Saturday saw a slow recovery, then Sophie and I drove off to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. On the way there we happened across Middle Farm, and having had many discussions of said farm the previous night I requested a stop-off. I thought I'd not been there before, but everything seemed frighteningly familiar; I must have popped in at some point over the last few years.

 

After that we continued on our journey to magical Bexhill, to see an exhibition of work by Jeremy Deller and then a performance of Acid Brass, the project he collaborated on with the William Fairey Brass Band. It's basically a brass band performing a selection of Acid House classics.

The exhibition was great; I wish we'd gotten there earlier to see all of The Battle of Orgreave, the film he produced about a clash during the 1984-5 Miners Strike... but the bits I saw looked good. I also particularly enjoyed his selection of calling cards designed to provoke conversation (e.g. "Please help me - I went to a single sex public school", "There is only one Minogue").

 

Mark Curtis on mobilising our meat based selves: "On Flirtomatic, a flirting community on mobile and web that I'm closely involved with, we see our biggest interaction (chat) levels at 4.30 in the afternoon and between 10 and 12 midnight – and equally on phones and web. These latter users are to some extent choosing a virtual night out."

We see similar behaviour with mobile puzzling. We expected commuting times to be the big hours for it - 7-9am and 5-7am, mirroring the times when crosswords and sudoku are embedded into everyday lives already. (We can track when people are actually wanting to puzzle because Puzzler uses a single download, pay-per-play model)

No way. Usage grows steadily throughout the day and peaks in the wee hours (2-3am). This is complementary to puzzling in the real world.

Making the Most of a Working Day: "Big projects in particular come down to planning and not just planning in the sense that you stick some deadlines in a calendar and leave people to it. It's up to each and every one of the members in a team to assess their to-do lists and decide which of the three modes they need to engage in order to accomplish the tasks and communicate them openly"

I liked the recognition of different "modes of working" in this post too:

1. If your work requires long periods of un-interrupted concentration
2. If your work requires short bursts of intensive activity
3. If Your Work Requires Creative Team Input

Graffletopia: "As a web designer, I've been using OmniGraffle for years. It's fantastic for designing interfaces — miles better than Adobe Illustrator for most tasks. Stencils are a big part of why Graffle is great. So, hopefully, this website will make it easier to find cool stencils."

Etsy: "an online marketplace for buying and selling all things handmade. Etsy lets you shop by color, place, time and material."

Very cute.