pleasant Saturday

Nice lie-in, bacon sandwich for breakfast, then cut rjk's hair for him, which was a bit of a mammoth job. Came out OK in the end, though I was getting a bit frustrated with how much of a mess of it I seemed to be making. Pottered out mid-afternoon with Mike to go look for CDs for him to buy his mum for her birthday. 20 mins in Fopp and I came out without having bought anything. A minor miracle.

In the evening arranged a mad last-minute trip to the Hot Pot for dinner, where the food was nice as always, then back to GR for wine and port and music and chat, while Ian and rjk killed lots of aliens. Was surprised how late it was by the time we came home. Late nights just seem to keep happening to me lately.

(And it's hard to type with someone hugging me and shoulder surfing, maliciously).

Glastonbury 2004

Having done some tidying up I've unearthed the notebook I sometimes use as a diary while away, so here rather belatedly is what I wrote about Glasto:

( Glastonbury )

This is where I ran out of time for writing. And to be honest apart from a lovely wander round with Mike that afternoon (which was remarkably platonic compared to last year - amusingly so in retrospect), some brief sunshine while we watched the Opera the next morning and seeing the BMRC on my own some time later Sunday afternoon I don't really remember much detail. Richard was feeling fed up and blistered. We were both a bit tired of the mud. But I did still mostly enjoy the rest of the weekend, even if I listened to much of it from up in the tent. A great weekend. Hope to get tickets for next year. In the meantime Reading next weekend here I come.

Glastonbury pics are here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~eleanorb/gallery/pics/glasto2004?

Networking, and Small World Syndrome

A couple of people on my friends list have posted lately on these subjects, partly triggered by a post made by rho who I know only tangentially. doseybat quoted part of it here, fluffymark drew a wonderful diagram on paper and scanned it in, and emarkienna posted his version (friends only). (I'm sure someone else linked to rho's post too but I can't find it now).

I've started thinking about drawing a similar thing, but in some cases I know people from a newsgroup first, or something similar. I'm thinking vague groups like RPGsoc people, oxnet people, AFP people, ucam.chat people - all those are fairly early groups in the food chain, so to speak, but even there there's a fair bit of overlap. And do I say I know people I met through ucam.chat via damerell (since it was he who introduced me to the group) or do I have the group as an entity of it's own? And what about the people I think of as vaguely AFP people who I didn't actually meet through AFP myself, but through others. And later groups are so much more complicated, and it gets harder to work out which set of people the link actually came from.

I suspect if I actually make the attempt. I'm going to end up with a strange cross between a directed graph and a Venn diagram, with lots of different colours. It's still the random collisions of two completely different sets that always make the small world syndrome so much fun. I wonder how on earth you could show those? And of course if you knew about them before they happened it wouldn't feel like small world syndrome any more. Perhaps by not getting round to it I'm giving some of you a chance to make the discoveries of connections yourself, rather than giving them all away.

Update: Of course the Mindmap thing is kind of linked, but it shows the closeness of various people to each other, and lets you begin to see vague groups, and I'm more interested in how they evolved and how well they match the groups I mentally file people under, IYSWIM.