cowfish

Picture by Benjamin Ellis

Much to the dismay of ‘normal’ people I mentioned it to, I spent Saturday down at the eBay, PayPal, GumTree offices (I didn’t realise that the latter were part of the gestalt…) in Richmond (very specifically in the office building that we heard was up to rent but my employers told us was not a good place for our engineering team - by the river, round the corner from the White Cross, 15 miles away from our clients, both internal and external… We reckoned it was perfect) at Tweetcamp.

The intention was to run a barcamp style event but with a focus on Twitter related topics, dragging in people from all corners of the twitterverse, from the techies to the marketers and chatters to podcasters. As with almost every barcampy event I’ve been to the organisers decided to add a bit to the normal format and, as ever, that had some effects, both good and bad.

Anyways, Farhan, Dees and Jon managed to pull together a load of volunteers as well as an impressive line up of sponsors, who not only filled me with cider, but also curry and sushi, and gave me a bag full of muesli and goo to take home for later consumption (Consumer warning! Do Not Eat The Goo). Goodies aside, the day was good fun, if not as productive as I’d hoped, and I managed to put together a few more faces and online names as well as meeting a bunch of new people.

The problem seemed to be one that I’ve seen before - deviating from the tried and tested. I have no problem with that in principle, but in this case the two of the three approaches that were used during the day seemed to fall short (for me at least - others seemed to do quite well).

The Good:

• Much as my cynical brain hates to admit it, the group sessions were great - circles of 10 people given a topic to discuss to, at first, start connections within the group and to get people talking, and later reflect on what we’d talked about and work out what we wanted to talk about next.
• The space - I’m jealous. Very jealous. The offices are rather nice and an excellent venue. Even if the Rock Band guitar was broken. It was like that when we got there. I also think you need to calibrate the screen lag for the drums. Yes, I am a Rock Band and Guitar Hero addict, how did you tell?

The ‘Bad’:

• The open session organisation - two different approaches were tried during the day and neither seemed to really work that well. First off was a free for all in the morning - no fixed session times, just a chunk of time to chop and change as you choose: the paperwiki (sheets with area names on for the sticking of postits to organise who would be where talking about what) on the wall wasn’t well used; There was no real indication about who was talking about what where and when; The seperate areas within the office (cinema, library, etc) didn’t have a line of site to anything else, so there was some wandering to locations to find a conversation only to find noone there. In the afternoon there was a push towards more organisation, with group discussions to propose three talks per group, which were then collated and read out in an effort to get groups together before we dispersed. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to work to well either, with the discussion losing the thoughts behind some session proposals by the time they were read out, some proposals not even getting their proposer to start a group and other proposals not being read out. A start with too little organisation and an end with too much - BarCamps seem to normally slip down the middle and work fairly well, this one felt a little chaotic.

That said, I had some very nice chats with people, including a thought provoking discussion with Amy Ward about having to tell people at some time that they are Doing It Wrong, that it’d be lovely to be able to trust people on the internets and that while there is potential to use twitter as a collaboration tool it’s not the solution to every problem. It’s nice to be able to talk to people about these sort of things without them backing away and looking for exits.

Anyways, the thing I rather liked (probably due to my love of Things and also Stuff) was the SwapUp - bring an item and swap it with someone during the day. It worked well as an icebreaker, with many a group of people interrupted by my barging into their midst and asking if anyone had anything to swap for a Pink CD… My swapping was very successful, with my first exchange being so good that I was thankful that I brought a second thing. So, the score sheet:

Swap chain 1:

1. Chewbacca Pez Machine, swapped for a copy of Games Workshop’s Chainsaw Warrior. I wanted this rather a lot when I started reading White Dwarf, now I have it. Only 20 years later…

Swap chain 2:

1. Pokemon ball, spring loaded, enclosing Pikachu keyring, swapped for a copy of Pink’s album, I’m Not Dead. I entered into the spirit of swapping and passed on a premium item for one that I knew had been through a not insignificant number of hands already.
2. Pink CD, swapped for a USB keyboard (as modelled by Utku). Continuing in the spirit of things I exchanged my CD for another item that was doing the rounds. However, I feel it was a step up from the CD, giving a feel of One Red Paperclip-ness. The recipient, in a theme that was often repeated, was the person who brought the CD to Tweetcamp…
3. USB Keyboard, swapped for a pair of Funky Glitter Toe Socks With Glitter. They were funky! They were glittery! They had toes! They were also for size 4-7 feet.
4. Glitter toe socks with glitter, swapped for a VHS tape of Care Bear Town Parade. I think I got a bit carried away at this point. I should have at least held out for the bottle of hot sauce that was floating around, or maybe the toilet seat…
5. Care Bear Town Parade VHS, swapped for a bottle of Marques de Grignon Rioja Reserva 2002. SCORE! Swapped with the person who brought the Care Bears with them. I’m not sure if it was guilt or a reluctance to finally part with the video, but either way I win.

So, overall a good day. This was a bit of an experiment and the organisers tweaked things as they went on, so I look forward to the next one. I still have things vaguely twitter-related that I want to talk about, and it’d be nice to do that without getting the special looks and being asked to leave the pub…

There are loads of piccies up on flickr and a bunch of tweets, as you might expect.

I’ve had my shiny iPhone for a week (almost to the minute) and it’s lovely. The camera even works alright.

I’ve been going to see lots of things recently. Many things. It’s thanks to Dr Michael Reeve, who rather than wanting to pay me back for the horrendously expensive ticket I’ve got him for Spinal Tap next week has decided instead to chip away at the money mountain by getting me tickets to see other things. Which works rather well. On Wednesday his ticket buying activities peaked in their randomness with a gig at the Brixton Windmill - Shonen Knife supported by No Cars and The Debutante Hour.

Shonen Knife were maybe the least interesting of the lineup, despite being the headliners. They play punky j-pop, trying to emulate The Ramones while singing about sushi, jelly beans, fruit and the internal tensions that often cause supergroups to fall apart. They’ve been doing it for a while (28 years according to Wikipedia) and after a couple of songs of warm-up they smashed their way convincingly through their set, with a mini-mosh pit and lots of very polite thanking of the crowd. The scary thing was that the ladies of Shonen Knife were tiny - from my position in the crowd I couldn’t actually see them despite the rise of the stage; when they came off and ran ‘backstage’ (behind the bar) I lifted my arm to let the drummer through and she slipped underneath with a large amount of space to spare.

Coming up before them were No Cars, another japanese band, although one where the singer/guitarist’s english was rather less strong than that of Naoko from Shonen Knife, despite her having lived in the UK for 4 years. This did lead to a number of interesting bits of between song patter where the audience were left decoding the slightly obscure sentence structure while they ichi-ni-san-shi’d their way into the next song. They were rather big fans of Shonen Knife, with the lead singer painting KNIFE across her face, and did a bit of dress up, with a nurses outfit and big billowy kimonos evident. The finest thing about them was the visual aids - a drawing placed on a chair at the front of the stage for each song, giving some more information about the subject matter. Unfortunately the pillar I had chosen to lean against did not have a clear view to the stage and the only one I saw was of a fat smiling Ziggy Stardust, drawn in felt tip, wearing a Union Jack with a picture of the moon in the distance. There was also a kazoo solo and an accompanying bit of banter about how popular such activities are on some specialist japanese websites. At least, I think that’s what she said.

However, my favourite of the evening were the openers - The Debutante Hour. Visitors from New York and, according to the various researches I have done since, part of the anti-folk scene over there. They are a duet, with friends (this time Mia on cello), accompanying themselves on a mini drumkit of snare and bass, with a tambourine sometimes tied to the top of the box, and accordion (with a piano as well when they have one, which they didn’t the other night). They song sangs with overly complicated lyrics, at least one of which was about zombies and their instatiable lust for brains and guts, and the problems that the depopulation of the human race would cause for them. I haven’t heard a band that has ‘For Billy’ written on them quite so clearly for a while. I grabbed their european tour CD (which doesn’t have the same zombie song on, but does have another one) and as with Birdeatsbaby (who now have an album out) it’s good but not a patch on their live show - looks like I’ve got another band to try and catch on my one-day-to-be-scheduled american odyssey.

I don’t like to talk about my many works that I do for charity, but I thought I’d mention this one. Because it’s the only one I’ve done for a while.

Anyways, I’ve been talked into doing a charity bike ride on Sunday the 19th of July - it’s the London Bikeathon and I’ll be doing the Chelsea-Docklands loop of about 26 miles. On top of that, and in my mind the much more foolish bit, I’ll be getting to Chelsea from Ealing. I may cheat and use a train a bit. Anyways, if any of you lovely people feel the urge to throw some money in the direction of Leukaemia research, then you can can do it in my name. There is, as ever, a page over at JustGiving for me and my team.

For reasons that I have never been able to entirely fathom I am a devotee of the Milky Way. Not, as some might hope, the bundle of stars, gas, planets, discarded socks and invisible alien civilisations that we call our corner of the universe, but the chocolate bar brought to life under that name on the fair isle of Great Britain.

This has led to many different endeavours over the years, from researching the history of the confectionary as deep as Wikipedia would allow (it’s based on one of the three bars that originally came in a 3 Musketeers in the USA, which in turn is now reduced to a single bar that is very similar to a UK Milky Way, the brand under which a pseudo-Mars bar is sold over the pond) to eating them in quantity. Even the strawberry ones, although my lovely flatmates gave my last pack of those away to trick-or-treating children while I hid from their candy-grabbing hands in my room. Halloween is not a time I enjoy.

One thing that I have been more devoted to than the rest of the ephemera surrounding the Milky Way is the 1989 television advert:

I even wrote up the words for posterity on a webpage on my site in ye olden dayes. So imagine my delight when I saw it appear again on the television this evening - not a remake but the actual advert. However, as I sang along I noticed that I was getting the words wrong, a strange occurence for something so indelibly burned into the collective consciousness of my peers, let alone my Milky Way obsessed mind (I wasn’t that much of a fan of the crispy wafer rolls, but they weren’t that bad), and a cold fear crept over me. Then, just at the best point of the advert, my worst fears were realised as a line was wholly changed:

…’cos he knows it won’t spoil his appetite!

became

…’cos he knows it’s gonna taste just right!

The following “Mmm, mmm, mmm!” sounded mocking, a hollow laugh ringing in my ears, projected from the mouth of a health and safety compliance officer from behind his plump and overfed wastrel’s hand, and the advert ended with me in metaphorical floods of tears. It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you, where a company selling a chocolate bar can’t use the fact that the empty calories it contains are put together in such a way as to allow the further consumption of food, even if that food will take you over your recommended calorific intake for the day, as a key selling point!

I’ve eaten Milky Ways between meals for years, although not while I lived at home due to the ‘rules’ laid down my parents about how eating chocolate bars between meals was bad for me, and it’s done me no harm. Yes, I may not be the sleek, ocelot-like figure of a man that I see when I look in the special mirror that I ordered from the fairground remainder store, but I can sing the words to the original Milky Way song without getting them wrong. And for that singular achievement I remain proud.

My final piece of iPhone info fell into place, after speaking to the nice chap in the O2 store on Ealing Broadway. Here is a bulleted list:

• The Ealing Broadway shop should have a good stock of phones as they are a ‘concept store’ and thus get more shiny than mere normal stores. They also have a 20p and a 5p stuck to their countertop with peeling sticky tape to advertise how much it costs to get broadband from them per day. It looks a bit shit; they need to refresh their sellotape…
• You do not need to top up a minimum amount per month to get free internets on the iPhone PAYG - you need to top up at least £10 when you get it and at that point you get a year of free internets. After that year it is £10 per month (maybe £7.50 without partner wifi).
• You need to make at least one call/send at least one sms every 6 months or your account gets deactivated.
• I have iPhone release day off work (for other unrelated reasons), but will not queue. I don’t queue. Well, sometimes…

I mentioned my love of spreadsheets in my last post, but it seems I did not realise the true depth of that love until I started feeding numbers vaguely related to the iPhone into Excel… It’s truly filthy and I am ashamed.

Anyway, as part of the road to accepting my row and column based perversion I have put up my spreadsheet on Google for the whole world to see. Well, if they click this link anyway.

By my calculations, the following things are true about the current state of play (or at least state of play come June 19th, shiny release day) with the iPhone:

• Tethering is expensive, so I’m ignoring it
• I’ll be getting a 16GB iPhone 3G[S] Supa-Compass as soon as I can, because I am a suckler at the teat of not-Steve.
• If you don’t ever phone people then you’re probably better off with a PAYG phone than a contract. Obvious statement #1.
• There’s not much (about £5) between contract and PAYG for the unique set of restrictions I’ve applied in my spreadsheet to justify things to myself, as long as you consider any expenditure spread over 18 months. Otherwise it all gets scary pricy.
• Comparing 24 month commitment upfront expenditure between the US and UK shows that the UK is actually a chunk cheaper than the US (infinitely, ~50% and ~12% as you go up the model list).
• I suspect that we get charged lots more monthly in the UK than the US, however US mobile phone stuff scares me so I’m staying away from the AT&T website. Until later today at least…
• Comparing PAYG costs between the US and UK shows that we are more expensive on all the phones, getting increasingly so as the prices go up (between about 4% and 10% more). Similar to the normal UK premium though.
• iPhones are actually just rather expensive and I don’t really need one. However, since when has need driven purchases? I’m helping the economy. Yes. Helping.

If any of my numbers or assumptions look wrong please let me know. Share my obsessiveness, you know you want to.

Updated: spreadsheet and numbers in this post now that I’ve been reminded that the US have sales tax as well. Done tax at 5% and 10% in the sheet and used an average value in the vague numbers above. It doesn’t change things all that much, other than PAYG phones coming out as I expected rather than the UK being cheaper.

As I wandered around Tesco yesterday, grumbling to myself about the constant lack of availability of my toilet paper of choice (both brand and pack size, a combination that has become important to me) and listening to Dire Straits, I realised that my life may have moved on a bit from my not-as-wild-as-I-like-to-think student days. And to top it all off, I was obsessively refreshing a page from the Guardian website detailing the latest goodies to fall from the gaping maws of Apple’s figureheads during the traditional WWDC keynote speech.

I have become that which I once mocked. I have become an Apple fanboy.

Worry not: I wear a beret no more often than I ever did (occasionally), I’m still banned from every branch, worldwide, of Gap (the ‘incident’ still burns fresh in their pastel clad hearts) and I constantly complain about everything about Apple from business practises to the length of collar on Steve Jobs’s turtle neck sweaters (unseen in public though the Imperious Leader now is). But behind all that there is a worrying feeling of brand loyalty gnawing at my secretly pastel coloured heart.

Evil teasing not-Steve-Jobs kept the baying crowd going for a whole 100 minutes in yesterday’s two hour speech before revealing what we were all waiting for - a new iPhone, the 3g[S]. I assume the [S] is for Sport and there will be some kind of badge involved somewhere, maybe with go faster stripes. However, the thing that seemed to get the biggest whoop from the crowd was the introduction of a built in compass. Maniacal screaming over the announcement of a compass in a phone shows me what I have to look forward to as my fanboy-dom develops. I have a loaded shotgun by my bed ready.

I’ve been holding off on getting an iPhone (for reasons of work paying for my phone and my not really using it to make phone calls due to a) a hatred of phones and b) a general hatred of people [not you, you don't count as people. You are lovely. I know I still don't call but that's because my phone's out of batteries. Always]) but decided about 6 months ago that I might be forced to jump in to the mobile internet fray after a period of playing with an iPod Touch - aka: the iPhone without the phone bit. Wireless internets did at first seem fairly ubiquitous, popping up on my Touch wherever I did roam, but more and more I am now finding myself reaching for the poor cousin that is my Blackberry <spit> to look up Important Things! on the internet (like the names of Star Trek captains, the history of Mali or whether anyone has responded to my most recent piece of compressed 140 character wit on twitter). Thus the time has come to make a jump into the world of owning my own mobile phone, a situation I have only been in once, 8 long years ago. Things have moved on a bit from the Nokia 3210…

So, after that rambling smear of brain juice here comes the famous “science bit” of this post - some prices. It seems that O2 like to shaft their customers with rather painful looking shafts (which I’ve been told you get used to after the first few times) and are charging what seems to me to be a horrendous amount of money for their debatable services. I would go for a Pay-as-you-go phone (with my not calling anyone ever policy and all) but they don’t enable phone-computer tethering on that package, promptly removing one of the main reasons that I wasn interested in this new iPhone in the first place. Anyways, here are some comparison numbers (spreading all the cost of a contract, including upfrontness, over the life of the contract):

Unsporty iPhone 3G 8GB: PAYG £342.50, 18 month contract on cheapest tariff = PAYG cost + £15.74 per month
iPhone 3GS 16GB: PAYG £440.40, 18 month contract on cheapest tariff = PAYG cost + £15.19 per month
iPhone 3GS 32GB: PAYG £538.30, 18 month contract on cheapest tariff = PAYG cost + £14.71 per month

For the shiny 3GS phones this means (to me, a man who makes no phone calls if he can possibly avoid it) I end up paying the cost of the PAYG phone over 18 months and then also about an extra £15 per month to be able to tether my phone to my laptop and play internets with a proper keyboard. This seems worryingly tempting, so much so that I may have to make a large spreadsheet breaking down the numbers further to try and dissuade myself (or find something cheaper). I love spreadsheets. Maybe too much.

Update: As pointed out by Dr P, it seems that O2 don’t include tethering in the standard contract, charging an extra £15 per month for a 3GB allowance. Further discussion with an iPhone PAYG colleague has also told me that you need to top up £10 of phone calls per month to get the ‘free’ internet each month for your first year. My spreadsheet must be updated…

(Looks like for me a PAYG 16GB 3G Sport will have the lowest ownership cost of the first 18 months and probably the cheapest maintenance cost after that [based on mystical formulae that I have pulled out of my head to justify the shiny])

This week Billy has been reading Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn while performing his daily ablutions, which has led him to talk in the third person in this little passage (even if it is a conceit stolen from his more recent Guardian columns rather then the opening salvos of Mr Brooker’s journalistic career that the daily visits to the smallest room have so far given the time to read) as well as using occasionally overblown metaphors, similes and potentially inflammatory language in the text above, although not to the same extent that Charlie Brooker does leaving some room for further development of bitterness. He did sit behind Mr Brooker at a thing at the ICA with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill the other day and would have been able to touch the hem of his jacket in religous worship if it wasn’t for his drunken companion’s pointing at said Brooker with an accompanying ‘Look that’s Charlie Brooker, he’s famous and EVERYTHING he is’. You know who you are, drunken companion.

Joe, Marc, Tim and Adam

I seem to be knackered. After a simple day yesterday of watching the rather excellent Stingray Sam, eating noodles and then watching the also excellent Timecrimes I went to sleep.

This morning I woke up stupidly early, eventually ignored the thunder, lightning and rain, and then wandered down to Canterbury to spend the day shooting my brother’s band, Black Sun Down. Hopefully they’ll be able to use some of them when they get their website in better shape, but until then you can make them feel special by looking at their MySpace and Facebook pages. They’re quite good.

It seems that I have somehow managed to get myself invited onto yet another podcast. This time rather than the assorted randomness that was required to impersonate the myk half of the Thomyk podcasting posse, I was allowed to be myself and witter intelligibly about old games with Matt of Geek Planet. In short: I’ve not played as many point and click adventures as I thought and have an ability to sidetrack conversations only surpassed by Matt. In long: it’s on the website or hidden in the little widget below.