The MAD Museum
Almost a year since I was moved to post something here, but a trip to Stratford upon Avon with my son has moved me to enthuse about kinetic art.
This was Robert’s first visit to Stratford, and our main purpose was to visit the various Shakespeare museums and to see a performance of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, The Tempest, excellently presented by the RSC in their wonderful theatre in Stratford.
But our attention was also diverted by a new museum in Stratford, the Mechanical Art and Design Museum. We loved it – a great collection of kinetic art pieces, some of them for sale, all of them fun to interact with. Of course it cannot match that wonderful tribute to the father of kinetic art, Jean Tinguely in Basel, but it can at least make up in variety what it might lack in grandeur and scale.
Among the works on display was Standard Time, a 24-hour time sculpture that had me, at least, hooked. I was delighted to discover that the museum had the video of it on sale, and that it has been engineered to run on a PC as the machine’s clock, and screen saver. And I was even more delighted to discover that the performance filmed took place on our 21st wedding anniversary! As a work of modern art, I find it entertaining, clever, funny, thought-provoking, and functionally useful (and slightly crazy). What more can you ask of art? I take my hat off to Mark Formanek and twelve teams who laboured through 24 hours to keep up with time, and record it for posterity. It is now able to do so continuously on my laptop.
There are even versions for the iPad and the iPhone, so if you own one of these devices you can at last give them something worthwhile to do!
Protect your laptop, macbook or android device
It’s been a while since I last posted something here. A job move and a change of country (from Wales to UAE) has taken up my attention for the past few months.
So perhaps I am the last person to discover Prey – a neat utility that runs on your laptop or mobile device and can be turned into an anti-theft device the moment you realise that your cherished laptop has disappeared. It can even take a picture of the thief for you!
I stumbled upon this recently when I read a wonderful account of how a combination of Prey and Twitter led to a stolen laptop being recovered at an internet cafe in the US. It will run on Linux, Android, Windows or Mac (but not yet on the iPhone, though I bet that is on the way). It’s a free service, for the sake of a simple installation and account setup, it just might rescue your laptop if it ever goes for a walk.
Check it out here.
Courgette Cake
This is a bit different from my usual posts, but if a blog is for anything, it is for passing on to others things that you find useful. So, at today’s Equality and Diversity Steering Group meeting at ONS I brought along a courgette cake which seemed to go down pretty well. This recipe has recently become a family favourite, and it was a surprise discovery a few months ago when we had a surplus of courgettes (works equally well with marrow, of course).
I can’t totally ignore technology in a post, so while you pick up the recipe here, take a look around the site, which is a wonderful example of mass collaboration – great use of reviews, ratings, tags, emoticons, the full works!
MacroWikinomics
Don Tapscott’s latest book, a macro view of mass collaboration to follow up his best-seller “Wikinomics” has just come out. I haven’t read it yet, but he was at his inspirational best when he spoke at the EA 2010 Conference in London earlier this year, and these short interviews with TechCrunch are full of interesting thoughts beautifully presented.
I particularly like his definition of University – “the very best model of higher education that 17th century technology can provide”.
I haven’t yet read the new book, and expect it is mostly a set of interesting case studies, but if it is half as good as Wikinomics, it is clearly worth reading.
While we’re on book recommendations, I thoroughly recommend Empowered, which nicely illustrates how you have to empower your employees to reflect the empowerment your customers already have. Harness this, and your customers become your best advocates. Ignore it, and you are taking one hell of a risk.
Zachman and EA
I greatly admire John Zachman – his framework is a tremendous piece of work, the very foundations of Enterprise Architecture. From an intellectual perspective, it seems to me unshakeable, and John was on excellent form at the 2010 EA conference in London this summer.
For many, the difficulty with the framework is not conceptual, but practical. How does one put it into practice, and what tools or models does one have to create, and how should one use them, to turn this beautiful set of models into something that can be put to beneficial use?
A memorable session at that conference was given with a demonstration of PowerDesigner from Sybase. We saw a really elegant demonstration in which the paper framework came to life before our eyes.
Stan Locke has been a great advocate and communicator of the Zachman Framework, so it is really too sad to learn of the falling out of these two, who have been business partners and co-evangelists for s0 long.
Let us hope that some common sense can prevail so the both parties’ energies can be devoted to more positive activities. And one day I hope to find an opportunity to take a closer look at how PowerDesigner can breathe practical life into the Zachman Framework.