Off the back of the presentation at OFFF Lisbon earlier this month, where Stuart, Ben and Stephen presented Rhythm of Lines, GT have launched their GT Labs website, where cool stuff will be dropping every month or so, to demonstrate things that we do and to open up some of our work to wider communities for use and re-use.

The R.o.L code released there last week is GPL’ed and doesn’t represent the entire code base for the project but does give enough away to demonstrate working end to end from Maya into Flash and Papervision.

Though the project work represented there took place before I joined GT, it represents something I’m happy to shout about; a successful technical project which is aesthetically beautiful. It encourages play and user-engagement, and has rightly won awards and accolades.

I look forward to adding to the GT Labs contributions some time in the near future.

I found another space invader this week, right next to work. There are a few more needing photos which I’ll get around to as and when I can.

Mark Earls, author of Herd followed Professor Rheingold this evening. His speech is also now available on the NESTA web site, and both addresses will soon be available as video too. Time to go home now.

I’ve just heard Howard Rheingold speak at the NESTA Connect event “Mass Collaboration, Tools, Techniques and Foundations”. Quite a milestone for me really, given that the guy is something of a luminary. For him to be speaking in my place of work was quite entertaining and he gave an idea packed presentation, as I expected.

Anyway I’ll save full reactions until I am no longer at the office and can absorb stuff fully. This is just to say that the recording of the talk is now online and can be got from the NESTA Podcast feed.

Alternatively you can grab it directly from the server :

Howard Rheingold – Mass collaboration, Tools, Techniques and Foundations.

Mark Earl also gave an entertaining and informative speech relating to themes he develops in his book, “Herd”. I’ll be uploading that forthwith too.

A new bike to replace the one stolen last week, and its arrival has cheered me up no end, deciding as I did to go up the range to console myself. First ride on it this morning. So, I leap on, all togged up and ready for an entertaining ride to work. And I can’t clip in to my pedals. And for 30 minutes I’m slipping off them in annoying metal-on-metal-in-rain ways. And at every lights I have a false start because I can’t lift accelerate. Every attempt to clip in, at any angle or force fails.

So I get to work and do a quick search and (nesto, this might be relevant to you to…) it would appear that the SPD cleats I have in my shoes are not compatible with the crank brothers clip pedals fitted to the new bike.

And a pair of cleats is going to cost me frickin £18 :/. And that’s if I’m able to remove the thoroughly gritted-in ones already on my shoes.

This message comes to you from the “should have bought Shimano M520 after all” dept.

Everyone got very demob happy at work yesterday afternoon. Some sort of collective madness overtook us all. I___ seemed to want to wear a pot of flowers on his head Carmen Miranda style, and the Comms team were understandably distracted by videos of sneezing pandas. The jovial Canadian who presented Thoughtfarmer to us in the afternoon helped too. It’s a very well engineered product, but getting the company to accept the shift in psyche involved in adoption of it or a product like it will be tricky. The Cluetrain Manifesto really should be required reading for CTO, CEO and COO by now.

But I think it was the fact it was Friday. Simple really.