JonMountjoy.com

Sometimes you encounter something novel, and wonder why nobody thought of it before. Case in point, the dyson airblade, encountered in John Lewis here in Edinburgh. Here it is from the side:

The instruction are simple. Place your (wet) hands in, and draw them out slowly. That’s it. It works too - unbelievably fast.

You can just imagine the engineer that created this. There he was in a loo, trying to dry his hands on those awful wind devices, just before nipping off to have his car washed. Sitting in the car as the dryer blew the water from his slowly moving car, a light went off…

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I’ve just spent 5 days in Barcelona and I loved every minute of it. How I regret not including a weekend in my trip. The city was clean, the transport network efficient, the weather superb, the food sublime, and the city had a wonderful buzz; it felt alive, lived in, enjoyable.

My hotel wasn’t particularly good, but I found a number of great patisserias nearby that supplied an alternative breakfast. The first time I walked past one of these I saw a number of Barcelona natives standing around a bar table, eating a pastry and sipping an espresso. I joined them the next morning and every morning after that.

I had a number of memorable meals: a ham dish (obligatory in Spain) at els quatre gats (photo coming), and a superb array of dishes at the Windsor (rather english sounding!) and tapas of course, at various restaurants. Lots of seafood (I generally only eat fish, though I did have another taste of Arròs negre) and I avoided the goats cheese (learned that after visiting Toledo a few years back).

I had a half day to myself the first day I arrived, and so visited Casa Batlló, one of Gaudi’s buildings. It was quite something, and you can see why it’s called the house of bones.

On the final evening, at around 2am, Victoria and Simone decided that we needed to visit the Sagrada Familia, which we duly did. Luckily it’s well lit for the batty tourists. Wow. Describing it, I could only come up with “organic gothic.” It felt a little like a mixture between the architecture and feel of the alien structures in Alien, and some of the cruisers in Babylon 5. Seriously!

Conferences are really about meeting people, and Barcelona’s cafes and tapas bars provided many opportunities. Patrick, Arunabh,Victoria, Quinton, Dain, Simone, Eddie, Pieter, Marcus x 2, Scott, Gary, Catarina, Hussein, Linda, Martin and many more made it even more worthwhile.

This blog is rebooting, please adjust your settings. It’s going to take a while too. New purpose you see. Oh, it has a new feed address.I’m also hacking the theme - using the excellent Sandbox. It has the correct layout and elements right now, it just looks awful. Need to brush up on CSS - any handy Sandbox themes out there?

Over on the Radar, Dale writes about Desperately Seeking Status. Dale’s a bit perturbed by the rather cold statement: “It never hurts to remind yourself of the business you’re really in: providing your customers and clients with status.” Though I agree, I also think that we don’t see enough conversation around this important topic.

As we enter the Web 2.0 era, where the social aspect of computing plays an increasingly important role, we need to see more social psychology and research being applied too.Much of harnessing collective intelligence is really also about groups and group behaviour. While Dale doesn’t think in terms of status, the majority of people do-perhaps unconsciously. We live in groups, and status within these groups and the hierarchies that we build are innately human things.

I’ve just started reading a fascinating book the subject: Michael Marmot’s Status Syndrome. Primarily a thesis about health inequalities, he provides some interesting research showing how our position with a hierarchy is reflected in our longevity. The social gradient in health seems to be based in our work and life circumstances-our social arrangements, status and position within the hierarchy.An example: Academy Award-winning actors and actresses live four years longer than their co-stars and the actors nominated who did not win. That’s a long time, and he argues that this is primarily due to their elevated status.

This health gradient is reflected in many different hierarchies (some overlapping): for example, income, amount of schooling, parent’s social classs. But, he argues, it’s not about how much money people have, but about two features of societies: hierarchies and cooperation, which he translates as how much control individuals have over their lives and how widely spread are the opportunities for social participation.

The knowledge economy has its own hierarchy:perhaps Tim’s alpha-geeks are nearer the top. If I learn more Ruby and Web 2.0 and mashups I will undoubtedly be improving my status within my group of peers. I am acquiring status skills, whether I like it or not. And if there’s any truth in Marmot’s research, I’m also going to live longer because of it. That’s a good enough reason for me.