Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Apprentice Live Predictor

Posted by Roo - 15/04/09 at 09:04:53 pm

For the next hour I’ll mainly be watching the Apprentice.

Except I won’t. Not just watching anyway. A few weeks ago, I talked about the Apprentice and Twitter and if you’re anything like me, you generally watch TV with a laptop open. This is sometimes known as a ‘second screen’ experience (I even recently heard it called, heaven help us, ‘double dipping’).

There are quite a few examples of social telly projects out there, and that list is far from comprehensive. Mac Morrison has been thinking about the web and live TV as an event and reminds us of Tom Coates’ thoughts on social set top boxes from way back in 2005.

Well, now there’s this. You might like it. The Apprentice live predictor is quite simple really. You predict who you think will get fired, can change your mind at any time, and score points based on how long you were backing (um, what’s the opposite of backing?) the person who finally gets the finger.

It’s not a competition (really), it doesn’t influence the show (it couldn’t possibly, since the show is pre-recorded) and it’s not (really) chat-around-content as some of the social telly examples were, because the messages are pre approved and hand picked by the site editor. That means that a secondary game, which I found myself playing last week, becomes trying to leave a comment witty enough, quickly enough, to get picked by the host/edtior.

The predictor is a nice example of participation around live television which isn’t just about adding open chat around a video stream. Fun, game-like elements interest me a lot more really. I think the best bit is watching how the fickle public prediction changes in response to the candidates doing and saying stupid things.

It’s been running for the last three weeks. In case you’ve missed it until now, here’s what it looked like during the closing minutes of boardroom scene last week. I waited for a week before posting this, to reduce the spoiler risk.

Recent Reading

Posted by Roo - 13/04/09 at 07:04:15 pm

February

• Arthur C Clarke and Michael Kube-McDowell, The Trigger – I’d like this book a lot more if it didn’t have an ex-baseball star President who speaks in non-stop sports metaphors. Also, the references to Arthur C Clarke (including Clarke’s three laws and Clarke Orbits) are quite grating. Forgettable
• Thomas Harris, Black Sunday – bad thriller
• Thomas Harris, Red Dragon – okay thriller
• Thomas Harris, Silence of the Lambs – actually quite good thriller
• Harold Pinter, The Dwarves – this is early Pinter, and about as full of non-sequiturs and strangeness as you’d expect. It strikes me that Harold Pinter would have been great on Twitter.

March

• Charlie Brooker, Dawn of the Dumb – lots of Guardian Screen Burn pieces. I love Charlie Brooker greatly, and this made me chuckle out loud a few times.
• Geraint Anderson, Cityboy – he wrote a column for thelondonpaper and now the guts of it are available in paper form. Again. On smaller pages and you pay for them. I mostly picked this up as a partner to ‘Kill Your Friends’. Of the two, this is much more enjoyable.
• John Niven, Kill Your Friends – horrible, horrible book. Imagine ‘American Psycho’ set in the British record industry in the 90s, but with less imagination and wit. Horrible.
• Stephen Fry, Moab is my Washpot – Stephen Fry’s brilliant autobiography, covering his life at school up to his 18th birthday. It was released after ‘The Liar’, but I read it first and I’m glad I did.
• Stephen Fry, The Liar – semi-autobiographical novel which (especially having just put down his autobiography) turns out to match his actual school life quite closely indeed. Quite brilliantly funny too.
• Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 – On the one hand, Tom Rob Smith has too many first names and is younger than me. On the other hand, it’s quite a good read, if suffering from a bit of a format plot. Robert Harris could have written it, if you know what I mean. That said, it’s as deserving of bestseller status as anything you’ll find in an airport this year.

This is why we need more photographers at public events

Posted by Roo - 07/04/09 at 08:04:01 pm

Regular readers will know that I don’t often mention news stories here. This can’t go unmentioned though.

Duncan Campbell’s piece in ‘Comment is free’ points out the very patchy reporting that the death of Ian Tomlinson has had thus far in much of Britain’s press. I think that’s about to change.

Please take a couple of minutes to watch this video and read this report. The video shows what seems to be Ian Tomlinson, the man who died during the G20 protests on April 1st, being pushed from behind by a police officer dressed in riot gear, including a balaclava. Unlike the others in the group, the officer who pushed Mr Tomlinson to the floor doesn’t seem to be wearing his identification epaulets, or ‘collar numbers‘, on his shoulders.

I’d already left the area by this point, but were you there? Did you see what happened? The Independent Police Complaints Commission is still gathering evidence in this case.

The investigation is continuing to look through CCTV footage to see whether the incident inside Royal Exchange Passage has been captured and we already have a number of witness accounts from the area. However, I would ask anyone else who saw Mr Tomlinson at about 7.20 p.m. or who may have taken a photo of him around that time to contact us so that we can build up a full picture of what happened.

Anybody who saw Mr Tomlinson in Royal Exchange Square is asked to contact the IPCC on 0800-096 9071 or email Tomlinson@ipcc.gov.uk

And who took this important video? Not the police (though they were certainly filming the protesters). Not a protestor. Not even a legal observer (though I saw at least one of those in the crowd). No, the person who filmed this was an independent bystander. He was apparently a fund manager from New York, working in London.

We all need to be observers. It seems to me that we need more people taking photos of the police during events like this, not to target them with yet more anti-terror legislation such as the Counter Terrorism Act 2008. (See also this article outlining the new legislation too. Especially the comments).

We need to be able to hold to police accountable, especially in tense and difficult situations like a protest. Imagine how much more difficult the IPCC’s job would be now if it were not for all those cameras in the hands of the public. If the police start using section 76 to prevent people from filming them in public, that’s a protest I’ll be attending as participant, not just an observer.

Browsing my browsing

Posted by Roo - 05/04/09 at 08:04:24 pm

I mentioned last week that I’d installed MeeTimer and was using it to track my browsing history. Now I’ve built up a weeks worth of data, it’s time to do something fun with it.

If I want to eliminate, or at least manage, distractions, it will be useful to know not just which sites I spend the most accumulated time visiting (MeeTimer already does a pretty good of showing me this), but also which sites I visit most frequently. Because MeeTimer stores all of its lovely date in an SQLite database it’s easy to get to it and create pretty graphs like this one…

Even better, lots of scripting languages have support for SQLite (I’m using Xampp as a convenient stack containing Apache PHP 5 and SQLite 3). After hacking around for a couple of hours, my nasty little PHP script was serving up this sort of thing:

(Larger version)

MeeTimer lets you group URLs into different groups, so here those groups are displayed using different coloured rows. Yellow represents site’s I’ve grouped as ‘work’ (mainly work’s webmail address), so it’s easy to see that when I was working on my laptop at home on Friday, i.e. 2 days ago, I was accessing work webmail pretty constantly. I have a desktop at work, so on most days I don’t need to use webmail to check my email except for on the train on the way in and out, but for some reason I had it open for ages on Monday morning (i.e 6 days ago). Perhaps I was away from desk?

I’m also experimenting with alternative ways of displaying the history, including showing the favicons for certain sites.

(Larger version)

Here I’m just showing the visits to about a dozen sites I seem to visit (very) regularly, e.g. Twitter, Gmail, Flickr, Google, Technorati, Feedburner, Google Reader, Delicious, etc. You can see that I habitually check Gmail about once per hour, and visit Twitter even more regularly than that.

The code for the DNA one is a bit specific to my groups, so I want to generalise that to work for all groups before I share it, but I’ve put the code on GitHub for the favicon one. It’ll probably only work in Firefox 2 or better. Canvas should work in Safari, but I’ve probably used Mozilla specific stuff for the text. This was a very quick hack, and there’s plenty of scope for enhancements, so let me know if you make any improvements.

On the ground at the G20 protests

Posted by Roo - 01/04/09 at 11:04:55 pm

I took some photos of the G20 protests around RBS and the Bank of England today. I had a quiet afternoon after a meeting in Soho, so decided to head to Bank to take a look at the square mile and see what was afoot with the much discussed G20 protests. It ended up being anything but quiet.

Arriving at St Pauls (I’d already heard that Bank tube station was closed), I overheard various police officers informing people of the best ways to avoid Bank, saying that much of the area was closed off due the protests. Deciding I’d just get as close as I safely could, take some photos and then go home, I started walking towards the Bank of England.

I soon realised that the officer’s advice was sound. There were police blockades on every single street leading in to the Bank of England.

Many streets had not just one line of police but two, with a gap in between them, essentially keeping a safe distance between two crowds. Skirting around the cordons in busy side streets, I got as close as I could get.

Plenty of flag-waving, singing, cheering and jeering. It seemed peaceful and good-natured and I found the police to be largely friendly and helpful. People were having fun.

The guy on the right was being interviewed by Radio 4. When asked why he was dressed as Satan, and which group he was represented, he thought for a moment and said, “RBS”. The interviewer couldn’t help but grin.

2:20 – Note the gap between the two crowds in the photo above. Looking in from the outside, I could come and go as I pleased, as long as I didn’t want to get any closer to the central area filled with protesters. Equally, the people on the inside couldn’t get out. They were hemmed in by the police on all sides.

2:40 – Just as I’m getting a bit bored and thinking about heading back to the office, the central crowd starts pushing and shoving the line of police which is penning them in. Scarily (for me), within a couple of minutes they had managed to break through the line, and were surging in my direction. I moved back a few paces, fearing a stampede, but all that really happened was that two bits of the crowd (the inner bit, and my outer bit) had joined up.

2:41 – But… the police had pulled back and regrouped, forming two new lines, one on either side of me. I ask nicely about leaving.

- “Excuse me officer” (I’m nothing if not polite). “I think I’d actually like to be on that side of you…”
- “Sorry mate, not happening.”
- “Really? I just…”
- “No. No-one gets in, no-one gets out. Those are my orders”.

I’ve suddenly gone from being an outside observer to being one of 2000 people (not all of whom were protesters, I can assure you) trapped in the middle of the square mile.

2:50 – After the surge, things were pretty peaceful. I started checking with officers at the various (9?) blocked streets and alleys that they really were not letting anyone out, and was slightly horrified to learn they didn’t even have any idea of when they would start letting us leave. Frustrated, but trying to go with the flow, I a) rang my wife and b) started looking around at the stuff I couldn’t previously get to. There were no groups shoving at the police now. In fact, perhaps because there was more room, everyone seemed pretty relaxed.

3:00 – It felt pretty much like a carnival really. Singing, dancing, sound systems blasting 3 different sorts of music, lots of friendly, people being happy.

3:10 – Bloody hell, they’ve smashed RBS. This must have happened a while ago. Before I arrived, even? There are mounted police here, and the atmosphere is different here, on Threadneedle Street. There’s still a lot of anger focused here. I don’t like it.

4:00 – Heading back in the other direction, I find some shade and sit in a shop doorway, pull out my 3G dongle and check my email. People ask if there’s any news. When are we getting out? No idea. The news doesn’t know. The police blocking us in don’t know, so why should the news?

4:30 – Hot and tired. Annoyed. Thirsty. Bored. Restless.

4:45 – The general mood seems to be shifting and worsening. I’m not alone in wondering when those of us who don’t want to be here will be allowed to leave. Portaloos have arrived, which is certainly a good idea, but what about food? And water? This part of the city is pretty handy if you need a cash machine, but there’s certainly nowhere open in here to spend any of it.

The police line starts moving people back down Queen Victoria Street (past HSBC) back towards the centre. Once it starts, it happens quite quickly, and in quite an ugly way. BBC News 24 captures the confrontations, while I stay well back from the shoving.

Some protesters were throwing bottles, and I saw one flaming newspaper hurled. A handful of the scary hardcore anarchist-protester-types just stood there, squaring off with the police, intent on being forced back rather than just retreating. From the police’s side, the violence mainly involved shoving people along the street with their riot shields, but I did see the batons did get used a few times. This was the ugliest part of the day. (That I saw). The crowd went wild with shouts of “shame on you! shame on you!” whenever any sort of police violence was seen.

I’m still not sure why it was considered a good idea to compress the crowd back in to a smaller area. It certainly did the police no favours in the eyes of the more neutral observers.

5:30 – Free at last. I finally got out by showing my BBC ID card to a police officer (who I think probably assumed I was press). I was told “Ok. You can go this way to Cannon Street, but you won’t be able to get back in”. I don’t want to get back in. I want to go home. Except that I felt very bad for everyone else still penned in there, and seeing Pete Blakemore’s increasingly worrying updates (and the fact he was in there for at least a further three hours) made me even more glad to be back, but also even more uneasy and a little angry.

Yet more pictures…

Update: the Guardian has a great video and story which sums up the day, plus a balanced look at various videos springing up on YouTube after the event.