Welcome to The Perfect Curve.

There are 145 posts in total.

simon gray - 2016-01-05, 09:07:29

It's mildly irritating having to walk all the way round to get on to Selly Oak station platform from the park and ride. Especially as one sees a train pulling in to the station. 

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About The Perfect Curve

simon gray - 2016-01-02, 06:01:28

Barely a month goes by without me seeing somebody get all riled up about the latest change to Facebook's or Twitter's design, functionality, privacy settings, advertising policy, or myriad other reasons for people to get all riled up.

At the same time, we as online communities have willingly given over our digital identities, our online presences, and the online discussion space from systems which were distributed and owned by nobody and everybody to a pair of private corporations, with single points of failure, accountable to nobody - not even in any real sense to their advertisers and investors - and immune to challenge or boycott.

The Perfect Curve is a response to this; it is here as an alternative to those who object to the way other social media and social networking sites operate corporately, and here as a place where people who just want to talk to other people using text and pictures can do so without other bloat getting in the way.

The aspiration for The Perfect Curve is for the code to be Open Sourced, for the site and its operating policies to be owned and governed by the community of users, for infrastructure of the site to be funded in a financially sustainable manner without resorting to external funders who will wrest control from the user community, and ultimately, for the site to work on a distributed database model to create resilience.

Sooner or later, first Twitter and then Facebook will disappear; if you think that's a fanciful notion, think [...]

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In group Perfect Curve help and information

Parking

simon gray - 2016-01-01, 14:52:15
Person parking at service station with many pullthrough spaces available still makes a meal of reversing into a space. [...]

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Slow news day

simon gray - 2015-12-31, 21:26:02
It's a sign of how little UK news there is this evening as for most of it all the UK news channels have near exclusively given over their coverage to footage of a hotel which is burning down in Dubai. [...]

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Wuthering Bytes – A Festival of Technology in the heart of the Pennines

simon gray - 2015-09-30, 17:12:37

I went to the Wednesday session of Wuthering Bytes, which was called Tomorrow’s People, exploring the future of public service provision and how councils, SMEs and individuals can work together. It was quite a departure from the usual local government technology events I tend to go to in that the topics were more of parallel relevance to my usual job rather than of direct relevance – but that said it was still of use for me to take back to work tomorrow, especially the talk about Open Source Circular Economy Days. It was also an good reminder to those of us who’ve become accustomed to the unconference / Open Space Technology format of events that it’s not the format of the event which makes it good or bad, it’s the quality people who turn up to speak at it.

I’ve not written a prose account of the day, instead, here are my bullet-point notes from the sessions, which may or may not be relevant to people outside of the context of the event itself:

Kathryn Grace – Digital Occupational Therapist – Digital tools and dementia

  • Dad had a sensor which can send a text to a carer if he’s left the gas on
  • NFC check-in and check-out on mobile phones for carers
  • CareZone iOS app for logging all relevant data for his care and medication; also caring.com

Dan Powers – IOU Theatre – The role of the artist in developing technology

  • ‘As a society we implicitly understand the value of play and the imagination’ – Brian Eno

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In group Public / Third Sector Digital

A musician's work

simon gray - 2015-09-18, 09:04:14
I dislike intensely the term 'back catalogue'; it implies an artist's work is disposable, that only their last release has any value. Imagine if Beethoven symphonies 1-8 were described as his back catalogue. [...]

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Political campaigning

simon gray - 2015-07-11, 11:17:50
Having a change.org petition calling for no confidence in a government less than two months after it was elected on a better-than-expected majority just makes us as the left look silly; there are surely better ways to campaign to make a point.And as an aside, its existence underpins everything I've been saying about what is wrong with change.org and the like - we've spent the last five years being anaesthetised into thinking we're changing the world one click at a time, forgetting the fact of it taking more than a click to change the world. [...]

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What is the Perfect Curve?

Barbara Forbes - 2015-07-09, 07:48:36
I found out about this project through simon's response to a post I made on Facebook about being fed up with Facebook. I am still not sure how this works though, but I suppose I will learn! [...]

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London Underground strike

simon gray - 2015-07-09, 06:30:06
Even though it's going to inconvenience me somewhat, I'm fully supporting the London Underground drivers in their strike today - both their right to strike at all, and the grounds of their dispute. It's not a strike about money, it's a strike about defending the right of employees not to have their working conditions arbitrarily changed by management without meaningful consultation and negotiation.If you think you've got it bad in your workplace, rather than griping about other workers who are standing up for themselves, instead why not join a union yourself - and persuade your colleagues to join the same union - and stand up for your own rights? If you think unions are just self-serving organisations who protect only their own officers, that's even more reason to join one, and become a workplace officer yourself to change that.http://huffpost.com/uk/entry/7751262 [...]

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Sunday trading

simon gray - 2015-07-07, 09:32:57
Ignoring the matter of who owns the respective businesses and how they operate, why should a shop which sells most of the things most people want to buy be restricted in its trading hours on a Sunday in order to protect the business interests of a shop which doesn't sell most of the things most people want to buy? [...]

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Please note! This is work in progress - if you have come across it by accident you're free to stick around, but please be aware not everything will work as intended yet. I have a To do list.