Conferences

To celebrate the success of the PlayTime event and continue Tim Wright’s mission to play golf on the moon (with David Bowie), XPT is offering a iPod Shuffle to the person who comes up with the best photographic simulation of a particular aspect of the the 30-year plan. By concretising events and situations in a series of manipulated images, we are making the whole project more real, more achievable. Simulation=Solution.

A few weeks on, I’m finally getting around to uploading my slides from my PlayTime presentation, Playing with Pictures (it’s a 20MB+ PDF file, exported from Keynote). I was intending to annotate these so that they’d make more sense to someone who weren’t at my session, but I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll do this. This gist of it however was this: Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth.

I was invited today by one of my clients – The Climate Group – to watch Al Gore give his presentation on Climate Change at the bfi London IMAX Cinema. Gore’s presentation is pretty well covered elsewhere, so I’m not even going to try and summarise it here (it was too dark to take notes and besides I’m a lousy note-taker anyway). Suffice to say for someone who has a reputation for being boring, he’s both funny and extremely passionate about our need to find a common moral purpose to deal with this “planetary emergency”.

Like most of the UK’s web development community I was at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps summit a couple of weeks ago. A couple of highlights for me were Tom Coates’ wonderfully lucid and entertaining synthesis of all things Web 2.0 (see also Jeremy Zawodny’s annotations of Tom’s slides) and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails ‘sermon’. Although I’ve been working with Rails intermittently for at least eighteen months I’ve never seen David speak and it had never really occurred to me before just how Scandinavian Rails is: minimal, beautifully designed and good for the soul.