We Are Team Rubber

http://www.webdevconf.co.uk/

Yesterday I attended the Web Developer Conference, an event organised for students of the Web Design degree course at the University of West England. The attendees where split roughly 50/50 between students and professionals from and around Bristol.

Of all the talks, I especially enjoyed ‘Designing for hyper-connectivity’ presented by James Box,  not least because he mentioned Lost within a few minutes of beginning! His talk centred around hyperconnectivity and how we make sense of The Web of Data that we have access to and how we make that data meaningful. The themes he touched on made me think of a conversation I had with Tom Abba a few weeks back whereby he spoke about the progression of Data to give it meaning. I will illustrate it below:

A example of this model working in a TR project would be Consultations - Delib do online opinion research and public consultation that will involve targeted audiences (data) giving responses (information) and help organisations make informed decisions (knowledge =resulting in= wisdom).

Things I learnt:

Cursebird - a twitter swear searching api.

programableweb.com - online repository of api’s.

yahoo pipes - pipes.yahoo.com, an application that aids in the drawing and syndicating of information from the internet, like mashups but with a swish drag and drop interface.

All hail the Ego Bentley Laptop, now I’m no techy genius, but I am a lover of nice, pretty things (and a reference to my name always helps), of which this is a perfect example. Outside it’s lush, inside however it’s pretty average with an unnamed AMD 64 chipset, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive with a 12.1″ display. 

At $20k i wont be getting it in the near future, but it is something that would be perfect for tapping away on in a Starbucks with a skinny mocha light frappachino.

x

http://blog.laptopmag.com/worlds-most-expensive-laptop-the-ego-bentley

http://www.slipperybrick.com/tag/bentley/

I saw this post and thought of the developers and their love of all things bacon;

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/24/from-the-makers-of-b.html

AntiVJ’s Joanie and Nio are residents at The Pervasive Media Studio where George and I have our Graduate Residency. They work with projections and a week or so ago they performed in Bruxelles, for Nuit  Blanche Bruxelles. Joanie had produced some content , along with  Legoman who performed live on the night.  Here is a little video <http://www.vimeo.com/1919594> which totally took my breath away, especially when the bricks of the building begin to fall.

Well, what a weekend! I spent Friday chasing people over the city dressed in what can only be described as an eclectic combination of clothing, however, my sports shoes let me down - I tried to catch a group of people and as I ran to catch one of them I went hurtling across the shiny concrete floor by the amphitheater, but ever the professional I told the people I was chasing to carry on regardless leaving me to pick myself up, with only a slightly bruised ego as testament to my accident.

Saturday was non-stop for all the volunteers who came down to help. Katrina came down and helped out at the iglounge where all games started from, here she got chatting to the authors of a game a few of us are playing in the office which is called Call and Return, she also helped out at funfed and managed to blag a place on a team for the ‘Rainbow Rain’ a massive paint fight that happened on Castle Park….I think her team might have won…….

I played the last game of Saturday night and yet again I found myself being a ‘baddie’ (I was a catcher the night before and a catcher again on Saturday) The game Sneaks and Blaggers is held in a multistory carpark, roughly based on snakes and ladders, all the sneaks have to find a complete set of coloured cards without being caught by the two blaggers who have bells around their ankles to warn the sneaks of their wear abouts. The game was voted as the audience’s favourite at the Igawards and was lots of fun to play as a sneak or a blagger.

Sunday was a wonderful end to a great weekend, a lot of the volunteers (including myself and Kat) went out and burnt the candle at both ends on Saturday night but it didn’t affect our enthusiasm on Sunday, a lot of the games on Sunday were family orientated and so where heaps of fun and we were all about to muck in and get involved. The most notable of the day was Korean Lazer Ball, which I unfortunately missed due to other commitments but I am assured will be blogged about by one of the Team Rubber Team members.

My mind is still buzzing from the weekend, the chance to be involved in such an interesting festival has given me insight into alternative ways in which to use our environment and ways to have fun that are away from a screen, keyboard or mouse. It has also taught me how kind and enthusiastic people can be when they are involved in a project that they feel positive about and how this energy is transfered to people who attend the event……Thanks you to everyone who was involved in any capasity at all.

Happy Gaming

x

After I completed my degree I was awarded a joint residency at The Pervasive Media Studio with my creative partner George Crabtree, following the likes of other Rubberees such as Rich Wilson, Ben Templeton and Daniel Course who now work in the Studio. ‘The Pervasive Media Studio brings together the computing, communication and creative industries to pioneer new forms of digital media, it is a collaboration led by HP Labs and Watershed, with support from the South West Regional Development Agency’ (taken from here).

Tonight the Studio presents ‘A Night at the Studio’, featuring a project showcase, launch of the website and the launch of the Interesting Games Festival. There will be a mobile game, designed by Mobile Pie, which will be played throughout the evening between canapés and wine scoffing. If anyone is interested they must RSVP to genevieve@pmstudio.co.uk with their name and telephone number.

The Interesting Games Festival begins tomorrow (Friday) with ‘Journey to the Middle of the Night‘, a giant chase game played across the city, where players evade the chasers, find the hidden checkpoints and make their way through a series of strange circumstances to reach the party at the end of the night. I am a Chaser and will be fully kitted out in day-glo 80’s sports wear, because, well, just because I can…..

Other games worth noting are;

Call and Return, a game where players (also known as Ludens) choose a toy to represent them in the game and are then set simple missions designed to re-frame spaces and de-familiarise everyday objects. A few people in the office are playing this at the moment and we are all egerly awaiting the posting of the first missions.

Rainbow Rain, three teams battle it out in a three way paint fight with only white boiler suits and umbrellas to protect themselves. The winning team is the one whose colour dominates the umbrellas and suits.

Girl Racer, a game where people race on a paper track with foot operated sewing machines.

The final game I will mention (there are loads more on the site….) is Korean Lazer Ball. Officially named the snappy but slightly long title of ‘OMMRPG’ or ‘Offline Multi-Mirror Reflector Positioning Game‘. In Korean Lazer Ball teams of lazer gladiators battle it out, scoring goals by bouncing the lazer beam from hand-held mirrors onto a super high-tech spot on the wall.

Team Rubber is entering a Team and is happy to announce that Heather, our Delib Project Manager who is away on Maternity leave at the moment, will be joining Jess (Seeding Superstar), Alex (Project Director Extraordinaire), Ant (King of CCS and skinning…no, not that sort of skinning) and Matt (Plythoplojax Master) to wave the Rubber flag. Jess and I will be cutting, sticking and pimping up the costumes tomorrow.

Have a good weekend

and

Happy Gaming

x

After trying and failing to teach myself mysql in ten minutes I purchased this book. It clearly describes and directs the user in the practical uses of PHP, Flash and MySql. The inclusion of evaluative chapters at each stage of the book gives the reader an overview of the newly covered area of PHP/MySQL/Flash; as such it was clear, straightforward and easy to follow. It introduced me to the syntax of PHP while illustrating how it compares to ActionScript, and how it integrates with Flash.

This book assumes the reader only has knowledge of Flash and basic web design skills, as such it leads you by the hand - I can’t tell you how useful this was to me -  as I found that although open source software is free, most of the supporting documentation is written for, and by developers and as such can be seemingly cryptic to a layman such as myself.

I picked this little book up off the Rubber Book Shelf about a month or so ago now. After three weeks I had still not taught myself Mysql.

This book is not for complete beginners - I was after a book that would guide me through the implementation of a database to aid in the passing of information from it to Flash. However, this book gives more of an overview as to the practicalities of working with MySql and the syntax’s that it reacts to. It was informative in as much that it taught me the basics of tables in addition to the storing and calling data from them - however, it did not communicate ( to me at least) what i did with all this information and how I would actually implement a database and ‘hook’ it up to my application.

Many Happy Returns and all that………

Click me

A very interesting article from the Guardian regarding Facebook, its founders and board members. The article speculates that the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel.

In Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.

Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax.

‘He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: “You can’t have a workers’ revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu,” he says. ‘

any way have a look see………