Russell Davies

2015 pictures of the year

I took a picture every day in 2015. I stuck them on Flickr and on this blog every Sunday night. I'm trying to tag them all and put them all in a Flickr album but, frankly, that's quite a pain. I should have done it as I went along.

Meanwhile, as a stab at picking out the best ones, here are the ones that Timo faved. I don't know why he faved them, but, you know, it's not nothing.

Naming is hard

Reasonable Nutjob Caucus was probably better. This is mostly not about naming, to be honest, but it's still interesting.

Soul Drums Ultd

Walrus and wine

♫ #lastfm artists: The Beatles (5), Patrice Rushen (2), Randy Crawford (2), Cliff Richard (2) & Foreign.. via @tweeklyfm #music

— russell davies (@undermanager) December 27, 2015

Well, that has a look of a Christmassy week doesn't it? That's probably how Cliff snuck in. A Christmassy week which unveils The Beatles on Spotify, which was nice. I like The Beatles so much I almost never listen to them, it just never occurs to me. Hopefully Spotify will encourage me to just throw them in.

355-361

Ing day

Merry to you all

Bring your darlings back to life

This wonderful edition of Archive on 4 is about editing and what gets left over when you edit, the off-cuts that don't fit in 'the story'. And those left over bits are often fantastic. I love them because they're not stories, they don't have resolution or narrative focus, they're unpredictable, fragmentary, characterful. That's what I want to hear and read, moments.

A Slightly Welsh Coup

This LRB review of the latest Thatcher biography reminded me of a very true thing Ian McEwan wrote after her death in 2013. "It was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her."

In that spirit, this programme - A Very Welsh Coup - from BBC Wales is well worth a listen. It tells the story of her removal from Number 10 through the slightly shoe-horned fact that Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine are both surprisingly Welsh.

podcast d'escalier

A few weeks ago, Martha Lane Fox and I recorded a podcast with Michael Copeland of A16Z.

I can't bring myself to listen to it, but on the way home I jotted down some notes on what I should have said, and what I wanted to say. So if you listen and think me an idiot, please find some mitigation below.

As I remember there's a bit where we talk about online education etc and I think we fell into the trap of comparing the world of online education with the old world of elite universities. If I'd remembered I would have pointed to Clay Shirky on this.  As he points out, it's not about whether the OU or FutureLearn can compete with Harvard or Cambridge, it's about whether online courses are better at getting someone a job than a college they can't afford to go to.

And, we spent a long time talking about the need for different models of tech development than the standard Silicon Valley / Venture Capital story, without, I suspect, coming up with any great examples of what we meant. I think that's because the difference is quite nuanced.

What I should have pointed to was Robin Sloan's Atlantic piece: Why I Quit Ordering From Uber-for-Food Start-Ups. What we are arguing for are technology organisations that realise that they're in a society, not just a market.