Got up early this morning and found my blog had been visited in the night - at my invitation - and all sorts of new techniques explained and installed. It's like being taught to read and write all over - comparing with our first sail into cyberspace in 1994 (see log at the foot of today's entry) (see Wikipedia on Web 2)On 2 Jun 2007, at 20:43, Simon Baddeley wrote:
Dear Nick. Thanks for the URL for the old B&W photos. Can I ask you to scan two issues for possible attention and even a podcast. 1.The gate to nowhere (the tension between permeability and the pressure to introduce gated communities for the middle classes in Handsworth.) 2. The marriage of Black Patch Park and Soho Foundry (the future of one defines the future of the other). The issues are outlined on my blog and on 30 May (Soho Foundry). Thanks for all your help. Best Simon [I pinched the image of Nick and Vicky from Facebook.]
From: Nick Booth
To: Simon Baddeley
...
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Nick Booth speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
.. etc [Well sort of, Nick! Sorry, Mr Keats]
FLASHBACK: FIRST VOYAGE INTO CYBERSPACE
28th December 1994 at home - There is something of the frisson of preparation for seafaring about all this. Visits to the computer chandler to buy software and other kit; the ministrations of the compass swinger, in this case the programmer from campus computing services who loaded and tested the Authenticated dial-up Service, Local Area Network, Gopher and Netscape software; the neighbouring shipwright who installed appropriate input/output cards as a favour, letters of marque for the voyage in the form of agreements and passwords for accessing the university server; the first steps into the estuary in flotilla - a row of screens in the university information technology training centre, and, at last, the first solo. The machine is switched on, red lights blink on the front of the modem which amplifies the sound of the serial phone connections. Babble of static and staccato beeps of electronic space. Bumps and scrapes - “host error”, “host refused access”, “cache overload”, “host timed out try again later”, “call disconnected do you wish to reconnect” - and then as Richard enters a forum for people interested in tarantulas there appears at the top left hand of the screen the word “Hi”. For a moment we misinterpret this as an unfamiliar screen command. R. types back “hello” and identifies a girl in a suburb of Philadelphia playing on her parent’s computer. He begins a conversation with people in South Padre Island, Texas and in Philadelphia and Sunny Valley, Idaho - Mary and her son-in-law, Charlie, from Phoenix, Arizona - and Vicki from Dallas. They chat in text, each phrase appearing a few seconds after the other. The conversations go on for two hours as me and Amy watch intrigued, offering our own suggested questions. The light of the screen plays on our entranced faces deep into the night. [extracted from a paper prepared for a Conference on “The Governance of Cyberspace”, University of Teeside, April 12-13 1995 and published as: Baddeley, S (1997) “Governmentality” in Brian Loader (ed.) (1997) The Governance of Cyberspace (London:Routledge) (5) 64-96]
BACK TO THE PRESENT
It's small thing about which I can only share my enthusiasm with a small audience, but I logged into Transport Direct[page will be time expired; follow link] which offers the means of planning multi-mode journeys from A to B. I found I could get a bus from Llandrindod Wells to Newport in time to catch a train home from there next Friday afternoon - a lot earlier than the only available train from LW. I'm grateful to A2B Magazine for telling me about a site that can provide information about travel that combines walking, cycling, buses, trams, trains and ferry connections for the traveller who decides to go carless in an autodependent landscape.
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