Like cooking? Like science? Like mixing them up a bit? Well, the inspirational and insightful Danah Boyd (@zephoria) points us to the interesting looking “Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks and Good Food”. It gets some excellent reviews too.

To paraphrase and pulverise an obscure in-joke (so no worries if you don’t understand – only @dsumner will): but does it have hot-pot?

Danah (along with 4 other MSFT Researchers) has just been named in the 2010 TR35 award which recognises innovators under the age of 35 whose inventions and research are found to be the most exciting. Awesome recognition and well done to them and MSFT Research generally for such a representation.

I just ordered an excellent new pair of Air Max 95 customised via the Nike Store. The customisation stuff is excellent (and not exclusive to Nike of course) and breathes new life into shopping for trainers (sneakers to my American friends). I’m a bit of a trainer aficionado but my lack of proximity to London town these days means I don’t get to spend the same amount of time looking for rares.

Anyway, Nike have presumably built quite a lot of infrastructure (besides the little interface) to support this personalised commodity approach so it’s a bit of shame that the best they can offer for me to share my kerrr-azy designs is this bit of embedded code:

Check out the
Nike Air Max 95 iD Shoe
I designed at NIKEiD.com

It’s a fairly low-res image which could have been executed as a Silverlight/Flash object.

So “almost getting it” is where I think we are here – a nice piece of challenge and control offered up, but falling at the final hurdle of really allowing me to share my creations with friends and thus propagate brand awareness and value into my social networks. (Not my designs particularly – which are dull).

Anyway, you can also go to the site and vote for and comment on my design too: Air MEH.

For when you absolutely, positively have to have somewhere to push your toy cars and shout “Brmm, brmm!”. One for the Christmas list for the boy I think. (via Clementine)

Good grief. I’m sure I Russell M. Davies wrote about this in Wired 2 months ago.

Although the first comment on the video sums it up “Installing Ad Block in three, two, one…” it does make you think.

Are we heading this way? Probably.

On the other hand, maybe all of this has happened before. Given that it seems likely that the fundamental particle of the universe is information (I’m a little liberal with the use of the word ‘likely’ here as I can’t find a reference to hand but I read it somewhere – or maybe it was on the One Show) and considering that owing to the many worlds theory it’s likely we’re living in a simulation anyway, then perhaps after a bit of time with this sort of set-up (like, say, 30 minutes) everyone decided that although it’s nice to be hyper-connected, sometimes it’s nice just to have a cup of tea.

I did love the finger-spread hand-gesture though. Very cool.

Did I mention how much I really love my NEX-5? Well, I do.

Anyway, I would surely love to use one of these fellas (which use the same E lens system) for a bit of video work. Actually, the NEX-5 video has been great – in particular the sound of the inbuilt mic (seriously) has been really good even at distance. Only slight criticism is slightly sluggish auto-focus at times (but on the other hand, no whirring noise on the video itself).

Actually, I’m struggling to justify buying one as I bought a fabulous Sony HDR-XR500VE which has been great for producing stuff like this, but it doesn’t stop me wanting the shiny.

Dear Sony, please can you fix it for me and my evangelists to get our hands on this lovely kit? Go on.

Talking of identity, @andspo pointed me at this excellent idea for a minimal business card. Beautiful. Of course you’ve got to have the domain etc. to make this work, but if you’re starting up it’s definitely worth bearing in mind.

By the by, if you’d prefer @andspo to change his Twitter handle to @spooooooner then you should petition him at @andspo. Just a thought.

As I was saying in this post, I remembered about a post (or rather a series of posts) that I was going to do at the start of the year as it was 10 years since 2000 and I just happened to unearth my old copy of “The Internet – Rough Guide 2000” whilst spring cleaning.

If you like reminiscing, then let me know, and we’ll explore some more of what was then.

This was back in the day when the internet could be described in a book. Nowadays you’d need some kind of infographic (thanks @Jas) of course.

Anyway, the entry on Google says the following:

New, speedy, search engine without any excess fluff. Try it!

And that’s it. How quaint it all seems. Actually it’s quite good fun to run through the category lists (like “Retail”), check in on the survivors, and remember who was there at the start(ish). I love the web.

Took me a couple of minutes to recognise Chewie… at least I think that’s who it is (via FailBlog)

Excellent – a bakery for men. Loved the mission:

Our objective is simple. We’re men. Men who like cupcakes. Not the frilly pink-frosted sprinkles-and-unicorns kind of cupcakes. We make manly cupcakes. For manly men.

Found thanks to @danrough’s birthday. Happy birthday mate.

(I used Microsoft ICE to composite this image)

If you’ve been following my twitter feed you’ll know I’ve been at Thinking Digital this week. Microsoft were sponsoring the event – in particular the WebsiteSpark and BizSpark programmes for web agencies and startups. We were relatively mob handed with myself, @stevecla, @dsumner, @bindik, @will_coleman and @saraallison/@ubelly there for at least most of the event. Sadly @markjo couldn’t be there, but we didn’t really miss him…

This is my attempt to round-up the things that stuck in my mind before they fade into the general haze of experience.

Firstly, I should say that @herbkim and his Codeworks crew put on a fantastic event overall at a great venue. The theatre environment felt suitably smart and intimate. Well done to them.

Secondly, the attendees were a generous bunch in terms of their participation and additions to the experience – lots of tweeting under the #tdc10 tag, and it was great to catch up with @paulfabretti, @jas amongst a host of others.

As to the programme, the things that stuck with me:

• I attended an Origami for Beginners class run by Robert Lang who patiently took us through the construction of cranes and other paper-fold objects that any Japanese infant could create. Key takeaway from Robert: “We are smarter than a piece of squared paper”
• Chris Payne (@Documentally) gave a great talk on his general use of social media in the crazy world that he calls his life. I didn’t learn anything here other than that there are some people really exploiting life to the full – Chris is definitely one of them. He’s a great storyteller and evangelist and certainly switched a few folk onto Audioboo following the session.
• We (+ @will_coleman) bumped into Don Levy, a VP from Sony Pictures, in a bar the night before his session. Fantastic guy and very generous with his time with idiot movie fans like me. He told some great stories on visual effects in cinema and left me with a great quote from Jerry Bruckheimer: “We are in the transportation industry” and talked about humans being “storytellers by nature”. Also bumped into him again in the afternoon by which time he probably thought I was stalking.
• Next up was Andy Hobsbawm of DoTheGreenThing – a favourite site of mine – who told the story of Green Thing and how it came into being: focussing on actionable, non-preachy ways for the inclined population to go a bit greener. Judging by immediate Twitter buzz, this felt like one of the most inspirational of the sessions. See more of Andy at TED.
• The morning – yes this was still the morning of Day 1 – was then rounded out by @rorysutherland of Ogilvy who told (mostly hilarious) anecdotes of behavioural and complementary marketing: extracting/reclaiming value rather than “adding value”. (You can see him at TED here) An example:
  • Eurostar spends £6Bn upgrading the track to improve journey time by some percentage or other. He asked his teams what they would do to improve Eurostar experience for £6Bn. Favourite answer: hire supermodels to walk up and down the train serving free Chateau Petrus and you’d still have £5Bn left over. AND people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.
• He left us with the #diamondshreddies meme (see here), and on the perception of value he said: “If Louis XIV looked round your house he'd say it was shit but he'd give you half of Burgundy for your TV”
• Following lunch we had Luis von Ahn – opening line “You know Captcha? Do you hate it? Well, I invented that…” – explain all about the Captcha system, the Recaptcha system for digitising books (instead of just wasting your time) and a hilarious story of Recaptcha hackers and spam sweatshops. Too much to repeat here. As @documentally said: “Luis Von Ahn co-creator of Capatcha and now re-capatcha is a genius doing great work”
• The next speaker was @juliantreasure and his presentation was on sound – an unusual subject – but one which captured the room as he was able to deliver his point viscerally through the sounds he was talking about. Fantastic session and made a lot of folk think about the lack of focus this sense gets. Soundbite: “Your ears are always on.”
• Finally, the day was wrapped up by Robert Lang (the origami guy) who told us more of his backstory – a physicist at NASA – and how origami was used to fold solar sails and so on.

End of Day 1 and my brain ached.

Day 2 was a little bit weaker (in my opinion – many I spoke to disagreed) but still some great stuff:

• Mary Anne de Lares Norris described spatial interfaces and showed some great videos of it in action (think Minority Report) using the phrase “Emancipating Pixels”. Soundbite: “Generals don’t wear gloves” when talking about the need for a wand-based interface for the military.
• Jer Thorp (@blrpnt) a data visualiser working for Wired magazine talked about mining data and using http://www.processing.org to produce some fantastic visualisations. He was inspired by Mark Lombardi and reminded us all that “data is pattern”.
• Our own @rherbrich from FUSE Labs (Future Social Experience) talked about Twitter and the need for filtering – how in the real time web has meant that “the latest” has become “the most important” – before unveiling a Twitter filtering service: Project Emporia.

Aside from that we had some great music from GiveWay and Let’s Buy Happiness

Plenty to think about. Great event. Well done Herb.