devlog

Today I had a fun surprise digging out an old notebook of mine from a box that had been in my mother’s keeping. It dates through the summer of 2003, after my introductory whirl on the conference circuit with Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web. At the end it overlaps with the “Crystalpunk Notebook” that I made for Wilfried Hou Je Bek.

The notes are a fun mixture of annotations from conference sessions, rambling prophetic-style narratives, sketches of designs and implementation plans, anonymous phone numbers, a translation of Jabberwocky into Spanish (why?). There are a lovely couple of pages from what I think was a talk given by Ben Russell at the Locative Media Workshop in Karosta in the summer of 2003, and which I ought to transcribe soon.

There’s a gap of about a year in the notebook; it picks up late in summer 2004 and contains what look like a lot of notes from the literate programming session that I started at EuroFoo in Enschede. This page has copious re-annotations from some unknown later date, and these interested me enough to be bothered to copy them out on their own, scan them and dump them here. This amounts to a poem about code metadata and the understanding of system - well, that is its title.

In the notes i find narratives about finding notes left for my future self. I find a lot of plans sketched out that have since taken form - i see little more than seeds there sometimes. I see a pretty accurate picture of now. I see gestures towards not-now-yet, there in Ben’s thoughts particularly.

All the travel I’ve been going through recently has offered the chance to canvass a lot of different people on their views of - the kinds of thing i have made and could perhaps work with other people to make. I did a rambling but reasonable job of articulating in Hamburg the motivators and the goals behind a lot of the work I’ve done over the last few years, particularly the wirelesslondon-centred projects in collaboration with Saul. Believe it or not, I’m still chewing over the question of finding the simplest, least useless way to apply locative technology to collective media distribution over free wireless networks. The more I hear what about others are working on, the more heartened about that I become; a few video metadata production and consumption tools are in progress; the wifidog crew are working on local media streaming and programming through their captive portal software; this could all lead to a fun and easy win for a small amount of glue.