Tag Archives: Pink Floyd

It was twenty years ago today…

According to Google, it was twenty years ago today, that I made my first comment in an on-line forum (that doesn’t link to my comment which, it seems, has escaped the archives, but to one which quotes it).

Champagne uncorking photographed with a high speed air-gap flash

It was a post to the then-active alt.music.pink-floyd . It includes the obligatory typo (PInk) and an embarrassingly-mangled signature (I shared a dial-up account with my then boss, Graham). The content was relatively trivial.

But even so, I had no idea where it would lead me. It was the first-step on a life-changing journey; being online effectively became my career, first as a website manager, then as a freelance consultant, and as a Wikipedian (and Wikimedian) in Residence. It greatly enhanced my life experiences, created opportunities for travel, and is the foundation of many long-lasting “” friendships, with people from all around the world.

So I’m using this anniversary as an excuse to ask you all to call for an open, fair and internet. Join the Open Rights Group or a similar organisation. Let your MP or other representative know that you support and oppose . Don’t let vested interests spoil what we have made.

And please, forgive my twenty years of awful typing.

The BBC, Open Content and Wikipedia

I had a really interesting meeting with Robin Morley, the BBC‘s Social media lead for the English Regions, a couple of weeks ago. After he gave me a very interesting tour of their premises in Birmingham’s Mailbox (where, in its former guise as Royal Mail’s Birmingham head office, my father Trevor had an office), he described to me the work he does.

We then discussed how his London colleagues insert automatically content from Wikipedia, into the BBC website’s pages on wildlife (example: Barn Owl), and on music (example, of course, ). I contributed to the former by writing markup to make them emit the ‘species’ microformat, of which I’m also the author.

Screen capture of BBC article on Pink Floyd, linked to in post

BBC article on Pink Floyd, including Wikipedia content (links to original article)

They are able to do this because all of Wikipedia’s content is available under a . In other words, anyone can reuse it, for free.

I suggested to Robin that his news staff could similarly reuse Wikipedia content. For example, the article “Birmingham Assay Office silver name plaque stolen“:

screen shot of BBC article linked to from this post

BBC Birmingham & Black Country article on a theft from Birmingham Assay Office (links to original article)

could use text from Wikipedia in a pullout (a sub-section, or box at the side of the article) which might say:

The Birmingham Assay Office is one of the four remaining assay offices in the United Kingdom.

It opened on 31 August 1773 and initially operated from three rooms in the King’s Head Inn on New Street employing only four staff and was only operating on a Tuesday. The first customer on that day was Matthew Boulton. The hallmark of the Birmingham Assay Office is the Anchor.

Services provided by the office include nickel testing, metal analysis, plating thickness determination, bullion certification, consultancy and gem certification.

Text in this section copyright Wikipedia authors, licenced

All that would be required would be for credit to Wikipedia to be given, and the pullout text (but not the whole BBC article) to be made available under the same open licence, as above.

This could be done on articles about all sorts of topics: people, places, organisations, events and more, as well as sports reports.

Robin seemed to like the idea, so I’m looking forward to seeing how he and his colleagues make use of Wikipedia content.

Update: Another post, “The BBC, Regional News and Sport, and Hyperlocal Blogs” about something else we discussed at our our meeting, is now published.

Talking about Pink Floyd at Thinktank Planetarium

Later this summer, I’ll be giving a series of newly-compiled talks about three Pink Floyd albums, at the Immersive Theatre in the UK’s first purpose-built digital Planetarium at Thinktank, in central Birmingham:

Each talk precedes the playing of the respective album (a 65 min edit in the case of The Wall) accompanied by Fulldome animated visuals across the full planetarium dome.

Doors open at 18:30 for a prompt start at 19:00. Tickets must be booked in advance. I hope to see you there.

More on my Pink Floyd-related work.

Update

The above talks are now sold out. I’ll be repeating them on the following dates:

My interview about Wikipedia, with BBC WM’s Carl Chinn

I appeared on Carl Chinn‘s radio programme on BBC WM this morning, to discuss my eight years of editing Wikipedia.

Smiling man, wearing headphones, at microphone

During the interview, I took the above picture of Carl. Afterwards, I drove home, cropped the picture, uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons (the repository for open-licensed media, allied to Wikipedia) and used it to illustrate the Wikipedia article about Carl — all while he was still on air and thus able to tell his listeners about it near the end of the show.

The interview can be heard online.

I’ve done several radio interviews, about the web (including some with Carl, back in the 1990s), my books on Pink Floyd and about birdwatching and my role as a trustee of the West Midland Bird Club. I really like doing them.

Google Books: please make better use of screen space on my netbook

The screen-shot below shows the appearance of a 15 April 1972 Billboard magazine article about Pink Floyd, in Google Books, on the screen of my Lenovo S10-S2 netbook, using my default settings. 

Screengrab, showing the top of a scanned magazine page, with a picture and then only a few lines of text showing

Although I’ve used Google Books’ “full screen” setting, this only uses the full width of the screen, not its height. Of the viewport’s 509 pixels height, virtually a fifth, 98 pixels, are taken up with navigation tools which are, while I’m reading the article, redundant:

The top of the previous screengrab, showing navigation links

It would be good if Google would let me hide that header until I need it again, and thereby reduce the amount of vertical scrolling needed as I read the multi-column content.

Ian Emes’ ‘French Windows’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘One of These Days’ at Ikon

This evening, I went to the opening of a new exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon gallery, ““.

The exhibition celebrates Ikon’s artistic programme from 1970 to 1978, and I particularly enjoyed Peter Sedgley‘s hypnotic Corona and David Hepher‘s No. 21.

David Hepher's 'No 21', painted in 1973, and Becky, who wasn't even born then.

But for me, as a Pink Floyd biographer, the highlight was undoubtedly the chance to see not only Ian Emes’ 1972 animation for the band’s One of These Days, projected onto the wall of a room the size of my living room (and in better quality than the YouTube version below), but also several cells from the animation, allowing close inspection. The film is accompanied by Pink Floyd‘s music (or is that vice versa?); sadly the sound system isn’t up to the job.

I had been told that my new book, Pink Floyd: The Music and The Mystery , would be on sale, but apparently there was a supply issue. Maybe soon?

Ian Emes will be giving a free talk on 18 August (booking essential); the exhibition itself runs until 5 September 2010.

Update: Spelling corrected; it’s “Emes” not “Eames”. Thanks to of Ikon for pointing that out. Sorry, Ian!

Update 2: I wrote a Wikipedia article about Emes.

Location: 52.477597, -1.912346

25 things about Andy Mabbett

I’ve been wondering whether anyone would tag me to give “Seven Things you Never Knew About Me”, and how on Earth I would come up with that many. My friend and colleague Emma Routh tagged me on Facebook in a similar exercise, but requesting twenty-five factoids!

For the benefit of those of you not on Facebook (where I’ve already tagged another 25 victims), here they are:

  1. I come from a long line of horsemen (following the paternal line). My grandfather was a cavalryman in India in the 1920s, then delivered bread from a horse-drawn cart. His father was a carriage driver for a wealthy Birmingham family, before that, my ancestors were stablemen for a Duke; and were from Fairford in Gloucestershire. I’ve contacted someone called Mabbett whose family has been in New Zealand for generations, but also harks from Fairford.
  2. I love flying and watching or reading anything to do with aeroplanes. I had an hour piloting a helicopter as a 30th birthday present, I’ve been up in a microlight, and I sweet-talked my way onto the cockpit of a commercial airliner for the landing at Birmingham International Airport on the return leg of my first flight (to Amsterdam) in 1989; yet I haven’t flown since a business trip to Dublin in 1996.
  3. I’m a pacifist.
  4. My spelling is appalling. I particularly have trouble using double letters when I should not, and vice versa. This is, apparently, typical of people of my generation, who were taught to read using the “” (ITA) system, which had no double letters. Nonetheless, I’ve always been a good and voracious reader (my reading age was over 16 when I was 9), and could read “proper” English while still being taught ITA. Forbidden, as a child, to read at the meal table, my mother says I would read sauce-bottle labels.
  5. I am a published writer: I have written two books on Pink Floyd ( an update of a previous work by ; all my own work), contributed to another, and written articles on the same subject for Q and Mojo, among others. When Pink Floyd were inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Seattle, I wrote the programme notes. I was subsequently invited to the induction ceremony in New York, but couldn’t go as I was in the middle of buying my house. My second book is a set text on a university course in the USA.
  6. My hair used to be waist-length. Female friends were aghast when I cut it. I sold it to a wig-maker.
  7. I used to be a professional computer programmer, in COBOL and suchlike, for Cadburys. There was a time when every bar of chocolate which left their factory at Bournville had been counted by a stock control programme which I wrote. I haven’t coded for many years, though. I’d like to learn to programme again, for the web, perhaps using PHP.
  8. My books came about because, for ten years, I published and edited, with friends, a fanzine about Pink Floyd, ““. It was read in every continent except Antarctica (I really must get around or sending a copy to our research station there) and even smuggled behind the iron curtain. We had a subscriber in Kuwait, but sadly I never heard from him after the Iraqi invasion.
  9. I hold a certificate in counselling skills. I was encouraged to take my training further, but a job change took my career away from working with unemployed adults and towards on-line work. And how does that make you feel?
  10. I absolutely love dogs, but my domestic situation means I can’t keep one. My friends laugh at how often I stop to pat dogs in the street.
  11. Through my writing, I’ve met many famous people, and become an unashamed name-dropper. JohnRabbitBundrick, the Texan keyboard player with Free and The Who, once cooked me chilli and cornbread. James Galway and the London Symphony Orchestra played just for me (but he still owes me £15). The picture researcher on my first book was Mary McCartney, daughter of Paul. Bob Geldof once called me a cynic.
  12. I am a certified first-aider, and once saved a man’s life with CPR.
  13. I’ve always done voluntary work. I now do so for the RSPB, such as entertaining children at events (I’m very skilled at making dragonflies from pipe cleaners), and as a trustee of the West Midland Bird Club, for whom I am also webmaster and chairman. In my schooldays, I did conservation work at Moseley Bog Nature Reserve. Later, I was a volunteer for the Birmingham Railway Museum, doing almost everything from engine cleaning to shop sales, and from manning a level crossing to booking guest speakers. I also acted as steward on mainline steam trains, looking after the passengers as we went all over the country. The only place I never worked was on the footplate.
  14. I only passed my driving test at the third attempt, and have since been involved in four collisions requiring insurance claims. Only one, the most minor, was my fault.
  15. I’ve been managing websites since 1994 — the year Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented them founded the W3C (he invented the web in 1991, of course). I’ve been using on-line fora for work and socialising since 1995 since October 1994.
  16. I’ve been stalked online for years. If you search the Usenet archives, you will find fake accounts (including someone pretending to be me) announcing that I’m both a convicted “cottager” and a child abuser (I have a police safety-check certificate which says otherwise), have been sacked by the people who still employ me, and more.
  17. I collect things. If I had unlimited space, I’d collect everything, but I really have to stop myself, and limit my collecting to books, original artwork showing birds, fossils, and old artefacts related to Birmingham, such as bottles and badges and beermats and coins and 78-record sleeves and… Oh dear.
  18. I’m a grammar pedant: I say “fora” not “forums”, and detest the use of “bored of”. I love copy-editing and proof-reading, too.
  19. I had the job of demonstrating the World Wide Web to Michael (now Sir Michael) Lyons; the first time he saw it. He’s now head of the BBC Trust, and ultimately responsible for bbc.co.uk, ““.
  20. The Guardian‘s Ben Goldacre once referred to me as “the ever-vigilant Andy Mabbett“.
  21. I own an original drawing by Bill Oddie, from one of his books, “Birdwatching with Bill Oddie”. It cost just a couple of pounds on e-Bay, in a job lot with a signed photo of Liberace.
  22. I love old street furniture, especially the old cast-iron stuff we have inherited from the Victorian era. One of my achievements was to save the street-urinal from where Birmingham‘s International Convention Centre now stands, for Birmingham Railway Museum (though I don’t think they’ve yet re-erected it).
  23. I hate bananas. I really wish I didn’t as I know they’d be good for me, and are handy to carry when out in the countryside, but I can’t stand the taste or texture. Even the smell makes me feel nauseous. I love almost all other fruits and, as a child, would usually prefer fruit to sweets.
  24. If I go near fresh paint, I can still smell it for a week or more afterwards.
  25. The Duke of Edinburgh once trod on my cousin’s toe.

RIP, Richard Wright

I’ve met and chatted with, or interviewed, every member of the “classic” (1970s) Pink Floyd, apart from Richard Wright. And now I never will.

RIP Richard, the unsung hero of Pink Floyd.