randomosity

Well, time to come to grips with what has been a won­der­ful jour­ney, a great read and a thought pro­vok­ing diver­sion. Vin­tage Tomor­rows by Brian David John­son and James Car­rott stems, accord­ing to the authors, from a passing dis­cus­sion in a pub between a his­tor­ian and a futur­ist. The out­come is an unex­pec­ted delight. A crit­ical, deep and prob­ing ques­tion­ing of what makes steam­punk tick. For the unfa­mil­iar, steam­punk is a counter-culture bub­bling under­neath our days-to-day lives and often simply char­ac­ter­ised as neo-victorian sci­ence fic­tion. But, the premise of this book is that that is far too simple a defin­i­tion and the authors chron­icle their attempt to try to expose the deeper motiv­a­tions behind the sur­face effect of fancy dress cos­tumes, glisten­ing brass gears and a fas­cin­a­tion with clock­work orna­ment­a­tion. The res­ult is a deli­ciously read­able, superbly craf­ted and con­struc­ted expose that demands that the reader engages and is open to self-reflection, but is rewar­ded with some far reach­ing real­isa­tions about how we per­ceive today’s world and humanity’s engage­ment with our own his­tory. This is a book about how human­ity engages with tech­no­logy and the nature of the rela­tion­ship is deep, fluid and indi­vidual. Con­tinue Reading

I’m work­ing on a review of Vin­tage Tomor­rows for O’Reilly. The book is not all what I was expect­ing (in a serendip­it­ously won­der­ful way) and am abso­lutely hooked. A deep and pithy look at the rationale and motiv­a­tion behind a coun­ter­cul­ture move­ment. I am savour­ing the exper­i­ence more than most books of late. The review is com­ing but as I said, I am savour­ing and there’s no rush­ing that ;-)
One of the more fas­cin­at­ing aspects — not of the book itself — but of the read­ing pro­cess is the rather extens­ive use I seem to be mak­ing of the high­light­ing facil­ity on the Kindle. For some reason or other it just seemed to kick in with me on this book. Click and drag and it’s synced with my account. The res­ult is a lovely sum­mar­ised view of my view of the writ­ing, much like a word doc­u­ment with the Show Final without revi­sions in track changes. I am not sure why this is so novel but it is to me. I know that oth­ers have com­men­ted on the facil­ity in the past mus­ing on how it changes the e-reading pro­cess, but sud­denly (and intu­it­ively) I find myself using it — walk­ing along the street, read­ing and mak­ing annota­tions — the jour­ney to work takes on a new dimension.

Con­tent Every­where by Sara Wachter-Boettcher intro­duces the cas­ual end-user or first time con­tent man­ager to struc­tured web con­tent and provides a quick course in the con­nec­tion for how things are stored and how they can be deployed. It is very famil­iar in tone and the author presents a poten­tially deep and intric­ate topic (one that simply dares dis­trac­tion) in a logical manner.The vari­ous sec­tions build from a case under­ly­ing the need for struc­tur­ing and sim­pli­fy­ing web con­tent to meth­ods to struc­ture and encode to the vari­ous pro­cesses that aid in its deploy­ment to the web. Simple and logical. Con­tinue Reading