mssv

  • Old British Actors

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Old British Actors

    Who will play wise, old men in 5-10 years? It’s an interesting question which deserves some attention ever since they’ve been looking for a replacement for Richard Harris as Dumbledore in Harry Potter. “Old British Actors, a non-renewable resource?”

  • Ragging

    ·

    4–6 minutes

    ·

    3 comments on Ragging

    Is ragging – making new initiates/players/students perform pointless tasks – the key to forming a strong community?

  • Benevolent

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    1 comment on Benevolent

    Take a look at the LambdaMOO constitution (about halfway down the page). It confirms my belief that the most efficient and often best form of governance for an online community is essentially a benevolent dictatorship. LambdaMOO is basically an virtual online world. In their constitution, the LambdaMOO administrators (‘Wizards’) explicitly state that they will sometimes…

  • Milestones

    ·

    2–3 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Milestones

    A few days ago, the world (for me) passed another technological milestone – I now had full and unmetered Internet access for 99% of the time*. I’d just bought the Orange SPV Smartphone. This phone is quite a nice piece of kit; it has a decent sized colour screen with a reasonably fast processor. Importantly,…

  • Xylophone

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Xylophone

    Saw four people busking with xylophones and glockenspiels in Cambridge city centre today – I think it’s been the first time for years that I’ve felt compelled to give a street performer some money. Their performance of Blue Danube was pretty damn impressive. On another note, I have two long posts that I have in…

  • How to get rich

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on How to get rich

    How to get rich – an interesting lecture by Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel (a very good book, on the whole). Fairly woolly, but it has some useful points.

  • Life online

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Life online

    Putting your life online – recording and organising all of your emails, conversations and other life events on a computer to serve as a supplemental memory system. This isn’t a particularly new concept, but it is likely to be the first decent implementation. Very interesting stuff – I wonder how it’ll affect kids growing up…

  • Films

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Films

    Not many updates recently, alas. I’ve been watching The Princess Bride and reading The Code Book, both of which I heartily recommend. I’ve also been emailing my crew mates for my upcoming mission at the Mars Society Desert Research Station in December and writing content for the MetaFilter wiki. I plan to write a couple…

  • Wiki-wiki-wah!

    ·

    1–2 minutes

    ·

    No comments on Wiki-wiki-wah!

    I’ve finally done something I’ve been meaning to do for months; set up a wiki. Or to be exact, three wikis. Wikis are webspaces in which any material can be edited or added by anyone; a bit like a community whiteboard with hyperlinking, if you will. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but after…

  • School

    ·

    2–3 minutes

    ·

    No comments on School

    I was feeling a bit bored this evening* and decided to have a look at my old school website. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had been updated recently, and what’s more, it had some inspectorate reports online. Before the website was created I’m not convinced that it would’ve been easy to get…