Michaela Hyde and Michael Rod (and my laptop)

Michaela Hyde and Michael Rod (and my laptop), originally uploaded by epredator.

I was presenting at Rockingham raceway in the midlands to hordes of kids. The MC's are Michael Rod and Michaela Hyde.
Now as a tech geek and film fan Michael Rod is part of my youth. On Screentest I distinctly remember watching it to see clips of Star Wars and Battlestar galactica.
Then I watched Tommorrows World relgiously. A fantastic expo of all things tech and future in the 70's and 80's. It was initially live too. Live demo's of the future. Very much like the gadget show.
It is actually a great rush and honour to be able to share what I do with people. When they are people who infleunced me and my choices in career it is even better and an honour for me to be here.
Everyone on this tour is realy friendly and knowlegable, I could do this for a living... hey wait.... I do :-)

An odd perspective

An odd perspective, originally uploaded by epredator.

This did come out as an odd perspective, but really the oddness was that poor old judge went to the Wimbledon media canteen to get 2 tea bags for a drink.
They rang up a cost of 3 whole english pounds, and he was distraught to finf something more expensive than petrol.

Widgets, Widgets, Widgets Dot Wimbledon Dot 2.0

A I have blogged this on eightbar and on my internal IBM blog I thought I would put it here too :-)

This year more than ever before the Wimbledon web experience is much more what us Web 2.0 geekanisters would like to see. Letting people experience Wimbledon wherever they happen to be. I am not just talking about the Second Life presence
This widget is another prime example, able to be embedded and posted all over the place, facebook, blogs etc. It is also personalized to the user, the players they choose to follow. Its been a quiet revolution for a website that got 266,311,332 page views last year over the event, but one that I am very happy to see.
So props to Stephen Hammer and the Atlanta sports event crew for putting this widget together. You have the next 7 days to enjoy its live features.

Fame and coincidence

Its really funny that we have a picture John Lydon on the wall here in the Wimbledon house. I took the photo the other day of Jay posing by it.

I was playing with my cut down crazy talk doing various faces and thought I would try this one.

Then.... I happened to be showing Qdos for a laugh and it turns out the list I picked... There is John Lydon, in qdos terms slightly better score than me.
Of course I think Qdos needs to sort its act out and let us have single names. The Qdos is for Ian Hughes not epredator :-)
Not serious just a bit of a fun game and another strange coincidence that I said I would do a seperate post on later :-)

Wimbledon08 middle sunday - like a stop over on a long distance flight

Middle Sunday here at the Wimbledon championships is a much needed rest for most people. Usually we are just too tired to do anything much, but we tend to all go our own way now on the day.
Still being in the house in SW18 I really could not be bothered to head up the various hills to Wimbledon village, but instead (eventually) took a stroll to Wandsworth town. Basically just because I needed a long walk, and I got to see something different and different people wandering about.
Before I went that direction I popped to out local shop for some supplies, and its right near the park. Already there were quite a few people queueing for tomorrow. Whilst moving the queue for security reasons from the side of the club is a good idea, it is surely good for all the people. The park makes a much more festival side to the whole queuing thing.

It turned out on my detour walk to Wandsworth that a road near us is nearly Ricky's surname. Just an odd coincidence which requires collecting with all the other ones this champs in a post of their own!

A little local art shop, which was closed had some very neat urban gnomes too

So what did I find in Wandsworth (funny every time I type the W I want to type Wimbledon cant think why)
Well I ended up in Game and HMV, but I did see Young's Brewery

Armed with GPS on the N95 I took a bit of a detour, not much just the next road across and it turns out that there is a massively ornate church just at the end of the road. St Barnaby's.

Anyway, I strolled back and spent a few hours playing Boogie on the DS making a little fat man dance to britney spears and some other classics. It was odd as I was going to watch the new Rambo movie, but just could not be bothered. Save that for home when I have a proper TV and sounds system to hand.
The best thing though was my spinach and ricotta pasta. I bought a £2.49 packet, put ina pan with water, salt and olive all. 7 mins later served on a plate with butter and black pepper.
Given my previous post, it is amazing how for £2.50 and 7 minutes of gas I ended up with something very very tasty, cooked al dente. So.... be nice if the venue could sort that out given the prices they charge out companies. Or maybe just pay staff to clean a food prep area and we will cook ourselves and pay a small amount of whatever the food equivalent of corkage is.

Anyway, looks like Spain have just won the Euro2008 final against Germany. Twitter will be happy as Summize was full of chat about "go Spain"

DS drumming mad Skillz

Rob who joins us at Wimbledon to work with Jay dealing with all the photos editing, processing and sorting out for the wimbledon website is a true gaming guru and keep and amongst other things a Golden Eye N64 Uk champion.
He he is in the garden of our rented house playing a superb import bemania game on his DS. As you know I love rockband, well this is the mini version with drums.

Yes we have to live on this. How glamorous

Yes we have to live on this. How glamorous, originally uploaded by epredator.

The food here at the Wimbledon press centre is not great. I am not a pro-food photographer but this is the best thing I have had so far. Not saying a great deal.
Having given up on the 4 types of sandwich, I resorted to yoghurt.
As Jay points out there is also the profiteering immorality of the prices knowing media corps are going to suck up the expense.
So I think that tommorrow (middle sunday day off) I will have to find some real food to eat, but not this
which was my oh I give up no more stodge or bacon!

failwhale

failwhale, originally uploaded by epredator.

I decided to join the failwhale facebook group to honour the out of service picture we get on twitter occassionally.
I did a quick SL sign, but what I want to do is recreate it as a sculpty.
Maybe have an app detect and then rez it in SL when it happens.
Shirts, hats, contact lenses all to do yet too. A side project of course

When audio goes wrong

We normally have gladiator playing as we drive past the queue into Wimbledon. No reason, its just inspiring as is Wimbledon. It was an in joke for a few days.
Today our commute was adjusted in an amusing way

Andy as an Avatar @ Wimbledon

Another Crazy Talk special :-) it made us all laugh. Andy is part of the furniture here at Wimbledon

Jay and Johnny

Jay and Johnny, originally uploaded by epredator.

He could be wrong, he could be right. Jay our designer of legend poses with a Mr Lydon nee Rotten in our Wimbledon house before heading to the venue

Jay is making a foray into blogging this year on this site so pop on over and get his perspective on the designer and photo role that he has with IBM @ Wimbledon

Oi! where's my video gone.

**update 9:20am 25/1/08
Just had it explained to me that IMG had been trawling for copyrighted material and accidently revoked my video. I have had a conversation indicating that we want people to be able to youtube and record their time at Wimbledon and that we they need to be careful in the balance of brand ownership and protection, against the blatant ripping of content. As we engage with a brand we take a little ownership of that brand. Its a hard balance for media rights companies, and there are subtleties and impact way past the obvious. Still its getting sorted and normal service will be resumed. I did also point out I dont want special treatment because I sit in the room next door, this care for public content needs to apply across the board.

*original post for the record
I was a little surprised just now to have got this DMCA removal of a video I just posted to youtube. As I work onsite, I have access to the wimbledon grounds, but where I shot the video is open to the public, and we had a photo session there today for 10 mins.

The new number 2 court is being built and some terracota statues are in place of some of the players. I videoed them and the court and cut a small video becuase it all looked like a Second Life build.

"This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by IMG Media claiming that this material is infringing:

Terracotta Warriors at Wimbledon 2008: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a_ROI-4VqDY
"

Someone being a little heavy handed. So I have filed a rebuke via email. However i suspect some conversations will be needed tommorrow with some "colleagues"

And its posted on eightbar

If it turns out I am wrong in some way then that puts pay to any form of behind the scenes commentary. Could be an honest mistake on their part. Either way grrrrrrr!

Epredator at work

epredator at work, originally uploaded by rickydiver78.

Ricky very kindly took this photo of yours truly at my desk at wimbledon

More book thanks:- brushing print shoulder with fame

More book thanks close to fame, originally uploaded by epredator.

A former colleague Walter Hehl in switzerland has written a book on technology futures. I had a nice list in this post of books where I get a mention or had some hand in, this is now another one. The book has some pictures I had done of Wimbledon 06 and Walter, and many of the Zurich crew had dived headlong into Second Life and virtual worlds with us in eightbar.
The cool thing about this thanks page is the company I am sandwiched between. Grady Booch, Oliver Goh, Me and Ray Kurzweil.
It gave me a real kick seeing this today.

My CV as a Tag Cloud - CV 2.0 ?

A colleague at IBM found another colleague at IBM's side project website. A tag cloud generator, and decided to pop their CV through it. It gave some really great results so I gave it a go too on wordle.net
The results are very impressive, and quite an interesting way to represent who you are and what you do.
My full public CV is linked on the right of this post, it was the source for this.
If may be an interesting way to look at what people have written and decide if they fit in a role that you have or compare tag clouds of jobs versus people.

I suspect there are not that many tag cloud position descriptions that would match with this one though (he said modestly)

Radio control car with motion tracking headset - Awesome

On the gadget show last night they had this awesome radio controlled car. An in car camera, but one that responds to your head movements and tracks what you want to look at. It projects the incar view to you on a visor headset. Fantastic stuff.

Glassdoor, public salaries and does that add up?

I have become intrigued by glassdoor.com and I am not the only one I should imagine. It aims to help demystify salaries and employee opinion by gathering mass contributions in a web2.0 ugc style.
Clearly this taps into the whole trend for sharing, and one that I am usually quite happy to go along with. Indeed I think that openess in organization atleast on salary when performance is said to be relative to your peers when rated, yet the results are secret seems a bit barmy to me.
However the openess on pay has to be across the board, a few of us volunteering publicly to share will simply be used as a weapon by those who choose not to share.
The anonymous nature of glassdoor tries a different approach. Many corporates benchmark themselves against the wages and benefits of others, but again its cloak and dagger stuff. I mean that information in the hands of a potentially disgruntled workforce leads to all sort of problems for those attempting to keep control of the purse strings. A prime example if the current petrol tanker drivers strike. Fuel companies have to publicly declare their earnings and massive profits, also maybe the bonuses of bosses to shareholders for accountability. Well, thats public information and sure enough those workers down the food chain will say "where is my share?"
However, getting back to glassdoor. There is another side effect that will happen. Clearly people who share what they earn will feel underpaid and be wanting to prove it in general. If the mass amount of data on the site is people who feel underpaid and undervalued then the averages will be low. Those averages will then not help those salaries increase? The opposite may be only the very well paid confess, as an anonymous blag "loadsamoney" style. That make the average insanely high and makes the actually average paid not to badly done by population annoyed along with the undervalued.
Of course the way around this is not individual action, but companies publishing all their salaries, but that is very unlikely to happen.
So we are left with something that really should work, should be done, but seems to be in a place that would take a politician from the West Wing tv programme to sort out.
Yes I have shared mine on there, mainly to feel what it feels like to give that information. Its never really gone well if I have discussed my salary with anyone. People with less experience are bound to think its too much, people with more experience laugh at it and remember back, people with the same or near experience...well they are in competition so who on earth believes anyone.
Lets see where this one goes.

Wow I am in a lot of books

I just did a quick count up of the number of books I have made it into in various ways the past 2 years. I have kept fairly up to date with references on delicious to epredator I keep a pile of press cuttings and pamphlets to show the grand predlet's one day, and also to remind me of what an amazing time this has been with virtual worlds, IBM and of course Second Life in particular as Ian Hughes/epredator/epredator potato. So, by way of personal ego massage and plug for some great books here goes:

Second Lives by Tim Guest - A major part of the chapter on the rise of corporate interest in virtual worlds and of course Wimbledon
The Making of Second Life by Wagner James Au - A very kind mention in the list of thanks, something I did not expect as much of the great stuff in this book is before my time as epredator potato.
Eating the IT elephant by Richard Hopkins and Keving Jenkins - A nice credit suggesting I was helping put the final nails in the coffin of powerpoint architectures.
Second Life the Official Guide (Second Edition) (by lots of folks) - Not seen a copy yet, but I appear to be in the index (*update my copy arrived today from Amazon and ther is a shiny new whole page on epredator potato, thanks to Wagner James Au again as I now remember the vignette I wrote for the page)

A brand new book on marketing 2.0 on its way to the publisher as I type.

It seems I should write my own book, or maybe I should save that for when its all business as usual :-)

Yikes £1.19 a Litre

Yikes £1.19 a Litre, originally uploaded by epredator.

Enough said really. Very expensive to move around these days. If only we have some sort of way to communicate as humans, yet still feel the presence of others, we could call it a metaverse or something.

It's amusing when the sky schedule display combines in such ways

It's amusing when the sky schedule display combines in such ways, originally uploaded by epredator.

This happens a lot, either the names are truncated on the on screen viewer in amusing ways, or two programmes flow into one another as a concept.
One to look out for :-)