The Perfect Curve

Council digital teams - have we stopped innovating?

simon gray — 2017-10-05, 16:15:41 - 4044 words

Way back in November 2013, as part of the project to improve Birmingham  City Council's website I was leading on, I wrote a blog post speculating on a few ideas which might be coming up in the Local Government digital sector in the coming year; at the time of writing I didn't expect I'd be likely to be implementing any of the ideas myself, because at that point my project was principally an information architecture and content strategy project, we weren't at that point expecting to be in a position to improve the underlying technology behind the site. So these things which I predicted somebody else might do were: 

• Open data, 
• Mobile, 
• ‘The Internet of Things’, 
• Responsive Design, 
• Ebooks, 
• Crowdsourced content, and 
• Real time information 

So when recently I was copying the old blog posts from the site for that project into this site, that original post caught my eye – in the sense that I was moderately surprised that nearly four years on, actually not much has changed. 

Let's examine those predictions and what's transpired over the last four years: 

Open data 

Open data in local government is still a niche area; yes, many councils now have their data portals with a handful of datasets on them, but they tend to [...]

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Cheese filled portabello mushrooms

simon gray — 2017-09-24, 13:09:14 - 104 words

Ingredients:

• Portabello mushrooms (or other large flat mushrooms)
• Chopped garlic
• Butter
• Bouillon powder
• Truffle oil
• Hard goats cheese

Method:

Sprinkle a small amount of bouillon powder into each mushroom, then dribble a small amount of the truffle oil over them. Spread the chopped garlic around them, and then spread large amounts of butter in. Place broken off pieces of the cheese around the stem, and then bake for about 10 minutes at 220c

#cheatcuisine #lunch

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Balloon releases

simon gray — 2017-09-22, 11:33:14 - 336 words

In other news - balloon releases, and similarly, sky lanterns. Yeah, they look pretty, and can be a nice gesture as a celebration of a life lost. But actually, they're not really that nice at all, when you remember that what goes up must come down. A city - or a field, out an ocean - littered with balloon debris isn't very nice, and neither is the charred remains of a house, park, or warehouse after a still-burning sky lantern has landed on it and set fire to it. Balloons are often sold as biodegradable - what that means is they'll biodegrade in landfill over a period of years, it doesn't mean they biodegrade in a field or a river over a period of weeks.

If the litter and environmental impact of balloon releases doesn't convince you, maybe the human impact might. Helium might be the second-most abundant element in the universe, but on Earth it's actually extremely rare - it's difficult to extract, and the known stocks of it are being depleted at an alarming rate. Why is this a problem? Essential medical equipment such as NMRI scanners need it as part of their cooling systems. No more helium, no [...]

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Rice

simon gray — 2017-08-17, 09:23:46 - 41 words

I've long been dubious about there being any real difference between paella rice and risotto rice, but can anybody persuade me there's a real difference between arborio risotto rice and carnaroli risotto rice?

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Great way to promote a brand

simon gray — 2017-08-16, 12:24:51 - 36 words

All the dog turds on the pavement this person has stepped in will now be on your food. Great way to promote a brand, @emmicaffelatte

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NHS cuts and private bathrooms

simon gray — 2017-08-14, 09:23:51 - 50 words

Any Tory-leaning folks care to trying to defend the health secretary having a £44,000 private bathroom fitted in his office at the same time as ordering £21,000,000,000 of cuts to the health service?

#nhs #politics

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The new Doctor Who

simon gray — 2017-07-17, 09:30:22 - 286 words

I think a legitimate criticism of casting a woman in the role is that whilst fiction is all made up anyway, it ¡'should'! follow it's internal continuity rules within the universe that's been created, and in 50 years there's never been anything built into the continuity to allow a time lord to change sex on regeneration, Missy notwithstanding - if they were going to do it, then they've had nearly 15 years of the new series to do a proper job of laying down some backstory conditions to enable it. 

The counter-argument to that is all the way through its history the show has played fast and loose with its established continuity, whether that's been out of convenience to solve a rabbit hole they've gone down or whether it's because the producer and script editor at the time have simply forgotten something. The various alternative histories of the Daleks, the date settings of the John Pertwee U.N.I.T. stories (and indeed the modern reverse engineering of UNIT to be Unified Intelligence Taskforce rather than United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), and Robert Holmes just making up on the fly the 12 regeneration rule are the biggest examples. 

And arguably the show has been at its [...]

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If I were a betting man...

simon gray — 2017-07-12, 21:52:10 - 57 words

'If I were a betting man...' it has only just occurred to me is a phrase only ever said by people who aren't betting men. Because if they were betting men, they'd know that there's no point in betting on a dead cert, because you'll win about 20p from so doing.

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Mobile emails

simon gray — 2017-07-07, 15:52:11 - 28 words

In 2017, why are organisations still sending out HTML emails which look like this on a handportable telephone?

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