Roger Hyam

Last year Channel 4 declared Edinburgh the best place to live in the UK according to a comparison of facilities, house prices and jobs etc.

But today the BBC news website reports a study that says it is the least cheerful place in the UK.

Does this mean living in the best place makes people sad - probably.

Just stopped at a motorway services on the way ‘down south’. I had to ask the lady who sold me coffee where I was because from the inside it could be any service station. This isn’t globalization this is regular human homogenization.

It is Keel apparently.

Well I wrote a basic application that would allow people to sit together virtually and I tried it out on my own. I logged in and logged out at the beginning and end of a couple of sessions and the whole thing seemed really unsatisfactory. This means I must break the first precept and kill the iZendo concept stone dead. It is a shame but there you have it.

The meadows is being abused through over use for corporate events. I walked through the rain this morning passed two circus big tops (Lady Boys of Bangkok and Chinese State Circus) plus a fairground  joined on to them with a series of big rides. They are erecting corporate type marques at two other places. There have already been a series of events on the meadows this year and they are beginning to suffer. Why can’t they leave our green spaces in piece?

So I start writing iZendo from scratch and make quite good progress in simplifying it down. Just four pages and some AJAX to update the lists. All looks good till my crisis of faith! Could I do this with twitter? Could I ‘just’ have a Twitter feed that is the virtual zendo? It would certainly save a lot of effort and would integrate with all the IM and phone systems etc.

The trouble is I can’t see how we get a public page that updates in near real time to show  messages from multiple people. The zendo would have to follow people and look for messages that said they were meditating or it would have to wait for direct messages and post them back as messages on its own page so others could see them. None of these things work. Even if I used the API the app would need to poll the server all the time and there can be quite long delays on this. We are limited to once a minute for starters. This would need to run on a ‘real’ server not a hosted space.

Looks like it isn’t feasible but maybe I should sleep on it.

Thanks for listening,