fisharepeopletoo

The Ideal After-Christmas-Stocking-Filler

Lucky timing, in which someone must have bought one bang on the last possible delivery date before it was too late for Christmas and everyone stopped shopping on Amazon and went to queue in Waterstones instead, means that Text Messages is at number 42 in the Amazon festive charts in Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Poetry > By Period > 20th Century

This makes it sound like it's been accepted into the canon of English Literature, and there is nothing that poets like more than the thought they might join the canon, mostly because there is bugger all money in writing slim volumes so all we can hope for is to be on the list with keats and yeats.

Sadly, by Boxing Day it'll have dropped like a stone again into the far hundred thousands of the amazon hot one million.

But if you are short of an unusual after-Christmas-pressy and want to help my bid for immortality, it's selling for £1.29!

Christmas Cracker Banker Jokes

This is serious. The more scorn and contempt that is tipped on them, the less easy it is for their lobbying money to corrupt governments.

These are Christmas cracker jokes though, so get ready to groan at the low quality. I can take no praise or blame for them, they all come from the www

What do you say to a merchant banker who knocks on your door?
How much do I owe you for the pizza?

What’s the definition of optimism?
An investment banker ironing five shirts on a Sunday evening.

How many bankers does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but only when he's finished stacking in aisle 5.

This one is my favourite, for its brutality:

How do you get a banker out of a tree?
Cut the rope.

Stories for Mixed Realities

If you read Lord of the Rings (or Persuasion by Jane Austen or anything else) on the bus on the way home from work you're in a mixed reality.

Even gazing out of the window daydreaming you are.

I wonder if the stories we are starting to write now are the ones to be told in the space between the bus and the book.

Secret Society of Angels

I've switched my laptop over to linux ubuntu in the hope that it will force me to learn a bit about how computers actually work.

And I'm going to try and learn linux on the train home from work.

So on Friday evening I started on page 1 exercise 1 of Linux for Dummies.

And got stuck straight away.

I typed in what I thought was the right thing, hit return...

"no such directory"

"no such file"

"no such command"

and so on.

I couldn't get past step one.

After about 10 minutes of sighing, putting my head in my hands and staring out the window at the snow covered moors glowing in the moonlight, I was just about to give up, when the young man sitting next to me, who I'd hardly even noticed he was so quiet and calm, said:

"I use linux. How can I help?"

and spent the rest of the journey giving me a beginners tutorial in linux.

When we got to Manchester Piccadilly I offered to buy him a drink in return, but he said no, there was no need for any payment, and that

"as long as you use linux, there will always be one of us here to help you."

So we shook hands on the platform, and it must have been a trick of the station lights, but there was a sort of glowing circle behind his head.

And when I looked back again he was gone.

NB the important parts of this story are true.

Dictum Bebo Application

Another example of asking questions as a structure for participation, a nice myspace and bebo application called Dictum.

In this case the questions are more a way to think about a world view and important choices than to tell autobiographical stories, but the two are quite close - past and future actions almost.

My Superstruct Prize

OK, not really mine. A participant called Lord Samwise did all the spadework.

But I made my own contributions to Quantum Governance, not least strong support for the idea of replacing nation states (so nineteenth century) with self organising constellations of city-states from anywhere in the world.

And some quantum silliness including turning the UEFA Champions League into a non competitive league (as in the Hanseatic League rather than "league" meaning a ladder of competition) of self governing city-states.

And that ghosts should have votes in city-state legislatures.

Anyway, we won the MindStruct Award, "created and awarded by Jane McGonigal and Kiyash Monsef... for the superstructure that provides the most delicious and satisfying food for thought."

Which we got because "Quantum Governance is the most fulfilling thought experiment we’ve witnessed in ages. You took a strange little seed of an idea and you played and played and played with it, until you turned it into a feast."

New Knowledge for Old

Aisha Jilani with her first poster explaining her research.

Aisha has just started her PHD in the Informatics Research Group at the University here, sponsored by myself and Ben Childs at Common.

The areas of research as outlined on Aisha's poster are below, specified by Ben and I, and supervised by Professor Lee McCluskey.

The language of computer science is still a bit strange to me, but I understand exactly what I want Aisha's research to do, and why, based on 8 years of experience and insights, and so far everything is going along very happily indeed.

I'm ridiculously proud of sponsoring a PHD, and looking back, the steps that got us here seem like the only ones to take, but I'd never have foreseen it for second when setting off.