Third Places

I was reading Chris Anderson’s blog earlier, and he mentions “third places” – a term I’d not heard of before. A “third place” is basically a friendly, accessible place with some sense of community where you can hang out and have something good to eat or drink. Think something like a really relaxed coffee shop or cafe.

I’m saddened that can’t think of any such place within walking distance of where I live or work. “Third places” are, almost by definition, privately-owned, and I don’t think we do a good job of making such places welcoming in this country. A good example is the deli not far from my home. They sell reasonable coffee and food, but the cups are made of paper, you have to eat the food out of a bag because they don’t give you a plate, the furniture is uncomfortable, they have a loud radio tuned to a crap music station, and the staff are surly. Result: I don’t wanna go there.

Okay, so we have pubs. A good pub can be absolutely great, but who wants to leave with their clothes stinking of smoke? I live in one of the most expensive parts of this city. Why can’t we at least have a Starbucks? With WiFi, obviously.&nbsp

Pointers

Raymond Chen: “Remember, most people do not view the computer as a world to be explored.” Fairly obviously, ‘we’ in the development community almost always forget this. And: “Why should we expect them to understand how a computer works before they are allowed to send email?” #

Scoble on Longhorn: “the graphic designers are now in charge” #

Guardian: “Not a long walk.” #

Guardian: “Television reports produced by “embedded” correspondents in the Iraq conflict gave a sanitised picture of war, according to an academic study published by the BBC today.” #

NY Times: Voyager I crosses the heliopause. Probably. There’s more at Wired. #

Guardian: The real festival of Britain. “Bonfire night is the only major national celebration that still truly belongs to the people”

Pointers

Bruce Sterling has a new weblog “Beyond the Beyond” on the (new) Wired News weblog site. I love reading  Bruce’s writing but, doh, theres no RSS feed. Come on guys! You’re Wired. You’re supposed to /get/ this! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: No feed == No read. I just don’t have the time to check a zillion sites every day. That’s why I use an aggregator. #

Michael Wilson captures in words the same frustration I feel a lot of the time. #

Guardian: “Sales of organic food in the UK have topped ?1bn for the first time, according to a report by the Soil Association published today.”

A few .net tools

Via Jason Tucker’s asp.net weblog comes exciting news of a new product from Appforge. Called ‘Crossfire’, it enables .net apps to run on mobile devices like Palm PDAs and mobile phones.

The press release is pretty sketchy, but unless they’ve done a deal with Microsoft, I would guess they’ve developed a portable version of the CF. As for the CLR, I dunno… maybe they’re using Mono? Irrespective of how it works, though, this brings .net to a lot more platforms, and that’s got to be a good thing. #

SourceGear are selling a single-user version of their highly-rated Vault source-code control system for $49 (about ?30). Eric Sink has a couple of blog entries about it here and here. #

Holy moley! COBOL and RPG for the .net platform.