Courtesy of Photojojo's Photo Time Capsule which is a tremendous idea, reminding you of your own life.
100 hours
Matt Webb said a bunch of insightful and exciting stuff at Reboot. The best bit was his challenge about 100 hours. And I'm going to quote him about that at length, because it's enormously well put, but to really get the most out of it you should go and read his whole presentation and get the context.
Here's Matt:
"Look. Every time a person takes into their own hands the tools of production, it’s like they have eaten a macroscope. They see and feel the world in context. They are able to not just consume, but to produce, to invent culture...
...So I say our decisions about culture at large, about the question of how to spend our 100 million hours, I say these are rooted in personal ability to wield the tools of production. And as we said, 100 hours practice would get you a really long way.
Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?
Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.
I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.
Ask them what theirs is, find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on. Do that for me.
Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting."
Personally, I'm not sure what to do with my 100 hours. Not yet. But I love the way Matt's taken the '10,000 hours to develop expertise' idea and reframed/refocused it as something you can do something about, not just observe. V. good.
And surely someone, even now, someone must be building some sort of 100hours.com thing. Surely.
ssssound
Dear lazyweb, I tell you what I want, an easy way of clipping, posting and annotating tiny clips of sound. Because I spend my life thinking that little moment there, that's the best thing in all recorded music ever, and then, when I try and list those moments I discover I've forgotten them.
So here's one I actually remember. From The Whole Of The Moon by The Waterboys. It's about 6 seconds into the fragment below; two little muted splashy, crashy cymbal hits. It sounds half-way between a cymbal and a paper bag with a big spoon in it. It only happens in that bit of the chorus, just in a little gap that opens up, on the left of the stereo, and it sounds slightly off-centre from the rest of the sound world of the song. And there are moments when I can be persuaded that it's the best thing in all recorded music ever.
Listen here.
third100
Right, let's have the third lot of Interesting tickets on sale in the evening. It'll give people without internet access at work a chance. So 100 more tickets will be on sale at 9pm (BST) on Wednesday the 8th of July. After that there'll just be another 50 to go. I'm sorry they're selling out so quickly but I can't think of a better way to manage it.
get these
I sent some postcards today. And was reminded how nice Anne's postcards and greetings cards are. And you can get them from her Folksy shop. So you should.
streampunk
In this universe, however, I just like the gear.
But I also like the look of Caught By The River, a book and website that's similar in feel to Roger Deakin's work, updating fishing/river literature for a generation who listen to Underworld.
But it's the Caught By The River podcasts that really get me. (iTunes link). They just sound lovely. I don't understand a lot of it, I mean I literally understand the words but it doesn't strike chords of recognition or anything. But the sound of the words is great - it's ambient language, like the shipping forecast or baseball commentary, like the audiobook version of Discrete Music.
Favourite bits so far are Bill Drummond on the Penkiln Burn (iTunes) and Roger Deakin's piece on Fenland skating (iTunes). Especially nice because they're produced by Chris Watson, perhaps that's a sign that podcasts are maturing, the new place where properly produced audio will appear.
data / maps / narrative / adventure
We've been watching the Indiana Jones movies at home these past weeks. And loving the map scenes all over again. Made me realise that while points mean location, lines mean adventure.
Two splendid examples right now; Nick's cycling round Britain, and filming interesting people he meets along the way. And James is cycling around the world with mapping built by our very own Tom.
And, in looking for reference for this, I found the YouTube user/channel: Maps In Movies and TV, which I suspect will be of interest to many.
twenty years on
We first discovered the radio version of Alan Bennett's Forty Years On about twenty years ago. (I think it was the year the basement flooded and drowned all our singles.) It was a cassette, bought in a garage somewhere. I remember listening to it non-stop for a long holiday driving round the Scotland. I fell in love with it parked under a bridge, next to a chip shop, eating and listening. I think it's my favourite bit of media of all time. If I'd have last.fm running for my whole life the top thing on there would be Forty Years On.
Phrases from Forty Years On pop into my head all the time and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself saying them. "What is the meaning of these warlike habiliments?" "Speak for England, Arthur" "You're a stupid boy, Rumbold, but by God you're a consistent one" "The shoddy splendours of the new civility" "Tidy the old into the tall flats" "The crowd have found the door into the secret garden" (I have a similar problem with "Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government", and "When workers are on strike you don't cross picketlines").
Of course, having listened to it so much I now have no real idea if it's any good or not. It's just part of my life. But I suspect it really is good. It manages to be affectionate and satirical at the same time, parodying huge swathes of 19th and 20th century British life while making you nostalgic for them. And it's a bit less cloying and funnier and more playful than later Bennett. One of the pleasures of it is the way it sweeps up so much of the mis-remembered English canon. Bits of the book of common prayer, classical allusions that sound familiar but that you don't quite get, 'snobbery with violence', the war poets, Wilde, war-time politics and society, public school fiction. It's all in there.
For a while we even started building a Forty Years On library; Sapper, Buchan, Dorford Yates, Dodi Smith, Amery, Duff Cooper. Blimey.
I'm not sure if an isolated moment will sum it up particularly well, but this is one of my favourite bits. From the play within the play within the play, it's John Geilgud telling a fragment of story from a young aristocrat before the outbreak of the First World War. Posh people talking about driving fast is normally exactly the thing to make me angry, but the way this is written and read, and the spectre of the guns in France, always gets me.
MP3 here.
It's available in the iTunes store but buried as part of an Alan Bennett double bill. (iTunes link) It's well worth seeking out and downloading. This later version is good, but not as good as the original.
GPS MapCard
My current favourite iPhone app is GPS MapCard. On paper it's incredibly banal, just a picture and a map, but they seem to lend each other context. The place and the activity help explain each other. And it makes the most of the iPhone as a good geolocative tagging device rather than a bad camera.