Category: Four pillars

I was tagged this afternoon, by Glyn Moody. The tag requires me to

(a) republish these rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

(b) share seven (preferably less well-known) facts about myself:

• I don’t drive. Have never driven. Tried and failed decades ago. Plan to fix it this year. Planned to fix it last year, but never got around to it….
  
• I don’t swim. Never learnt to. Actually drowned once, fishermen brought my body in. Plan to fix it this year. Learnt a bit while on holiday. Love water, don’t know how to float. Panic sets in….
  
• I collect books. I have over 180 different editions of Don Quixote, covering 17th-20th century. Safely in storage. Along with around 36,000 others. Ran out of money to build my library. One day….
  
• I love chillies. I tend to have habanero-level chillies most days, in home-made sauce, bought sauce or raw. The capsaicin sets off an endorphin rush which I adore. Zubin Mehta is probably the only famous guy who does this….
  
• I will set up a school locally when I retire in seven years time, and work there for the rest of my life. Education is a personal passion, I was very privileged to receive a good one in Calcutta. I loved school…..thanks to Abu, whom I’ve known since 1966, I am now in touch with most of my class.
  
• Since leaving university I’ve never worked for a competitor. I don’t like “crossing the floor” for money…..
  
• I’m vaguely bionic. I have an Implantable Cardioverter-Defribillator. The only other person I “know” with the same device is Dick Cheney (!). Went in to what cardiologists call ventricular fibrillation a couple of times in December 2006. Lucky to be alive. I thank God every day.….

(c) Tag seven people. Here goes:

Dina Mehta.

Steve Clayton.

Kevin Marks.

Laura Fitton.

Tara Hunt.

Tom Ilube.

Sig Rinde.

You have been warned. I shall be in touch. And Glyn, you now have to sign my copy of Rebel Code.

I’m glad Fortune brought the Flint Center Macintosh video to my attention:

25 years tomorrow. Get well soon, Steve.

Original article with links to the video here, along with links to the legendary Ridley Scott commercial.

Loved this story about how David Bergman set about making a 1,474 megapixel photograph of Barack Obama’s inauguration and address:

It’s an amazing photograph. The things you can do with it, how you wander round, the power of the zoom, the quality of the photograph, the sheer usability of the tools. [My retarded hippie roots showed up very soon. The first thought that came into my mind was “I wish I could have delved into the Sgt Pepper cover this way”, soon followed by thoughts about Woodstock.]

I found out about it here, because I was following Zee here.

It’s all changing. Digital objects and how they become social, as Hugh Macleod kept teaching us. How the social object, having entered conversation, creates markets, as the Cluetrain guys kept reminding us. How those markets work and expand using social software, as tools like Twitter show us. How more and more tools are becoming available to do all this.

And how the Web is at the heart of all this change.

Web changes everything.

Incidentally, talking about non-web: Can you imagine the chaos if people attached this photo to their email and sent it around that way?

Today was an unusual day. I went back to work after work. Now why would I do that? Well,  I was invited by Sally Davis, the CEO of BT Wholesale, (and BT’s Disability Champion) to a viewing with a difference: The Art of Disability and Diversity, organised on BT Wholesale premises with the assistance of Gig-Arts.

I’d had a long day: things are fairly hectic right now, and so a part of me wanted to go home straight after work. But I’d said I’d go, so I did. And I was really glad I did. [Thank you, Sally].

Why? Three reasons.

One, the art on display was really good. All of it. I was particularly taken with the works of Esther Appleyard, Alison Lapper, David Downes and Mike Fryer. Mike Fryer’s choice and juxtaposition of colour was arresting; similarly, there was something truly captivating about David Downes’ use of light and shade in his trademark urbanscapes. Alison Lapper, whom I first came across as the subject of Marc Quinn’s Pregnant (exhibited on a plinth in Trafalgar Square) had some stunning works, particularly a large scale Marilyn Munroe-esque portrait of a woman. But to me the highlight of the evening was discovering the works of Esther Appleyard, really brilliant stuff.

Two, the artists were all present; they had the opportunity to address all of us, and they then mingled with the guests all evening. [To be precise, Mike Fryer was not there, he was still in the Ukraine, but his wife and niece were present]. It was fascinating to hear why they did what they did, what each artist’s particular muse and focus was.

Three, the art was affordable, ranging from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand pounds. [Yes, I know that today a few hundred pounds buys you a bank or two, but then you have to worry about your asset being nationalised forthwith and entirely worthless to you. Whereas the artwork on display, albeit national treasures, carries no such risk of forfeiture].

As I said, I was particularly taken with the work of Esther Appleyard. Her work is brave and forthright, taking the issue of genetic screening head-on from the perspective of a disabled person. As in the case of Distance Not Applicable (pictured above) she has a series of works using the initials DNA: Diversity Not Alienation, Discovering New Alphabets, Decadent New Assortments. When talking to us, her message was clear: Are we in the business of screening people like her out? Is she not human like the rest of us?

Alison Lapper, in her comments, carried on where Esther left off: What constitutes “normal”? Is anyone a “normal” human being? If any of us knew a “normal” person, could we introduce Alison to that person?

Genetic testing is a complex subject with even more complex arguments; I am by no means an expert, and won’t pretend to be one. What Esther and Alison have reminded me is that there is more than one perspective on the argument, more than one side to be heard. And I hadn’t really heard the side of the disabled person.

Today I was in the presence of some very talented persons. Very very talented persons.The fact that they were disabled appears, if anything, to have spurred their talent on; talent that was prodigious and on display. Something we should bear in mind in time to come, as debates about the whens and hows of genetic testing evolve further.

A coda:  if you’re a captain of industry and you’re reading this blog, you’re probably lost. Maybe you meant to be here instead, despite the parlous state of the markets. On the other hand, if you are a captain of industry, or even if you know someone who is the real deal, check out Gig-Arts. Their model of making the works of disabled artists available for display in boardrooms and corporate offices is worthwhile.

Last week I used an image that had been shorn of attribution by the time I found it, and wanted to find a way to credit the right person. Lars Plougmann, a long-standing reader of this blog, found the source using a tool called Tineye.

Tineye calls itself a reverse image search engine, and is a pretty good service at the beta stage. There have been so many occasions where I had found the image I wanted, but not at the right resolution. Tineye appears to solve this; at worst, it tells you that the resolution you have is the best you’re going to get, so you don’t waste time looking.

I thought it was worth sharing. Not surprisingly, I went off on a tangent while using it, thinking about how similar techniques could be made to exist for audio and video files, and the kind of uses they could be put to.

Views? Thoughts?