November 2011
1 post
“The Twilight films have become something of a cultural event for young women...”
– Matthew Rorie
October 2011
3 posts
6 tags
The World at War and the Lost Art of the TV...
1968 was a year of exciting change in Britain. Arthur C Clarke published 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine hit cinemas, and the first Isle of Wight music festival was held, a year before Woodstock. British television was changing, too. The publicly funded BBC had been the only broadcaster in the country from 1927 until Independent Television (ITV) was founded in 1955. ITV...
3 tags
“Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever...”
– Richard Stallman
Stallman does not stop being Stallman for even one minute.
3 tags
Jobsworth
Steve Jobs was:
A great capitalist
A great industrialist
A great product designer
A great interface designer
A great manager
A great CEO
A great marketer
A great public speaker
A great self-promoter
A great investor
Steve Jobs was not:
A great inventor
A great computer scientist
A great engineer
A great father
A great philanthropist
A great philosopher
A hippie (at least, not for...
July 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Glasto 2011: Monday (day -727)
A hot morning turns to drizzle by lunchtime, so once again the festival finishes as it began.
Glasto was hard work this year, but no less fun for it.
I don’t want to think about what I will do next year. Camping at the olympics?
There is talk of getting the gazebo crew together to steward at a different festival!
Find it, find it, find iiiiiiiiiit… YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAH!
Glasto 2011:...
9 tags
Glasto 2011: Sunday (day 3)
Shift 3: 6am to 2pm
Half-dry mud is much, much harder to walk in than wet mud.
Morning shift on the last day, perhaps not surprising that the Oxfam radio traffic is all about stewards not showing up for shifts.
At last, a sunny morning!
IT’S NOT GOING TO RAIN ANY MORE!
A hot one. Feels like 2010 again.
Done aaaaaaaand DONE.
In most of the well-travelled areas the mud has dried and...
4 tags
Glasto 2011: Saturday (day 2)
The severe weather did not materialise, unless 10 hours of drizzle passes for severe.
It is not going to rain any more
I partied too hard last night, which has severely compromised my ability to party hard today. Pacing is important at Glasto, especially for staff.
Everyone is a little crazy by this point. I see a lot of people wandering around on their own talking or singing to themselves.
...
June 2011
6 posts
6 tags
Glasto 2011: Friday (day 1)
The met office has issued a severe weather warning for 6pm to 4am. So much for flip-flops by Saturday…
Shift 2: 2pm to 10pm
DRIZZLE
We shout ‘Hi Bono!’ at every tour bus and blacked-out 4x4 that passes our station, including one that (probably) actually contains Bono.
Apparently the severe weather warning is for wind, not rain. 35mph+ forecast.
The weatherocalypse has so...
5 tags
Glasto 2011: Thursday (day 0)
Time on shift passes faster when you pay it no attention
Watching ill-prepared and unhappy punters slog through the mud. Schadenfreude abounds.
Find iiiiiiiit…
Managed to avoid looking at my watch from sun-down to sun-up
Maintaining a night shift fire is more about keeping busy than keeping warm
Dawn is heralded by light drizzle, but I feel a nice day coming on.
The rain intensifies to...
4 tags
Glasto 2011: Wednesday (day -1)
The punters are welcomed to the site by several hours of heavy rain. It is going to be a muddy one.
The only benefit to this weather is that it keeps tents cool enough for sleep well in to the day.
The boss says no more rain. I believe him.
Find it…
Played some foosball in a diner tent with great music. Lost.
Is the Benevolent Musicians Fund a fund for benevolent musicians or a...
Glasto 2011: Tuesday (day -2)
How many Glastonburies have your pants been to?
The Tuesday crowd are festival people. They are not here to see bands.
Indulged in some light pagan ritual.
3 tags
Glasto 2011: Monday (day -3)
This is not a gazebo.
2 tags
Glastonbury 2011 Notepad-Delay Liveblog
Yes, it’s that time again folks. Buckle the eff up.
May 2011
1 post
3 tags
Wouter Weylandt
Monday afternoon at work, and like most summer days there is a cycling race going on somewhere in the world. It’s the 10th of May, and the three-week Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) is just getting started. Sitting over the email client on my second monitor is a live video stream of the 3rd stage from ‘Rai’, the Italian national broadcaster. The commentary is garrulous yet...
April 2011
1 post
6 tags
Battic
In the twilight of the Saturday of the hottest Easter weekend anyone could remember, I set off for my grandparents’ house one-handed and bare-footed, bearing with me two cardboard fruit crates full of books and DVDs, three framed pictures, a set of surround sound speakers, a Calvin and Hobbes collection in three massive hard-back volumes, a ham kettle full of keepsakes, and a bathrobe.
This...
March 2011
2 posts
4 tags
The Monuments: Milan - San Remo
Milano–Sanremo, ‘la classica di Primavera, la Classicissima’ : the Spring classic, the classic of classics.
The start of the 1954 edition in Milan (via Cyclingnews)
The first of the five monuments takes place in mid-March, and though it doesn’t mark the start of the season it does signify that serious racing has begun and the warm-up is over. La Primavera is no training ride,...
3 tags
The Monuments: Introduction
Anyone who knows me knows that I love cycling, and one of the many things I love about it is its endless variety. If you watch a game of football, you know that the pitch will be the same shape and the goal posts in the same place as they were in every other game you have ever watched. It seems a trivial point to make, but it does mean that the structure and character of each individual game will...
July 2010
6 posts
So there you have it
Glastonbury 2010. The Plastic Beach. The Heatrave. The best week.
Old friendships re-invigorated, and new ones cemented.
I honestly can’t tell if my notes are any good at conveying the energy, excitement, experience and general je ne sais quoi of Glastonbury to someone who has never been, but I hope they are at least interesting.
I had one of the best weeks of my life, and there is no...
Glasto 2010: Monday (day -363)
dawn breaks over a camp already half-vacated
We have been told that the exit roads are completely grid-locked, so this noon is being spent as all before it: under the Gazebo, in the shade, with friends.
Glasto 2010: HEATRAVE
fin
6 tags
Glasto 2010: Sunday (day 3)
Over-heard in the Oxfield:
Please can I borrow your shaver? I’ll get my boobs out!
Just answer my question please mate, I need to know! Can you moonwalk?
Shift 3, 2PM to 10PM
I am the Prince of Pennard Hill
The football has pulled tens of thousands away from the stages to two big-screen fields at opposite ends of the site. They were both full half an hour before kickoff.
Crowd...
5 tags
Glasto 2010: Saturday (day 2)
Yesterday the festival used 24h worth of water in nine hours. Our showers are off, and look like staying that way.
Over-heard in the market:
Fuck me! There’s ice in this glass!
The fence is high, but people still come over. The gates are over-staffed and the ticket rules are complex, but people still run and blag their way through. Corruption is a fact of life at Glasto. Stewards sell...
7 tags
Glasto 2010: Friday (day 1)
Stages are open. Rolf Harris on the Pyramid can be heard easily from our site
music and cheering everywhere at all times
dust keeps getting worse, and I haven’t seen any paths being sprayed down yet
Over-heard at the stone circle:
Albatross! Get your Albatross!
(he is actually selling bell pepper bhaji with sweet chilli sauce. They are delicious)
Did they haul you out, on a really...
4 tags
Glasto 2010: Thursday (day 0)
First shift, 6AM to 2PM
Glasto never sleeps, but 5:30 on Thursday is probably as close as it gets
Two hours into the shift, and the number of people who have passed through the gate is finally approaching the number of stewards staffing it
New best view of the site found, atop the slope outside the gate we work on
The supervisor relieving our shift arrived announcing that he had forgotten to...
June 2010
7 posts
5 tags
Glasto 2010: Wednesday (day -1)
Siesta under the Low Low Gazebo with tea and guitar
That is Bach, and it rocks, it’s a rock-block of Bach
It is so hot that I am wearing sun-cream in the shade. I know it won’t help but I want to believe it will.
1pm BST: Glasto 2010 officially begins (first spontaneous mass cheer heard from the main site)
And nobody knows what to do with the heat, under sunshine pylons we’ll...
3 tags
Glasto 2010: Tuesday (day -2)
I have learned that I am working the highest gate in the festival, so I visited it today. The view is
Mad dogs and Oxfam stewards go out in the mid-day sun
My sky is the white underside of the gazebo roof, and I still feel like I am getting sunburned
Over-heard at the stone circle:
Toby, can I use the small of your back to roll a spliff?
Gypsy dubstep. Like, with a violinist.
5 tags
Glasto 2010: Monday (day -3)
Helicopters fly over the beach, same time every day, same routine.
Oxfam doesn’t have the same site for us this year, we have moved down the hill one field and gained a better view with fewer pylons.
3 tags
Glastonbury 2010 Notepad-Delay Liveblog
After doing it last year and enjoying it thoroughly (and even being kind of pleased with the results), this week sees the return of my one week notepad-delayed liveblog of last week’s Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts. Needless to say I had an absolutely incredible time, but that should be apparent from my notes.
Without further ado, let the (not) liveblog begin! It starts slow, but...
April 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Trust me to use the great American pastime as a metaphor to discuss British politics
5 tags
February 2010
1 post
January 2010
3 posts
Politeness on the web
ferrrn:
words
What John Gabriel said about video games applies to Tumblr too, albeit to a lesser extent. Hurtful comments posted on a blog in deliberate view of their target and tirades of obscenity on XBox Live may seem worlds apart, but they both have their root in the same aspect of social interaction on the web: anonymity.
If you play an online shooter you are effectively dumped into a...
That wasn't a rhetorical open question!
ferrrn:
Somebody answer me :(
Give a guy some time! I don’t write fast.
tumblarrassed
ferrrn:
is this a thing? it should be.
I can’t figure out whether this means you were harrassed by tumblr, embarrassed by tumblr, or something altogether different involving your ass and tumblr.
December 2009
8 posts
“Nicholas was older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to...”
– a Christmas card by Neil Gaiman
4 tags
Some more Christmas music you’ve never heard...
4 tags
When did you first realize that you were a...
ferrrn:
[Any variation on an answer is valid. Kind of like “the way you choose to answer the question IS the answer itself” ish. I’m working on an end of decade piece, and I’d love to see what you all think about about the problematic nature of the “hipster” label.
never tried this crowdsourcing thing, but Tumblr seems like the right place to start for this particular query. Judging by my...
WatchZe Frank doing what he do
I feel like a lot of us are guilty of forgetting about Afghanistan. The early days of the Iraq war were much more TV-friendly than Afghanistan ever was, and the fact that we actually got to Saddam Hussain (eventually) made the whole thing a much more satisfying news narrative. It seems that there was a chance to put the whole Afghanistan situation to bed in the early...
Immediately after writing a huge blog post about how butthurt I am over having a cushy job at a huge successful company, I proceeded to open up my laptop so I can do some extra work. I am a hypocrite and a terrible human being.
Is the man getting you down much?
I was asked this a few weeks ago by someone who had just learned that I work for a large, well-known multinational technology corporation. I told him that yes, the man was getting me down a bit. Today, the man is getting me down quite a lot.
I ended up working here because when I was looking for summer internships in my penultimate year of University I set out to avoid defence companies and...
November 2009
1 post
Three Statistical Nots
Correlation does not imply causality
Two data points do not make a trend
Random processes are not uniform
October 2009
1 post
September 2009
2 posts
The View from the Porch
To describe the view from the porch I must first describe the porch, and if I’m going to do that I may as well describe the garden too, and everything else.
Time and sea air turn all wood grey in this part of the world, so the planks that make up the porch’s floor and ceiling, and the shingles on the side of the house that form its back are all the same shade. So too are those parts...
It's been a while
This is not a proper post, but there is one coming. It is lengthy. I think a more appropriate name for this blog might be ‘I hope you like text’.
Well, I hope you do.
Some context for the upcoming post: My father’s father bought a holiday house on the coast of down-east Maine in the fifties, and it has been the prime summer vacation destination for my family ever since. I was...
July 2009
12 posts
1 tag
Well, there you have it
I hope you enjoyed my notepad-delay broadcast of Glastonbury 09. Reading it back, I clearly got slightly crazier as the week progressed. I also hardly talked about the music at all, which is I suppose quite appropriate, since there is so much more to Glasto than just bands and stages.
Anyway, normal service will now resume, which is to say, I actually need to start thinking of things to write...