Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

This morning Nick Booth and I had intended to blog from Moseley for Birmingham’s Big City of Culture 24 hour blog. We failed spectacularly. However I did interview Nick eating an ostrich burger. He goes on to say how Farmers Markets are a nice cultural thing. Or something. Have a listen anyway: Listen!

For months I’ve been having conversations with people about how we should set up a Rails beginners group in Birmingham, so now I’m actually going to do it. I realise that even among beginners there will be a wide range of expertise levels. Therefore I ask attenders to have at least started trying to write [...]

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited round the new mac before its official opening next weekend. I was really very impressed. I hadn’t been particularly struck by the outside of the building, but now I’ve been inside I see the external fabric in a much more forgiving light. The interior is completely unrecognisable [...]

A lot has been going on recently with regard to digital inclusion and civic engagement. People keep publishing reports that I really ought to read for work, but just don’t have the time to; and even if I did, many of them are pretty impenetrable. So I’m going to spread the load. In April I’ll [...]

A while ago I chewed over the problem of making it easy for members of the public to leave useful contextualised information for others in spite of opposing commercial incentives. Whether their developers intended it or not, foursquare could be the solution. I had been incensed by a cashpoint in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. It [...]

The Custard Factory in Birmingham has become a bit of a joke. It’s looking run-down, and suggests no-one really cares anymore about promoting it as a vibrant space, and no-one really goes there (except for loud music at weekends). Simon Gray just tweeted a small but important change that would vastly improve accessibility for visitors: [...]

Last week I went to hear Lord Carter discuss his Digital Britain Final Report in Birmingham. I took a laptop and tweeted a little. As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here [...]

I’ve been meaning to go for ages, and on Saturday I finally went to Birmingham’s Pen Museum. Nikki Pugh steered me there: I’m not sure I’d have found it otherwise. It’s one of those incredible places that sit politely out of the limelight but are full of cool stuff: in this case, nibs, nibs, nibs, [...]

A few weeks ago Nikki Pugh and I were walking through the empty market stalls in Birmingham, and were struck by how much they resembled table-tennis tables. What a waste, we thought. Yesterday we put that right. Nikki and Charlie, who facilitate the BARG events, organised a bunch of us to meet at the vegetable market [...]

Every year the Birmingham Post polls the region for the top fifty most powerful people in Birmingham. So this year I’m doing the opposite (it’s probably been done before, but who cares). I’m looking for fifty people in Birmingham who are in the public eye but who seem to wield very little power. I’m doing [...]