The-Greenman.net

May Day is in a few weeks time. Last year, we celebrated the victory of the forces of conformity over the voices of dissent. It was a bit of a funeral. The end of the old May day. It was a bit of a joke when we thought it up, but it seems to have turned out to be true - this year there is nothing planned. Well, that was, until the Space Hijackers decided to get busy.

The anarchist May day died because it became a war ground. A day when the crowds on the street conformed to the expectations of those watching from the windows, and no message other than fear and hate crossed the great divide. This year, we're our to kick-start a new May day. Well, actually, we just want to remind people that the first day of May is something far older.

Take a look at a map of central London. Find the parks. What would the city be without those parks ? Just how valuable are the houses about its edge? Parks are important.

If there is nothing but park, well, then you have the countryside. It is also important, but the economy is slower. (Again, not a bad thing, but I am trying to make some kind of statement here, so bear with me.) I live in the city because I enjoy the energy, I seek the new and the changing. Yet, if a city is full of nothing but work, then there is nothing new and it never really changes. Which is why good cities need open spaces, need areas set aside for play. Parks keep a city alive, keep its people healthy, allow it to grow and be a successful economic entity.

We were made to be intoxicated. Altered states of consciousness are vital to the effective creative functioning of an intelligent being. I can't prove it yet, but one day it will be science, rather than just hangover justification. But I am serious, I really believe that the successful functioning of human society requires that we get ourselves completely wasted (every now and then).

Before I can explain my belief in "getting out of it", I may need to explain a little about how I see our intelligence functioning. I'll talk about this from the approach of a programmer cause it might sound more credible that way. So here comes the "Agile Development view of day to day life".

Our consciousness is one, decently complex, integrated system. Every time we make a decision, we apply our ruleset, check the results and make a few rapid updates to the code. We make these adjustments in a very ad-hoc way, based on the information at hand we make assumptions, build them into our system and then move on. No hanging around, no deliberation, just do it. We may be deliberating or hanging around up on top in our consciousness, but at an operational level, that does not happen, well, not till later.

I discovered "The Day Today" while sitting in a dodgy, illegal(ish) student bar, called The Abelarde Sanction, in Brixton, Johannesburg. The cultural blackout had meant that we never got to see any BBC television programmes on TV, although I doubt that The Day Today would have gone down well with the powers that be anyway. I was blown away. I promptly ordered my own copies of the tapes and proceeded to hold regular screenings at home.

While on the away week of everything we did a little bit of YouTube wandering, and found we could relive The Day Today in little fragments - which reminded us just how good the series was. One of the little gems is the interview with Peter O'Hanrahanrahan about Germany's response to an economic policy agreement. Go watch it , and then I'll try to get to the point.

Duh! Despite spending my life building Drupal sites for people, I still forgot to actually check the comment approval queue. There I was thinking that I was talking all on my own, when actually, I had had feedback for months! Thanks for anyone who talked back, I feel validated. ;-)

I drank a good bit last night. I drank to forget just how bad my Drupal 5 presentation at Minibar was. After years of public speaking practice I realise that I have just been in a comfort zone - speaking to the same group of people for 3 years does not actually count as public speaking, because they are no longer the public. Anyway, this is not a post about letting myself down, this is about a conversation that happened many hours later when the booze had done it's work.

Dot is a pretty clued up girl. He has been thinking about, and living within, social networking systems for most of her life - and has a knack for buzzwords that work. Some time this morning, in the corner of the pub, we ended up discussing the fact that associations within online social networking systems are (almost) always positive. In the case of EBay, this gets a little blurry because anything less than 100% counts as a slur, but that is a different kind of system. In real life however, social networks are often defined, not by who is in them, but by who is NOT in them.

Sometimes we go forwards by going all the way back. Tonight Joseph Davies-Coates from UnitedDiversity made his first presentation on his commons creation project. The project has been brewing for a while, and it's good to see things begin.

The idea: find a group of people with a common interest, gather a small amount of money from each of them each month, and place it in a bank account. Make this big pot available for the benefit of its members. Sound familiar ?

Mutual societies and group savings accounts are nothing new. We just seemed to forget about them over the last few decades when nothing mattered more than pure financial gain. Now, as attitudes start to change, as people start to seek value in areas other than pure profit, they start to matter.

Most people are surprised by my plan for dealing with hangovers. I think it's pretty simple - you just have to ride them. If you are stuck with a hangover, then there is not much you can do - cause it's too late.

So, the best way to treat a hangover is to put on a pair of cowboy boots and pretend to be a rock star! That's all there is too it, I guarantee you'll feel much better.

We were once wild. Our human race was full of the desperate energy of the undomesticated. Wild and free. This life was not pretty, we died young, we suffered much, but we gave up so much when we accepted to take on the rules of civilization.

Once a year I take part in an act of wildness. I dress myself up in a costume and do my best to forget the strictures that fence me in each day. (I try my best to escape more often than once a year, but responsibilities do their best to hold onto me.) Once a year I take myself out of myself and take part in what is one of the holiest days in my religious calendar - SantaCon (I tried to grab a few more pics of supersanta and put them in my flickr faves)