Tag: life

Categories
raves

Dropped by the office…


Dropped by the office…
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Decided to spend the day out of the house so that I don’t have to find excuses not to write. I even dropped by the office to see how the guys are doing. This is a photo of me with our senior technology consultant, Matt Banks, a guy so good-looking that when we had our company photos done, the photographer reckoned that he could get Matt work as a model. Matt is making a rude gesture with his fingers, in the general direction of the MD, Mark Salisbury.

I am going to look at a snazzy new, freebie content management system. Woo.

More photos on Flickr…

Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
writing

Le Petit Dejeuner des CrackBerries#3


Le Petit Dejeuner des CrackBerries#3
Originally uploaded by mgharris

All right luv, stop taking photos of me…

Seriously though, have you ever been out with another BlackBerry addict?

There’s little call for conversation.

What a world. It’s not just that my attention span will barely make it through a TV show these days but I’ve taken about 40% of my social life online too.

A friend on Jaiku told me that she and her hubby were going to a Café Rouge for breakfast this morning and because I’m such a sheep I thought David and I could do the same. By crikey it’s nice. Ersatz France, with French pop music and all… Reminded me how much I’m looking forward to spending time in France next month as we drive through to visit my baby brother in Switzerland.

Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
nostalgia raves

Dotcom daftness again? Or is it real?

It’s the sort of idea that we used to talk about breathlessly in innovation centre coffee meetings with other Internet entrepreneurs, swapping stories of the latest daft idea to get a squillion dollars of funding. Not that the ideas we had weren’t daft too. My best conversations were with then Oxford graduate student Alex Straub, of the splendidly daft mondus.com (hey, I too was a believer once), who probably personally made a few million from Italian investors Seat Pagine Gialle before mondus went belly-up. Back in 1999 Alex and I would go all googly-eyed at crazy Internet ideas, the madder the better.

So here’s the idea – and it comes from a DPhil Biochemistry student at Oxford. (Hurrah for the biochemistry training – it’s so darned versatile!)

A website where you buy moments in time. Your first kiss, it’s suggested, or perhaps the moment you were offered a book deal. For $1 per minute you get to baggsy that moment and upload content which will be hosted in perpetuity, to share and share again with everyone in the world.

Thomas Whitfield apparently pitched this to Dan Wagner, himself a wily Internet entrepeneur, the guy behind the business information service M.A.I.D and then Dialog…and now the investment fund Bright Station Ventures, at a competition run by the Oxford Entrepreneurs. Instead of giving the £5,000 prize, Dan Wagner offered Whitfield and his associates access to the whole $100 million fund to develop and idea that I’m guessing they think will be the new Youtube. Wagner thinks that Designthetime (now known as miomi) captures the whole zeitgeist of the Internet.

Except…Youtube, Facebook, MySpace and all those sites on which we all frantically upload content to our hearts content…are free. What’s to stop Yahoo or Google setting up something like this, and not charging?

When the whole dotcom thing collapsed it did so largely because most of the new businesses had non-existent revenue streams, and were spending money much, much faster than they could possibly make it. The smart money flew away and settled on the few safer bets, like Google and Yahoo. So respect is due to these guys for building in a user-driven revenue stream from the beginning. But will people pay for this frivolity? It will be interesting to see.

I can’t see how this won’t be imitated. For one thing, what will I do when I discover that my special moment has been nabbed? Will I upload content for my second favourite moment? Or will I go to a rival site, one that’s quite possibly free?

I like being all sceptical, but deep down I really hope it works. It was a great feeling, the belief that a graduate student could spin a yarn and end up running a multi-million dollar business. I Googled Alex recently – he looks to be doing pretty, pretty fine.

Categories
writing

Degrees of Separation: Two

In the space of less than 10 hours I had the uncanny experience of having 2 degrees of separation from two of Britain’s best-loved children’s authors. Not via their agents, publicists, etc, or anyone in the industry; I wouldn’t count that. No; I’m talking sheer coincidence.

Lookit: Yesterday, we’re having lunch in Brighton, celebrating the First Holy Communion of our friends’ daughter (her parents are enlightened atheists…). Two of the guests haven’t seen me since I first started writing novels a few years back. They ask me to fill them in on the progress since then. “Someone I know at school – a parent – writes childrens’ books,” one of them says. “What’s his name now? He’s always saying how competitive it is.” Later she remembers his name: Anthony Horowitz. “My nephew’s favourite writer,” I tell her. “My nephew keeps asking me if maybe one day I can get his autograph.”

Much later that day we walk into Xi’an, the Szechuan Chinese restaurant owned by my pals Amy and Gary. Gary tells me over the bar that Philip Pullman used to be his teacher at Bishop Kirk, once a middle school in Summertown. “He comes in here sometimes,” Gary says cheerfully. “He still remembers me! Tells me how I used to misbehave in class!” Then Gary tells me that Amy is giving lessons in Mandarin. I should learn, he says, so that I can one day converse with Chinese readers of my books. Gary does a quick mental calculation about what tiny proportion of the Chinese would need to read the books to make me a millionaire.

I love it when my friends are this optimistic. More power to the positive visualisation!

Categories
nostalgia

How to be thin – don’t eat enough

Well it’s all downhill for me, intellectually speaking. I’m experiencing a strange symptom of what is probably an early-onset form of dementia. It’s this: I’ve completely lost the ability to guesstimate how much pasta to cook to feed a family of four.

I used to be an overestimater, if anything. I figured that extra was always good, because you could always make tomorrow’s lunch. But now through no intentional action of mine, I’m an underestimator. When I cook pasta – which is something I cook at least three times a week – even though they all howl with disappointment. Not just that it’s pasta (boo!) but that there’s not enough. They’re always still hungry.

It reminded me of when I was growing up. We were never, ever given meals that left us feeling satisfied. My stepfather had grown up during the post-war rationing period and believed in small portions. (It was different in Mexico, obviously, where you could eat until you popped and proud relatives would stand by going ‘Look how well she eats!’)

But I was stick-thin until I was about 20, so this not-eating-enough thing clearly has something going for it. I’m sticking to the underestimating and telling my family to be glad of going to bed hungry. I try to fool them by heaping salad on top so they don’t notice the pitiful serving of pasta underneath. When they complain, I growl, “S’more than I used to get, so think on!”
They don’t listen though, these kids. They head for the cupboard and eat big spoonfuls of peanut butter.

P.S. No-one suggest using a balance, please. Weighing ingredients is for cissies who can’t cook in anything but a properly-equipped kitchen. That’s not the way I was taught Domestic Science by Mrs Blackwell. It’s acceptable to weigh amounts for confectionary and high-end baking – say French pastries – but nothing else.

The principle can transfer to some aspects of laboratory work. I speak as one who even learned to make tissue culture medium and bacterial growth broths by flicking out The Right Amount, who added DNA and restriction enzymes in amounts we referred to in the lab as A Smidgeon, A Wodge and A S***load. (a s***load was 10 microlitres, just to give you the scale)