Entrepreneurial Geekiness

Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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Devil’s Tower

Whilst watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind I got curious about the alien’s landing zone at the Devil’s Tower (Wyoming). I found a beautiful overhead shot via Google Maps. If you zoom right in and pan a little left you’ll see the visitor centre – the maps are so detailed you can even make out the cars. There’s also a nice map at the University of Texas’ library site.

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Review: War of the Worlds

Oh heck, I’m not going to say much about this – Spielberg does it again. Aliens turned up a million years ago and buried giant killing robots underground. We missed them and built cities over them. They sit in space and watch us for years then zap pilots down into the robots so they can mince humans and make us into fertilizer.

SPOILER ALERT: If the aliens have been watching us for ages, why didn’t they watch the 1953 original and remember to wear encounter suits, lest they succumb to the same ‘flu as the others? Silly aliens.

Still, it’s a much better film than A.I. and the flaming train was a moment of genius. But the ending? Oh, so Minority Report. Thumbs neutral, I guess.

[EditJohn points out that the technical term for a thumbs-neutral is ‘meh‘]

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Shardcore in the news

ShardCore has been interviewed,

When I see the work from UK cult artist Shardcore, I know that these pieces represent more than just the images at face value. There’s something else in play. His mixed media work features pop culture icons juxtapozed with vibrant paint strokes.

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CustomKnoppix write-up

CustomKnoppix.com (archive), the market test by Duncan and I for a customised Knoppix distribution is finished, I ended the hosting a few nights back. Duncan and I ran the site for three months to test Google Adwords and of course to see if anyone wanted such a service.

The test was successful in two ways:

  • We learned a lot about marketing
  • We learned that people probably aren’t interested in customised Knoppix distros just yet ;->

I’ve written up some detailed notes about cost, referring search terms, click-throughs and browsers versions. What’s cool is that in the space of a few hours and a few hundred pounds we could validate an approach to a new idea – that’s just peanuts in money and time. I love the ‘net.

I owe a nod of thanks to Seth Godin‘s Big Red Fez for inspiring the php-based contact form (dead in the archived version I’m afraid) as a way of making it trivially easy for a visitor to ping us a contact request.

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New Theme

Hopefully I’ll settle on this theme and just stop faffing about. Thanks to Becca for providing the very refreshing Ocadia theme.

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