I've just had a Douglas Coupland moment. I realised that I haven't read Boing Boing for a while, and so I'm surfing through the last week of it in Google Reader. I'm sure there's a bit in a Douglas Coupland novel where a character says that he wishes he could go to sleep for a year so he could wake up and read all the back issues of Time Magazine. Blogs have taken that feeling and compressed it. If you miss a day or so (mixture of a super busy academic schedule, a social schedule and a broken computer) then you get a real headrush when you start to try and climb to the top of the feed mountain. 
That's why attention metadata matters, folks.
London doesn't need terrorists - the wind does the job just as well. It took me 90 minutes to get from Kensington High Street to Tottenham Court Road the other day. Google Maps says that this is a 3.7 mile journey by road and should take "about 12 mins" to drive. Not last night, kids. There was wind.
Incidentally, the opening chapters of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe is set on the familiar roads of Kensington through Knightsbridge. It is, of course, totally unrealistic - you could never reach fifty miles an hour, even at night (K-Gore is filled with traffic lights). Based on my time yesterday, that would be 2.6 miles an hour average speed. I was listening to the podcast of and Pluckering (that is, reading on the Plucker ebook reading app) Eastern Standard Tribe on the (delayed) train in to London yesterday. Another Coupland moment.
I found out yesterday that if a commuter train is delayed by more than thirty minutes and it has a drinks trolley on it, they give out free stuff. I got a bottle of orange Tango in the process (I was at the far end of the train - the gin had been nabbed by the time the trolley got to me). It's a bit like a tombola really.
For any Americans and other assorted non-Brits in the audience, a tombola is a curious British practice usually found at school fetés and other fairly ineffectual attempts at raising money and/or community spirit. The basic idea is that in order to raise money for some school building project or the other without doing the rather simple step of writing a cheque people bring in all sorts of old tat that they don't want, stick raffle tickets on it and put the tickets in to a rotating drum which they then spin around. You come up, pay a quid or two and pull a ticket out of the drum. If the ticket's number matches up with any of the prizes on the table, you get the prize. It's like going to a sideshow attraction, only without the ridiculously unsafe rides, plastic ducks or inflatable mallets.
Okay, down to business. The technology I've been getting excited about is quite simple - XForms. Ian Forrester from cubicgarden.com was telling me about XForms the other night and they're mighty cool. Take a read of this article to see how cool they are. I've got some huge great big dreams of where one of my currently under wraps applications involving a plugin architecture. XForms could be a significant part of that - especially since it's all just XML. I could imagine how easy it would be to turn either XML schemas (XSD, DTD, RNG etc.) in to XForms or using RDFS/OWL to generate XForms with not much work. Similarly, WSDL, XForms and some form of stylesheet language for XForms could mean a very interesting scenario - automatic interface building for Web Services.
I'm contacting the brains behind Twitter to ask them if they could make a more comprehensive API available. Why? Well, because I've got an application that I'm trying to build but the data I want isn't available from Twitter. If it were to be made available, we'd be able to do Lots Of Cool Stuff that involves group messaging, mapping and statistics. And RDF of course. Can't forget the RDF. 
Oh, and I am sure that this video proves that Microsoft really is fucked up. I'm so glad that the operating systems business is a competition between a group of DRM-addled nutcases and, erm, another group of DRM-addled nutcases that has a very pretty GUI.
I'm hoping that in the next few days I will manage to hack my way through a large part of my workload. And once I've got Zurich Insurance, the Apple Store and whatever intermediaries to talk to one another, my blogging may be a bit more often and a bit less schizophrenic.
