Moving house is always a good excuse for a decluttering and one thing I’ve been dragging around with me the last decade is my ergonomic kneeling stool.  Loved but never used, up on eBay it went and fetched the princely sum of £15 plus P&P.  The P&P requires corrugated cardboard, folded (and possibly joined) to certain dimensions.

Feels like I’m working too hard already as I rummage in Aldi, ask in Delta Pi and surf Access Self-Storage.  It doesn’t fit in an off-the-shelf box and I’m starting to develop the hungry look of a (90% recycled) junkie.

If there were a small god of packaging, he smiled on me as I left work.   An abundance of the brown pulped planes appeared – far more than I could transport on my bike – and I was able to select an ideal piece.

So what’s the kicker here?

I’d not noticed the cardboard before although I’ve no reason to think it just appeared.  However, having been primed to see cardboard, it jumped right out at me.  It got me thinking.

Far more passes in front of my eyes than I can possibly be aware of.  My conscious attention is just a surfer on an ocean of mental activity.  Yet what I notice is very much set by what I’m tuned to – even if I’m not aware of what that is.

If I’m expecting sleights, I see them.  When I feel lucky, I am.  Accidents come in threes and successful roll has its own momentum.

You can call it serendipity, cosmic alignment or whatever.  The point is that consciously maintaining a positive, opportunistic outlook does not just cast a rosy tint on your view of the world but actually puts the spotlight on things within it.

I imagine many belief systems get a lot of mileage out of this simple principle.  I expect it has a name if only I could google for concepts.

It’s generally held that early traumatic experiences can be pivotal to the shaping of an individual.  Something about my childhood might be inferred from the fact that one of my most vivid comes from ‘The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang‘, an 80’s animated spin-off from the popular ‘Happy Days’ TV series.

Most of it was whimsical Hanna-Barbera fun but one episode (probably ‘Science Friction‘) freaked me right out.   I was too young to realise it was a rip-off of the classic The Time Machine but it featured a race of red-eyed, lycanthropic creatures who captured humans and brought them underground to toil.

One of the ‘gang’ was told by a fellow prisoner that after three days human prisoners would spontaneously turn into one of the ‘Krolacks’ (IIRC – the Morlocks, basically).  The gang member relayed this news before turning to ask his informant how long he’d been there but he’d mutated in the interim.

This scared the living shit out of me as a kid and, somewhere in my shallow subconscious, probably still does.

Cycled into work along the old railway line this morning.  Always feels like a lovely, leafy wormhole to Harborne.

This morning I got a rosy ‘hello’ from a gent sipping an early export on joining the trail at Hagley road and a smallish dog made an embarrassing but enthusiastic attempt at killing my shoe.

It would have been better this evening when I was wired up with GPS, heart-monitor and mic to record my commute.  All part of a crazy research project.

Normal relationship stuff is being unpleasantly spiked with international news this evening.

N flew out to visit her family for a couple of weeks this afternoon.  Unfortunately, they happen to live in Tabriz, in Iran.   This was supposed to be a sure win for the presidential challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, it being his home town and an Azeri stronghold.  The results didn’t come out that way and now there are kinda alarming clips on YouTube and Twitter echoing ominous retweets.

I’m sure the use of social media to circumvent political suppression in this instance is fascinating but I’d be happy with a simple text message right now.

…but I can’t help noticing that it’s a big deal at the moment.  There’s this credit-crunch, global recession, economic crisis going on and we are all Having to Deal With It.  Whether this means roughing it with supermarket beans, camping in the UK or whatever.

There’s the Economic Climate story where everything just happened.  We couldn’t do anything about it.  Best to just ride it out and not try to understand it.

My issue is this:  hubris.  We pretend we understand what is going on, we know how to fix it and have the power to do so.  By ‘we’ I mean, of course, the people charged with sorting it out.

There’s this thing called The Market which by recent consensus is a very good way of generating wealth.  It seems to work without anyone being in charge.  Competition tosses out the inefficient and irrelevant (and maybe immoral in ethically-aware times) to leave the best players, provisionally.  It’s an evolutionary system where much loved brands can go to wall without appeal.  It’s ruthless, continuous and it scales.

And now it’s gone all wrong.

This cues the Reckless Bankers story.  A whole bunch of bankers started making risky gambles on a bunch of clever stuff we don’t fully understand and, what do you know — it all went a bit tits-up.  Banks, unlike hardware stores, can’t be allowed to go under.  They are immunised from market forces.  The bosses walk away with big, swinging bonuses.  They also take the blame whilst the goverments come to save us and bring the good times back.

I don’t buy it.  Here’s my story.

Artificial wealth was created and compounded by layers of unaccountability.  Indeed, it was in no-one’s interest to break the loop.  The initial borrowers wanted the stuff they saw in the media.  The media wanted to advertise the stuff.  The banks wanted to max out their bonuses using lucrative credit.  The government wanted to stay in power by making people feel rich.  The longer it went on, the bigger the hangover.  The bill is now on the mat and it’s too big to hide any longer.  The system can correct itself even at this painfully late stage.

I’d just like to see a little more accountability and comprehension.  I’d also like to know who it is that all this money owed to…

When I read a few weeks ago that Alastair Campbell and John Prescott were launching a Web2.0 campaign to get Labour a fourth term of office I was naturally skeptical. It smelt like a desperate bit of bandwagon-jumping.  The name ‘Go Fourth‘ seems vaguely amateurish and the obvious Twitter account hadn’t even been bagged.  Utterly irresistable.

I’d like to say I was trying to show up the pitfalls of privately-owned arbitrary namespaces or some such guff. In fact, very few people can resist the allure of a platform and I’m not one of them.  I fondly imagined some kind of satire or spoofing opportunities.

After a couple of weeks I’ve realised a couple of things.

Firstly, there is an active community of political tweeters and I feel faintly guilty each time I get notified one of them has started following me.  Prezza may not have fully grasped Twitter (no following and mostly automatic blog post notifications) but he’s kicking it up on Facebook.  Campbell gets Twitter but has entrusted his official website to monkeys who’s brief must have been ‘make it look painfully authentic, like a rushed Frontpage job’.  I’m saying it’s generally genuine — even if it’s only on the fringe.

Two, I’m not a political animal.  I enjoy robust debates with people with differing firm political convictions for the same reason I like to talk with theists: to find out how they square their circle and force me to test my own logic. Nevertheless, I’m really not interested in the ins and outs.  And I’m no Swift.  It’s pretty obvious they’d be more value in sticking the badge firmly when it belongs.

So, where do I send the password?

The word ‘community’ is bandied about a fair bit these days and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a cosy term used lazily.  As an exercise, I used the pseudo-random idea generator in my head to squeeze out some candidates:

© Bruno HEROLD - Fotolia.com

• The 20th Bristol Juggling & Circus Skills Convention
• Birmingham Bloggers
• Asda customers
• Bohemia patrons
• Flickr users
• Guardian readers
• Nokia users
• iPhone users
• Cyclists
• Procrastinators
• Tossers
• Bandana wearers
• All the shoe shops in Amsterdam

I want to know which of these are communities and which are arbitrary groupings.  If you find a definition that works for you, please share.

The bit I really love about flying is that fleeting moment, a few thousand feet up, when your sense of scale shifts.  Towns are shown up as real entities interconnected across the landscape via moving channels of light particles, each of which are likely to be aware only of the few nearest particles nearest them.  It’s a perception that’s easier to slip into if you’ve been up since 0330 hours.

So, I got to spend a couple of days in Paris. Shockingly, I’d never been to the place before.  Perhaps I’ve seen Amelié too many times but it didn’t seem very ‘Parisian’.  Most likely this was because I didn’t have time to get any further than Notre Dame. I’ll be back to take it in at my leisure.

The workshop I was at was a decent affair.  Everyone agreed there are problems to be solved and every seems to have their own solution.  It reinforced my belief that a common characteristic of creative geeks is a readiness to  build everything from the ground up rather than mess around with other people’s stuff merely for gains in time and effectiveness.

I thought my part of the presentation was patchy but they saw the value in it and invited us to Helsinki for a week, nonetheless.  Should be fun.

toilet first on the left

Something seems to be happening to me.  Maybe it’s age-related and so, along with the hormone that spurs nasal and aural tufts, there’s a chemical cascade that propels me into the back yard to get all horticultural.

Some context: our back yard is a jungle.  A small tribe held together by the absolute belief in the sanctity of the abandoned shopping trolley and we’d be none the wiser.

There’s something immensely satisfying about reeling in yards of thorny blackberry stems, unearthing a patio or discovering a WC that’s so old it was actually manufactured locally.  Whilst my body is pottering, sawing and carrying, my mind is free to wander and toy with ideas.  Some of my best ideas happen here.  This could be down to the endorphin high or perhaps the rate of oxygen to the brain (cycling or walking produce a similar state).

By contrast, when I’m at work and stationed in front of the ‘puter, the vast proportion of my time is on problem solving.  My attention is trained on the task in hand, traversing a tree of problems which branch into sub-problems and so on.  Even if I take a break, I’m still selecting from a set of links and buttons,  See…click..see….click…  like a lab rat searching for a neurological payoff.

It’s only if when I ditch the choose-your-own-adventure structure that the bigger ideas have room to step forward and quietly introduce themselves.

I’m in day 2 of a classic bout of flu.  So I’m steering clear of web server admin and directing my delirious attentions here in a sort of cursory round-up.

It’s been a busy week-and-a-bit with the new job.   All the grappling with new stuff leaves my synapses frazzled but I can feel my neurons getting leaner.  My curse of distractability is getting a battering as feeds go unread and my social networks are shamefully neglected.  I’ve no time at work and when I get home I’ve no inclination.  I’d rather polish brass while my head cools off.

There’s something particularly satisfying about restoring nice stuff that’s been abused.  Kind of like bringing in a rescued cat but without the hair-trigger claws and pools of piss.