peteashtondotcom

Maybe because I’m on an organisational trip tonight, maybe because it always amuses me when m’gd’friend Stef contacts me through his PA, or maybe because I was just in a silly mood but I created my own personal assistant today. His name is Simon and he sorts out my meetings and such. To try him out I got him to email a friend who is notoriously hard to pin down for a drink. She responded via her own imaginary PA and, as they say, mild hilarity ensued.

Interestingly she reckons her PA was much more efficient that she was and while Google is failing me in confirming this apparently inventing a PA is a recognised organisational technique, helping you to detach from whatever it is you’re doing and sort out the boring admin stuff. Putting on a different hat or whatever.

And so the idea took root in my brain and started sprouting nonsense.

I’m self employed so in theory I take on all the different roles of the average office. I am my boss, my PA, my creative department, my accountant, and so on. (You’ll have to excuse me - I’ve never worked in a “proper” office so I’m not sure exactly what the different roles are.) If I were to formally divvy up my working day into different areas I could create characters to do them which I could slip into, helping me to focus better and get the job done without any distraction.

It would also save me from myself. Having committed to a period of work a friend might call ordering me to the pub. In a normal situation I’d say, fuck it, and get my coat. But in the this situation I’d have to ask the boss if it would be okay to leave early and the boss would make a decision independent of my social needs.

But the thing with an office is it involves complications. All those characters in one space every day. I mean, at least your average office in a decent sized room. This lot all work in my head which, contrary to appearances, isn’t that big. Any simmering arguments and personality clashes would be hard to deal with since I’d have to take sides against myselves.

And then there’s the nightmare of the Xmas party. I’d have to drink too much and cop of with myself, which might be embarrassing in a public place. And then the next day I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the eye, which would make shaving rather difficult. The boss might have made an inappropriate move on the attractive head of finance causing the HR to get involved and I’m all these people. Nightmare.

So I think I’ll just stick with Simon for now.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with Dave Peebles at the Custard Factory about the large number of art galleries and similar projects and establishments that were cropping up in Digbeth all of a sudden. Ideas such as approaching the council or Marketing Birmingham about doing some kind of awareness campaign were thrown around with the notion of, if you’ll excuse the concept, branding the area as Birmingham’s Hoxton or Camden or something. At the very least shouting about the fact that Birmingham now has more arts venues in one square mile than anywhere outside of London and they happen to be in an area that isn’t, strictly speaking, supposed to have them. Possibly. I’m not partial to the exact plans for Digbeth but most of these spaces have sprung up autonomously so I expect the planners would be surprised to see them all there.

Anyway, I left Digbeth with ideas spinning around and threw they past a couple of Artist (with a capital A) chums. Predictably the balked at the “branding” thing and we kinda lukewarm about the general idea of getting the council involved (I’m paraphrasing from memory hence no direct credit) but I still thought the idea had legs.

And then I thought it through a bit. Going the long route is kinda boring and usually ends up with the wrong result. Better to just do it CiB-style so on getting home I did a bit of clicking and discovered digbeth.org was available. So I bought it and installed WordPress on a subdirectory. Now, since I had no interest in running another arts blog myself, all I needed was a blogger.

Nicky Getgood seemed like a good candidate. She knows a fair number of people in the Birmingham arts and culture community and actually lives in Digbeth (unlike most of the people who work there who come in from Moseley / Kings Heath on the whole) so she bridges the two worlds rather well - she loves all the interesting stuff thats going on but is also one of those people living in the so-called “luxury” flats that are springing up. So I put the notion to her and she said she’d give it a go.

And so, after a week of me faffing about, Digbeth is Good went live last week. The design is off the shelf and needs work but Nicky has, I think, found her voice pretty quickly. It’s her beast to develop as she sees fit but the general idea is it’ll report on the art and culture that’s happening in the area, from the high-falutin’ conceptual art shows to the random stuff that goes on in the Spotted Dog. Hopefully it’ll show Digbeth is not a brownfield site ripe for bulldozing but a vibrant and essential part of Birmingham’s social ecosystem. We’ll see.

So go subscribe, spread the word and, if you feel the urge, leave a supportive comment or two so she doesn’t feel she’s blogging in a vacuum.

When I’m blathering on about Internet bobbins I often use the term “stuff” as a shorthand for words, pictures, videos and online content in general. “Conversations take place about and around stuff” I say “and it’s in your interest as a [insert audience here] to provide that stuff or a venue in which that stuff can be talked about.”

The thing about “stuff” is it’s quite a physical concept. “I have lots of stuff in my room” means there ain’t much space to move about. Stuff is tangible. Stuff has mass. Online stuff, on the other hand, doesn’t so much. And yet it can be quantified in terms on bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. Your external hard drive is a tangible thing that runs out of space, and bandwidth, the speed by which you get stuff from the Internet, is analogous to forcing water through a pipe - bigger the pipe the faster the stuff can get through.

So while digital content is intangible we deal with it in a tangible way, filling up drives with music and videos and waiting for photos to upload. Maybe, when storage and bandwidth increases by such a degree, as it surely will, that nothing you want takes more than a nanosecond to download and storage is effectively infinite, will we treat digital stuff as intangible but right now we don’t.

Which, in a long winded and roundabout way, might explain why I occasionally look at the USB cable that delivers music to my laptop and imagine the mp3 moving along it. Or why I draw a line in my mind between the laptop and the wifi router and picture the file I’m downloading flittering through the air like swarms of tiny insects. I might even pass my hand through the space in the vain hope that I might feel something.

The funny thing is we all grew up with radio signals and electricity cables but it’s only now we have quantified visualizations of that data in on our computers that this thing that our elderly relatives’ parents found magical becomes magic again.

I mean, if I watch the network activity monitor on my Mac while I request an mp3 from a site I know, when it spikes, that that song has just passed through the air in front of me. Not just data but a specific song.

What do you think. Is thinking of digital stuff as tangible a simple category error or are we wrong to think of digital bits as intangible? Are they simply just very light indeed?

When I first started playing with Yahoo Pipes I did what I think everyone else did - I smurshed all my RSS feeds into one massive feed - blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter updates, anything that was produced by me on the internet could be accessed from one single address. There’s one big problem with this sort of feed. It’s utterly useless.

Why, for the love of all that may or may not be holy, would anyone subscribe to this torrent of context-free nonsense? Nobody ever asks that question. But still they create these things because it’s a cool experiment, a useful process in understanding what Yahoo Pipes can and cannot do.

I’ve become a big fan of Pipes these last few months. RSS feeds are great but they’re often not quite right. The Twitter feed, for example, automatically prepends your tweets with the username and has identical content in the title and body. Wouldn’t it make more sense if this:

peteashton: I’m picking my belly button fluff
peteashton: I’m picking my belly button fluff

looked like this?

peteashton
I’m picking my belly button fluff

I think it would, and I can do that in Pipes. Here’s one for Twitter posts with “onthebus” in them. Nice.

What about removing all my tweets that have an @ symbol in them (since they’re conversations and only make sense within Twitter) creating a real status update feed? Easy.

So Pipes are great, but lifestreams, or whatever you want to call them, are just overload. I can’t imagine anyone being interested in everything I write on one of my blogs, let alone all of them. But there might be, and it’s kinda cool to have a big fat “anthology” feed. At the very least my parents might be interested even if it goes over their heads at times.

So from now on the Pete Pipe only has blogs posts. The main sources are this blog, ASH-10 and my Tumblr since they represent the basic range of my bloggery, and they’re prepended as such. Anything else has the prefix “Other:” and this includes my posts to Created in Birmingham, the Birmingham Post and the Custard Factory. If I join any other group blogs I’ll add them in there.

I supoose the thinking is these posts are curated whereas places like Flickr and Twitter are more like dumping groups, the raw materials from which curated stuff emerges. Or something.

Here’s the Pete Pipe which you’re welcome to clone and adapt for your own use. If you just want to subscribe to see if it’s less annoying than before click here.

I’m a big fan of buying t-shirts online from boutique operations that print them in limited numbers. In a way these sort of tees are like posters and prints except you don’t have to clutter up your walls with them - you just shove them in a cupboard and wear them until the armpits go all crusty and the smell won’t wash out. Threadless is the grandaddy of these services but I’m always looking out for new places to get my t-shirt fix.

Deplorable Tom pointed to Rumplo which gathers “artist t-shirts from around the world” in a blog/shop/gallery format and from there I came across T-post, a Swedish subscription service where you get sent a shirt every 6 weeks with a design inspired by a recent news story (which is printed on the inside).

The gallery looks to be to my liking - I doubt I’ll get sent a shirt I’ll really hate - and the price, at €26 a shirt, is pretty reasonable. They also only print as many shirts as there are subscribers so you know you’re getting something unique. I like that. Makes me feel all special. And given that I’m seeing more and more Threadless shirts at gigs that’s an important factor.

I also like how their models are relatively normal people photographed in their pants. Nice touch.