Entirely Unnecessary Geekery

After a 7,500,000:1 chance encounter yesterday in central London, I felt quite chuffed with my l33t improvisation skillz yesterday on the return train journey back to the office.

Because the very short headphone cable mini-jack section I use with my Nokia N95 was annoyingly too short to comfortably reach my noggin from my table bound iPod which was eagerly waiting to play me a podcast - plus I’d just bought a new FM transmitter for my iPod - so I tuned the FM radio receiver in the N95 to the frequency the iPod+transmitter was at and then connected the full Nokia headset with its proprietary extension to the N95 and listened to my iPod through the Nokia N95.

Fortunately as it was a late morning train, there was nobody else in my carriage to look at me strangely.

But I did smile as I considered the millions of dollars of investment and product development that had been expended on this configuration just to enable me to listen to what is, in effect, a taped tech radio talkshow. Bloody marvellous.

Mental Boards Of Directors

Doc Searls:

Logic and reason sit on the mental board of directors, but emotions cast the deciding votes.

In my current situation, that being one of impending self-imposed early retirement, this guidance seems to be appropriate, and quite acutely so.

So, my new plan is to retire for at least the month of June - possibly July too - to some far off, warm, sunny, beachy destination much nearer the equator than I am now, and host occasional mental board meetings and see what resolutions get passed.

Once several well defined objectives have been agreed - and a good few enlightening books read - I shall then reboot myself, return home and wantonly allow myself to be talked back out of retirement.

Sunken Creativity, Re-floated : MiNi-MoMa

Professionally speaking, the period of August & September last year was very tough, the precise coals of which I won’t rake over here. One of the knock-on effects of this was - aside from listening to Johhny Cash’s “Hurt” on permaplay for about three weeks solid - I felt a sense or obligation to respect - and possibly even embrace - the grave nature of the circumstances. It completely choked any creative output on this blog.

One of the few creative ideas I had during this time, and which was promptly banned from being posted on the grounds of being too upbeat, was this…



Quite simply, it was some wallpaper that I designed to look like a blank wall of a museum or art gallery. It was meant to be used in conjunction with Yahoo!’s Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator) and the Picture Frame widget which displays either your own photographs or a feed of other people’s shots from Flickr! - the shots cycle or rotate at a frequency of your own choosing.

The desired effect I sought was to enable you to present your photographs in the rather unlikely, simulated context of an art gallery. I created a handful of different variations and briefly wondered how easy it would be (for a community effort) to create a variety of blank walls from various actual art galleries around the world - the one I made was based upon the MoMa in New York.

But it was binned as an idea and forgotten about. Until this week when I found Museumr (which appears to have been launched right at the same time I had my brainwave) and I had a simultaneous sense of satisfaction and regret.

It’s not exactly the same idea - mine’s a background desktop wallpaper / widget implementation of it - but it’s bloody close enough. That’ll teach me to listen to Johhny Cash.

Instructions for use : set your chosen gallery wall as your desktop wallpaper, install the Yahoo! Widget engine (Window & Mac versions available), enable the Picture Frame widget and point to either your won photos or take the Flickr! widget and you’re done. Helps if you have a clear desktop too.