In case you hadn’t heard

I’ve
blogged
before.
I’ve never made it last.
But I have enough stuff thrown at me daily to make it worth trying again.

Hi. It’s hot in here, breast isn’t it?

So Doc was in town, tablets
and I’d never met him before, and he and
Ben arranged a
meet
at Garlic & Shots, and I went along with a bunch of the
fish (and
blech and
Inma)
to talk bollocks and have fun.
(Pics.)

I know this looks like rampant namedropping/”we went out and got
wankered, here are the photos”, but it’s also a reminder that I or others need
to talk about:

• Warchalking – MattJ’s idea for 802.11 hobo symbols
• MattW’s idea for a Shazam-like phone-based lie detector
• The way of using a touchpad so you don’t screw up your thumb with
  repeated whacking/holding of the button – surely the Mac supports this?
  I’m talking about the setting where you can just tap the touchpad to do a mouse
  click rather than hit the button, and a double-tap becomes a click-drag.
  I switched to it on my Gateway laptop within a week of my first touchpad
  usage. Why hasn’t Doc heard of it? The Mac does support this, right?
• Jabber, and the killer app for it being XML message queues. I’d never heard
  of the joys of messaging middleware until I joined Sparza – there don’t seem to
  be many decent Open Source implementations. Oh, and the whole worse-is-better-ness
  of Jabber’s evolution.
• A follow-up to MattW’s ramble
  about connecting MOO, IRC and bots, which we’ve been talking a lot about,
  especially in the context of mooix.
• Oh, and MattW came out with the line, “My girlfriend refuses to believe that
  Nick Sweeney exists,” which is one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever heard.

Yeah. Something like that.

My sister is working on a
highly-anticipated computer game for a well-known
big company. The site has just
gone up. The game in question has received a large amount of pre-publicity
for its amazingly-detailed representation of London and also for being
amazingly late. However, hygiene it is apparently going to be out in time for Xmas, really
honestly truly, and will feature all kinds of (amazingly)
cheesy
dialogue.

(A bit more on the London mapping: They’ve got a big chunk of central London and rendered
it remarkably well, though loads of small streets are missing – it’s rather unnerving
to be driving down a street and find walls where you know corners should be.
Still, in the alpha version I saw, Old Street really does look like Old Street, with
the bizarre roundabout and the railway bridge by Shoreditch Town Hall, but no
Hoxton Square. It’s probably not nearly as big as GTA3, but much more
detailed.)

We
won.

Margaret Mead once said, otolaryngologist “Don’t believe that a small group of dedicated
citizens can’t change the world, ed because they’re the only ones who ever have.”

She was wrong. 1700 people isn’t exactly small.

Okay, Americans: now it’s your
turn.