There was a fairly weird response to dConstruct this year. Last year set the bar so high (Merlin Fucking Mann, anyone?!) that it was pretty unreasonable to expect this year to be as good. You can call me wrong if you want, Jeremy, but it wasn’t. Some talks didn’t have enough time (to the fault and credit of the speaker) and some had way too much. Some waffled on without so much as a water biscuit to feed my thoughts and some were over-self-indulgent (if entertaining) and directionless.

With the bad out of the way, Kelly Goto is amazing. She had a lovely story and was engaging and entertaining. I was lost in time whilst she was talking and upset when she skipped through some seriously interesting-looking slides.

Frank Chimero is a rockstar. He has the huge, effortless, accessible lexicon that he seemingly whimsically dips into and pulls out perfect words and a flawless delivery. He spoke as a bewildered user, suggesting that we’ve all collected enough awesome stuff online and conjectured that it’s about time we started making the stuff we already know is awesome more accessible. He made some excellent points and I felt really inspired to build something whilst he was talking and when he was done.

Matthew Sheret talks my language. He’s in love with the things he carries in his pocket and he’s a total nerd. I had some interesting ideas off the back of his talk and I’m looking forward to getting an Arduino, a bunch of RFID chips and scanners and making something cool for my key-ring (yes, Benjie. Let’s do it). He linked our personal associations with the things we register just before the front door closes to totems in Inception, Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver and a material symbol of ourselves and what’s important to us. You’re not clearer-defined by anything more than the things you simply cannot go anywhere without, right?

And now, some photos that are chronologically and/or geographically linked to the event. They’re irrelevant in every other way.

James Moss has this amazing face that I always want to point my camera at. Just look at him. What a dish.

Pete and Craig smugged it up with these ridiculously cool MailChimp hats that I just missed out on.

My problem with Spotify, and the reason I’ll probably cancel my subscription (again), is that the player is broken. It’s a horrific abortion of an application. A worthless, frustrating, horribly-designed, fundamentally loathsome piece of garbage.

I come from a media library school of music-listening. That is to say that I have all of my music available to me all the time in iTunes. I can browse by artist, album, genre, I can arbitrarily create playlists, all the nice things that Spotify pretends to be able to do, but doesn’t. Say you’re in the mood to listen to something you know you’ve got in your library. Here’s a worst-case, oft-realised scenario of how that situation could end up causing you to want to kerb stomp a puppy:

• I’d like to listen to this album today
• I search for the album
• I’m presented with a visually cacophonous assault of things that are likely irrelevant to what I was looking for
• I realise what I was looking for was in my library, not Spotify’s and Spotify’s search only searches their catalogue
• I drop back to “Local Files” and I have to Command[Control]-F a string precise enough to match the album I want to listen to (I suppose I could create playlists in this instance, but by now I’ve illustrated that Spotify’s search is worthless, and the app doesn’t allow you to browse by artist or album unless they have the artist/album in their library. Suck it up, pansy)

Say I find my albums, and I want to queue them in a playlist, in the order I choose. I sort by “Added”, foolishly assuming that this will be able to emulate iTunes’ behaviour, whereby adding music to a playlist results in a playlist automatically sorted in the same fashion that I added it. If I add an album in Spotify, and sort by the earliest added, it seems to flip the track listing order, so that if I choose tracks 1-12 and add them, the order that they appear in the playlist is 12-1. I can’t even trick Spotify into doing what iTunes does perfectly and intuitively.

Assuming I’ve actually managed to find something to listen to, things go well from there. The controls are way more responsive than iTunes, which is nice. I don’t have to hit pause then wait for three seconds for music to stop before I can answer a phone call. Sound quality seems good, although if you’re doing something CPU-intensive, playback gets noticeably jittery (I say “noticeably” because I do a lot of CPU-hungry stuff, and have never noticed iTunes stutter).

Spoonful of sugar notwithstanding, the final (small-to-some) gripe I have with Spotify is their library tagging and how they force it on you. My #musicmonday posts are calculated programmatically by gathering all the songs I listened to in the last week, querying a few web services to get song lengths, then calculating the amount of time I’ve spent listening to artists individually that week. Naturally, as I started using Spotify as my main music player, I decided that I would implement Spotify’s music metadata API search, as I noticed that musicbrainz wasn’t getting a lot of the tracks that I was submitting. Having done this, I noticed that when using the Spotify music metadata search, submitting strings that it had obviously sent to last.fm as scrobbles, it couldn’t find this music from its own database! How is that even right? Is it not working from the same data? To make matters slightly worse, it seems to have inferred tags from my library. I have a beautifully-tagged iTunes library, which Spotify has taken it upon itself to apply its own shitty metadata to!

So there you have it. Spotify’s player all but completely ruins the whole experience of finding music to listen to, and my own esoteric obsession with collating data on said music. I guess Spotify’s plan is to piss me off so much when I’m looking for music to listen to that there’s no data to collate. Problem solved.

Any recommendations for essential Linux software (even obvious stuff – I might’ve missed it!) are gratefully received at my twitter.

PSP Phone – need this.

No More Gurus is an issue close to my heart. Working with these fools and ending up doing their job on a regular basis, I hope this gets some traction!

Spamusement – webcomic inspired by email spam

Howard Marks; author, former teacher and drug smuggler. The usual.

Dog licking and what it might mean. If you’ve got a dog, it licks itself. When it begins to seem to enjoying it too much, read this.

Peyote is a ubiquitous American drug, but I’ve never known what it was. It’s in all American sitcoms, smoked by hippies and apparently legal. So now I know.

Furniture designer featured on those enigmatic design blogs that look awesome but I’ll never be able to afford.

French Toast is just fucking eggy bread. Mind. Blown.

Life in 16×16. Gifs are awesome, icons are awesome, pixel icons are awesome. This website? Yeah. Awesome.

Spaces of Play are one of very few game developers for iOS devices (there’s loads really!) and they look pretty cool. Spirits looks great!

I don’t use ad-blocking software on my web browsers for a few reasons:

• They can be greedy and block things that I actually might want to see
• When developing websites which might have ads on, I always forget to disable them and spend an hour trying to figure out why ads are invisible
• I care that companies rely on ad income to perpetuate their content (on sites I regularly visit)

The first two reasons aside, I want to focus on the abuse of my care of a company’s income. Considering how easy it would be for me to just install some ad-blocking software in my browser, I don’t understand why companies insist on making me mad at their adverts. Take this, for example.

This is an ad in my face – it opened when the page loaded. I don’t block ads and I do actively click on things I might find interesting so that content creators get paid and keep on creating that content, so I’m insulted when these ads are thrust in my face. What’s more, I clicked the close link and the ad opened anyway. That is just shitty advertising.

So please, cool website owners (I’m looking at you, Kotaku), stop putting these horrible ads on your site. It cheapens your product and insults your users and I don’t want to have to stop reading your site like I did with Wired (in my defense, Wired is pretty terrible anyway).

With that in mind, I’ve been saving my mobile tabs because they’re representative of the random browsing I do! Steve Jobs seems to think that people don’t search on phones like they do on desktops. Physically, he’s got a point, but I don’t think there’s a huge difference. I make more impulsive, general knowledge searches on my phone, but that’s probably due to not doing my day job on my phone.

So, here’s the Safari tabs currently open on my phone:

Steph Thirion‘s (Eliss developer) tumblr

Music from The Hard Times of RJ Berger

LaTeX, document formatting markup

The girl who plays Celeste from Two and a Half Men’s Twitter

Programmable Midi footswitch thing – I really hope something like this comes out for AmpKit/iPhone.

Operation: Hulk Edition – I was convinced that Hasbro didn’t make Operation. Turns out Hasbro makes all the board games.

This song always gets stuck in my head and I always forget who it’s by (When in Rome – The Promise)

I don’t use last.fm any more, but this is cool-looking

This song is featured on all the TV shows. Heard it on Numb3rs – those guys are so good at picking music.

(as a side note, I wrote this on my phone – 3 fault starts because WordPress for iPhone sucks and crashes all the time. Horrible app)

Firstly, I’m going to assume that every industry that has these things is the same. I know they’re not, but you understand that I’m talking about my own personal observations. Your mileage may vary and I’d like to know why it does, if you have time.

Humans are obsessed with celebrity. We love it. Those of us who believe ourselves to be above it are not. We go weak-kneed and fumbly when in the presence of our heroes and there’s no two ways about it. I don’t like this behaviour, but I am definitely not immune to it. I try to remember that people I consider to be celebrities are just people who’ve excelled in their field and gained a lot of recognition for what they do. They’re normal people who do normal things like apply deodorant and get their hair cut and cross the road and hate aubergines and we tend to forget this.

Conferences are a great way to create celebrities. If you’ve a relatively obscure interest, they effectively gather successful people to talk about how they got successful and tell you how to be more successful and that’s fundamentally a good thing. I think it’s important, however, to remember that the concept of a celebrity isn’t particularly healthy for the subject or the observer. On a long enough timeline, a subject will grow aware of and buy into their hype and become aloof (if they weren’t already!) and the observer will go to further extremes of their character type (the sycophant or the hater) and it becomes a self-perpetuating monster. No-one wants that.

Furthermore, as an attendee, you’re likely to be in love with what you do. You’re hardly going to sit for a whole day and listen to someone harp on about asparagus if you hate asparagus. Therefore, I think it’s important to have people talk conceptually on their subject. If you’re at a web development conference, listening to an evangelist preach HTML5 is redundant. You might make some conversions, but you shouldn’t be there to do that! The people who are going to embrace your talk will all know everything you’re going to say anyway, and the naysayers with conviction will probably just bitch about you on twitter.

So, why was dconstruct so good? For me, it was because people were talking in the abstract. I am a PHP developer primarily. I have other interests related to this industry but, gun to head, my day starts <?php and ends ?>. Whether I’m any good at it or not is irrelevant, but it’s not going to be beneficial to me to listen to another PHP developer talk about either why PHP is so good or why they’re so good at it. There was none of this at dconstruct.

(Quick disclaimer. What I took away from people’s talks isn’t necessarily what they were talking about, so if you’re one of the people I am talking about and I got it wrong, maybe you should consider your approach!)

Marty Neumeier’s talk on beating the game by getting ahead of it seemed like stating the obvious. He talked about four different types of new product (different-good, different-not-good, not-different-good and not-different-not-good) and, although I felt his process for identifying these products was flawed in that you had to wait until it had gone to market to really tell, he gave a good framework for new product developers to decide on whether something was worth the effort really only based on an idea. A lot of companies wouldn’t be failing if they listened to a guy like Marty talk for 30 minutes.

Brendan Dawes’ talk on how to get the most out of your product and process by removing as much of it as you feasibly can was quite inspirational to me. This is something that I have quite a strong opinion on not only because it can be a real money saver, but because it can also improve your overall product by removing the weak links. It was, therefore, reassuring to hear that someone I consider to be successful has had such success by following an ideal that I subscribe to. If you weren’t interested in what he was saying, the anecdotes, animations and accent should’ve been enough to involve you anyway.

David McCandless spoke about his approach to data visualisation and made me jealous that he’s been able to get access to stacks of data to do cool things with, but he also strikes me as the guy at the party who will call you in a week with an answer to whether there’s a correlation between breakups and major holidays, or whether cool is cooler than awesome. More than that, though, he made you feel like it’s good to be that guy, and it can be really rewarding and unpredictably interesting to investigate things in this way. He seems to be really inspired by social interactions, which I can relate to. I tend to obsess over byproducts of social interactions, and I was pleased to see that it can be productive!

Unfortunately, I was interrupted during James Bridle, so I think I missed a lot but what I did hear about the interconnectedness of data and the importance of revision as a journey (using Wikipedia and those awesome Iraq war volumes as a case in point) just hit the nail on the head. We have the ability as a hive to revise and collect all of our knowledge to educate and solve, and I hope this ability becomes part of everything. Wikipedia is criticised heavily for containing inaccurate information, but I rarely see it done by intelligent people. They’re too busy correcting the mistakes.

John Gruber spoke a lot about movies and Kubrick and I like both of those things.

Tom Coates’ presentation was like 8GB, and visually brilliant. Sadly, I don’t feel like I really gained anything from it. He spoke about the abstract concept of a network and how practical applications can benefit everyone. If you get a chance to see this, you should because he’s a great speaker!

Merlin Mann is an interesting guy. He doesn’t at all look like any picture I’ve ever seen of him. He spoke about the importance of being a nerd, how it’s dangerous to be comfortable with your abilities and making good choices. He’s basically the voice of all nerds, giving us a big hug and going “it’s ok, no great, to be a nerd but, in the interest of mortality, you should dial it down around people who don’t care”. The world needs nerds to obsess over the things that no-one else cares about. Nerds will constantly be trying to improve things that they disapprove of, and I don’t think that constant, objective improvement has ever been a bad thing. The A-bomb’s obviously terrible, but it’s a damn good example of a thing built to do a thing that does it fucking well. And it’s because of nerds.

I was a little disappointed that all-but-two of the talkers seemed to escape and not attend the after party. I knew that John Gruber would leave – he barely had any interest in getting up and speaking, much less mingling for five minutes with the people without whom he’d be nothing. That being said, it was nice to chat with Brendan about moviepeg and how, as a developer, I’m interested to see how designers approach things and elaborate on that a bit more, and it was cool to chat with Merlin further about embracing nerdism. I try not to be that guy who goes up to speakers and go YOU.WERE.GREAT because I don’t consider it to be constructive (and there are almost definitely enough people to do that without me chiming in), so I only attempted to talk to the people I felt like there was more to say to.

If you were there, or know anything about the speakers, you will notice that there are some omissions. My mum told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you should keep quiet (those of you who know me should see your faces!).

As a for instance; I write on Twitter (and, subsequently Facebook) things that I would talk about with my friends at the pub. I am probably in a minority here, but everyone freaking out about privacy online is jumping off the deep end for a substandard reason. If you restrict what you say online to things that you don’t mind people knowing about (does this seem obvious to anyone else?) then your privacy isn’t really at stake. I don’t mind people knowing how old I am or what city I live in or who I’m married to. I understand that this is valuable information to some people, but it’s also information that I’m comfortable to have in the public domain. Similarly, I quite like my music and film taste to be public, because there’s a chance that I could be on the receiving end of targeted ads that could broaden my horizons.

The important thing to bear in mind is that privacy is a huge word and it covers everything about you. If you drew a set diagram of privacy and security in this context, security would be a relatively small subset of privacy, and it’s the only thing that’s really worth concerning yourself with. If I say on Twitter that I just ate an enchilada, that’s me shrinking the size of my privacy set, but it doesn’t decrease my security set, so I’m not worried. It’s not really surprising to me that Facebook are trying to make money out of the information that people give to them, but I trust that they’re not in the business of dangerously impinging on people’s privacy – that sort of thing would easily earn them a reputation and that’s not good for business. Similarly, if 5% of their user base ruins their lives because they got tagged in a drunken photo and lost their job/spouse/medical licence/whatever, that earns Facebook a bad reputation and that’s not good for business.

The key isn’t to just abandon ship and become a Facebook martyr – it doesn’t solve anything. If you really care, educate your friends. If someone shares something inappropriate that you think isn’t going to do them any favours, tell them and tell them why you’re telling them. If you’re uploading photos and is unflattering/incriminating, think before you upload it and, if you must be a jerkoff, don’t tag the culprit.

Finally, most reputable social networks have privacy settings. Study them. Understand them. Check that they work. Go to some of your stuff, copy links and sign out. Can you still access this stuff? Create a control account and check if that can access your links. If not, you’re safer to trust. Most importantly, read terms and conditions. No-one reads terms and conditions, but you absolutely should. They’re often written in pretty archaic legalese, but persevere and understand. If there’s something you don’t like, you’re justified in leaving (do remember, though, that granting a website a licence to publish the things you upload is not the same as relinquishing copyrights and IP rights).

Disclaimer: I’m not expert on this, but I can exercise some common sense, and I urge everyone to do the same. I am also an idealist. Life’s too short to run around worrying about everything all the time, so I conduct myself with caution and common sense so that, in the event I do get bitten, it won’t be too devastating.

After this interchange, I figure they don’t have the title, I can’t rent it and that’s why. It was really just a throwaway comment, because it’s the first film I’ve searched for that I haven’t been able to queue for reasons other than its release date not having passed. I have since received an email from a customer service representative:

Dear Jasper,

Further to our conversation on Twitter, unfortunately, “9″ is not currently available to rent from LOVEFiLM due to very recent problems with the supplier of rental copies. I‚m sorry for any inconvenience or disappointment this may cause you. If this situation changes we will of course let you know. To make it up to you we are crediting your account with a free rental.

Now, this is how you treat customers. I am on an unlimited plan, so an extra rental isn’t really going to affect me that much, but the gesture is the point. This shows me that, even though this isn’t a fault of theirs, they’re trying to show that they care about my experience with them, and (I hope you’re listening Panelfly and Sony Playstation – I know my updates are protected now, but they had weeks to respond before I did that!) ensure that every experience I have with their company ends with me being happy. You certainly nailed it again, LOVEFiLM.