job of showing how Wikis work, and the most interesting part is that you get to see a battle erupt as a page viewer tries to deface the page while someone else defends it by removing their edits. The tussle goes back and forth for a few rounds and perfectly illustrates the social process that moderates wiki content.

Once you've had a look at that, look at this; last week the LA Times allowed readers to wiki its editorial on the occupation of Iraq. What happened next is hilarious...

Came across this site honouring US war dead. Choosing a month at random - April 2004 - I couldn't believe how many soldiers had died, about 150, and the impact is all the more sobering because each listing has small picture, invariably one of them proudly smiling in front the Stars and Stripes. Yet, today on BBC News;

Vice-President Dick Cheney has said the insurgency is in its 'last throes', while Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has warned it could last up to 12 years.

Yani picks one of the first strawberries to ripen in our new fruit and vegetable patch. There will never be enough to fill a punnet, since they are getting picked as soon as they're ready and individually divided up between the four of us in our special little harvest festival. The raspberries are also starting to go pink, and a tomato has even appeared on one of the three plants, albeit a 5 millimetre green tomato. It's all rather exciting. I must be middle-aged if gardening can be this much fun; last time I felt horticultural stirrings at all was many years ago and it was an altogether stranger fruit;

In countless spare rooms, attics and garages, hundreds of thousands of leafy plants are being lovingly tended, their roots fed by nutrient-rich water, their leaves bathed by hot lamps 24 hours a day. And if the neighbours have a room with the windows blacked out from which emanates a rich, earthy smell, they are probably growing something far more potent than tomatoes.

The police arrived today to get a statement from Miss Marple about the robbery over the road last week. Jo's also been noticing more dodgy stuff since, and a particular cleaner seems to be on the periphery each time. Then suddenly she pulled up outside the house the other night and shouted "I was just cleaning there", so obviously the police have been asking questions and she's figured out who's been watching them. We'll be talking about the witness protection programme next.

There's an element of 'I told you so' in this. I would have kept my nose out from the start, but I still felt a bit guilty reading the incredibly timely 'Have you no conscience?' in the Guardian over the weekend. In it, the writer lambasts those who refuse to join the fight to reclaim public space from fear and intimidation. Unfortunately, in an area where a brick can easily go through the windows on either my car or my house, the quiet life beats the moral stance every time.

Interesting interview with Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie (designer of LotusNotes, now with Microsoft). They discuss how people are using and abusing email and collaboration tools, and speculate about future developments. On competition, Gates describes the status quo as Microsoft's biggest competitor. I like that.

E-mail has become a victim of its own success. Whereas initially it might have been used to communicate a simple thought or a message from place to place, today people are using it to manage entire projects and teams. Funneling messages in chronological order into an in-box is not necessarily the best model for dealing with different projects, different teams, different issues, while other unrelated things get intermixed with those. You have no sense of the priorities.

A recent survey conducted by Microsoft finds that workers average only three productive days per week and lays the blame on among other things, unproductive staff meetings. The most common productivity pitfalls are;

• unclear objectives
  
• lack of team communication and ineffective meetings
  
• unclear priorities
  
• procrastination
  
• lack of team communication
  
• ineffective meetings

I'm surprised people think they get that much done. Reminds me of a joke someone at the university told me; Management asked the unions to support a three day week. The unions replied, "We're not working an extra day for anybody!"

Intelligent insights into the attractions of CSI by the writer JG Ballard;

In CSI, not only are there no cars, but there are no guns. The team wear sidearms, but I have rarely seen a gun drawn in self-defence, let alone fired. The only bullets discharged end up in calibrated water tanks. The assumption is clearly made that reason and logic need never rely on anything so crude as brute force. No cars, no guns and, even more significant, no emotions, except in the flashbacks to the actual crime.

Is it a cat? Is it a train? Either way, the new and very strange looking Tohoku bullet train in Japan is going to run at 225 miles-an-hour. Faster pussycat, kill, kill, kill!!

The 2005-06 fixture list is out. Looks like the most likely and desirable (sic) trips this season will be Coventry, Crewe, Leicester, Hull, Leeds, Burnley, Preston and Sheffield Wednesday. Putting the Sheffield United game on Boxing Day is a downer, since other things are likely to be happening at that time.

Roger Ebert has been given his own star on the Walk of Fame. Thoroughly deserved. The only time his advice ever failed me was when he gave only 2 stars out of 4 in his review of Pulp Fiction, but apart from that I couldn't imagine having watched films the last 10 years or so without him.

Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert might not be a movie star but his work has been so memorable that he has earned his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ebert was named the Chicago Sun-Times film critic six months after joining the paper in 1966. In 1975, he became the first film critic to receive a Pulitzer prize for arts criticism.

We witnessed a burglary over the road at 4am this morning. A couple of lads in hoodies pulled up outside the offices opposite and started loading boxes into the back of a car from the alley next to the building. It was pretty much broad daylight. (But what can you do if you're a thief? So much stuff, so little time.)

A couple of strange things about it; firstly, the security gates weren't locked like they normally are because it looked pretty easy for them to just drive in and out with minimal effort. Secondly, the stuff was just sitting there. They didn't have to enter the building at all. Inside job? They certainly weren't employees.

Anyway, we called 999 and reported the registration number even though it was probably a stolen car. Hopefully they won't have seen who spotted them. Part of me says forget it, they robbed a business, why risk any hassle? The only people who will lose out are another set of thieves - the insurance companies - but I suppose it's the right thing to do. Time will tell if that's a bad choice.

This report examines the debate over the success or failure of e-learning in the USA. It tracked the changing attitudes about and perceptions of e-learning by faculty and technical staff over 18 months across a wide sample of US colleges and universities each with substantial investments in e-learning. It also mapped the changing supply of e-learning providers and products.

This article about changing trends in the French wine industry shows wine as a mirror of wider social and economic change.

In this new wine world, growers can only compete globally by making good wines that have an 'international style'. On the other hand are the keepers of the 'terroir', that traditional French view that a wine should be a complex thing that speaks of its origin, and tastes of the soil in which it was grown. In the two trends is a distillation of the wider row between Tony Blair and French president Jacques Chirac: the global free market Anglo-Saxon model, versus the local, subsidised, social French model.

We watched one of the extras on the DVD of The Incredibles last night. It's part of the film that never made the final cut and got developed instead as a short called Jack Jack Attacks. In it the babysitter discovers some the baby's hidden powers that never get seen in the film.

Generally it's very funny, but one part of it is quite disturbing where the baby bursts into a ball of flames. It happens several times - and I discovered on the web that there's a name for this, Pyrokinesis - but as I watched it I couldn't help think about Jamie Bulger and Child's Play 3, the video (they say) influenced the two children who murdered him.

I wondered what Oscar was thinking while watching this, and could imagine him setting fire to dolls as a result if he could get hold of matches (especially since his father was something of a well-known pyromaniac in younger years).

I also wondered if Pixar have thought of this - perhaps it was the reason the scene got pulled from the film. I'm surprised that they would want to risk it at all, anywhere. All it would take is one incident for the media to be able to whip up some pretty bad PR around their wholesome product.

Adaptive Path publish a regular piece on different aspects of usability. The latest is on breaking away from user entrapment and focussing instead on empowerment;

When Google launched, one reason it shocked the Web community was its focus on getting you to where you actually wanted to go. How could there be a successful business model in actively sending people away from your site? Seven years and a $75 billion market capitalization later, that question has obviously been answered.

An interesting article on knowledge working as a craft and its implications.

"In a craft economy, your craft was your birthright and you learned it through long apprenticeship. One strength of the industrial revolution was to define jobs and skills that could be taught more rapidly and systematically than craft apprenticing practices. Whether it is the fundamental nature of knowledge work or the state of our understanding of that work, learning to do knowledge work is more apprenticeship than job training."

The author argues that there's a tension between the long cycle nature of knowledge work apprenticeship and its rapid evolution. I've been thinking more and more about support for super users and communities of practice as a more sustainable approach to IT skills development, and the same concern applies.

One man's open letter to the music industry detailing all the reasons - with examples of specific album downloads - why he is no longer happy to just buy music and is now going to use other means;

"I still buy, but now I also steal. You have forfeited your right to my loyalty. And maybe you're too lost and beaten to care, and even more likely it's too late to matter, but for a few minutes I'm going to pretend that neither of those things are so. I'm going to pretend that you're still capable of awareness and reason, and in a spirit of truth that you long ago stopped deserving, while I've still taken little enough to list, I'm going to tell you exactly what I have stolen from you, and why."

Debates over the best film of all time tend to go no further than Hollywood classics such as Citizen Kane. But the influential Halliwell's Film Guide now says the title belongs to Tokyo Story, a little-known Japanese film in which nothing much happens.

Labels: 2005

Apparently the ref extended the 1970 Brazil-England game in the World Cup: "When I blew for time the players didn't hear the whistle and as it was such a great game I let it continue for a few minutes."

Labels: 2005

Ongoing experiences of a guy from UC Davis like my old pal John Byrd, experiencing the bizarre delights of Japan, including 12 year-olds regularly trying to grab his dick;

"You know what's kind of funny though? Some kids can't say "Good morning", but damn near all of them can ask if I have a big dick. Or, "bigu dikku" in Engrish."

Labels: 2005

Proof that trailers mean nothing;

"Trailers are full of deception because what they want you to do is to see the movie they want you to see, not the movie that it is. The only way to see the movie that it is is to go see the movie."

Labels: 2005

Will Hutton responds to the French referendum on the European constitution;

The French Revolution changed Europe for ever; the bankruptcy of France's political system in the 1930s and consequent French weakness created the opening for Hitler's armies. Then it was the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 under De Gaulle that allowed successive French Presidents to pursue European integration with such vigour. Without the concentration of power in the President, on which De Gaulle insisted, along with the evisceration of its national assembly, France could not have driven European integration as hard as it did. Where France goes from here will have an impact on all of us.

Labels: 2005

Spent the weekend camping on the Llyn peninsula in North Wales for Jo and her folks to see King Pleasure and the Biscuit Boys at the Abersoch Jazz Festival. I remember a couple of years back there was a big advertising campaign for Wales with the tagline 2 hours and a million miles away. It used airbrushed images like Mum and Dad walking hand-in-hand at sunset while the kids romped in the surf, alongside captions like 2 hours ago they were at each others' throats.

Well, with the last few visits to Wales having been to Rhyl and Prestatyn - on the Tattoo Riviera - I'd assumed that this other Wales was figment of a marketing man's imagination. But it exists. And it's the promised two hours away. And Abersoch is its name.

There was a harbour that disappeared at low tide in the evening leaving lots of sand and stranded boats to roam around. It was a bit surprising, with so many people in town for the festival, that hardly anyone was down there so we didn't worry too much about going off to watch the bands and instead spent both evenings on the beach in the sun while the kids paddled in the sea. I really like this picture of tracks on the beach from the tractors that pull the boats in.

There was even a bit of wind on the Sunday and Oscar flew his new helicopter kite for the first time. Definitely a place to go back to and only a couple of hours away with a fair wind.

Labels: 2005

I was a paranoid wreck in the run up to Oti's big day - invitations went out just before we went to Devon for the week so we couldn't get the RSVPs and I spent the whole time plagued by visions of no-one turning up.

Fortunately, this social-fear-by-proxy was unfounded - most of his class turned up and he had a great time. He was crowned king of the party and got to sit on a throne at the head of the table in his ermine robes as all his little pals stuffed themselves with junk food and bounced off the walls.

The staff at the venue were kind enough to totally fix the game of musical statues so he won. It was a travesty really - he didn't cotton on to the whole standing still thing until about the 5th round but even at the age of four or five the other kids showed commendable political awareness and all took their inevitable elimination on the chin.

Labels: 2005

Went to a free festival in Rusholme today with Mum and the kids. It was raining on and off, but that's not enough to dampen Manchester spirits, especially with lots of off-beat activities and installations scattered round Platt Fields such as water-squirting wheelie bins ambushing passers-by.

The kids got their faces painted. Oti enjoyed the creation of his spiderman face but burst into tears when he saw the end result in the mirror at the end and smudged it all off straight away.

Most memorable was the girls dressed as restaurant tables so that their heads poked through the top and were crammed into small birdcages. They danced through the crowds stopping every few minutes to scream and wail until people fed them with grapes through the bars. Weird but great.

Labels: 2005

A great time was had camping near Ilfracombe over the last few days. Just like last time we risked a holiday in Britain, we lucked out with the weather and got four hot days on the trot. Best of all, though, the perfect campsite at this moment in time; play area in front of the tent, heated pool behind, showers to the left and bar to the right. We barely left the site the whole five days.

The kids had a whale of a time on the swings and climbing frame, and when they got bored of that, we all went swimming. The week followed a rhythmic ... play, swim, barbecue, beer ... play, swim, barbecue, beer ... I even got to read a book - admittedly a bit of lightweight holiday fodder - but a radical holiday achievement nonetheless.

Yes, we'll definitely be going back to probably the best campsite in the world as soon as the sun looks like it's going to give us a long weekend. The only drawback with having so much fun was that I completely forgot to take any piccies. Oh well.

Labels: 2005