On Saturday, whilst visiting Richard's family in Margate, we decided to pay a visit to the recently opened Turner Contemporary gallery. Having watched it evolve over the past few years, from building site to gallery, it was a real pleasure to step inside and see what the space was like.  And it has lots of space, art is displayed on a grand scale, and I loved it.  

The opening exhibition, Revealed: Turner Contemporary Opens, is described as

Turner’s painting is evidence of the power of his imagination and his curiosity about new places and natural phenomena. This desire for knowledge marked the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when many discoveries were made in science and technology and artists and scientists worked in close dialogue.

The six contemporary artists in the exhibition work in the same spirit of enquiry, invention and interest in the natural world that flourished during Turner’s lifetime. Just as Turner explored nature in paint and colour, so these contemporary artists play at the borders between what we can see and know and the truly fantastic. 

On entering the gallery, and looking towards the sea, which I am always likely to be drawn towards, the Daniel Buren installation (pictured above) was the first thing I saw, framing the sea and lovely blue sky in an effective manner.

The Russell Crotty work was the highlight for me. The globes, like the one pictured above, are ink drawn on paper, fragile and beautiful, featuring poems or prose.  The one above is "Walking towards dreamland" and features the coastline between Joss Bay and Margate itself, a coastlne I've walked along on many occasions whilst out walking the dog.  These globes, coastlines and words are frequently found in his works.

A wonderful gallery, with some delightful opening works. Planning to sneak off for a couple of hours every time I visit the in-laws and immerse myself in it.

I got a Kindle for Christmas, and I love it.

I love that is a single purpose device.  As I managed to brick my iPhone the other day, so it wouldn't turn on, that meant that this multi use device, which is also a phone, wasn't even a phone. That's a bit limiting!

Things I love about my kindle are:

• ease of getting books onto it via WhisperNet
• ease of getting additional files onto it via the @kindle.com email addresses (paid for or free via the free.kindle.com address)
• my case - the green leather case makes it a delight to hold and interact with
• ability to highlight text in a book, and get at it later to include in a summary
• ability to annotate text, and again to later get at it for summarisation etc
• the screen works well in many different light conditions - outside, inside, lit naturally, artificial lit
• it doesn't go beep or distract me in any way, meaning that I can get involved in whatever I'm reading

Things I've learnt are:

• turn off the wireless access if you don't need it, this saves a lot of battery power
• there's a minesweeper game on it
• you can take a screen shot

My kindle goes most places with me. It goes to work with me every day, and for the first time in years I can often be found reading a bit of my novel during my lunch break. During the two weeks whilst I was in Hull, dealing with my Dad's death, the ability to get at new books easily and quickly was wonderful. I could stop myself from getting too upset by losing myself in an engaging bit of fiction, not necessarily a book I'd have bought in other circumstances, but that was really suited to my situations. And it was only a couple of clicks away.

Over the Christmas break, I downloaded a copy of The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program and have been reading it on my kindle, enjoying the ability to annotate and highlight aspects of the text that seem relevant.

Innovation is a word I've struggled with over the past few years. Its a word that seems to have been used to describe almost everything. So, I was pleasantly surprised to get barely into the preface before I got to two quotes which made me wonder if the book was written just for me

The word innovation has fallen on hard times

and

The i-word is thrown around so frequently it no longer means anything

The book is well laid out, and easy to read.  Each of the original chapters takes a myth and breaks it apart, often using forays into history to describe the real story behind some ideas, rather than the popularly held one. Whilst the newly added chapters are more practical "how-to" lessons based around creative thinking, pitching and motivation and seem to contain good advice.

This book is obviously well-researched, and the references are all well marked up for easy follow-up (especially on the kindle where its a simple one click to find out more).

So, do I still struggle with the word innovation? I still think its used far too often, by far too many people.  But, at least I can now smile to myself when people describe something to me as innovative, whereas before I'd have probably switched-off and stopped listening immediately. 

I'd recommend this book, and having enjoyed and engaged with Scott's writing style, I've already bought and downloaded Confessions of a Public Speaker which I plan to read later in the year

When we were in Tokyo earlier in the year, I found a collection of cameras for sale in Kiddy Land and couldn't resist coming home with a photographic souvenir.  I chose the cheapest of the Superheadz cameras I could (my Blackbird, fly is by Superheadz so I figured it was a low risk purchase).

It is a very simple camera, but with a lovely wide lens (22mm) and is incredibly light for carrying around.  It takes 35mm film and has a slightly rubberised surface.  These cameras come in different colours, with different names.  Mine is the Blue Ribbon, because it's blue.  They are also available in other colours, each with their own names, which makes finding photos taking with them on flickr more of a challenge.

I have now taken 5 films with this camera.  4 of them using the delightful Kodak Ektar 100 film.  1 of them cross processed using Agfaphoto CT Precisa.

My observations are:

• it is incredibly light, and so really very portable and great for taking out with the dog
• the lens is so wide, that keeping my fat fingers out of the way can sometimes be challenging
• there is quite a lot of vignetting normally, so cross processing a film makes it ultra vignetty
• loading and unloading a film is very simple
• it loves Kodak Ektar 100 (but then again, so do I!)

Some sample photos:

More photos can be found on my flickr stream under the tag blue ribbon

Yesterday I had the pleasure of welcoming Jeremy Keith to the Madgex offices to reprise the talk he gave at Fronteers 2010 entitled The Design of HTML5

Jeremy's description of the talk was:

Everyone's talking about the benefits of HTML5 for web apps but the specification also introduces an extra layer of semantic richness to our web documents. These additions aren't wishful thinking for some far-flung future: you can start using them today. That's because the design principles driving HTML5 are steeped in pragmatism. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it's a website, a content management system, or the very language that underpins the World Wide Web.

And 17 Madgexians crowded into the boardroom to hear what he had to say.  Jeremy's talk at Fronteers 2010 was transcribed, so with the exception of different questions and answers, you can read what he shared with us.  An enjoyable talk, an engaging speaker and a great pleasure to have been able to arrange it.

In my dConstruct post the other day, I said

James Bridle was the highlight for me I think. He spoke about the history of the internet, not how it started, but how data evolved. He talked about GeoCities, and how much of that information is lost, the internet archive wayback machine has some of it, but not all. The whole of the internet archive fits into a shipping container. It's a special Sun data center one but it's still a shipping container. He taught me about wiki racing and introduced me to Wiki Hunt which I think is a genius idea. And finally, he told us about the history of edits on wikipedia. He chose the Iraq War page and collected every edit and revision ever made. And then printed it. It ended up being 12 volumes of fairly large books. Leafing through it, which Alex and I did during the break, shows trolling edits, and informative edits. Amazing and beautiful. Amazing to think that there are 12 volumes of history for one article, and yet as a child I remember having a set of encyclopaedia which were probably of a similar size, which were covering every subject in the world.

When reading Jeremy's dConstruct review I noticed he'd linked to James's own article On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography, so I went off and took a look and I'd thoroughly recommend a read of it.  It'll give you a far better insight into his talk, than my paragraph could.  Or alternatively you could listen to the audio, whilst looking at the slides

Lots of people will blog about this conference, lots of people will have blogged it in long form, I didn't. I just made some observations, and as I'm away on my holidays tomorrow, I figured I'd do a very rapid brain dump now...

Marty Neumeier kicked off with the involvement of design in innovation. Beautiful, simple slides.

Brendan Dawes followed talking about  "Boil, Simmer, Reduce"

• Boil - collect, gather, be inspired. He mentioned Charles and Ray Eames as inspirations. Going to go and read that wikipedia article and learn more 
• Simmer - consideration (context, other peoples views) 
• Reduce - make less but make it better - Perfect design is when there is nothing left to take away 

David McCandless was up next speaking about "Information is beautiful". All about visualisation, which I love. Loved the phrase "It's not a chart, or an article - it's a chartical..." about an image with too much text on it. He did a TED talk recently, which apparently was much like today's talk, so go and watch it.

Samantha Warren was the last session before lunch and spoke about Typography, something I know precious little about, and that my tiny developer mind can't quite engage with. I did remark to Alex that I thought the Papryus lower case h looks like a giraffe, so Alex drew me a giraffe in her notebook. Aww, Alex, you have such talent! As there were a lot of analogies with shoes, Alex put shoes on the giraffe for me. If you ever get an opportunity to sit near Alex at a conference, do it, her notes are elaborate and wonderful.

John Gruber had the difficult post lunch spot, all about auteur theory and the examples between films, tv series and web sites/applications. Interesting stuff, but lost a bit by the fact that he talked to his notes and not his audience a fair bit.

Hannah Donovan spoke about improvisation, after entertaining us with some improvised music (cello, mandarin and piano). She told us how to improvise and why it was important and helpful. She told us that Beethoven and Mozart were improvisers originally - they met once, at a party, and improvised on the piano all night - apparently - but that's not quite how wikipedia has it.

James Bridle was the highlight for me I think. He spoke about the history of the internet, not how it started, but how data evolved. He talked about GeoCities, and how much of that information is lost, the internet archive wayback machine has some of it, but not all. The whole of the internet archive fits into a shipping container. It's a special Sun data center one but it's still a shipping container. He taught me about wiki racing and introduced me to Wiki Hunt which I think is a genius idea. And finally, he told us about the history of edits on wikipedia. He chose the Iraq War page and collected every edit and revision ever made. And then printed it. It ended up being 12 volumes of fairly large books. Leafing through it, which Alex and I did during the break, shows trolling edits, and informative edits. Amazing and beautiful. Amazing to think that there are 12 volumes of history for one article, and yet as a child I remember having a set of encyclopaedia which were probably of a similar size, which were covering every subject in the world.

A trolling edit:

Alex holds one of the volumes (again with a trolling edit):

Tom Coates talked about networks and social graphs, about data sharing across applications and how that makes everything richer. He talked about Spimes, another wikipedia article being stuffed on to InstaPaper for me to read. He talked about Objects as a service, and mentioned his internet enabled set of scales, which can differentiate between people and then use wifi to send the data to the website. It can even tweet on your behalf. So just @howfatistom? 186.6lbs at the last reading.  Always a pleasure to hear Tom talk, last time was his best man's speech for Nat and Simon's wedding.

Merlin Mann finished the day with almost a stand up gig, rather than a talk. No slides, no notes, just talking. Talking about being a nerd, and a geek, and making a lovely analogy between developers/designers and border collies - you've got to give them both work to keep them happy. Also introduced me to the concept of Segway Polo

So, another great dConstruct, only my 2nd which seems odd to me, but I guess none of this is core to my specialism, but it was a wonderful reminder of how amazing the internet is, and how inspiring listening to passionate people can be. I also learnt about the existence of micro pigs (thanks Denise!)