4. 2013-07-06

    Top Skaters


    This is what my final day at last.fm looked like.


    In the morning, this.



    Last.fm 720° team


    <p> In the evening, this.<p>

    Yes, I'm working on getting a MAME cab smuggled into Moonfruit.

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  6. 2013-06-28

    This afternoon I went on a short guided tour of the decomissioned Royal Navy submarine, HMS Ocelot . It's in a dry-dock at the Royal Dockyards working museum at Chatham , just 20 minutes down the road from home.


    Apologies for the poor quality of the photos. I only had my iPhone, with 15% remaining charge, and submarines do not offer much in the way of natural lightning.


    HMS Ocelot


    Despite having owned a year pass for the best part of a year, and frequently admired the Ocelot from the outside, this is the first time I've been aboard. The tour is short, cramped, and completely fascinating, although perhaps not for the squeamishly claustrophobic, and definitely not for the mobility impaired.


    The Dockyards is a superb example of a modern lottery-assisted regeneration project. There's several large ships in dock you can wander around, huge warehouses full of boats and machinery to pore over, a ropery, an art gallery space, a working steam railway, several sub museums. Far more than you can do in a single visit, but your ticket, once purchased, is good for 12 months of repeat admission.

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  7. 2012-10-08

    Original Sim : From Marvel Fanfare #25 (1986) - Dave Sim Marvel character portfolio. Yeah, me too.

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  8. 2012-04-17


    For the last few weeks I've been utterly immersed in a fairly exlusive relationship with David Bowie. He doesn't know anything about it,unless he makes a habit of checking out people's play counts on last.fm . It's just me and his back catalogue. This relationship is mostly played out in trains. On headphones, music fed from iTunes or Spotify. Complete albums at a time, played through in the correct running order, naturally.  As I listen my eyes are glued to an electronic book. A book about David Bowie and the same songs I'm almost obsessively listening to.


    It began with the book, or perhaps I mean to say it awoke. A few weeks  ago, listening to Word Podcast 188 , I heard about Peter Doggett's latest book . Commissioned as a sequel, or at least inspired by Ian MacDonald's influential song by song Beatles chronology: Revolution In The Head . I thought the idea was sound, if any classic rock canon could bear the load of similar scrutiny, it was probably Bowie. I noted the book on my 'to read' list, and the next time I found myself without an ongoing book, whilst waiting to depart St. Pancras International, having recently ended one book, I  bought the Kindle edition, via "Whispernet". I do most of my book reading on trains. I thought it would probably make an interesting read, despite knowing that I didn't really enjoy listening to Bowie's music.


    It wasn't always that way. At some level I would still identify myself as a Bowie fan; albeit a heavily lapsed one.  We go way back together. His commercial peak as a pop star (  Let's Dance ) neatly coincides with the start of my interest in the pop charts. He still seemed a current, voguish music figure. The promo video was a new central focus of pop culture, and Bowie was of course one of the craftiest, most-prepared of the video pioneers.


    Access to archive media was rare then, and fashion was forward-looking; any consciously retro styles were focused on the '50s.  I remember a classmate at boarding school, with the archetypal 'older brother with record collection' filling me in on the standard mythology. The multiple identities, snatches of song titles and character names and iconography all seemed unimaginable and distant. Fascinated by the scraps, I used my sense of wonder to fill in the gaps.


    I remember the first time I saw a photo of Ziggy Stardust , years later.  It was in a newspaper colour supplement. There was a stock photo collage piece on 'The Many Faces of David Bowie'; probably already a cliche even then. Like anyone, I was knocked out just by the look of it. It was preposterous; somehow ridiculous and cool. A vision from the future, even 15 years out of date.


    Bowie still pops up throughout the rest of the decade. He's still a face. Movie and soundtrack work. Labyrinth . Absolute Beginners . When the Wind Blows . I watch all of these at home on a VCR.


    I pretend to study for 'A' levels, at the local sixth form college. A grim time for chart music, the fag end of the Stock Aitken Waterman years, just running up against the first twinklings of rave culture. There's a jukebox, with actual seven inch singles in. Most of them are by Rick Astley, or Sonia, or Michael Bolton. There's a 'Golden Oldies' section with maybe a dozen  records  over on the far right side. 'Ziggy Stardust' is one of them. I play it once or twice a day for weeks. After this, a little piece of me is always slightly disappointed each time I play an electric guitar and it doesn't sound very much like Ronson .


    Tin Machine are next along, the sheer contrariness of this scheme just delights me; although I never get to hear much of the music, there's a near media embargo on it. As I move through the 90s, with a gradually solidfying income, I fill out my CD collection with all the back catalogue. It gets solidly played until I've commited the bulk of it to heart.


    I'm amused by the negative attitude to 'Drum and Bass Bowie' from the inkies, most of these still in thrall to the last few coughs of Britpop. I like the singles more than most others from that year.


    Then it's spoiled. Glastonbury 2000 kills it. Against my better judgement, I trek down to the pyramid stage to watch Bowie's headline set. Stadium Rock is not my thing. I stand in the mud for a while, and I try to watch on the giant TV screens on the other side of the crowded field. It's too slick, too caberet, I'm completely disengaged and intensely disappointed. I leave them to it after half a dozen songs. Something feels quite broken. After that, I find it hard to listen to the old records in a more than academic way.


    Nonetheless, now I'm reading the book, I put a playlist together that covers all the albums it discusses. I'm mostly reading on the train, and this means I'm mostly listening as I read. It's a peculiarly immersive way to listen to records. I tried it once before, with Scott Tennent's book about Slint's Spiderland . I read that on the Northern Line, with the album on rotation. Eventually it almost felt like I'd been present at those recording sessions.


    It leaks into your ears, ambiently informing your reading. Occasionally mid-passage about the invention or arrangement of a song co-incides with the track playing everything pulls into focus across multiple senses. Berlin-period Bowie plays particularly well with rail transport, with it's stations and trains and mechanical sounds. Listening to Heroes, waiting platformside in the raw concrete trenches of Stratford International .


    The book itself is a solid read. Bowie remains an unsurprisingly opaque presence, and some of the speculative interpretation on lyrics and motivation feels like a stretch. The musical analysis likewise falls falls a little short of the template established by 'Revolution In The Head', occasionally quite gratingly clunky (a 'sustained fourth' chord?). Luckily the framing works just as well. Imposing a narrative upon the chronological order of recordings creates an appreciation of it as one body of work. Considered so forensically, it's an astonishing thing. Much as with the previous book, what stands out just as markedly as the quality of the songs and recordings, is the rate of progress, and the rate of change. Here's a rough calendar of the recording dates of the albums covered within 'The Man Who Sold The World'.



    I still find this list astonishing. Just five years separate the psych-folk/music-hall of Hunky Dory and the ambient alienation and hyper-stylised funk of Low. A further four years between that and the proto-industrial-cum-New Romantic Pop of Scary Monsters. It's a lot of terrain to cover in a decade, banging out over an album a year interspersed with global touring. For the sake of convenience, I have left out the live album releases.


    A couple of other interesting points leapt out at me after reading. I realised my instinctive dating of 'Scary Monsters' is mistakenly late. ' Ashes to Ashes ' has been so convincingly retconned as a New Romantic cornerstone, I have been unconsciously sticking it in the middle somewhere around '82-'83 amidst Culture Club and Duran and the Spandaus, and 'Come on Eileen'. The actual recording date puts it barely out of the 1970s, which means that dense, sound bricolage of such modern sounds was hand-stitched in the most analogue ways. Tony Visconti deserves even more of my respect.


    The second thing I never before realised, was that the 'Art Bowie' period - the less overtly commercial works spanning from 'Station to Station' to 'Scary Monsters' does rather neatly line up with a management dispute. As I understand it, these records were produced under a settlement that meant a significant portion of royalties were due to a now estranged management organisation. Once this lapsed, he abruptly switched to the ultra-commercial, lucrative career arc prefaced by 'Let's Dance'. Which is of course, where we came in.


    A final, unexpected triumph. As a side effect of the book and this entombment in the music. The joy came back. In sounding all the material out new depths, informed by fresh context, and with rested ears refreshed, I've rediscovered my original appreciation for this sequence of records. Pity my poor family.


    The only fault I can find with this technique of marrying immersive listening with a scholarly reading is that it is intrinsically retrospective, and perhaps simply nostalgic, and reductive. It obviously requires you find an artist or a work that's had enough time to embed itself in it's surrounding culture, and can never be forward looking.


    Best album from the set? I change my mind constantly, but think I most often settle upon 'Low'. There isn't a bad one, although I'll never consider 'Pin Ups' to be essential, and I think I might always find 'Lodger' a little underwhelming. Who's next for the treatment? I'm not sure. I notice there's a book about the rise and fall of Spacemen 3 .

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  9. 2012-03-30


    Five LPs I used to frequently listen to when I was a lad, that I frequently listen to now



    1. Green On Red : Here Come The Snakes


    2. Jane's Addiction : Ritual de lo Habitual


    3. Pixies : Bossanova


    4. Metallica : Master Of Puppets


    5. Depeche Mode : Music For The Masses



    Five LPs I used to frequently listen to when I was a lad that I occasionally listen to now



    1. The Sisters Of Mercy : First And Last And Always


    2. Genesis : Nursery Cryme


    3. New Order : Substance


    4. Steve Vai : Passion And Warfare


    5. Frank Zappa : Joe's Garage



    Five LPs I used to frequently listen to when I was a lad that I haven't played in a decade



    1. Marillion : Script for a Jester's Tear


    2. Simple Minds : Live - In The City Of Light


    3. Pink Floyd : The Wall


    4. Madonna : True Blue


    5. Red Hot Chili Peppers : Blood Sugar Sex Magik


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  10. 2011-11-26

    Hello there, old friend #movingin

    Of course, I bought and read the Jobsography , Kindle edition, naturally. While I'm not sure I identify with all the howling fanboys' anguished reviews, given my role as super-NEXTSTEP-fanboy  I was a bit disappointed, although not particularly surprised, at the relative lack of NeXT content. So I was overjoyed when this 1986 PBS documentary , featuring NeXT in it's pre-launch startup guise, popped up in it's wake. The linked blog post also contains the NeXT stevenote, from the eventual product launch.

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  11. 2011-11-16

    The perfect laptop at last

    Of course it's not actually running NEXTSTEP. Of course, in a sense it is. Just like your phone.


    Thanks to ebay. I like the fact that the sticker arrived with a little template indicating the correct 28° of jaunt. I ignored it of course, and just lined it up by eye.

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  12. 2011-10-31

    As if finding young me in a box wasn't enough of a memo from Father Time, I've had the "circle of life" message underlined firmly this weekend, by throwing my back out. I mean, properly out, like a sit-com old man, or a Dad from the pages of the Beano. Lifting hurts, walking hurts, sitting mostly hurts, breathing hurts, and bending over is right out. It's one of those marvellous hysterical systems, as the slightest twinge of pain induces all sorts of involuntary tensing in the frantically overcompensating muscle superstructure of my back. The lower nervous system is clear in it's mission. No harm must befall the spine. I strongly suspect that the resultant freezing and spasm makes everything significantly more painful than the original twinge would have managed on it's own, but I am not a doctor. Even though I often assure people that I am, this is actually a well-practiced lie, serving the purposes of antique stock-comedy forms.


    The generational aspect of this calamity draws from the fact that I triggered the strain whilst throwing young Ada May ceilingward, in response to her requests to "play flying". Unluckily for me, the initial spasm occurred at the point of release of a throw, meaning that despite my attention being drawn to all sorts of immediate and novel spinal trauma, I still had an falling two year old to catch safely before I could collapse sobbing to the floor with my honour and dignity intact. Two year old children, I must say, are quite a bit heavier than their one year old incarnation.


    The thing with back trouble, most sources assure me, is to try and persevere through it. Grit one's teeth, and carry on as much of your normal routine as you can manage. On no account admit defeat and flee to your bed rest. Rest will relax and weaken your back, and exacerbate the problem, or if you're unlucky, invent some new ones. And so I struggle forwards in embittered mimicry of my daily routine, gasping and wheezing and moaning every couple of steps, frozen in place with involuntary grimacing stuck to my face. It has taken me nearly twice as long to get to work as it ordinarily might. Negotiating St. Pancras, I find myself flooded with sympathy for anybody with genuine mobility problems. The place is a nightmare, and it's supposed to be one of London's newest, most accessible hubs. I inch my way towards the office. All my hope is invested in my fancy orthopaedic stool . Please, mighty German engineering, please do your work.


    Twenty-five year old me pouts condescendingly from my home page as I update my blog. He's got nothing but contempt for broken backed old men. He's too vain and pre-occupied to worry himself with mundane things like exercise and posture. I'm starting to hate that guy a bit.

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  14. 2011-10-07

    Mr. David Hepworth , of the lovely Word Magazine (I subscribe !), a usually reliable, and always interesting cultural commentator just blogged a piece about the reactions to the untimely passing of ex-Apple CEO  Steve Jobs . I think his assessment of Mr Jobs' cultural impact is wrong. I was going to present my reaction in place on his blog, although it did seem to grow a little too long for the commentary section, and I subsequently found out that his blogger site seems to be set up disallow comments from people who aren't logged in to a Google account, which I object to, somewhat dogmatically. So I decided to post my piece here, and link back to his , which is more in keeping with my own views about how the Web ought to run.


    I don't disagree fundamentally with the tone of the piece. I do share his unease over the now seemingly mandatory broadcast grief marathons that accompany any death in the public eye, and I find an unpleasant hint of infantile narcissim in the fetish relationship between the user and product celebrated with the mass parades of public Apple evangelists and their iDevices, which might be a cousin to the sentiments he expresses about toys and proportional responses.


    This attempt to sum up Mr. Jobs as a super-skilled marketer I think underestimates the scale, and perhaps also the nature of Mr. Jobs' contributions, some of which are subtle, many of which may look obvious, but usually only by hindsight. Even if his role was solely as a provoker, and curator of works; and I doubt it was, the truth is rarely that neat - he seems to have his fingerprints near the genesis of a string of transformational products, which do seem to fulfill the cliche of yes, changing the world.


    Start at the beginning: His role in realising the portable microcomputer as a packaged appliance, something like a food processor, that people could be taught to directly integrate into their homes and offices. The Apple II barnstormed this market. I am not so sure as most other commentators that this idea was an obvious, archetypal product simply waiting to happen. Putting computers in your house, I think, is a fundamentally odd idea, albeit one that we have now fully naturalised. In 1976 it must have been almost schizophrenic.


    Refining this idea into the Macintosh and Lisa, a specifically pioneering further insight was that a then unusual  square pixel bitmapped display would better lend itself to curve plotting. This gave us the WYSIWYG relationship between the graphical computer and the laser printer , computer typography and thereby re-shaped the primary means of production for print and graphics.


    The post-Apple "wilderness years" are particularly interesting. At NeXT they pioneered software controlled automated computer assembly and production, I've heard it said maybe a decade ahead of everyone else. I think they made a lot of mistakes, but I also think these lessons learned were invaluable later on. More significantly, the NeXT system software placed an elegant emphasis on "object-oriented programming", carefully enveloping the tedious nuts and bolts of interfacing with electrical computer hardware with well chosen software 'components'; tidy abstractions that lead to a system that was significantly easier to port to new hardware configurations, and simultaneously could be more-easily programmed at a higher level, without resorting to so much specialist understanding of specific hardware.


    The significance of the work at NeXT will not be fully realised until later in his career, but as an intriguing footnote, it is on a NeXT workstation that a British scientist called Tim Berners-Lee develops some applications and protocols he calls the "World Wide Web". Mr Berners-Lee is on the record noting that the unique NeXT development tools allowed him to easily connect abstract layers to form useful application prototypes in the space of a couple of months.


    Steve's other business during those years was Pixar . You don't have to study the history of cinema over the last two decades too hard to detect just how fundamentally Pixar shaped mainstream family movie making.


    Then he returns to Apple and begins that now over-documented turnaround from prodigal son and failing company, to pin-up CEO and spectacular media and financial success. It's worth pointing out that the portablility of the NeXT system software allows them to insinuate it into Macintosh entirely. Next the iPod, and then we get iTunes, and the 'iTunes Store'.  And then the same elegant software evolves to pocket phones, where the relative ease of programming buoys up the freshly invented 'App market'. And a finely edged production control builds an on-demand production, supply and retail operation that is the envy of the rest of the industry.


    I'm not a professional writer as Mr. Hepworth is. I hope I don't read like I'm elegising him mawkishly like some Princess Di or Jade Goody for the "Facebook generation", or lionising him in super-human terms as though he's some over-egged digital Da Vinci, or Newton. I never met him. I'm not laying flowers anywhere. I'm sure that a huge part of his success was through fortunate timing, and developing good taste and keeping good company, but this is surely true of many whom history accounts amongst the Great, perhaps even of most. What a C.V. though!


    These things are not a competition you can score, and yet I don't think most Word Magazine readers would rush to disagree with the suggestion that Steve's musical idols like Dylan or the Beatles "changed the world". I'm comfortable suggesting that to a subsequent generation, with it's own new media of choice, Steven P. Jobs influenced and changed the world to an arguably similar degree.

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  15. 2011-08-26

    Some time in 1997 I decided to get a modem for my home computer and try and get back on the internet. I hadn't really been online for a couple of years by this point. I'd spent a good 60% of the time I was supposed to be at university exploring the net, at approximately the same time the world-wide-web was being invented. Subsequently, a few of the offices I'd done contract work in were high-tech enough to have an internet pipe, but the majority were not, and by 1997 I was a year or two into the embryonic stages of what I then imagined to be a high-flying enterprise IT career. There were are few dial-up terminals in the office, but they were proper walled-garden , pretend the web isn't happening, CompuServe accounts, and I mostly ignored them.


    By the time 1997 came around, the internet was seriously encroaching upon the real world. URLs on product billboards, mainstream magazine articles, entirely dedicated consumer magazines, even. Java hype was everywhere in the trade media, and was getting a further boost up from the growing sense of discomfort about the disproportionate amount of influence Microsoft now wielded over the PC industry. I was pretty grumpy about Windows by this point. I'd cheerfully embraced it's third generation, as a standard way to build what were for the time fairly advanced interfaces for DOS, with a built-in graphical toolkit, and I was making my living building client/server applications for businesses, using a 4GL called ' Gupta SQLWindows ', and a smattering of C and Visual Basic. The IDEs and the Win16 API were probably rudimentary, but I didn't know much better, and it was the closest thing to NEXTSTEP I'd found in a professional context. Then came Windows95, which promoted itself from a graphical shell for DOS, to a full-blown OS, which I found tremendously exciting until I'd worked with it for six months. All my tools and APIs were now yesterday's thing, and this new shiny Windows came with ridiculously inflated hardware requirements, and was frustratingly unstable. The joke term " Blue Screen Of Death " started to grate with familiarity. I grew insufferably contemptuous of Microsoft and everything it stood for.


    At home I'd been running a linux system for a year or two. Linux had grown up fast since I'd first encountered it as a barely installable joke UNIX passed around the office one day on a handful of floppies. I'd spent a day installing it on a COMPAQ laptop then, and quickly judged it to be no competition for SCO . It improved and spread rapidly, and within a couple of years I was sufficiently inspired by reports to acquire a cheap PC clone and install, break, reinstall a succession of linux distributions, starting initially with a Slackware 2.something from a magazine coverdisc ( Computer Shopper , I suspect). Now I had a religion; I'd periodically switch distributions, usually from a CD/Book bundle in the bargain bucket of the local waterstones, sometimes from a CD set ordered by mail.  No net connection at home at all. Well, hardly anyone did, and there weren't yet any flat-rate or free dial-up systems.


    By 1997 though, I  felt I was ready. I bought a discounted 33.6 external modem, subscribed to an ISP that sounded platform neutral, and didn't rely on bundling DOS or Windows software dialers (Direct Connection, as was), and spent a surprisingly effortless afternoon figuring out how to connect my little linux system to the internet. This seems like it ought to have been a frustrating process, given that this was RedHat 2.x or whatever I was running by this point, and I had no internet to search for help, and no local experts to ask, but I seem to remember it being fairly trivial to set up and script a PPP connection. I think the first thing I downloaded was Netscape Navigator. Or maybe Doom. I remember setting up an offline USENET server, and then feeling my way around the web, hungry for more linux information. I would download any interesting software source code bundle I could find, and try and build it. I periodically toasted my linux box this way, inexpertly installing new homebuilt versions of libc or XFree86 with little attention to package management or change control, and not much more appreciation for the software build process. Outside of USENET the linux web community seemed disjointed. Little islands of conflicting information, often hanging off university home pages.


    One day I found this amazing sort of crowd maintained combination of a news feed and a bulletin board, already populated with a peer group almost custom-fit for me. I think I can remember how I found it. I was using a little desk applet for the Afterstep window manager called asmodem that let me toggle my modem. I was very big on customising my desktop then. I looked up the author's home page , to see if there were any good links to other AS wharf applets. One of the links to there was to this other place. I remember I spent a couple of hours there, browsing around what passed for the archives. It wasn't just linux and X, there were other nerd-friendly topics. I don't remember much about the content. I remember being engrossed, and following stories and commentary back and forth, drinking in content. Unluckily I didn't make a bookmark, and a couple of days later I realised I couldn't remember what the site was called.


    I think it took me as much as a couple of weeks to find it again. It had a stupidly hard to remember URL. http://slashdot.org/ . I re-visited it frequently. It had a clever page construction, where the updates floated to the top, like a reverse INBOX. It aggregated interesting content, seemingly focused around linux, and GNU and other cool Free software like this new nuclear-mega-awk scripting language called Perl , and other nerdly content about movies, and sci-fi, and super-computers, and spaceships and BeOS . Stories were posted, usually based around a couple of links with commentary, and the users could add their own discussion in a threaded hierarchy, unmoderated, uncensored and even fully anonymously. I quickly became a compulsive visitor. Soon it was the first site I'd load after dialling up to the net.


    The anarchic commenting community sort of worked. You'd recognise the same usernames in discussions. Actually, I'd recognise sigs before names. Most of the discussion was lucid and informative. I'd usually get as much from links in the comments as I would from the submission or editorial. Even the trolls seemed funny and community-minded. It had a sense of culture, of community. First Post! Duplicate submissions on the front page, Hot grits down your pants, The naked and petrified guy, Mae Ling Mak , Natalie Portman, the caveman user I'm struggling to recall the name of (urk?), In Soviet Russia,  a Beowulf cluster, and all the rest. Memes, I suppose, but we didn't really call them that much then. The 'slashdot effect'. I remember every time there was a stable linux kernel point release, which was pretty frequently, they'd post a story about it, and I'd dutifully download the source, spend a couple of hours compiling it, and then install it, ruining my precious uptime in the process. JonKatz and his floundering attempts to become one of the gang.


    I remember frequent stories about all these futuristic new desktop interfaces that were in the pipeline. GNUstep was well on the way to bringing my idolised NEXTSTEP frameworks into my home, cost-free. Futuristic new graphics display technologies ( Berlin, Fresco ). The amazing (and almost functional) eye-candy of the Enlightenment WM with it's realtime miniwindow pagers and overlayed virtual desktops. Some new initiative called GNOME which was going to bring a CORBA -based networked component GUI desktop framework to run on top of traditional UNIX some day. Funny submissions, hoax submissions. Disappointingly frequent pseudo-science stories about perpetual motion machines and cold fusion, and the like. Crack dot Com were writing their new game "Golgotha" that would blend the large scale RTS wargame with the cutting edge first-person mouselooked shooting genre, and they were targeting linux as a first class platform at launch. It was all intoxicating stuff, and I spent hours immersed in it, genuinely feeling some part of a community.


    I was never a frequent poster. Initially I lurked, and dabbled with anonymity. I was very cautious about revealing too much of my personal information online in those days. I remember feeling really regretful for ages that I'd held off registering once I realised that people were competing over low UIDs. Still, here I am - user 24640 - 5 digits, not too bad. "scrutty" was the character I used to use on Perilous Realms MUD in my polytechnic days. I can't see any easy way to find my earliest comment by this account, and I can't remember what it was. Probably something embarrassing.


    I remained pretty obsessed with the site for years. My friend Tim was reminiscing on Twitter yesterday about my introducing him to it. I can remember coming home from holiday abroad, internet-free of course, and deliberately reading the previous seven days submissions to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I quit my boring career and got a job at a cool dot com startup , just as things were bubbling up. Everyone there seemed to read slashdot reloading dozens of times a day. Important technology stories broke there hours before the mainstream news sites got hold of any of it, we were always days ahead of the 'suits' with these information nuggets. Famous people had accounts and posted amongst us (John Carmack! ESR! Bruce Perens! Neil Stephenson! Wil Wheaton!) which seemed really bizarre in those days long before twitter or official facebook accounts. Comment moderation arrived, and I remember submitting comments and then reloading frequently to check my karma score, which used to be visible numerically. Karma whoring inevitably arrived, and brought meta-moderation along with it. I was the first in our office to be selected as a meta-mod, and I remember feeling proud or cool or a massive nerd,  or some composite emotion made of all three. I loved that the site was billed as news for nerds , a term I felt far more comfortable with than the more US-specific 'geek', which still grates on my ears a little.


    I remember their IPO conducted in some kind of interestingly nerdy dutch auction system. I remember watching the stories of subsequent corporate ownership and acquisition and nervously watching the site for signs of imported cultural spoilage. I remember the Slashdot PT Cruiser . Slashdot was just a daily part of life, reflexively checked and rechecked. I submitted a handful of stories, but I don't remember ever getting one accepted. I remember Jim chuckling one day across the desk from me, because whilst running HEAD requests against slashdot.org to test a proxy server or something, he spotted that slashdot was inserting Futurama quotes into it's HTTP responses, as X-Fry or X-Bender headers. I remember feeling I was drifiting a little out of touch with the herd when they posted their famous iPod launch story .


    I particularly remember that infamous afternoon in September, TeeJay looking over his screen at me and saying something about the Net being broken, and the World Trade Centre. All the news sites were down, but Slashdot just about stayed up enough for me to read about what was happening in New York city, and dash to the office kitchen to remain clamped, open-mouthed to the BBC news feed.


    When I was formulating the boards at IMDb, slashdot was a gigantic influence on my design. Most obviously in the nested table thread structure, and the view options, but in some other subtler ways, that lead me to eschew the fiddly point scoring and filtering, and implement constant post expiry to try and prevent the conversation ossifying around the earliest, most repeated subset of views. We inadvertently spawned the GNAA, who went back to slashdot, forming a particularly weird and unpleasant slashdot troll subculture. The first time I watched as IMDb was in a slashdot home page story (probably LotR or a Star Wars prequel) I remember my disappointment at the somewhat smaller than I'd imagined size of the slashdot effect, I don't think they even made it into our top 100 referrers report. I was already visiting the site less often, I had my own enormous forum to worry about, and I'd switched back to using a Mac (which had become consumed by the latest iteration of my beloved OPENSTEP). I was still probably reading it most days a week, but posting far less.


    I never quit completely. These days I'm probably down to a couple of visits a month, perhaps less than that. It still feels like an important part of my life, and I think it also represents an under-appreciated contribution to internet culture. It was the first blog-formatted site I recall ever seeing, although nobody called it that for years. It was the first successful news aggregation site to find a mainstream audience, and it unquestionably forged the the user-sourced content and discussion model template used by subsequent sites like Digg, Reddit and HN. I think it was a peer group for a huge number of people much like myself, and an important bridging stage for internet community culture in between USENET and the all-encompassing web. It was "Web 2.0" and "Social" years before they arrived. It really promoted a sense of belonging. I have never met Rob Malda, but I remember feeling elated all day, when he used slashdot to successfully propose marriage to his girlfriend , and yesterday when the surprising news broke about his resignation from the job he invented at the site he founded, it gave me far more pause than the more famous, wealthier man who grabbed all the headlines by resigning the same day.


    Slashdot will endure, and I expect I will still visit it, sporadically. I'm not going to pretend it's as important to me today as it was even five years ago. I only just realised yesterday, that Rob Malda is one of my heroes, and I never even said "Thank You". Well, I have done now.

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