Welcome, to The Perfect Curve.

There are 175 posts in total.

Wuthering Bytes – A Festival of Technology in the heart of the Pennines

simon gray — 2015-09-30, 17:12:37 - 1015 words

I went to the Wednesday session of Wuthering Bytes, which was called Tomorrow’s People, exploring the future of public service provision and how councils, SMEs and individuals can work together. It was quite a departure from the usual local government technology events I tend to go to in that the topics were more of parallel relevance to my usual job rather than of direct relevance – but that said it was still of use for me to take back to work tomorrow, especially the talk about Open Source Circular Economy Days. It was also an good reminder to those of us who’ve become accustomed to the unconference / Open Space Technology format of events that it’s not the format of the event which makes it good or bad, it’s the quality people who turn up to speak at it.

I’ve not written a prose account of the day, instead, here are my bullet-point notes from the sessions, which may or may not be relevant to people outside of the context of the event itself:

Kathryn Grace – Digital Occupational Therapist – Digital tools and dementia

A musician's work

simon gray — 2015-09-18, 09:04:14 - 35 words
I dislike intensely the term 'back catalogue'; it implies an artist's work is disposable, that only their last release has any value. Imagine if Beethoven symphonies 1-8 were described as his back catalogue. [...]

Read the rest of A musician's work .

Political campaigning

simon gray — 2015-07-11, 11:17:50 - 104 words
Having a change.org petition calling for no confidence in a government less than two months after it was elected on a better-than-expected majority just makes us as the left look silly; there are surely better ways to campaign to make a point.And as an aside, its existence underpins everything I've been saying about what is wrong with change.org and the like - we've spent the last five years being anaesthetised into thinking we're changing the world one click at a time, forgetting the fact of it taking more than a click to change the world. [...]

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London Underground strike

simon gray — 2015-07-09, 06:30:06 - 157 words
Even though it's going to inconvenience me somewhat, I'm fully supporting the London Underground drivers in their strike today - both their right to strike at all, and the grounds of their dispute. It's not a strike about money, it's a strike about defending the right of employees not to have their working conditions arbitrarily changed by management without meaningful consultation and negotiation.If you think you've got it bad in your workplace, rather than griping about other workers who are standing up for themselves, instead why not join a union yourself - and persuade your colleagues to join the same union - and stand up for your own rights? If you think unions are just self-serving organisations who protect only their own officers, that's even more reason to join one, and become a workplace officer yourself to change that.http://huffpost.com/uk/entry/7751262 [...]

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Sunday trading

simon gray — 2015-07-07, 09:32:57 - 60 words
Ignoring the matter of who owns the respective businesses and how they operate, why should a shop which sells most of the things most people want to buy be restricted in its trading hours on a Sunday in order to protect the business interests of a shop which doesn't sell most of the things most people want to buy? [...]

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The code behind this site is a bit of an abandoned project; I originally had lofty ambitions of it being the start of a competitor for Twitter and Facebook, allowing other people to also use it turning it into a bit of a social network. Needless to say I got so far with it and thought who did I think I was! Bits of it don't work as well as I'd like it to work - at some point I'm going to return to it and do a complete rebuild according to modern standards.