Great few days – as I keep saying, they always come in clumps. Lots of things I’d like to write about properly, but I know I never will. So I’ll jot them down here, and if you’re (un)lucky I might come back to some of them later…
Wild Thyme Cafe
was excellent, mainly becuase it was full of people I haven’t talked to nearly enough. Most of them don’t have livejournals, so I can’t point and giggle. The usual Cambridge small-worldness culminated in me being asked if I knew mjg59‘s girlfriend. There was also the joy of seeing lavendersparkle for the first time in 9 months or so; I just hope it wasn’t too unpleasant being the civil servant in a roomful of anarchists
Then I went off with writinghawk and Francis and emerged four hours later with a lot to think about. In brief, so I don’t forget:
- Why so many geeks are big on civil liberties
-
Faith schools + ‘
modular religion
‘ –> state-funded Summerhill - A bizarre horizontal tetris variant that I have no hope of ever describing
- Links between Intentional Communities and Social Software
-
The Wireworld computer, a cellular automaton that must have taken a great deal of time for somebody to dream up. [
Edit
: As Gareth points out below, the people behind this were David Moore, Mark Owen, and friends] - Collective fanboying of Chris Lightfoot, who is like Freakonomics only better, and should really be given a column somewhere
- Why web services are bad news for open-source software
Before that,
Slimelight
was also very good fun; elixir-zero has already written about it. I’m getting to understand why some people don’t like it: the druggies, the over-pushy people, the falling-apart building, the 6am exhaustion. But none of those are really downsides for me personally – ymmv.