bounder's soup

Today I was the first speaker at the launch of the Birmingham LINk, which took place at Aston Villa Football Club and was attended by over 200 people.

LINks (Local Involvement Networks) have taken over from PPI Forums (which in turn took over from Community Health Councils). The Birmingham LINk is a new independent body through which local people can express their comments, concerns and criticisms of health and social care services.

There will be dialogue between the LINk and Birmingham's Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee (which I chair) so we will become well aware of each other's work and plans. The LINk will be able to feed its findings into the Health O & S Committee and may make suggestions for possible review topics for the committee in the future.

This month the Birmingham LINk got started with its first elected core group. What it is hoped will be a more representative group will be elected in July. Between now and then, the challenge for the LINk is to make sure as many people as possible in the city get to know about the new organisation.

Therefore today's launch is being followed by an event at the Bull Ring over Easter. So if you're shopping in the city centre this weekend, and you are interested in getting involved with the Birmingham LINk, have a look out for their stall.

Le Corps Mince De Francoise - Ray Ban Glasses

This is exactly how the second CSS album should have sounded, proper electro pop + attitude + weirdness. There’s more tropical stuff on myspace as well.

To promote its Simpsons schedule, Sky1 has made a spoof of the Adidas Originals House Party spot (which we wrote about here)

Yesterday I was invited to an event held by UHB NHS Foundation Trust in Edgbaston where the name of Edgbaston's new hospital (currently under construction) was revealed.

The new hospital which dominates Edgbaston's skyline, and which will replace the current Queen Elizbeth and Selly Oak Hospitals, will be called the "Queen Elizbeth Hospital Birmingham".

The Trust explained how before they decided on the new name, they conducted an in depth consultation with staff at both hospitals, patient groups, the public and partner organisations. Overwhelmingly it was felt that it was important to keep "Queen Elizabeth" in the name. It was also felt important to add Birmingham to the name to differentiate it from other hospitals with the Queen Elizbeth name. With the new name now revealed, Edgbaston residents know the memory of Queen Elizbeth, the Queen Mother will live on in their new hospital.

At yesterday's event, guests were taken up to the Helipad on the roof of the car park in Metchley Lane, for a spectacular view of the new hospital. As you can see, the new hospital's QE initials are marked clearly at the side of the helipad (pictured).

Many thanks to UHB for inviting me to join Governors, PCT representatives and others at yesterday's celebration.

Let's attempt an axiom. The person who really loves life is wary, in general, of edited highlights -- "the best bits, with all the boring bits edited out". Someone who loves football isn't going to be satisfied with a Best Goals compilation, and someone who loves sex won't settle for a tape of cum shots. It's the indirection, the boring stuff, that makes the highlights, when they arrive, high. If you bypass the boring bits, the exciting bits ultimately get boring too.



For a long time I've been interested in ambient TV, and by that I mean, essentially, TV with all the boring and random and awkward bits -- the bits excluded in the edited highlights -- put back in. Because the television we normally see on television just has too much clutter, too much chatter, too much going on. It's all too interesting, and in the end that gets incredibly boring.



Exactly two years ago I made a DVD of ambient video loops. These were boring but evocative scenes -- an open fire, a plant twitched by the wind -- looped so that they became constants, solid states. In a way, of course, these were edited highlights; the best bits of reality, selected and then looped. Not a goals compilation, perhaps, but the same goal played over and over again until it becomes something calm, formal, a backdrop.

That backdrop idea reminds me of something Eno quoted from Satie on the sleeve of Discreet Music, his first ambient record. Satie had said that he wanted his "furniture music" to mingle with the sounds of cutlery and chatter, the sounds of other activities. That's "backdrop" music, a music self-effacing (and dull) enough to take its place as just one element amongst many in a landscape, and share the space with other sounds, other activities. Eno said such music should be "as ignorable as it's interesting".

Two years ago, blogging about my ambient TV loops, I said "The reason that television and music have become "ground" or "field" in this way is that only the internet can be figure." Older media like music and TV just had to take their place in the background; I was too busy clicking through web pages to pay them much attention. The internet had become the place where I searched for "edited highlights".

But two years on, I find I'm expecting the internet, too, to start falling into the background. I want the internet (and perhaps this is a mark of its mellowing maturity as a medium; it lost its teenage stridency, its me-me-me quality) to get ambient, to get dull. I'm not talking about those 2007 buzz terms "the internet of things" or "everyware" or "pervasive computing" or "ubiquitous computing" or "ambient intelligence". I suppose I'm thinking more of the internet as a medium in which you can go for a daily walk, without really doing, or expecting to do, anything significant. I like the Japanese word hibisanpo, "an everyday walk".



The exemplary 2009 version of online hibisanpo is "going for a walk in Google Streetview". It's something I do almost daily now. I'll drop the little yellow Google flaneur somewhere random and just walk around, with the images bled right to the edges of my screen and the screen turned up bright. It's like a virtual holiday; you really do have a sense of being somewhere and strolling around, and what gives it that feel is the fact that not much happens, and the scenery is altered by your decisions.

The closest old-fashioned TV got to Google Streetview hibisanpo may be the NHK show Sekaimachi (世界ふれあい街歩き), which translates as something like "World-Viewing City Walking". The show airs once a week, from 11.35pm to midnight twenty on Sunday nights. Each week it shows a different city. Last week they were in Singapore. Here (it's the only online video of Sekaimachi I was able to find) is an episode set in New Zealand.



The Sekaimachi formula is that the camera literally walks around a town, encountering interesting things along the way. It's Steadicam, and there's a voice over, a narrator who asks people what they're doing, or apologizes when the camera intrudes or takes too long climbing the stairs, following someone up to an attic filled with whisky barrels. Sometimes Google-type maps appear on the screen, showing the camera's current location and tying the sequences together spatially. Unlike Streetview, though, human faces aren't blurred. And you're on the sidewalk, not out in the road in a car.

Now, Sekaimachi is deceptive. In fact it's a series of "edited highlights" -- setpiece interviews, tours of sites of interest -- strung together by some sequences of seemingly-random live action. I was "walking around New Zealand" in Streetview the other day, and I mostly saw suburban streets that looked like the worst bits of the UK and US put together. If the Sekaimachi team found something more interesting, it's because what they always do is fly into a location, research it for a week, bring back photos and Handicam recordings to Tokyo, discuss it with NHK producers, then fly back to the location with a shooting schedule and all the necessary permissions and interviews set up.



There's something weird about the way this unwieldy Steadicam thing -- you glimpse it ("yourself") in reflections sometimes -- walks into a crowded restaurant and the people there don't really react. There's also something weird about the way this monstrosity approaches an interviewee and "your" voice is just a voice over, whereas the interviewee's voice is there in the actual environment. It's as if you're just thinking your lines, and the other person is somehow reading your mind and responding. It's also weird that "your" voice is in Japanese, whereas the interviewee's voice is in the language of the country you're visiting.

Sekaimachi isn't quite "locative TV", nor "ambient TV", nor "Andy Warhol's Nothing Special". There's too much happening for it to be any of those. It is, though, the closest TV ever came (before being dethroned by the internet) to hibisanpo: a nice, peaceful, relatively random daily walk. As such, it might be the closest TV ever came to loving life.

Since we metaphorically dug up Waller Jeffs for our tribute event Curzonora a couple of weeks ago, a surprising number of people have been enquiring about his last resting place. In particular, the lady who interviewed us for Midlands Today had definite Nancy Drew tendencies and was very excited about the idea of digging around cemeteries on a Sunday afternoon. For her and anyone else who is interested, Mr Jeffs’ gravestone can be found in plot no. 947, section B1 at Brandwood End Cemetery in Kings Heath. (Fourth section on the left if you enter from the Broad Lane gate). Photographic evidence above. While we’re on the subject, Scott Johnston has been posting the little filmed interludes from the show on his youtube channel, featuring the excellent Simon Britton as Mr. Jeffs, while the real Jeffs can be glimpsed fleetingly (0.06-0.07 secs) at the beginning of Mitchell and Kenyon’s film of the first Birmingham University degree ceremony.

PS: a nice review of the show is up at Birmingham Live
.

Every graphic designer eventually finds themselves facing this client request. You’ve designed a newsletter layout in Adobe InDesign. The client loves it, but they want a template in Microsoft Word they can edit themselves. There isn’t a perfect solution, but here is a technique that does a surprisingly good job. Full Tip: Convert InDesign layouts to Microsoft Word.

I’m making quite a lot of use of the social bookmarking service Delicious at the moment. Luckily, it is mostly using my own account, but on one or two projects I am using specific accounts.

This can be a pain in the neck. I’ve installed the Delicious extension for Firefox which makes bookmarking a dream - but that only works with my usual account. Logging in and out all the time is a faff and not really an option.

What I have been doing recently is using different browsers for different accounts. It’s cumbersome and sometimes tricky to remember which browser works with which account!

However, I’ve now found the answer to my multiple delicious account problem prayers. It’s called Pukka.

Pukka is a piece of software from some guys called Code Sorcery which makes it a breeze to manage all your accounts in one go.

Effectively, it is a client for Delicious. You load it up with the credentials for all your accounts, which you can then choose from a drop down menu when creating a bookmark.

There is also a bookmarklet which lets you call up the application straight from the browser and which fills in quite a few of the details of the page you are viewing for you.

It isn’t perfect - I can’t find an option to be able to post a bookmark to multiple accounts, for instance - but for roughly a tenner you can’t really go wrong.

Sadly for Windows and Linux users, it is Mac only.

Possibly related posts:

• Mini
• 5 Blogger tools for Mac
• MobileMe
• Bookmarks for March 15th through March 22nd
• Bookmarks for March 8th through March 14th

Nolan Bushnell received a fellowship at the BAFTA Games Awards last week in recognition of his pioneering efforts. In the first interview Bushnell has granted for many years, Steve Boxer spoke to him about the early days of videogames and where he thinks the industry is heading

In the late 1960s, Bushnell studied electrical engineering at the University of Utah, where he came across Steve Russell's seminal Spacewar on the PDP-1 mainframe and even Willie Higinbotham's Tennis For Two, an oscilloscope game devised in the 1950s.

Enthused by these early attempts at videogames, and having run a (mechanical) arcade while a student, Bushnell created the first arcade games machine, Computer Space, in 1971. Manufactured by Nutting Associates, Computer Space's complexity proved baffling, and it wasn't a success.

But in 1972, Bushnell and Ted Dabney, along with programmer Al Alcorn, formed Atari, where their first effort, Pong – inspired by a tennis game on the first console, Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey – was the first commercially successful videogame. Here, he recounts the story of those early days.

Steve Boxer: I'd like to take you back a bit – you're known as the father of the games industry. But where did it all start for you? You had access to a DEC PDP-1 and Spacewar at university?
Nolan Bushnell: Yes. I sort of stand on the shoulders of a guy named Steve Russell, who programmed the PDP-1 in, I think, 1962. I played the game when I was in college, and I thought: "Hey, there's a business here if I can drop the cost." So I did, and it worked.

SB: Then you created Computer Space, which was the first coin-op games machine?
NB: That's correct. I was actually the manager of the games department of an amusement park when I was at college, so I understood the coin-op side of the games business very well. That was an easy place to enter, because you didn't have to drive costs down so much. In the consumer marketplace, costs become even more draconian.

SB: But you weren't entirely happy with its success? There was a sense that it was perhaps too complex and people were baffled by it?
NB: No question about it. I like to say that all my friends loved it, but all my friends were engineers.

SB: What were those days like? How much drive did you have to have, and how obsessed did you have to be to even turn it into a product and get it on sale?
NB: It was very, very difficult. Everything was very hard. A lot of people don't realise that a video screen sucks data at a massive rate. And the logic in those days was just mind-numbingly slow. So you really had to perform tricks to get the information out fast enough. Processors in those days had clock speeds of 200,000Hz – 2kHz; not even a Megahertz, let alone a Gigahertz.

SB: What was the story behind Pong and the Atari 2600? Had you already had the idea for a home console? Had you had many dealings with Ralph Baer at that stage?
NB: Not really – we were in a situation where we had created a whole bunch of paper designs, and the ping-pong game is sort of a standard. In fact, the very first game, even before Steve Russell, was an oscilloscope tennis game by a guy called Willie Higginbotham. We played one of those on the university machine, and seeing the Magnavox kind of reminded me of it. So I said: "This is not a very fun game – let's make it better," never thinking that would be a commercial success. We felt that it would be a good training exercise, because it was so simple. We turned it into a game for the first time, because the essence of Pong is the way the paddle works – where you hit the ball on the paddle determines the angle at which it comes off. That little tweak turned it from a non-game into a game, and I've always felt that that innovation that Al did was the thing that made Pong really special.

SB: But Ralph Baer threatened to sue you for ripping him off when Pong was a success?
NB: I never thought that Ralph's attacks were worth anything. But, you know, I'm a businessman and I took the attitude that if I can license something for less than what it would cost to litigate, why not do it. Ralph talks a lot about us licensing it, but I got a paid-up licence for 0.006%. That's what we call a garbage licence.

Bushnell on the Atari years

After getting Pong into the arcades, and making a hard-wired home console version of the game, Bushnell turned his attentions to the Atari Video Computer System, later to become known as the 2600, which proved to be the first console that could be described as a runaway success.

But the whole process was tricky for Bushnell, who struggled to raise the cash to design and manufacture the 2600. To such an extent that when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak approached him, wanting Atari to make and sell what would be their first Apple computer, he turned their proposal down.

In 1976, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28m; the 2600 came out in 1977. But Bushnell constantly clashed with the new management, and was forced off the board in 1978. As he walked away from the industry he effectively founded – devoting his energies to the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain – Atari proceeded to dominate the fledgling games industry. Until it crashed, spectacularly, in 1984.

SB: Did you know that Pong and then the 2600 would be such a huge success, and would effectively spawn what is now the games industry in the process?
NB: You know, it's interesting. I saw it as being a multi-million-dollar business. I didn't see it as being quite as explosive a success as it turned out to be. You know, when you're building something, you know all of the trade-offs, and I always felt that the 2600 was – in that gaming space – kind of a stepping-stone, and that maybe it would be on the market for two or three years. After I sold the company to Warner, I said: "Well, we've got to get started on the next version." And they were horrified. I think that one of the big mistakes that happened was that the 2600 was pushed too hard, too far, and there wasn't a gentle transition to the newer technology.

SB: Atari had a golden period when it dominated the industry, then everything went wrong in the early to-mid 1980s, with things like the notorious ET landfill fiasco. How involved with the company were you then, and how bad a period was that for you?
NB: I left the company in 1978, and I really had massive, massive disagreements with how Warner was running the company. I really saw that they were going to totally screw it up. The only thing that I was wrong about is that it took them two years longer than I thought it would.

SB: What are your favourite games from your time at Atari?
NB: I always loved both Breakout and Asteroids – I thought they were really good games. There was another game called Tempest that I thought was really cool, and it represented a really hard technology. It's probably one of the only colour-vector screens that was used in the computer graphics field at that time.

SB: What's your biggest regret?
NB: Selling Atari when I did – I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years. So I did Chuck E. Cheese and things in automobile navigation. It's made for a very interesting life, but I feel I had some core skill-sets in the games business that I sort of allowed to lie fallow.

SB: Can you tell us about what happened when Jobs and Wozniak approached, wanting you to turn their computer designs into a product, and you turned them down?
NB: You've got to understand that Atari was very underfunded all the way along – the venture-capital community and financial community didn't get the fact that games were a business. We were using every bit of capital that we had just to keep up with the growth. We were internally funded and growing as fast we could, limited by our capital. So, to take on anything else that would alienate any of that capital just didn't make sense at the time. I recognised that we were going to be able to – at some point in time – get into the computer business, which we ultimately did once we had access to Warner's capital.

We had some really powerful technology – Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. We had some of the most sophisticated sound-creating systems, and were instrumental in MIDI.

SB: Were you impressed by Jobs and Wozniak at the time?
NB: The two Steves were young and excited, but I was not convinced that they were ready for the bruising business world.  I introduced them to Don Valentine, who brought in Mike Markala, who provided the business skills for their first years in business.  I think much of their early success was because of Mike.  Jobs has grown into a truly great CEO – if it would have happened anyway is anyone's guess.

Nolan on retro and modern games

A debate constantly rages in the games world, about whether today's flashy, complex 3D games are actually any better than the blocky-looking but supremely playable efforts introduced in the early days (and particularly on the Atari 2600).

Many maintain that games like Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout, Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust and so on possessed a purity that has been lost on the 21st century, and they point to the enduring popularity of retro games on, for example, the Xbox Live Arcade and mobile phones.

We sounded out Bushnell's views on this debate, and encouraged him to nominate some seminal efforts that had an enduring impact on the evolution of games.

SB: Now that games have become 3D and often complex, are there any out there that float your boat?
NB: I'm a big believer in the Wii. I love the physicality of the Wii controller, and how you can get the feeling of throwing a bowling ball or swinging a golf club. Those are the kinds of games I really like. I would be playing first-person shooters with my kid, except that those are games in which you have to have such fast circuits. My kids just whack me, so it's no fun – I hate to lose. I like games where you can use stealth and guile. As you get older, it's like the difference between playing squash and racketball. Squash is an older man's game, because if you're stealthy and wily, you can beat a better-co-ordinated and stronger, younger person.

SB: How do modern games stack up against games like Breakout? There's still a great love of retro games, which many feel have a purity and simplicity that has been lost. Where do you stand on that argument?
NB: I believe that in games, when you're talking about pitting my wits and my brain against your wits and your brain, that simplicity of the game becomes a dominant factor. In some cases, that simplicity is actually helpful. For example, you never see world-class chess players playing with anything other than a standard chess set. There are beautiful glass and marble sets you can buy, but it doesn't help the game. The essence of the game is best played with zero ambiguity. Occasionally, there can be so much time spent on the graphics that it actually introduces a little bit of ambiguity. So the simple, classic games, where we didn't have those graphics to fall back on, had to be really well-tuned, and the response times had to be honed. We focused more on gameplay than I think people do today. I've played some games where I thought the controller wasn't working right. But it wasn't the controller – it was the way the software was interrogating the controller. You get an extra 50ms lag and it really screws the game up.

SB: What for you has been the single biggest advance in the pretty much 40-year history of the games industry?
NB: I think there are two or three what I would call monumental points, where I thought: "Wow, this is really, really good." One of them came from id Software. I think that what they were able to coax out of the PC in those [Wolfenstein and Doom] days was truly remarkable – it represented a big leap. It actually made a couple of leaps. Not only was it instrumental in giving a 3D experience that was believable and understandable, but it also introduced network. And the third trifecta on that was it was the first time authoring tools were given to the public so that you could create your own levels. I really think Carmack and those guys made a tour de force. That's one.

Another game that's on my top-10 list is Myst. You had such a wonderful feeling of being there – I feel that I've been to those islands, and I have probably as much of a feeling for those islands as I do for the Hawaiian islands. I feel like I've visited them both.

Bushnell on the present and future of the games industry

Bushnell has clearly maintained a close watch on the games industry over the decades and, indeed, has a measure of involvement in it these days, through his company uWink, which allows people to play games while eating in restaurants, and NeoEdge, which finances the creation of casual games using various methods of advertising.

He's quick to stress the social side of gaming (perhaps neglected now that consoles have taken over from the arcades) and has a vision of where the next crop of consoles might go. And he's optimistic about the latest incarnation of Atari, whose games development is now overseen by industry guru Phil Harrison, a high-profile signing from Sony Computer Entertainment.

SB: Do you think it's a shame that the arcades are now deserted?
NB: Any business that does not innovate will fail over time. And for some reason, the differential between what you can play at home and what you can play in an arcade has become very small. What we do at uWink is really focus on the social nature. People can buy a bottle of gin and drink it at home for about a buck a drink, whereas they are willing to go to a bar and pay 12 bucks for the same cocktail. The difference is that man needs to be social. So I believe that there is a strong demand for games that are social, and we've been able to prove it. I'm talking about really simple games, yet people want them.

SB: Can you talk us through uWink? That's your main project these days, isn't it?
NB: I'm working on two or three things, but uWink is my main focus. I'm also chairman of the board of NeoEdge, which is a very interesting way of monetising casual games. I actually think that, if you look at the numbers, there are only about 15 million people in the United States who play console games. But there are 150 million people who play casual games. But the thing about that big marketplace is how do you monetise it? Some people pay $20 to download a game, but the vast majority want to have them for free or advertiser-supported. So we've created all kinds of ways to facilitate advertiser-support for casual games, which means that the quality of the casual games will increase – and they already have, because of some of our innovations.

SB: And you're involved in a company which lets people play skill-games against each other and win vouchers for a lottery draw?
NB: That is correct, and this is a way to keep games social. People love to compete – and competition is more fun when there's a little bit of skin on the game. Giving prizes is a good way for our sponsors to reach the kind of people that they want to sell their products to.

SB: Where can you see consoles going in the future – how will the console companies differentiate their machines when games are purely downloaded?
NB: I believe the differentiation will become less console-centric and much more network-centric. I think all the real activity is moving to the network. There's a funny thing that's happening, in that as the power of the consoles' processors lets you approach photo-realism, you lose your market differentiation. If I say: "My photo-realism is better than your photo-realism," you'd say: "I don't care." I almost feel like the consoles are going to be relatively stuck where they are if they're just going to talk about manipulating more polygons than you can. It will be much more a war based on innovation, as it should be.

SB: Do you still keep an eye on the modern Atari? The licence pinged around the industry for a while, but the current incarnation, with Phil Harrison, seems to have more credibility than it has for ages?
NB: Phil Harrison is a very smart man, and he knows the games business. I really hope he can put some of the lustre back on it. The big problem with any of the games software companies is working out what they stand for, and for many years, Atari didn't stand for anything – it was doing me-toos, movie licences and things like that. I believe Atari should stand for technical innovation, and doing things a little differently – and I hope that's the direction they take.

SB: Will Wright was the last person to be awarded a BAFTA Fellowship. Have you spoken to him about?
NB: No, I haven't. But Will and I are friends. I've appreciated his work for years and years.

SB: Games are now very much part of popular culture: do you feel vindicated now that pretty much everybody is playing games?
NB: Well, I don't know if it's called vindication, but I appreciate the fact that technology and games are a big part of life. I think like any proud father, you're happy when your children do well.

We need to re-invent online/mobile maps. Who knew? But I do like this idea…

“…designers are toying with how time could be visualised on top of a traditional map by ’spiraling out’ from the search area, so a search within central San Francisco would reveal a three-dimensional spiral into space that lets the user navigate historic data.”

I think we also need maps that forget, otherwise our augmented reality mapping is going to start to become even more cluttered with things we don’t need to know than ordinary maps already are.