Dan Sumption’s adventures in the real world
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Thinking Digital Newcastle, 2016
Last year, I remember talking to Chris Dymond and Saul Cozens just after they returned from Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle/Gateshead. They raved about how good it was. So did others I’d seen mention it online. I decided to go the following year and, as the 2016 tickets were already on sale, I booked one […]
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Vibrant Sheffield
I recently attended Grant Thornton’s Sheffield “Vibrant Economy” Live Lab at the Millennium Galleries. This day-long workshop was intended to “bring together key leaders and influencers … to co-create a visionary identity for Sheffield and the wider city region”, posing the question “How can Sheffield become the innovation and creativity capital of Europe?” It’s easy […]
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Stewart Lee
Like most people, my first encounter with Stewart Lee was via his comedy and Fist of Fun. But the thing that first drew me to him was his taste in music.
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Small Things
Sometimes a very small thing can change the course of a life. This is the story of how a beautiful stranger once put me back on track when I was about to abandon everything.
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Empty Space playlist episode 0001
This is the return of the Empty Space art radio show after a hiatus of seven-and-a-half years. To commemorate this dawning of a new era, this show is numbered 0001. The DJ is a robot. The show is available to play and download, for a short time, on Soundcloud, and for a long time, on […]
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I don’t do Voicemail
I have never liked voicemail. I’m not keen on phones in general (there is a great Medium post, Why I don’t answer most phone calls, which explains why the telephone is my least-preferred means of communication). But voicemail, ick. Unlike phone calls, voicemail has no redeeming features. Here are the reasons why voicemail is evil […]
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Sheffugees
This weekend I attended a “Sheffield refugee hackathon” organised by the folks at Yoomee. I really wasn’t sure what to expect, having never been to a hackathon before, and being unsure how well the fairly specific set of application-development skills I’ve been using over the last few years would generalise to building something that could […]
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Knitting Code
Last night, I watched Greg Wilson‘s excellent talk “What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True” – which I now think is perhaps the most important video about software development that I’ve ever watched:
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Your Detox-debunking article is Bullshit
It’s that time of year when a lot of folks’ thoughts turn to detoxing. It’s also the time when a lot of other folks’ thoughts turn to rubbishing the whole idea of detoxing. Some-time scientist, logical positivist, gleeful-debunker and proud skeptic though I am, I’m firmly on the side of the detoxers on this one.
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Berlin
Clearing out my hard-disk, I found a file containing the following text. It was the beginning of what was to be a complete journal of my first trip to Berlin, in November 2014. As it was, I only got around to writing up the first day. Here it is…
Got any book recommendations?