Status-Q

If I read that someone is

...working on debates within inter-disciplinary urbanism around notions of 'Darwinistic individual selfishness' – or 'Who Dares Wins Urbanism' attempting to make apparent the predictable, though overlooked failures of individualism within and apparent across the 'leadership' of the centre, left and right.

and is preoccupied with

...how social relations (dissolving of nation states and rise of cities) might change on earth with the colonisation of other planets

but has now created a non-profit that intends to

inject a criticality into discussions about cities via creating a platform for existing, though overlooked multi-disciplinary critical actors and provocateurs

then I can't help feeling that he must find it difficult to get people to take him seriously, and that wrecking the Boat Race must have been a last desperate attempt to get himself noticed.

The above quotes come from the culprit's RSA profile page. (You shouldn't read anything into the fact that he's an RSA Fellow, by the way, even though it sounds good. The RSA is a pleasant-enough club in London, of which anyone can become a 'Fellow' by stumping up 150 quid a year.)

But as I read about what he does, the very worrying thought occurs to me that someone, presumably, is paying for him to create this kind of mumbo-jumbo, and I really hope it's not the taxpayer (i.e. you and me).

The broadcaster Richard Madeley put it nicely: 'God, the monumental ego and selfishness of the swimmer who screwed the Boat Race. Imagine sharing living space with someone like that.'

But wait a minute... that's much too obvious an explanation. I'm off to apply for a grant to do some interdisciplinary research which will explore the creation of a forum to inject a criticality into the suggestion that such actions are simply the predictable, though overlooked failure of individualism.

For many years I've been a fan of TextExpander on the Mac, a utility which converts a short sequence of keystrokes into a much longer one. For example, most of my email messages end with

All the best,
Quentin

which appears when I type 'atb' and hit space. There are many much more complex things you can do with TextExpander, which is good, because it's a little pricey for a small utility, but in the end I realised that 35 bucks wasn't too much for something I use dozens of times every single day.

But typing efficiency is even more important when you have a sub-optimal keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad's. One of my favourite tips is that you can get an apostrophe or quote mark by pressing the comma or full-stop key briefly and sliding upwards; there's no need to switch into punctuation mode. (I wrote about this before once, but I think it must have been on Twitter or Facebook, which means I can't find it now. Note to self: always keep useful stuff on blog.)

Anyway, one of the recent iOS updates added a very handy but somewhat hidden keystroke-expansion feature, and I've realised that I'm using that all the time too.

Under Settings > General > Keyboard you can create shortcuts, which will let you do something similar to my 'All the best' trick, and can be very handy if you have a silly long name like mine: 'qqsf' expands into 'Quentin Stafford-Fraser', complete with capitals and punctuation.

But the thing I've found most useful is to have abbreviations for my main email addresses, since an increasing number of sites use them as login usernames. I find I'm always having to type, say, 'quentin@mycompany.com' on my little iPhone keyboard, and it was a real pain until I replaced it with 'qmc' and a space.

One small note: if you use it this particular way, there are some sites that get confused if you leave the space on the end. So I actually tend to type 'qmc<space><backspace>', but that's still a great deal easier than the whole address.

Anyone who's starting to tire of my holiday snaps will be pleased to know that I'm back in the UK, and, while I may yet post the odd picture over the next few days, they should decline to a respectable level before long! On Monday, I need to get back to work.

Various friends have been asking just what 'back to work' entails for me at present, since my situation has been decidedly vague for a while. So here's a quick personal update for those interested...

After leaving Camvine in the autumn, I had a bit of a break, and then started a new company, Telemarq Ltd. (Hans Rosling once told me that he had worked out my model: whenever I run out of money, I start a new company! That's not the intention, but it does sometimes look like that...)

Telemarq was initially formed as a vehicle for the exploration of a new invention. I think I have a good and viable idea, but I don't have the resources to get it very far on my own (and I haven't yet filed the patent, which is why I'm not broadcasting the details!)

Anyway, as I was debating whether to go out looking for investors for another startup, I was approached by several different companies who wanted some consultancy work, and I thought they would all would be rather interesting/enjoyable clients. Besides which, my bank account had dwindled to a level where it needed some topping-up!

So, for the moment, Telemarq is a consultancy business through which Rose and I do our work (which means it already has a rather broad remit, since our fields are very different). I'm delighted that Richard Morrison is going to be working part-time under the Telemarq banner too, since he's one of the nicest and smartest chaps I've run into in a long time.

A big part of Telemarq will be software development, but there's some teaching, some publishing, some intellectual property stuff in the mix already, and we're only just starting.

May need some more people soon, or some more days in the week...!

To the extent I've formulated a coherent plan, it's this:

To do really good work, on interesting projects, for, and with, people we like.

Not exactly a conventional business mission statement, but I've seen a lot worse. It'll do as a placeholder!

Thought for the day:

A human is a YouTube video's way of making more YouTube videos.

In the past, we've just been casual tourists, but this time I felt we really got to the bottom of Venice.

Where we're going, we don't need roads!

Venice, as you may know, is made up of about 100 islands connected by lots of little bridges. That's roughly how the little network here in my Venice hotel room works, too.

The hotel charges for a wifi connection - only a one-off charge, but it is per-machine, so I only paid for my Macbook to be connected. With recent versions of OS X you can easily create a PAN (a 'Personal Area Network') using Bluetooth, so Rose's laptop and my iPad could then get access by using my Mac as a Bluetooth < -> Wifi gateway. All very cool.

However, I could not get my iPhone to connect that way. I don't know whether it should work or not - the general expectation is that you're more likely to use your phone to provide connectivity for your laptop than the other way around! But I wanted a connection for the phone because I needed to download maps and other reference materials to have in my pocket as we explored, and I didn't want to pay roaming data charges.

And then I realised that, just as my laptop was sharing its wifi connectivity to Rose's laptop using a Bluetooth PAN, so her machine could then share that connectivity as a wifi network again! And, hey presto, my phone had a network, so I can now download maps to my heart's content!

What else would one be doing in Venice, after all?...

:-)

The Camvine office is now, to all extents and purposes, finally closed. A quick summary is that we had a great team who worked very hard, a great product, customers who really liked what we did and placed repeat orders frequently, but we just never found a way to get enough of them through the front door each month to keep the company going. The fact that I started the company just at the beginning of a recession didn't help, either!

An emotional time for us all, and the fact that I've been out of the company for six months or so now doesn't lessen that fact. It hasn't been appropriate for me to write about it before, because of the various deals and legalities going on, and I'm not going to do so yet either, except to say that deals have been struck which mean that the CODA system will live on, in some form, and involving some of the original people, at other companies.

Garry, the backbone of the technical team for several years, has written a blog post about the trials, tribulations, and technical challenges of his life at Camvine.

An elderly woman in Manhattan walked into the door of an Apple store. Rather literally: the door was too shiny and clean, and she broke her nose on it. Now, that's no fun for anyone, but she's suing Apple for a million dollars. Must have been quite a nose.

I wonder what the success rate for this sort of case is? I mean, could I make a living out of walking into doors, slipping on floors, etc? I'd be willing to sustain quite a few minor injuries at $1M a time.

The law of costs is a wonderful thing, and it helps most nations avoid a great deal of the silliness that afflicts the American legal system. This case is very reasonable compared to some. I don't think Apple should be fined $1M, but something should probably be done - they should apologise and should be required to buy a roll of stickers to put on their doors. Giving her an iPad would be a nice gesture.

It really bugs me that so many people in the world seem to operate on this basic principle:

IF

• Something bad happens to me

• You have lots more money than me

• It must be your fault
  

• I should have lots of your money

If exactly the same thing happened at, say, your sister's house, would you ask her for a million dollars? Of course not. It's attempted redistribution of wealth through forceful means, that's what it is. Communists.