graemehunter.co.uk

The Sound of Young America used to be one of my favourite podcasts. Jesse Thorn interviews creatives from many fields who meet the simple criteria of being 1) good and 2) interesting. The podcast/radio show has been going for ten years now, and I was a happy listener for nearly half of them.

I am shy. I hide a lot of me in different places. This is an inbuilt protective layer. I don't like to though; I like to share, to talk, to listen.

So how can I strip away this layer? Well, I have to change. One stage of this is to have fewer places to hide. Change this site so it reflects me better, tells more of the story of me.

This brief post is step one, and the rest of the first few steps are changing some of the design for the site, which starts now.

Having watched the first episode of Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, I wrote howI wasn’t quite at ease with some of his proofs of how technology had influenced society. I was keen to see how he developed his ideas, which rolled on into a new direction, of “How the idea of the ecosystem was invented, how it inspired us, and how it wasn’t even true”. This exploration was preceded by the statement that:

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is a three part documentary on BBC 2 by Adam Curtis, who made the fantastic The Power of Nightmares, an exploration of how the Islamic Fundamentalists and the American Hawks rose from the same point in history, each with complementary aims, and a fundamental need of each other. This new series sets out to portray how we as humans have not been empowered by technology, but have instead been somewhat enslaved. A fascinating premise for me, so I was rather excited by the prospect of the series.

I went this evening to a debate on Activism vs Slacktivism at St Anne's College, Oxford this evening. Very interesting range of opinions, and I'm still gathering my thoughts together personally. For one I made a load of paper notes, and it's going to take a little while to write them up. In the meantime, there were several useful links, particularly on papers studying the effectiveness of online activism, and I thought I'd get those into a quick post:

As someone who's relatively new to Drupal, I've been quite surprised with how much spam I've got on my new blog. Mainly bots trying to set up new user accounts, which is something that seems should be turned off by default. Even when I did, there is still a page accessible to apply for a new account. So without wanted to dig too deep just yet, I've found the Mollom module, which promises to stop this.

I've just started using the beta of the Netbeans 7 IDE. There are a few sharp new little features in there. The HTML5 support is much needed, but a nice one I've just found is the ability to launch a Terminal window (in Linux and on OSX). Just go to Window > Output > Terminal.

As I help to organise the Oxtuttle social media discussion group, it seemed to make sense that I set up an Oxtuttle web site. It's also a good place for me to learn a bit more about Drupal.

In addition, that seems like a more suitable general place to list Oxford geek dates and events, so rather than do a monthly-ish post here, there is a page on the Oxtuttle site devoted to events: Oxford Events. So go there for the latest Oxford events for the geek community.

Okay, slightly different format this month, I've marked up all the events in microformat style, so that they can be read better by search engines.

If you have a geek event in the Oxford area, please let me know via twitter: @graemehunter