So: I’ve had lots of posts in my head to write and not a lot of time. I’ve still got post-match analysis on d.construct (which I attended) and Railsconf Europe (which I spoke at) to come. I’ve also been busy with at least one out-of-work project which is going quite nicely, and means I get to play with Capistrano soon.

The other reason I’ve been a bit lax is that it is birthday season for many of my friends, so the weekend was spent first in boozy fun, and then going to see the Tindersticks at the Barbican (which was great). And that lot all culminates today, because it’s my birthday.

I’m 24, which isn’t the most exciting age, but Wikipedia seems pretty convinced it’s quite exciting. All I could think of was Kiefer Sutherland and (1 x 2 x 3 x 4), the latter of which is more satisfying. 23 was fun, incidentally. Lots and lots of things happened, I got busy, I got stressed, I just about surfed over it. All in all: a good year. Here’s to another one.

Quick update before I hit the hay:

firstly, Barcelona was awesome. 7 photos are up on Flickr now; I’m hoping there’ll be about 50 in that set when I’ve found the time to process them. (For reference, I took 211).

Secondly: two conferences coming up. I’ll be attending d.Construct 2006 tomorrow in Brighton, and then I’m going to be talking (with my colleague and friend Gavin Bell) at Railsconf Europe, which could be quite intimidating. Looking forward to it, at any rate.

Then I’ll hopefully find time to do some blogging again, writing up some recent events, and talk a little more about photography. You’ll see why.

…off to Barcelona. Taking the camera, a stack of books – Lee Child, Susan Sontag, Frederick Brooks and Phillip Reeve – some factor 20, myself, and the girl. Leaving behind – my laptop, work, and hopefully my worries. Hoping my hand luggage isn’t problematic.

Holiday, here we come.

Matt Jones asked us what we’d print out from the Internet when it went down for good. I spent a while mulling this over; like Tom, I came to few conclusions. But I wrote some ideas down.

Anyhow, it’s now August 24th, and I’m going to Barcelona for a week tomorrow (because I desperately need a holiday). So I thought I’d just put up what

1) Something on how to make batteries
– Jones has stolen all the useful stuff, and besides, books still exist. Electronics may be dead, but electricals are going to be very useful. Batteries aren’t so hard to make (although they’re not exactly going to be Energizer standard), and might turn out handy. Also, it’s the kind of knowledge I can trade for more useful things.

2) Having remembered to use Flickr properly, dump out a nice flickrToys page of my favourites.

3) Print out everything unread in my RSS account.

4) Print out the huge single page which is every blogpost I’ve ever made (and which, for the sake of argument, resides in secret on my server.

– so, I was racking my brains about what to print out from the Internet that wouldn’t be available in any of the many libraries. I had a really hard time. Most things I was thinking of were available elsewhere – it’s just I came to them via the Internet because, well, it was more immediate, it had search. So there’s not much that only exists in Wikipedia, or Gutenberg, or even the web. And what I can think of that is uniquely online is either experience – be it Flash, or something like Flickr (where the value is not in the content, but the interactions; not in one page, but in the social links and relationships represented across many) – or things like the cartoon strips I read that would never really get published apart from on the web.

Hence why I’m printing out my social interactions – my memories of “the Internet” as a place, rather than any unique information it could offer me. Silicon may be dead in Matt’s dystopia, but books aren’t. I’m planning to ransack the Cambridge University Library pretty much the second the bombs start falling – hopefully it’ll be a less popular target than the British Library.

(Talking this over with Alex, she also said that actually, in an Internet-free-world, that was a great idea; she wanted a wing in the Library of Congress or the British Library just for blogs – everyone prints their own blog, binds it, and hands it over. It’s not about saving the high-value content – it’s about saving all the content people make, just like any copyright library does with books. If the internet’s gone, we should be saving as much of the unique content on it as possible, rather than stuff that might just exist somewhere else; if everyone chose a blog as one of their five pages (because you can probably dump the entire contents to one, massive, page), we’d save so much – not just in the content, but in the blockquotes, in the excerpts, in the criticism, in the memes, in the anecdotes, and in the stories. I’m glad it wasn’t just me being egocentric, then).

5) The original Yahoo homepage. (Actually, the original is a bit too spartan, but this one is a better bet

– Possibly my “slightly up-oneself” entry. I’m interested in this because before the search engines, the web wasn’t searched; it was explored. Yahoo found you things by cataloguing what was out there. Very Dewey-Decimal way of thinking. But I want that original list of categories, if only to remember that this was the structure that much of the Web began with; this was how somebody imposed order on the system in the early days. It’s easier to extrapolate from an ordered beginning. So I want to keep that fragment of the early architecture of the web so that I can remember how it all began – when that was “all it was” – and remember that it all grew from there.

After all, silicon may be dead, and the world might be ending, but once you’ve had widespread shared knowledge, it’s hard to go back. Somehow, we’ll work out how to build another Internet – even though it might be slower, mostly-off, and not very neutral. When we do, I want those categories, just to compare the new effort to.

---

To conclude: it’s a bloody hard question and I feel my answers aren’t really so good, but at least I tried. And I think it does prove that right now, the Internet is more about the interactions we make than the data therein. Which is Web 2.0, right? So it’s not that the sites themselves are “2.0” or not; maybe it’s the users who’ve demanded more, who’ve been upgraded.

A quick heads-up to two brief speaking engagments I’ve got coming up on the horizon.

First, I’ll be talking about software to tell stories with at the London Techa Kucha night on 25th July that Steve and Tom are running. That’ll be a radio-edit of the talk I gave at Reboot, more or less.

Then, I’ll be talking at LRUG on August 8th, looking at how as a Rails developer you can work effectively with front-end designers and client-side developers, and how you can keep the integrity of your front-end code at the same level as the back-end.

Come along if you feel like it. And if you found out about these events through the blog, do say hi.

I had my first ever nightmare about work. Well, I say nightmare; to be honest, it only qualifies as unsettling.

But it did involve Ruby’s unicode support.

If you know what I’m talking about, you’ll appreciate why I was scared.

…and get away clean.

My pal Joey Muck is doing some music/dancing shindig with a few of his pals. “A club night in London’s trendy Clerkenwell”, if you please. 8-2am, tonight – I’m probably leaving well before 2 because nobody appears to have got the message that whilst Thursdays may be the new Fridays, they’re still school nights.

Anyhow. If you like mucky pop, rude raps, sleazy rock, and filthy electro (and god knows I do) get down there tonight and shake some.

(Also, if you’re that way inclined: Do Dirt’s Myspace page)

It appears that I’ve been AWOL for a little while. For that, and many other things: apologies.

It appears to have taken a while to decompress from Reboot and get things back on track. The to-do list floating above my desktop has not really got much shorter for a few weeks now. Even though I’m making my way through it, there always seems to be new stuff that needs adding. Also, the stuffy heat is contributing to a lack of both sleep and energy, so maybe that’s why I’ve been posting here less.

Still, I have been doing a few things behind the scenes. My Flickr stream has seen a lot of updates recently, and you’ll probably have noticed the string of del.icio.us links filling the blog up. As ever, they provide rough hints to where my brain currently is.

One thing I’ve been working on is… redeveloping this blog. Boring, I know. But the last time I redesigned, the purpose was to get me writing again. It kind-of worked, but it was also an experiment at developing a truly generic WordPress theme (which almost succeeded). Now I want to make something just for me (although, it turns out that it shares some aesthetic sensibilities). At the same time, it seems like a good enough resaon to upgrade to WordPress 2.0. That’s a story in itself, I tell you. I’ll write more about the technicalities of redeveloping it once it’s launched; there’s a post in the works on patching tagging plugins, the ups and downs of upgrading and the hell that is wp_rewrite, and also another on faking “offset” with the WordPress Loop. Until then, expect to see this place updated soon.

Other things I’ve been working on: a moderately-sized Rails project, on which I’m sole developer and designer. It’s going quite slowly, due to the concentration it’s now demanding – I’m at the “complicated” part of the development, when things go beyond CRUD, and also start demanding the final templates – so there’s been a big diversion into XHTML work. Still, this is also the stage where it gets *really* satisfying. I’m not going to be able to opensource the project as it stands, but there’s at least one plugin to be released from it, not to mention some useful experience. I’ve currently been adding fragment cacheing, which has been most satisfying – both (relatively) simple and elegant in its implementation.

We’ve also been busy at work, having finally launched Nature Network Boston in beta. There’s still some work that needs to be done there – on my part, fixing the microformats (again, more in the future) and tidying the HTML output – but it’s great to see it in “the wild”, as it were. Out of that, I’ve got an article I’d like to write for this site on “Rails from a design team perspective” – there’s an existing “Rails for Designers” piece on the web doesn’t quite cover the ground I’d like it to, or in enough details, so, you know, rather than whinging, I thought I’d write my own. Expect to see that in a week or two.

So, in short: expect to see more, longer content here. I need to get back into writing, and it seems sensible to start by writing up the stuff I’ve been doing that others might find interesting – or at least want to correct me on. In short: this place is going to be revitalised. I’m looking forward to the challenge I’ve set myself.

Day 1: I’m having a lot of fun at Reboot 8. That fun’s mainly taking the form of a lot of entertaining mental somersaults.

I’ve already met so many interesting people doing fantastic, tangibly brilliant things, and listened to many fantastic talks. And there’s a wonderful, wonderful balance of technology, art, media, design, all hinged around an axis of thought. It’s really good. I’m definitely coming again next year, I’ve already decided.

Michael Thomsen’s opening was a cracker; Matt’s Making Senses was thought-provoking, revealing, and no less enjoyable than ever. Adam Arvidsson’s General Intellect – or the Renaissance of Karl Marx was utterly captivating – a lecturer with no slides, no notes, and the audience in the palm of his hand for 45 minutes. It also complemented Ulla-Maaria Mutanen’s Crafter Economics very well indeed, and illuminated more of that talk for me.

Ben’s “How to be a Renaissance man” ended the day – and began the night. I have merely one sentence of notes from it, but it was pretty fantastic, and a pep talk that I really needed right now. A pep talk for doing, making, building, and being in the future. I hope I’ll return to the UK energised and excited – and with enough momentum that nothing else will get in my way.

I hope, anyhow. I turned down another beer for the sake of sleep and my talk tomorrow. I’m talking tomorrow, which is moderately nerve-wracking. Hope it goes well.

Over in Denmark now. If you’re at Reboot, do say hi to the bequiffed redhead with a beard. Ended up flying out sitting next to Jeremy and Jessica; very pleasant chat, and nice to meet someone before the conference proper kicks off.

I took the opportunity to finish my slides on the plane. A job well done, I feel. Now: to go and find a boat…