Posts
Dear Photograph,
I awoke to the sound of an airplane hitting the tower. As we looked up and stared in utter disbelief at the nightmare unfolding in front of us.
Mark Yokoyama
Interesting developments in the gps world.
Farmers have begun to turn away from organic food production in the face of waning interest from the big supermarkets.
In Britain a new Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s or Asda opens every other day. But across the country people are battling the relentless march of the ‘Big Four’. John Harris, who has taken up the fight himself, reports…
As the scale of the nationwide outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg started to sink in Thursday — along with the stunningly large recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey, much of it probably already eaten — there were a number of moments that made a careful listener need to stop and just think.
Fuel (by NewVideoDigital)
Director Josh Tickell takes us along for his 11 year journey around the world to find solutions to America’s addiction to oil.
feature length.
Stand Your Ground (by ShootExperienceTeam)
On Tuesday 21 June 2011 six photographers were assigned different areas of the City to photograph. Some used tripods, some went hand held, one set up a 5 x 4.
Audio
Posts
Since my move to the countryside and considerably improved health, I am launching a new company called LoveFre.sh. I have decided to stop blogging as Colt - in fact, I'm only using it as my gaming name now - as it began - because I don't want to be annonymous anymore.
I will start my new blog soon but in the meantime, I am using my Tumblr blog http://spoff.tumblr.com.
Incidentally - the same good health and start up plans have forced me back on to Facebook.
Feel free to 'friend' me :) I'm on there under my real name, Mark Spofforth.
Currently making plans for a small holding. This would be a dream come true. It's complicated by a fear of recurrent illness - but the fact remains, I am far more fortunate than many who suffer from Depression or anxiety related illness. I have a supportive family and opportunity to work again - doing something that fires a passion in me. I have asked myself whether I'm rushing forward into something I am not fully recovered enough for - and frankly, the answer is, I am really in need of purpose beyond recovery, rushing or not, I want to take the opportunity while it presents itself (the farm next door has just vacated). It seems like this planned element of our future is one worth accelerating to reality.
Not usual for me to post politics. However, Johann Hari writes with such clarity and sense that I wanted to record it here. Recommended reading. Especially if you remember the 1980's! I worked in mental health services back then - for 4 years at Mind. If you think mental health care is underfunded and badly organised now ... just you wait. It's going to get ugly.
Sick and tired of having to keep an eye on my privacy settings - and concerned by their use of data mining. The only thing stopping me was the possibility of losing touch with people. However, there is a contempt for users becoming apparent, as the zero's after the dollar sign mount up.
I don't particularly like the service, and find twitter and my tumblr blog serve my needs well - social and media. Audioboo covers my audio needs nicely. YouTube, Flickr...they are all great tools for their jobs. I see the Web as my social network - not one particular corner of it.
If you wish to delete your facebook account, click here.
Finally, here's a message supposedly from Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, back when he started the site.
Google Buzz didn't work out for me. I've packed up and deleted my account.
It's appeal - a forum without portfolio, was eventually it's downfall.
Seldom moderated threads turned easily into flame wars.
The loudest opined with startling arrogance. Trolls roam unchecked, usually justifying themselves with some bollocks about free speech or their horror that 'lilly livered liberals' dare to tolerate and accept, rather than rage against those with different views.
It's vaguely possible to ignore the idiots. You can block them from your own Buzz. However, you are guaranteed to run into them on another thread, since the 'block' feature is really more of a 'try to avoid' feature. Ill thought out and poorly implemented. I'm really not about to start sending PM's to others on Buzz bitching about someone they are allowing to troll their thread. That's effort that shouldn't be needed. Social tools are supposed to be easy.
For me, when earlier today I had personally offensive bile spat in my face, it was a simple decision. There are far better social mediums, where I can concentrate on being social without having to stumble across ignorant, racist, homophobic bigots with a very twisted, aggressive take on the world. Actually, I don't mind stumbling across them - they can be mostly ignored. However, I very much mind when they launch personal attacks.
I don't come on line to be anti-social. I want to engage with people, positively and with respect. I take care to moderate what social media I consume. When a service fails to provide the tools to do this, it stops being social and becomes an irritant.
A subject too complicated and personal to be served by text. Here's an audioBoo I recorded to pose a question. If you can be bothered to listen to it all, then I value your opinion.
I'm not proposing the drugs don't help - or that I stop them without doctors guidance. I'm just suggesting that daily thoughts, weekly appointments and monthly reviews, along with CBT and CAT can only really guarantee one thing - that my life remains full of reminders that I have suffered a mental breakdown and am considered mentally ill.
My new life, away from the stress of London living, in peace and with no urgency at any point, is anxiety free, stress free, depression free....and currently Psychiatrist free. I'm due to sign up with the health service....and frankly, I've found my closer proximity to family, fresh air, exercise and quiet are doing more for me than any of the 'mental health services' I've been offered could.
I'll leave the rest for the recording. I don't want to feel like a victim / patient any more. I want to move on. I'm not 'in denial' - I know i'm suffering from a mental illness and will go straight to the doctor if the panic attacks return, or the self isolation,....or depression. I'm not stupid. What I am sick of though, is having a life dominated by a kind of 'patient psychosis'. It's made worse by the shoddy state of mental health care provided by the NHS. I can do without it I think....and if I get a little low, there's always my vegetable patch to talk to ;)
......or 'Caught Napping'!
Claud snapped this after I'd finished 2 days hard work on the garden in our new house.
Thought I'd post it - it's significant because it sums up our new life. I'm relaxed and exercising loads - gardening, running with poppy, lifting stuff, and going for walks. I'm outside, alot. I spend my day whistling rather than trembling, as I did for the last two years in our London house.
I am even relaxed enough to just sit back and snooze outside. It won't mean so much to anyone reading - but for me, it's a marked change! I'm loving it.
With a two seater car, Poppy doesn't get out much.
Waving goodbye to my agoraphobia, I have today purchased a 15 year old Land Rover with only 76,000 miles on the clock. It will get us out and about in the Countryside - and it will be perfect for the small amount of stock I will need to start my new Market Stall in the village.
The engine was rebuilt 2 years ago by a good friend of my Dads, so all is sound! Very excited! Should have it by Saturday, with 1 years Tax, for the bargain sum of £1800.
It's in mint condition and future repairs will be done by my Dad's mate - who is a Land Rover mechanic :D w00t, is all.
We've finally got heating, refrigeration, a freezer and washing machine - and a hoover.
Right. My new lawnmower has just arrived - very excited. My first lawnmower and it's a beauty :) Must dash -- having measured the lawn areas at 300 meters square, I have work to do!
*Leaving London after 20 years for life in the countryside*
Wow. Unbelievably nervous and feeling the need to write it down. If I ramble, it's because I have had to medicate. Bloody nutter. I guess my agoraphobia is doing me no favours over this move! I haven't driven in over 4 months - but will have to on Thursday. Only about 150 miles but still....I've not been much further than 1 mile from my home for some time.
Still, I've enabled tethering on my iphone, so I will have laptop access to the net while waiting for my broadband (limited at 3Mb due to remote location :/). Going to be a change from my current Cable internet 20mb! Running my game community will be a challenge but there's a good team of peeps there who'll keep it all smooth. I reckon my tethering should allow me to blog and keep up with Buzz. I'll probably stick to my iphone for twitter and simple surfing and save the tethering bandwidth. Looked at MiFi but too extravagant for a temporary need.
Boxes are arriving soon so we can pack up some stuff. The removals company arrives tomorrow and they do all the packing...then we leave on Thursday morning. It's definitely freaking me out. I'm leaving behind a kitchen that looks out on Prostitution and Crack activity, nightly - but we built this house from a shell - and I'm attached to it!
Claud is going to love it. Poppy is going to love it. I am too - once I'm there.
Since I've been recovering from my stress induced breakdowns, I've been under strict instructions not to tax myself. So, I'm kind of trying to float through the whole experience as much as possible. I pick small jobs. Do them. Then pick another. Everything seems to be going smoothly. If I'm honest - if my wife wasn't so superb and organised, we'd be in chaos now. Makes me feel useless - and my depression of late is not welcome. Still, whatever happens, I know that in a few days I'll be surrounded by fields and farmland, and I am certain that will do us all a world of good.
I'll be leaving my 'control room' - ideal for any hermit / agoraphobic geek. It's like a comfort blanket of tech.
It's been intense living in London. From the early student days, DJ'ing and living it up, to my most active studio recording times - 10 years of them - to a stressful period in my career and 8 years of IBS...all the while in a day job that involved face to face negotiations with FTSE 100 CEO's at it's worst. I lost 3 cases in the Court of Appeal before having my breakdowns - and I'm absolutely certain that where I'm heading, that life is going to seem a world away. Forgetting about money, career and socialising, there really is nothing about the move that I should fear.
I wish I could convince my nervous system of that!
Well, I've been up all night fretting about 350+ lost comments on our 'petition' blog - Time for a distraction.
I've been working on putting together some music for the fashion label HOSS. I've loved every minute of it. Marathon listening sessions - and being paid - you couldn't dream it up! Anyway. I'm up and awake now. This tweet brought a huge smile to my face, and my mood is good. loudmouthman is a legend for his 'Morning' tweets, amongst others - highly recommended follow!
I thought I'd throw together a quick 'micro-mix' to share some of my 'top choices' with you. 10 minutes of musical head strokes, followed by some fresh air, to go with your coffee. Just the job on a Saturday Morning.
As you know, I have been putting alot of work into getting my Game Community's voice heard, following an outrageously ignorant broadcast on ITV's The Alan Titchmarsh Show.
We submitted a complaint to Ofcom, the UK regulator, and created a blog specifically for people to sign their support.
The complaint blog is here. Here's a screenshot I've just taken of it,
We had already had great support, over 350 people had signed or commented on the blog, using Third Party comment system Disqus . As you can imagine then, I was pretty horrified to log in tonight to find all the comments had gone. I contacted Disqus and they claimed to have fixed it - but the comments are still not there, so I have informed them and await their response.
Here's a picture of my in box - evidencing 380+ comments
It's been a long night of frustration over this. I'm waiting to hear from Disqus on Twitter - but they don't appear to be in any rush to fix. Meanwhile, my Game Community is full of frustrated members who don't quite know what just happened.
I'm discussing this on Buzz also - feel free to join in!
I will abandon books when I am able to purchase a device with a nominal amount of pages, 10 minimum (I enjoy turning pages, so what), made of electronic paper with typographically perfect electronic ink fonts, a moleskin or soft leather bind, and the ability to reproduce the smell of a database of book types. That would see me happy to find something else to fill my bookshelves.
I can imagine picking up my reader and selecting an old encyclopaedia, and it responding by stiffening it's cover, softening it's pages, and exuding that 'old library' smell that brings back so many comfy childhood memories for me :)
Until then, I'll continue to get my news from my computer screen and RSS feeds and my fiction from chunks of paper with ink filled pages.
You'll want to click the image and read to properly understand this post.
Sometimes, it's easy to forget the Open Social Web is, well, open and social. I guess you never imagine the 'big players' will ever read anything you write about them. I'm sure he didn't take any notice of it - but it made me think that I need to be careful what I say. From a 'no reason to go pissing people off' point of view.
Then again, I've been openly talking about my mental illness online for over a year. Hardly the best CV. I guess I'll just continue doing things because I enjoy them and have passion for them. The business can build itself around that :P Epic fail possible!
I often worry about saying something anti-social. Maybe I should worry more specifically, about the fact that I plan to launch several web applications in the next 12 months and will need friends....
If you know me, you'll know i'm a sociable geek who's been active in online communities for years - forums though. I've also built a fair few social based mashups,.....you may call me a nerd. Think of me as the friend who lives online. Worry that I don't interact with real people in real life due to agoraphobia and mental illness. You would definitely not describe me as a Social Media expert - in fact I have some concerns over the very terms - Expert and Social Media, and the way they are bandied around these days.
Against this background - WTF am I doing ranked at all in this Twitter Chart : Titled 'Social Media Guru's' ..... I mean...they have me there at number 62/100.
Does anyone have any insight into the bizarre algorythms that lead a 38 year old vaguely mental geek to find himself on such a list?
I have all sorts of possibilities for a future, more balanced, less stressful career. One dream I have lies in agriculture. Small scale, local and specialist. It's kind of matured these days to a Bookmarks list full of Aquaponics and Hydroponics references, British Cheese makers, and organic Carp farming. We'll see. I'm on the right path at least - moving to a part of the country both laden with farms, and famous for it's cheese (Cheshire).
I have always been keen on gardening, particularly for the kitchen.
I lived on a farm for a while and it was one of the most inspiring periods in my life.
I guess the magic of helping to deliver a Foal at 4am probably contributed to that but, the most inspirational part was the family spirit (which appeared to be fed by hard work and feasts), their relationship with their land and livestock, and their farm shop.
All the food it sold was local. Without exception. A good chunk of it from their own herd, crops and processing (Cider, Cheese, Jams). If it couldn't be produced locally, it wasn't sold. (anecdotally, this was a philosophy my wife and I employed for our wedding 3 years ago - allowing a 50 mile radius for all produce except the champagne....which was understandable when your sister is a Pol Roger rep ;)
This was 20 years ago. The family worked exceptionally hard running their farm - each was ruddy faced and fit as a fiddle. It seemed to me that whatever madness was going on in the outside world, they lived in a self sufficient nirvana of hard work and reward. Most obvious was that every mealtime was a very special time - a celebration of life at it's best. Centred around gloriously loved produce. Pigs that we'd all rolled in the mud with, made the sausages and bacon for our breakfasts, Beef roasted and delicious was often commented on with sentences like 'You see gang, I told you 531 was going to be a beauty"... It was, however, apparent that they would all be alot richer if the large supermarkets weren't making such effort to undercut cost of produce with full on mechanised intensive food production. It didn't make sense to me that their main worry was money - when their produce was so popular and so amazing when set next to supermarket junk. It was apparent that the Supermarkets agenda was simple, force as many farmers as possible to produce food as cheaply as possible, then process the hell out of it, to ensure it remained valuable to them once delivered to their distribution centers.
It seems unbelievable that it's taking so long for us to wake up to the fact that you get out of something what you put in - food being one of the best examples of this, and shocking it's taken 20 years after my small revelation about food, where it comes from, what it really costs and what it means to our lives (not just health but social and family), for a public 'movement' to start gathering real momentum.
I hope that this revolution builds and that tools like the social web can open up a whole new market place for agriculture. Not just because I'd like to be part of it in some way. No, I hope it grows because now I'm painfully aware of the harm we're doing to future generations health, not to mention our intensively farmed agricultural lands, and I'm also an uncle 4 times over. I want my nephews and neices to grow up respecting food, glorious food...and appreciating how much the stuff of life it is.
edit: this Blog has provoked an interesting discussion on Google Buzz http://www.google.com/buzz/twitamp/HgaPdv8DTB6/We-Are-What-We-Eat-Its-about-time-we-all-thought
What a coincidence. First time I check my Buzz stats and I notice i've just hit 100 Buzzes.
This is an interesting new app. that provides data on your use of Buzz - or others use of Buzz. It gets beyond Follower count and into engagement - which I like alot.
I can imaging it will expand it's scope hugely, once the Buzz API is out. One to watch for sure.
http://buzz-stats.appspot.com/
To create your own Wordle. First grab a feed of your Buzz. Then paste it in Wordle. Then save to public and grab the embed code. Pretty easy stuff. You can radnomise your Wordle until you get something you like the look of.
Wordle, of course, will work with any RSS feed. Give it a try.
Thanks to Dr. Matthias Thorner for the tip.
A long free flowing ramble this morning at 6.30 in the park. I don't recommend listening. I have a head full of thoughts at the moment and needed to spill them out and archive them - something an AudioBoo is perfect for.
So excited to have found ourselves a new home to move to the countryside and begin our new life.
Claud will be commuting to BBC Manchester initially, then move to the new Salford Media City in 12 months.
The commute is about 60 minutes by car, but it used to take her that amount of time to get through the traffic across London to Shepherds Bush, so she is relaxed. Besides - the house is literally in the middle of a farm - so it's almost too good to be true. It's modest and compact - but neat. Anyway, my criteria was easily filled by a tent in a nice field - so you can imagine how pleased I am.
Here's our, soon to be, local village, Sandbach, complete with Saxon Cross
The view from our new house (front)
Update 16/3/2010 We have had confirmation of the rental and are set to move in 2 weeks!
I can hardly wait - although I will of course miss London in many ways - having lived here for 20 years!
Well, I've done 2 entries now. One thing i've noticed is I am fairly slow until about 400 words - then the next time I stop typing, I'm on about 900! I think this proves to me that I'm not as comfortable writing as using AudioBoo, or rather, my thoughts don't flow as freely.
Now, it definitely took me a while to get going as I've said. So long in fact, that I'd been at my PC for 4 hours since the reminder I'd last night set flashed up saying 'write 750 words'. In the end I did what I often have done in the last year, recorded an AudioBoo, to get me focussed on what I was planning next - and to spill out some free flowing thoughts - about free flowing thoughts... and 750words.com.
Do I feel better for all this outpouring? I guess so. I feel like i've put my head in order (well, sort of messily pushed it into a corner - but that's my heads fault not the concept of free flowing brain spills. I will be continuing throughout March. Heck, I need all the help I can get - and if typing pages and pages about life as I've seen it and see it in the future is going to help in any small way - and it is - then I think it's worth adding into my daily routine.
Here's my Boo, made just before I started typing.
http://audioboo.fm/boos/102009-my-750words-com-a-daily-private-journal.mp3
Recent tracks
-
City Scape Sky Baby by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Out of Control by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Bleed Forever by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Father Father #1 by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Venus & Serena by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
The Piccolo Snare by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Sex, War & Robots by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Golden Retriever by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Liberty Belle by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
-
Hello Sunshine by Super Furry Animals21 months ago
