I went to see Steven Wilson play last night. Post to come - but during the evening found myself in two very different conversations. Both with 'two old white guys'.

One just before the concert. 

The other in the break. This was the happier conversation.

One guy was saying he was heading down to LA to see Steven Wilson the following day. And that will be the 25th time he had seen him. Maybe my ten or so times aren't as crazy after all ?

He commented that the smallest venue he had ever seen him play was in Wisconsin - in a Bar - couldn't have been more than two hundred people there. Impressive. I raised him an Ace.

Smallest concert I had ever seen him give was in a Record Store in Camden Town, maybe 80 or 90 of us.

Proof :

I saw him play Radio City said my new friend. I saw him play Albert Hall I replied. Nod of mutual respect to each other. 

And then he commented that he had tickets for when Wilson was in town last year and at the last minute had to give them away due to a family funeral. 

My other new friend .. ‘Me too’. Turns out that he had tickets and fell ill, just couldn’t get down to San Francisco. 

Me too. Had the tickets for months - and when Steven was in San Francisco - well - I was in London.

Shared experiences - across time.

I wish there were more reviews and such positivity in the world ... what a great review. Who's he talking about? well here are some links to his blog featuring Mad King Ludwig from the event he attended.

Watch This.

and now 

This.

Full disclosure, Mad King Ludwig is the son of a friend of mine. My only advice get some better sound production into the public domain.

.. it was a movie. It was true. Keep it in mind when you think. When you vote. When you live.

So this post is much more of a test than ever before - having just read this post and watched the embedded video. 

In it Dave talks about two different ways of adding images to posts on 1999.io  It is the Metadata one that caught my eye - so I am going to try it out. And let's just see.

That said - he didn't mention what I consider to be the third way of adding an image - which is 'embed HTML - which allows me to have an image in the actual body copy of the post. But I know how to do that.

Beyond that - what was interesting is that I didn't really learn anything much more about how to add images to 1999.io except it appeared that a function that I thought wasn't available to 1999 users outside of Dave is now available. BUT - I am a big user of Preview and Google Image Search - and in there were some very interesting little tips and hints that I never knew. Thankyou Dave.

Anyway, onwards.

Later - The image in the header is still a Dave only function.

Tickled my funny bone:

Bill Gates: “So, how’s heaven, Steve?” 
Steve Jobs: “Great ! It doesn’t have any walls or fences.” 
Bill Gates: “So…?” 
Steve Jobs: “So, we don’t need any Windows and Gates.
Bill Gates: “Heh Steve, I heard a rumor.” 
Steve Jobs: “What rumor?” 
Bill Gates: “That nobody is allowed to touch Apples there - and there are no Jobs in heaven.” 
Steve Jobs : “Oh no, there definitely are ... but only 'no-pay Jobs'. But that means no Bills in heaven - since everything is free!

Found On LinkedIN.

Sarah Cooper - two back-to-back pieces well worth a read. If it wasn't so true - it would be really funny.

9 Non-Threatening Leadership Strategies for Women

Honest Diversity in Tech Report

Surprisingly, nearly two-thirds of subscribers believe the autonomous car revolution will take place outside the U.S., according to the latest subscriber survey. 

I am more surprised that one third of subscribers believe that the autonomous car revolution will take place inside the USA. Let's file this away in the 'American Exceptionalism' folder and the unfailing ability of so many people to believe we are number one despite al facts the contrary.

Read All About It.

"Do you pick someone who's under federal investigation for using a private email server?"

OR

†Do you pick someone who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, bragged about committing sexual assault, was accused by 12 women of committing sexual assault, said some of those women weren’t attractive for him to sexually assault, said more countries should get nukes, said that he would force the military to commit war crimes, said a judge was biased because his parents were Mexicans, said women should be punished for having abortions, incited violence at his rallies, called global warming a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, called for his opponent to be jailed, declared bankruptcy six times, bragged about not paying income taxes, stiffed his contractors and employees, lost a billion dollars in one year, scammed customers at his fake university, bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself with money from his fake foundation, has a trial for fraud coming up in November, insulted an opponent's looks, insulted an opponent’s wife’s looks, and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy?â€

Remembering a lot today ...

For today's Musical delectation ...

REPOST

First thing to point out ... I definitely am not a techy - but love what Dave Winer keeps on pushing with his work around the open web. That is why I signed on here and am loving what I am seeing.

I installed 1999 yesterday without a hitch. I have hit a couple of issues of Java exceptions that I have not reported - since I can't really get a repeatable case. The 'switch it off - switch it on' again solution has worked every time.

I love the live updating. Simple to use. As Mr Jobs used to say "It just works".

Seperately I am compiling a short list of nice to haves that I will post at sometime in the future - not yet though, I am still playing.

I hit a bug with RSS which I posted into Github - and Dave reponded VERY quickly - which in turn made me read the documentation. Sorry Dave. The documentation included this post. Duly read. Duly absorbed.

I think there is similar behavior with how 1999 works as with DayONE, of which I am a long time user. DayONE's recent changes cut off my ability to share from my personal journal into the big wide world. I wonder if there is synergy between them and this. Don't know.

Depite getting RSS recognized by IFTTT - thanks to reading Dave's documentation, I still haven't got the recipe working - it says it is working - but nothing is posting into the stream. Still thinking.

I also notice that I am not getting live updating on my blog of these posts. I have added the RSS widget on the menu bar to the left - and it has picked up the first few posts - but nothing since. If anyone is interested, it is running here on Beyond Bridges scroll all the way down to the bottom left headed 1999 Feed. None of this reported, since it still may be me - who knows. However, I did note that when I checked the feed at The W3C Feed Validation Service - it recognizes a valid feed - but at the same time lists a number of areas that it calls out under an initial statement

"This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations."

All that said ... I am loving this - very happy bunny.

Thankyou Dave.

Originally posted on April 22nd, 2016 with my 'first thoughts' on 1999.

REPOST

I Liked Dave Winer's post 'this' morning (actually April 22nd).

... as I wrote yesterday, auspicious that the day his project 1999 widens out for testing with a larger group was on the very day that Prince passed.

More to come on this topic.

Originally posted on April 22nd, 2016.

REPOST

Originally posted on April 22nd, 2016.

This blog / river / though stream is written using a system developed by Dave Winer called 1999. It references back to the halcyon days of 1999 - when life was easier.

When Dave opened up his product to a more public collective, I joined and haven't looked back - learning more about coding than I ever thought I would. But it has been fun.

My day of joining the fold was auspicious - as it turned out, the same day that Prince (of 1999 fame)  passed into history at 57.

• A Great Prince story

• Prince Does Radiohead

• Jon Stewart's first Daily Show was in 1999.

Superb Article from Gustavo Tanaka, a Brazilian author and entrepreneur.

The article was published nearly a year ago, so you may have already seen it. But always good to be reminded. Right?

If any one of these headlines makes you pause for a couple of seconds then click through and read the article.

1- No one can stand the employment model any longer
2- The entrepreneurship model is also changing
3- The rise of collaboration
4- We are finally figuring out what the internet is
5- The fall of exaggerated consumerism
6- Healthy and organic eating
7 - The awakening of spirituality
8 - Unschooling trends

FutureWorld is a boutique consulting group that help companies visualize and try to understand where the world is heading. They also have a weekly newsletter that takes a piece of news from the previous week and extrapolate into the future. 

You might have caught the Otto story recently. An autonomous truck delivering beer.

Great Future Read ... and is this a possible future?

This is how it works. Sensing an unavoidable collision (moose on the highway), the autonomous beer truck polls other affected parties (approaching Uber, pedestrian on sidewalk, overtaking vehicle). They immediately bid to be kept out of the mess. The beer truck then accepts the highest bid, and manoeuvres to limit damage to the winner.

Read All About It.

Great Article from Anil Dash that popped into my feeds today (even though it seems to have been published back in August). It hits on a number of themes that have been running through my head for a while.

I am not as erudite as Anil - but I have long felt that companies need to forget the role of CIO/CTO et al - since their business is by definition - tech. And I don't care who you are - it is. And if it isn't - it should be.

It all started years ago, as I realized that a 'tech at the table' allows others 'at the table' to believe that they do not need to understand the emerging technology landscape. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Example

Back in the 80s, I was always stunned by how little understanding of Marketing, Business and Tech people had in the 'MarCom' teams of various organizations. 'We do graphics and design.' 'We write.' 

Thankfully those days are behind us. Sadly, the virus has spread into all kinds of people inside of organizations. Time to wake up.

Three choice quotes to wet your appetite - but why not just go read the article.

Similarly, it's easiest to understand Uber as a machine for converting publicly-planned metropolitan transportation networks into privately-controlled automated dispatch systems; the fact that an app is used to achieve that transition is almost incidental to the overarching goal of owning a market. 

and

When we see a company like Theranos unravel from being a widely-lauded medical technology pioneer to being investigated in a criminal probe for misrepresenting its products, one of the reasons the scam could be perpetuated for so long was because the company, its founder and its investors all shielded themselves under the cultural cover of being a glamorous member of the 'tech industry' rather than a prosaic medical supplier.

and

... why does it matter what we call the industry overall? The reason is simple: A reductive name for the industry masks an enormous set of social challenges that we need to tackle quickly. 

... just a name I am thinking about. There is a lot going on up there.