• "We write and listen and play music in a cultural environment in which there's intense excitement and anxiety around the idea of music as a social object, not just a commercial one… in order to understand better the ways in which songs are becoming lines in listeners' conversations, we need different ways of thinking about how they've played that role for musicians too." Tom Ewing on music as fanfiction.
  • "After she left, the school began to switch away from Acorn computers to Windows PCs, and computing at school became less and less about actually wrangling the machines for their own sake: programming went away, to be replaced by word processing and the other kinds of useful activities which I'm sure helped a lot of pupils gain the kind of computer literacy they needed for the real world, but it wasn't the kind of computer literacy I needed. I needed the more abstract, joyful, engagement with computers that Sister Celsus provided, and which could only have been provided at the end of the 80s." A lovely post for Ada Lovelace Day from Matt.
  • "In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels." Just gorgeous.

Barcleona, now online

02 November 2006


Montserrat
Originally uploaded by Tom Armitage.

So I finally finished processing all my photographs from Barcelona (or, at least, the 1/4 good enough to make it online). They’re available in this photoset at Flickr. Really pleased with many of these, even though they’re not at all popular on Flickr itself. Probably something to do with my inability to join a bazillion groups.

Now, onto the next set of photographs from two months ago that need uploading…

More photos from Etech

26 March 2006


Julian Bleecker (landscape)
Originally uploaded by Tom Armitage.

I’m slowly getting my pictures from ETech online; the last batch left will be of my time in San Diego after the conference. These ones are slightly better than the ones I uploaded first – in part, because I’ve processed them a bit more. This is one of my favourites – of Julian Bleecker – from the afternoon where we took break on the pool deck. Fun.

Web apps – the wrap-up

09 February 2006

Well, that was pretty great. Tom‘s talk was pretty staggering – lots of ideas I’ve been following over the past year or two all coalescing together into one big lump. Very excited by that; really need to sit down and think it over when I’ve got some space. Cal, Joshua, and Ryan were all also excellent; Ryan’s talk especially, given its real-world, raw-data approach. Lots to think about.

I pointed out on the (slightly sarcastic) IRC back channel that it’s not necessarily the individual facts coming out that mattered – many people knew them already (like “don’t forget to cache”, etc) – but the context, the stories, the examples that wrap around them. Context is so important, and the summit put masses into context in a really exciting way. Shame there wasn’t more networking, but I had a good night afterwards, and it was nice to see a few old familiar faces, like Meg and Cal again, as well as meeting Rod for the first time.

My photos from the event are now online. Pretty pleased with the way they came out, given how far I was away from the stage, and how (relatively) slow my lens was.