Archive for December, 2010

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End of a year review (endings aren't ever real endings)

December 28, 2010

4 year old tradition.

1.What did you do in 2010 that you’d never done before?
Missed a flight.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Really didn’t as far as I can remember. I have a lot on next year’s list as a result.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes, my friends A and S had a little girl R who is totally wonderful.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.

5. What countries did you visit?
26 trips, too many to name.

6. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?
More freedom.

7. What date from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory?
November 7th.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Having the courage to take a big decision that will change my life forever.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not making that decision earlier.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Yes to both.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Golden shoes for my friend’s wedding.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Nobel Peace Prize jury.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Julian Assange’s. Good intentions on paper, strange egotistic execution.

14. Where did most of your money go?
My business.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Working with great people on exciting projects!

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2010?
“I’ll try anything once” by The Strokes.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
More positive.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Sports

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Travelling

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Home.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?
Brock

22. Did you fall in love in 2010?
Yes

23. What was your favourite TV programme?
The Wire (late to the party, I know)

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No

26. What was the best book(s) you read?
Everything Julain Barnes wrote.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
The soundtrack to I Am Love

28. What did you want and get?
A sidekick.

29. What did you want and not get?
More time for my own work

30. What were your favourite films of this year?
Somewhere, I am Love, Inception, A Single Man, The September Issue.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 30 and spent it with friends in London

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
More time to read books

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
1920s

34. What kept you sane?
Hanging out with C, C and K.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
The entire cast of Inception.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
The Wikileaks scandal, fascinating.

37. Who did you miss?
Friends across the world, C more than most.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
C & N

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010.
Pick yourself up, Dust yourself off and start all over again.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

“There is a time when we all fail,
some people take it pretty well,
some take it all out on themselves,
some they just take it out on friends,
oh everybody plays the game,
and if you don’t you’re called insane,”

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30

December 23, 2010

30 today

1. Used (as –30–) to indicate the end of a newspaper (or broadcast) story, a copy editor’s typographical notation.

2. The duration in years of the Thirty Years’ War – 1618 to 1648.

3. 30 is the sum of the first four squares, which makes it a square pyramidal number.

4. The number of tracks on The Beatles’ eponymous album, usually known as The White Album

5. Slang for pornography due to its representation as Roman numeral XXX.[2]

6. Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Matthew 26:15.

7. The house number of 30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin)

8. The total number of major and minor keys in Western tonal music, including enharmonic equivalents

9. One of the rallying-cries of the 1960s student/youth protest movement was the slogan, ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’.

10. A stage in young adulthood

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Deep City (the printed edition)

December 20, 2010

Giles Lane invited me to lead one of the days in the series of hands-on explorations called “City as Material” which resulted in Layered being published. I came into the Proboscis offices a few weeks later and decided to revise the Deep City talk I’d given at the Microsoft Social Symposium and put those thoughts down into a little e-book. Download and enjoy!

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mybookmarks and the death of del.icio.us

December 18, 2010

As the mass exodus to Pinboard takes place in the wake of the almost announcement of “sun-setting” del.icio.us, I had a real long thought about these bookmarking sites and exported by bookmarks from delicious in order to look at all of it. I found stuff I hadn’t looked at in ages. Some of it made me smile. Like opening a box of photographs.
Thoughts:

- I used to use online bookmarking a LOT more in 2006.

- Bookmarks, for me, are about forgetting, but knowing where to forget.

- For me, there’s nothing social about bookmarking, it’s mostly deeply personal, but I’m glad other people used the same platform. When people would blog their del.icio.us bookmarks, I knew what that meant. I’ve never followed anyone else’s bookmarks, but I clicked on what people linked to.

- I cannot find it in me to sign up to new things like it’s 2007. I’m done being social online.

So I decided to hold on to the 1073 days of using del.icio.us and make a thing. I called it mybookmarks.

It’s a sort of archive, as we near 2011 and as a way to tell when I was most active, and what I was interested in. It’s like my Twitter profile, but just with my bookmarks and my comments, sorted by year. It’s for me, hosted by me, not going anywhere, not being sunset, just sitting there quietly being useful. It makes me happy. So there.

Bookmarks are dead, long live bookmarks.

(It also probably doesn’t work on anything other than my version of Safari, sorry.)

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Interaction design history

December 14, 2010

Always good to know how to look back. Very nice deck.

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Mapping creativity in London?

December 10, 2010

Was intrigued by the accusation that the council of Barnet was going to be the only council not to invest in Arts by cutting funding to Artsdepot. The whole debate in the Evening Standard article a few days ago made me want to know where exactly does “creativity” happen and if you can start mapping it geographically and investing on that basis only (as per my previous post on the Tech City idea). A first step in that general direction was for me to pick up the weekend’s Guardian Guide and map out the exhibitions listing. It was interesting to see that for that particular week, things are quite “central london” if that means anything. Not much south of Southbank. Not much West west. Not much north. Lots in “the west end”, Soho and Shoreditch.

I grant you this isn’t very scientific (I’ll try to update the map every week to spot any changes or new additions), but it shows London as a creative beast all over, with no real clusters when it comes to enjoying art / visual arts / creative industry outputs.


View Les carnets d’Alexandra: Guardian exhibitions list in a larger map