mypipeline

Channel4/Food is soon to embark on a little culinary adventure, and they’d like you to take part. Eating Albion is going on, according to the blog, “a six-month journey back to nature, working on organic farms and small-holdings around the UK to see if the grassroots organic movement offers a viable alternative [ to some vast corporate food chain].” The blog posts are going to be tracked around the country via a Google Map, and there will a lot of user-generated food finds put up on the site too. Again, to grab a para from the blog:

“We also want to seek out the little places - the obscure or hard to find - and maybe sometimes we shouldn’t always just go by the number of recommendations a place has. Thirty people may recommend Borough Market, but it’s not exactly terra incognito for anyone with even a passing interest in food. So it’s not just about the farms I’m planning to visit. We’re keen to explore growers, brewers, dairies, vineyards box schemes, producers, manufacturers, bakers, butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers, pubs, delis, cafés, and even greasy spoons if there’s a good story there. It’s about the people as much as the food in some cases. As my recent article about my local chippy showed, there are food stories everywhere.”

The Eating Albion blog is going to be run out of the 4Food site for a while, and - this is where the web world comes into it - Channel4 are looking for food bloggers, and technologists interested in food issues, to join us at the Channel4 offices for a few beers and a discussion of how this site could be made better through some funky functionality. Obviously you need an interest some of the following: food, blogging, user generated stuff, Google Maps API, local produce, maps etc. All the details are here.

No Comments | In: Miscellany | tags: channel4, food. | #

A little link-lurching today got me on this article on the NY Times about the phenomenon that keeping more options open to us (overbooking) actually decreases productivity, fortune and happiness. The author tells us that the pain of giving up an option is too great for most of us, who can’t bear to live with the ‘what could have been’ thoughts. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss.” True, true. The article makes the point that this is what compels people to buy cameras with gadgets they are unlikely ever to use; and why they make their children take piano lessons on top of a host of other activities, just because ‘it might come in handy one day.’ The solution, of course, is to cut back on the things in your life that simply add to the chaos, and strip your priorities right back - even if it means not committing the odd hour to your new favourite hobby.

It’s something that certainly affects me, and I’m not afraid to admit it. I just hate thinking that there’s something more interesting or worth doing than what I’m currently engaged with, and that sometimes leads me to drop what I was doing, and pick up something completely new. Meaning I’ve only ever got very good at a scant few things in life, and have become only somewhat good (and here’s where the defeatist in me would say mediocre) at a great many things. To wit, I could have been a fairly accomplished banjo player, I reckon, if I had not also picked up guitar half-way through my self-tutelage (This is a good many years after I had started and stopped the trumpet, piano and drums at grade school). There are plenty of these “I could have been a contender” moments gaining distance in my life’s rearview mirror. It just means that to be an exceptional banjo player, I’ve now got to do twice as much work - but at the end of it, I may be both an exceptional plucker of the banjo and the guitar. But most likely, the added strain of learning two instruments will slow down my learning of each of them, meaning I may never master either of them. So the rational option would be to forever abandon the guitar… for the sake of any future banjo mastery. (Unfortunately this is rarely the choice of an aspiring polymath.)

The same can be said of a host of other hobbies. And here’s a harder question: if a passion is to be abandoned for the greater good of mastering another, how do you decide which to abandon - ones that you secretly suspect you could never master, or ones that you suspect are just a passing fancy? But how do you know that just another few more hours of studying a hobby wouldn’t ‘tip the balance’ and convince you that you could indeed master it, or deepen your passion for it further? It’s like trying to figure out which books you’re going to commit to reading. You know that your life has a finite number of hours to devote to the world’s greatest plots, so how do you choose which stories top the list. Or worse yet, how many hours do you devote to the choosing of the books?

[ ... thoughts to be cont. ]

1 Comment | In: Digital Life, Miscellany | tags: creativity, productivity. | #

About a month ago my wife and I moved to a town about 20 miles outside of London, where we’d been in London for the past decade. The town thinks that it is a village; but it isn’t. There is a village a few miles or so up the railroad track though, and today we decided we needed a visit.

In typical Pipes fashion I didn’t check to see how far the station was from the centre of the village and trundled the fam onto the train anyway. When we got to the station a little sign said it was 1.5 miles to the village centre. We felt like a walk though and the babe was in the land of Nod, so we set out with the pram. About a quarter mile down the road, we asked a lady passing whether we were on the right path to the high street.

Not only did she tell us, but she walked us all the way into the village, and explained the local history of the place, and a good bit of her own history too. We talked about the changes to the buildings and the community over the last 50 years; about the exodus of the local shops and the invasion of the Tesco. And the thing is, I never once felt as if we’d picked up some mad clinger, like I might have in London when someone offered a little bit more than a smile.

And I was genuinely interested in everything she had to say, because she was speaking passionately about her roots and there’s nothing more folktastic than that. She might as well have been walking down the road plucking a banjo and sucking on a piece of straw. I’m liking this country life, even if we’re not quite in the country, really.

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Oh dear. It was getting a bit touch and go over at the Platform4 offices, as the deadline day drew near for submissions and I’d only received a handful. But then one courteous submitter pointed out that I had the wrong email posted at on the comp, and he’d been getting bounces.

D’oh. Oh, well, what’s done is done, and we’re extending the comp till the 7th of February now, just for good measure. Here’s the link to email me your submission at Channel4:

platform4 at channel4.co.uk (not .com, as before :()

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Sometimes, you wake up and just need a change. Today was one of those days. So here’s a bluer, wider, more flexible my.Pipeline for a new year…

And because I care, the link for the day is #hashtags, a neat little Twitter tool for categorising your Tweets. And shortly, I’ll be including an extension of my Tweats app that hooks up to #hashtags data, I would think. Look out soon too for mapped Tweats.

New Year’s energy? Pah!

No Comments | In: Miscellany | tags: hashtags. | #