I rode my bike to Buckingham Palace today, checking out Brompton, Knightsbridge, Victoria and Chelsea on the way. I raced a bus down from Knightsbridge to Sloane Square which was quite fun. He just won though - higher top speed. After that I meandered to the palace, I didn't mean to go there but suddenly I was on Buckingham Palace Road and I thought what the hey. I stopped for a bit and gawped at the tourists. I was just posting to my moblog when it started to rain, then hail. Got very wet on the way back and didn't really know where I was going for much of it, buses either side, glasses covered with water. I was quite glad when I found Chelsea Bridge and followed the river home (rivers are extremely handy navigational aids).
When I first got my bike I thought riding in the city would be quite scary, and on my first outing I was kind of intimidated. I'd only ridden in the countryside around my Mum's house before. But it's really not at all scary. You can always just stop and ride on the pavement or walk. Today I noticed that traffic lights, which of course cover London, cut great rifts in the traffic flow. So when the traffic is moving you just go straight and try to be predictable. Then wait for a light to leave everyone behind you for a bit and do whatever maneuvering is required, e.g. turning right across three lanes of the A4 at half past five. Rush hour is a good time to ride, there are lots of other cyclists about and the real traffic is mostly static or very slow moving.
The other thing about riding a bike in London is that you can explore for miles and miles in a relatively short space of time and you're outside experiencing it. You can look around, which you can't in a car. You can be more flexible with the road system as well, seeing as you can instantly transform into a pedestrian whenever it's convinient. I'm just wondering where to go next. I might explore the south bank a bit more. Hmm, it's difficult to know where the best stuff to bike around is :-).
I haven't been riding long and I'm probably being a touch naive, I'm sure I'll have an event of some kind at some point, but for the time being riding in London is one of those things where everyone thinks it's madness, but actually it's nowhere near as scary as they think. Kind of like being out after dark in Nairobi (though that did take some getting used to), or going to the Bronx. Try something scary today, maybe you'll find it's really exhilarating.
6:04, Tuesday April 6th, 2004 • feeling jubilent • no comments
Saturday I started hacking in some of things I've been thinking about for a while. Group support basically. "Hypothetical gives an established group a place to hang out online" is to be the value proposition. So I created a social software style login page, i.e. one that won't let you in until you fill in a form :-). My version allows you to visit however, though that isn't yet implemented. I also implemented the beginnings of the group membership subsystem and started modding the current features so that they exist in a group environment. Cool thought: groups is Hypothetical virtualisation.
Tonight I hacked a profile section together in just over an hour. It reads the config layout like wwWebflow, though there's only basic information there at the moment (very much unlike wwWebflow). That will get fleshed out though. For the first time in Hype 2, it's possible to change your theme! Not that there are any other themes to use :-(. Profile section lacks niceties as well, such as drop downs where appropriate and things like that. Like I said, more context needed in the config layout. Once the data is in the layout, drawing on it is as easy as {html_options}.
You cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
Members are different than users. The core group.
The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
Things to code for:
If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."
Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. [...] You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
A non-rule choice snippet:
All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. At the very least, the formal part is what's substantiated in code -- "the software works this way."
The informal part is the sense of "how we do it around here." And no matter how is substantiated in code or written in charter, whatever, there will always be an informal part as well. You can't separate the two.
And:
Users have to be able to identify themselves and there has to be a penalty for switching handles. The penalty for switching doesn't have to be total. But if I change my handle on the system, I have to lose some kind of reputation or some kind of context. This keeps the system functioning.
16:45, Saturday April 3rd, 2004 • feeling critical • no comments
Monster is an amazing film. As I sat down at the beginning I thought, I'm not sure I want to watch this. The previous film I saw was 21 Grams, also excellent, but in no way jolly. I have to give myself a break, I thought.
The film is very sympathetic to Aileen Wournos. The Daily Mail reader in you will turn that sentence around and could revile the film and me for saying such a bleeding-heart liberal thing. I believe the truth is that people do things for a reason and Aileen is a very sad example of that.
Charlize Theron comes out of the right field to play Aileen and gives an amazing performance. Like Halle Berry in Monster's Ball, she lets everything go and completely opens herself up to give a very honest and emotive performance. I think that's quite an acheivement given a background in Hollywood and modelling, worlds not conducive to honesty or openness. Yet her portrait of a terribly poor downtrodden woman is utterly convincing. Christina Ricci is also very good and only doesn't get more attention because she stands next to such a triumph.
At the end of the film, I didn't feel emotionally beaten like I had expected. I felt happy. And excuse me while I drop into bleeding-heart again, but I felt proud because I think films like Monster remind us that there are a lot of people in the world and all they really want is to be happy. There are many people who make mistakes and those mistakes come to define them in the eyes of others. I'm not saying that all Aileen Wournos needed was a big hug. I'm saying we should try and make the world a less destructive place for the next Aileen-to-be right now, so that we don't end up putting other people in the same situation.
6:20, Tuesday March 30th, 2004 • feeling relaxed • no comments
Maybe when I've generated some ninja cool graphics as a result of reading SOE, I'll use them to make this page look prettier. Maybe I can even replace Fireworks with some functions. Now that would be cool.
