Skyberries and Voidmelons or Voidberries and Skymelons

On the 25th September, I went to an IxDa event on Interaction Design from Yesteryear, with talks on HyperCard and Minitel.

Minitel was a system used in France from 1978, which allowed users to do online banking, chat, see a telephone directory, access pornographic services and in later years, email.

One of the reasons for its success was that it was free to get a Minitel device and instead you paid per minute to use it. At one time half the population of France were using it, but its popularity decreased and the service was turned off in 2012, much to the dismay of some users.

There is debate as to whether this made French people accept Internet banking and so on more easily or if they were reluctant to embrace the Internet as they already had Minitel.

The second talk was about HyperCard, an application for the Mac, which was released in 1987. The presenter actually had an old Mac there and demonstrated how to use HyperCard. He explained how good it was for prototyping at the time. "It's better than Axure."

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I also bought Douglas Coupland's Shopping in Jail that day, which I enjoyed reading.

I was a Cylon. (Or maybe I still am.) I played the Battlestar Galactica board game on Saturday and found that out. The humans were defeated.

I read Douglas Coupland's Player One. It was comforting to read somehow, and felt familiar due to the quotes from other books by Coupland, which were mixed in.

I went to Reading Geek Night last night and listened to a talk about Cyclepong (Pong that is played by pedalling exercise bikes) and an unusual version of Lunar Lander. The arcade machines are on Southwold Pier.

There was a geek quiz, which tackline and I came last in, which obviously proves we are not geeks.

The other talk at Reading Geek Night was on 3D photos and we all wore 3D cyan/red glasses to look at them and were given instructions on how to make our own 3D photos. How to build a digital 3D camera rig. There are some great anaglyphic photos on Flickr, which you need 3D glasses to view, such as this one: The Laboratory of Satan.

I started reading Undercover User Experience Design. I may become a secret agent (of UX).

'My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments - we hear a word that sticks in our mind - or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly - we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a pieces of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen - or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection - certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn't even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real - this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.' - Life After God, Douglas Coupland.

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Sometimes I wonder why I write things down, words that I see or hear when I'm wandering in the city, feeling lost amongst the people and gazing briefly at the shop signs and street art. Re-reading my old blog entries, and re-reading Life After God now, it becomes obvious to me, that I was trying to capture moments of that other life, and there are no maybes about its importance.