Month: May 2006

Thyme and Slime

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.

Livejournal: bigger than Google

…or at least, it is in Russia. So says Alexa.

Edit: that link doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out how to find a better one. Sorry, you’ll just need to go on blind faith!

Picnic Meme

Haven’t seen this one being propagated for a while, so I figured it was my turn to give it a little poke:

This is a picnic meme. There will be an LJ picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK on Sunday the 14th of May, from around 2pm. We’ll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it’ll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun.

Unfortunately I’m not sure I can make it – but it’ll be good despite that terrible, terrible shortcoming!