I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

“Creatives”

This is video of a 5 minute talk I gave at Ignite Bay Area 2. It’s inspired by the collision of cultures ten years ago at my first job, when they went from a purely tech/business/enterprisey consulting firm to being a cool sexy web firm. (I was worried before giving the talk that the problems had all been solved in the last decade — the reaction I got from the audience suggests not!)

The video isn’t the clearest, so the slides (sans nice fonts) are embedded below. If you hit the Play button on the slides at roughly the time I start talking, it should auto-advance in time with my blethering.

Incidentally, there are a bunch of upcoming Ignite events in San Francisco — at the Chirp, Google I/O and Web 2.0 Expo conferences — and it’s fabulous fun (and a great challenge). I highly recommend submitting talks.

“13 Amps Ought To Be Enough For Anybody”

Thinking of submitting this as a proposal for a five-minute talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Ignite night. What do folks think? Sound interesting?

“13 Amps Ought To Be Enough For Anybody”: A tribute to the Great British plug!

The curse of the business traveller. You leave the comfy confines of your native habitat, and find your laptop running low on juice. “No problem!” you think, reaching for your power pack. But drat and alas! The power socket is in some crazy configuration which denies entry to your humble two-prongs.

Rod Begbie proudly dons his nationalistic hat, hurrahs a hearty “Rule Britannia”, and romps through the history of that oddest of designs, BS 1363, or “the British plug”.

As we webbies attempt to design front-ends and APIs that we hope upon hope could be used for as many as “a few” years, take a look at the choices made in the 1940s which still affect every toaster, lamp and fifty-inch-high-definition-plasma-widescreen-surround-sound-home-entertainment-system on that sceptered isle.