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I saw yesterday in the Toronto Star that William Gibson was coming to town that night for a talk as part of This is not a Reading Series to promote his new work, Spook Country. I didn’t have time to pick up tickets, but gave it a shot at the door and sure enough there was room, so for less than the cost of a beer I got to spend an hour or so listening to Gibson on a variety of topics.

It’s funny, I can remember buying Neuromancer, down to a mental picture of the shelf of the store I picked it up at (W.H. Smith in the Quinte Mall in Belleville), and I remember that I knew to look for the book and it had some important ideas that I should read, but this was the late ’80s, so how did I know to buy it? The internet didn’t exist as we know it back then, so what was my recommendation engine?

Given the speaker and the topic, I thought it would be fun to try to take notes on the talk on my Nokia e61. I’m not an contender for the Blackberry Olympics, but fortunately Gibson has a bit of a drawl in his speech that slows him to a point where I could capture about one in every five sentences, so here are some quotes I picked out - in a lot of cases the quotes are verbatim, but due to the relatively low bandwidth provided by my thumbs, they shouldn’t be attributed directly to the speaker as they’re written here.

On the MacGuffin in Spook Country

For a while I didn’t know what was in the box… I had a list of possibilities, but they were no more than the standard items that a reasonably educated person would think of after reading the setup. When I finally knew what was in the box, it was a lovely day in the basement, a lovely day indeed.

On his writing process

“He writes with Google on…” That’s the meme that’s replaced “William Gibson writes with a mechanical typewriter.” Bruce Sterling used to write with a 12 inch television on top of his computer and headphones on to listen to something else, so compared to that what’s a little Google?

If it disappeared tomorrow, you’d miss your Google.

On eBay

eBay is a vast and constant rationalization of the world’s attics… The ultimate democratization of connoisseurship… You become Sotheby’s worst nightmare. This goes on all the time.

You can see every toy you ever had as a child. I’ve collected jpegs of every frog toy… I don’t want them… that would be sad… eBay’s an interesting tool with which to explore one’s life.

On books and novels

Books are the oldest mass [media? meme?]… We’re still making wheels. They’re titanium, they’re really fancy, but they’re still wheels, so we’ll still be making books.

Learning to read novels is a very culturally complex activity… We don’t recognize the creative contribution of the reader versus the writer… (tree falls in the forest thing)… The person who reads the marks [Gibson refers to writing as “putting marks on paper”] performs an equally creative act. The movie of your favourite novel never equals the one you’ve seen in your forehead. Nobody else has seen that movie.

On the settings of his works

Science fiction is always about the day in which it’s written. Having written about the 21st century since 1979, the ability to write about it as the present is really a hoot.

When I wrote Neuromancer I thought I was committing an act of almost ludicrous optimism… Nuclear armament was getting us all down… [Neuromancer’s setting was] a very simple extension of Reagonomics… Mexico city as North America… It’s not commented on in the text but I think it’s there… People think it’s dystopian but there are so many people in the world who would instantly and happily move to that world.

The final question yielded a fitting closing:

As wonderful as life is a fair bit of it is fairly creepy… Happy endings are about when you close the curtain, more a part of art than a part of life because life goes on and usually ends kind of creepy.

Tags: WilliamGibson, Spook Country

2007 09 22

Remember when you got what you paid for?

So today I got lured into a Yahoo News link to some video. I can’t remember what the video was about, but golly whiskers, it sure seemed important at the time, so you could imagine my disappointment when instead of streaming video, I got a message saying that something was wrong with my browser configuration. I’m running Vista Ultimate on a 5 month old PC with 4 gigs of RAM.

Of course, the 30 second pre-roll ad played just fine, but the content itself, well, that must have been pretty hi-tech stuff.

This seems to be the theme this week. I tried to download a ringtone, from a company I work for even, and when the WAP push came along, it told me that my phone wasn’t compatible. I actually paid a significant premium for a phone that was extra-super compatible, to the point that the major carriers weren’t selling it in favour of its less-featured successor, but it’s just not compatible.

This reminds me of the earlier days of the internet and computing, when I would run Linux and whatnot not for the freedom, but because it was all I could afford, and I was willing to sacrifice some compatibility to get stuff done. Today I’m paying extra for the same level of service. You know, if I’m going to get screwed at the low and high ends, I think I’ll be a lot more comfortable in the cheap seats.

2007 04 26

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Cameras! And Lasers! And Parsers!

I admit, I never studied compiler design or parsers back in school, but when I see Martin Fowler trying a simple “Hello World” type thing that involves cameras and lasers, I’m tempted to hit the books again.

Seriously, if all tech writing contained references to cameras and lasers, together, nobody would ever study geography.

2007 02 26

DemoCamp12: Yee-fricking-ha

I finally made it to a DemoCamp at No Regrets! I missed a few in the summer, largely because I didn’t feel like going out to King West. Of course, I had to wait until a freezing cold day with strong wind to brave the trek, and predictably, I got off the streetcar too early (hint: if you’re going West, it’s after the bridge. A few stops after).

I love No Regrets.

The venue was a lot smaller than MARS, but the fact that we didn’t have to move from the demo to the bar was huge, with much less drop off at the end of the talks. It’s also a bar where most people are standing up, which makes it a lot easier to join conversations. I must have talked to 20 people last night about all kinds of projects.

OK, the demos!

Dave Humphrey gave a talk about Teaching Mozilla Development. I misunderstood (because I didn’t really prepare or even read anything ahead of time) and thought it would be about how to contribute to Mozilla, and that did get covered a bit, but it was more interesting to see the wide range of contributions his students have been adding to the system. Mozilla is the kind of app where at first glance I think it’d be pretty closed to additions with a clear path going forward and established contributors, but Dave really showed me how wrong I was.
Alec Saunders (?) from Iotum demoed his Talk Now application for the Blackberry. I’m always stoked to see mobile apps get demo’d (Alec used a webcam of some sort to display the phone screens), but this app confused me a bit - it’s something so people can signal if they’re available to talk or not, but it’s being deployed on the device that people get because they’re absolutely desperate to be available all the time. Still, nifty stuff, and I look forward to seeing it roll out to more platforms.
Albert Lai gave an update on BubbleShare, which was recently acquired by Kaboose. Key message: the amount of due diligence applied to vetting a purchase doesn’t scale linearly with the size of a transaction, and in fact there’s not much more work to clear something 10 times as big.
Will Pate gave a demo of Flock, which I’d heard about but hadn’t actually tried. I don’t get to spend a lot of time on Macs these days, but it’d be interesting to try it out just to pick up a few new ideas.
We also got some updates from previous DemoCamp presenters, some of whom are doing really well. In particular, Freshbooks went from 7,000 accounts to 130,000 in the past year. Mike apprarently gets email reports about this stuff every morning, which is something I really want to do at the office.

Other thoughts:

I’m amazed and astounded that a sound system made of podcasting gear and PC speakers could actually work as well as it did. There was a bit of clipping and distortion, but I could understand everything that was going on.
Traci Lords and heart attack jokes will never stop being funny.
People need to bring business cards so I can follow up on the things we talked about, unless of course that was a variant on the thing where the girl gives you a fake phone number (not that that’s ever happened to me). Oh well, I’ll just have to catch them at the next event.
Mobile Monday was on the same night. Apparently they had a bunch of VCs there talking about how to make money. We mostly talked about how much it sucks that you can’t get an affordable data plan in Canada (and no, I didn’t start those conversations, but they were frequent.)
I don’t know where the idea bubbled up, but it seems that the pattern is that when you’re making something for yourself to use, just open it up to the world. That’s not a bad way to get started.

Technorati Tags: DemoCamp

2007 02 06

General
DemoCamp

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Your quote of the day

Overheard after some cutting-and-pasting of some boilerplate PHP code found through The Google:

Can you imagine what it would be like to code for the web without the internet?

2007 01 05

Indoor Playground gets closer to launching

David Crow notes that Toronto’s Indoor Playground has revealed its pricing and is having an open house. I’m working in an office now after a year and a half of working from home, but this would have been pretty sweet a few months back. I might try to make it down to see the place, since it’s on the way to Ange’s opening that night.

Technorati Tags: Toronto, Indoor Playground

2007 01 05

Random bits for Dec 15

A few miscellaneous things to round out the week:

ReSharper has a new build available. On the whole, it seems faster and objects to more of my code, but they did something with the way they handle brackets as you type that’s screwing up my rhythm. I’ll probably get used to it around the time that they change it back.

The 2nd Toronto Code Camp is gearing up for March 31. Registration and submissions for speakers are open (222 registrations at last count!) I love when sites are small enough that I can get my first name as a user ID….

Slashdot has another article about P2P content distribution, Digg has a few about the death of the page view in the age of AJAX and video. What’s this going to mean for crawlers and aggregators? My first thoughts are that the nature of crawling will change, but this might lead to a lot more structured metadata to make everything come together easier…

2006 12 15

I’ll miss you, CRT

My friend Kathleen once mused about how some bits of technology are going to vanish in our lifetime. Her example was the raised numbers on a credit card, and while I don’t necessarily believe her, I think I see the world differently these days.

I watched Code Rush recently, and I realized that documentaries about computers are changing with the loss of the CRT. On the bright side, we’ll lose that flicker of the screens, but I’ll miss the close-ups of monitors that show the red, green, and blue elements of each pixel.

2006 12 08

A helpful reminder for demos

If you’re going to be doing any kind of demonstration from your laptop, in the name of all that’s holy, create a demo user account. This will accomplish two things:

It’ll ensure that you didn’t leave an IM client logged in, and
It’ll hide your desktop icons and browser bookmarks (which hopefully aren’t as revealing as this desktop, but will still likely distract from your presentation).

I personally enjoy these kinds of diversions, but I was just reminded of the rules as I IM’d someone who, it turns out, was teaching at the time, and who will no doubt make it my fault when I get home. Convincing everyone to follow the “make a demo account” rule is the only way I can think of to keep myself out of trouble - changing everyone on the planet is preferable to stopping myself from starting conversations with dirty words… :)

2006 11 27

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