My dissertation is due in a little over 2 weeks. I may well find myself blogging during that time, but I should probably be heads-down getting the damn thing written and trying to get my planning software up-to-scratch and usable. So for the next couple of weeks things here may get very blogmarkey, but I promise proper content will resume in time for the arrival of my final exams 
Incidentally, today’s Dilbert rocks
Yes, you read the title right — I have 184 open tabs at the moment. Damn Simon for ever introducing me to the ambrosiac addiction that is tabbed browsing!!
But now, dear reader, you get to find out what lovely links there were hiding in those 184 tabs. Or at least in the first 40 — I’m trying to cut down, one full page of tabs at a time….
OK, that’s the first 40 or so closed. And probably a long enough entry for now. The rest will have to wait until tomorrow.
Although social networking sites like Friendster never made much sense to me, LinkedIn seemed to provide a half-decent rationale for the pain of keeping an online contacts list up to date — networking in the business sense of the word. I’ve been using it for a while now and although the interface is fairly pleasant and the functionality is OK, I wasn’t blown away by it until today. When I found this:
Is this incredibly technically difficult? No. Is searching the site a major new invention? No. But this is ostensibly a business site. And the fact that they have taken the time to hack together a search plugin for Firefox makes me think that they might, you know, GET IT. And suddenly I’m much happier using them to make connections.
Some blogs are really informative. Others are more insightful.
But then, there are blogs that make you laugh. That just make you happy. Case in point: MightyGirl talking about advertising in Vegas and Molly wondering about her angels.
This is what it’s all about.
UPDATE: This also made me happy today. I’m not sure why the story of someone giving birth in their bathroom makes me happy, but hey, at least it’s not artificial intelligence planning methodologies. You’ve gotta be thankful for the LITTLE THINGS, man.
These leaflets arrived this week. They’re individually addressed — one for each registered voter in the house. Each with postage paid as well. So what’s the problem? Well, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that they’d cut back on waste in government, does it?
As if this wasn’t enough to completely irritate me, the muppet campaign crew driving up and down every street in our neighbourhood with a megaphone shouting that we should vote Conservative that woke me up this morning definitely was.
As if I’d vote for the party whose current leader championed Section 28.
I teach a Speedreading course, having been lucky enough to be exposed to the practices during high school and having benefitted from the ability a great deal. Despite the fact that the course is multi-faceted and the most attention is given to techniques to help increase reading speed (without losing comprehension), those are not the sections of the course that people rave about. The single most useful concept in the whole course, the thing that makes people come up to me months later and thank me profusely (again!) for teaching them, is the concept that you don’t have to read everything — that you should cull some of the emails and blogs and websites and papers and books and magazines and the myriad other things that are piling up on your desk (both literally and electronically) and JUST LET IT GO. DO SOMETHING MORE WORTHWHILE.
This is how I’ve decided that this is the most important thing that anyone can ever learn:
Be sure why you’re doing stuff
So many people seem to do things without knowing why it will be useful, without seeing that the time saved could be used in so many better ways. Perhaps we all just need to find the preferences page in our minds and change the “Assume everything is worthwhile” setting to something more like “Require proof of worthiness”. Maybe that’ll help us all take back our lives.
The only problem with moving programming languages (in this case from Java to Python) is that the little problems can be big and difficult to find. Case in point: not realising that you’d declared the main data storage variable as a class rather than instance variable.
Ouch!
A while ago Molly posted a great critique of some recent news articles about the lack of diversity in the top tier of the blogosphere. Thoughts about this have been stewing in the back of my mind ever since and although I’m not sure of the coherence, I do have some things to say.
Firstly, people are not the same. Personally I don’t think that diversity is about making everyone indistinguishable, but rather about celebrating differences. I don’t agree with targets, since I’ve seen what they can do. I don’t think men are the same as women, I don’t think all cultures are interchangeable and I don’t think anyone is better off by people pretending so!
The best illustration I have seen of this is the melting pot vs salad bowl metaphor. During the 80s and 90s, many companies and even countries were actually trying to achieve monoculturalism — taking all different types of people and teaching them to behave in the same way, much as when you take many ingredients and place them in a melting pot, a sort of untextured mush is all that results. The ideal is more like a salad bowl (pluralism) — individual elements are identifiable and can be enjoyed separately as well as in concert with the other flavours.
This is the advantage of true diversity — you get to celebrate and benefit from the differences between people. Got a different viewpoint on how to solve a problem at work? Brilliant! Best way to avoid Groupthink is to make it unlikely that everyone can have the same viewpoint. Haven’t you all worked in teams where each member appears to be just a carbon copy of every other? Isn’t it refreshing when someone new, different, with alternative experience and viewpoints comes in and turns everything upside down?
Back to the problem of the blogosphere. Part of the problem here is the definition of what is seen to be the “good content” of blogs (especially technical blogs) — most of the very popular technical blogs are extremely focused. They are quite narrow in what they encompass, very detailed, even extending to code samples a great deal of the time. They are also almost exclusively written by men.
I have a few theories as to why this is:
Thus, I think there may be a grain of truth to the white male bloggers produce the best product argument — they do produce the most attractive product for a predominantly white male audience. Women write differently — as do non-Westerners. It’s even pretty evident that there’s a difference in style between white British male bloggers and white American male bloggers. There’s a greater difference evident when the people themselves are more different. So part of the issue is the perception of what is a “good blog” and part is the audience.
But what do we do about most blog readers (at least in the tech world) being white males from English-speaking bits of the world? How can female bloggers be A-list in this kind of environment?
There are three chief strategies:
Women tech bloggers do exist — there was a roomful of them at SXSW in the Where Are The Women of Web Design session. But even in person, style differences were evident. It was the only panel I attended where both audience members and panelists were laptop-lite. A number of people came up afterwards to me and introduced themselves. It stood out to me as a very different experience, in a very good way. And the web being the fertile ground for infinite opportunity that it is, I think we can make it the same here.
With the advent of digital cameras and Flickr providing the tipping point to online photo sharing, I’ve suddenly realised that I have a lot of hardcopy photos. I even used to be good at organising them (usually when I had better things to do — say exams to study for) and so I have albums and albums of trips, gatherings and celebrations.
I know that now you can take your digital camera’s memory card into some photo stores and print directly off it. I want the reverse service (something like the document scanning services in India) — somewhere to send my negatives or prints and have them scanned & stored in an image format of my choosing.
So, this is me asking the blogosphere — anyone know of anything like this? If not, if you start up a company with this idea, please let me know so I can avail myself of your services…
Following Nick Barlow’s recent entries, I felt I just had to get involved with the Conservative Poster Game. Here’s my contribution:
[For those of you who are overseas and therefore scratching your heads at this, see this article and look under Character Criticism]
Has anyone else noticed that Technorati appears to be b0rked? I check it every now and again to see if anyone new is linking here, but for the past month or so trying to look at anything but the first page of cosmos links appears impossible:
On a sidenote, isn’t it ironic that links from Tantek himself aren’t showing up in my Technorati cosmos?
There’s a great little sushi place at the railway station in Bath that I frequently breakfast at when I’m travelling. The first time I went in there, I noticed something strange and took this picture — all over the walls there are photos of live seafood. This is quite common in seafood restaurants and doesn’t seem strange on its own, but can you imagine if McDonalds had pictures of live cows & chickens up on the walls??
I wonder what it is in our minds that makes it appetising to see the original live animal when it’s seafood, but not beef or chicken.
The great thing about going to a conference in Austin was that we got to see old friends again and to hang around for a few days after SXSWi had finished. These days quickly devolved into a “food, guns and ink” tour of Austin.
We came, we ate, we sat back in our chairs too stuffed to change the channel from Fox News. Never doubt that Austin is an absolutely amazing place to be from a food point of view.
The most obvious delicacy (if it can be described as such) is of course barbeque. Having heartily enjoyed our original BBQ at Ironworks on the first day of SXSW, imagine our shock when we were told that this was “crappy, tourist barbeque”!
On a previous visit to Austin, I had been taken out into the countryside to visit both the Oakridge Smokehouse and the Salt Lick, but this time around we didn’t have quite enough time to travel out to either. So, we went for the local option, the sublime John Mueller’s BBQ. It was very very good. I had ribs, but based on the brisket taster that everyone gets slapped down on their plate, I probably should have gone for that. What I really love about BBQ in general in Austin is the casual way it is treated — you’re eating some of the best food you’ve ever tasted … with a plastic knife & fork (or just your hands!) off a paper plate on a plastic tray.
As previously mentioned, we also went to El Chile Cafe, an absolutely excellent Mexican place. Personally, I’m always quite wary about Mexican food. It’s very different from both the South African fare I was brought up on and the blander British food I’m now used to — not to say that’s a bad thing, just that I’m never quite sure if I’ll love or hate something. I was pleasantly surprised by how tasty the special I had was (I can’t for the life of me remember what it was tho!) and others around the table seemed to especially enjoy the prickly pear margheritas they were sipping on.
Since we were lucky enough to be staying with friends who own an Italian deli, they felt they just couldn’t let us out of the country until we had experienced the produce from Pasta & Co in all its gastronomic glory. And glorious it was — the table groaned with everything from pumpkin & walnut ravioli through to fresh egg pasta with vodka sauce. Following this with lamingtons and other hedonous desserts was too much for us, but some not only managed to eat their tiramisu, but also to serenade it.
Remind me of this next time I complain my life is uneventful, OK?
Is ice-cream really its own category? I hear you mutter. Of course it is! Especially when you have the wonders of Amy’s Ice Cream to experience. Since we first came across it on St Patrick’s day, Simon partook of Guinness ice-cream, whilst Elly and I chose some slightly more conventional but no less delicious options from their normal menu. There was also a little mini-version at the airport, where we saw the best tip jar sign ever:
The day before we left for home, we managed to get out to Red’s shooting range with a variety of guns lent to us by a friend. I thought that most of the excitement would be in shooting 3 handguns, 2 assault rifles and some other smaller weapons, but in fact most of the entertainment came from watching Si & Elly discover the joys of gunpowder:
More can be found over at my Flickr guns tag
Last time I was in Austin I had a tattoo of a wolf done (which you can see here) which was the first I had designed for me. The designer & tattooist was a lady called Karen Slafter at SouthSide Tattoos. She is the best tattooist I’ve ever seen — fast & light of touch, but very creative and inventive with her use of colours and movement. This time I had a mountain lion done:
It was amazing — she took about half an hour (with her various animal encyclopaedias and so on) to design it and only 45 minutes to ink it. If you’re ever thinking of having ink done, she’s absolutely brilliant and I couldn’t recommend her more highly. Elly got a new tat as well, a fish to accompany her existing one, as you can see here.
[NOTE: Hell, I am sooo bad at writing up drafts. But nevertheless, I figure I should still say this stuff, if only to keep the magic of SXSW alive in my own head for a little longer. Apologies is this is so March by now ]
Since we were staying with friends in Austin (in exchange for a new website for their fantastic Italian deli and fresh pasta market) and because of jetlag, we didn’t attend all that many of the evening events. Nevertheless, a run-down of my favourites is obligatory, so here it is.
By far my favourite evening event at SXSWi this year was Vox Nox at the Red Eyed Fly. We had been there the night before, for Fray Cafe 5 (thanks to Jeremy for explaining the first time round and reminding me again by email when my brain turn sieve-like), which was also very entertaining. Vox Nox, however, beat it hands down. From Curt Cloninger doing his punk thing, through Molly managing to get ‘avarice’ into a song lyric, to Eric Meyer making the whole front row cry with his very moving storytelling, it was just amazing.
It of course didn’t hurt that we followed this up with the most fantastic Mexican meal ever, combined with excellent company in the form of Zoom, T and Simon (who shall, according to the Austinites, henceforth be known as Niles or Nigel).
Honestly I think the venue for this was a mistake. It was difficult to circulate and meet people, I’m told the beer was crap lite stuff (I don’t drink anymore) and generally it didn’t seem to even resemble the cool parties of previous years that everyone talked about. Nevertheless, we did have some fun. Highlights included getting branded by MJ, getting promoted to the First Team in Quidditch and hanging with the Britpack a little, which we hadn’t done much of previously.
The really cool extramural stuff at SXSWi was just hanging out with cool people though. From barbeque on the first day, to having lunch with a table-full of unpresuming but famous people, to hanging out with Molly, Anders and others in the Hilton Bar, performing cunning acts of furniture stealing with Ping just prior to the Web Awards and so on and on. Generally just being surrounded by loads of friendly, smart people was more than enough reason to go all the way to Austin.
“Paul Anderson told several hundred Charlotte business and civil leaders at a breakfast meeting.” [Emphasis mine]
What the hell kind of breakfast meeting has several hundred attendees??
NOTE: Another problem with using an RSS reader is that when I open up a link from there (usually because I want to blog it…), essentially any useful referrer information is lost. Why can’t bloglines whack the site name rather than ID into the referrer URL?? Thus, excuses & apologies to anyone who’s links I’ve nicked and not acknowledged
I’ve never quite got the hang of backups. I know there are all these great tools out there, but I make lists of ones to look at and then something else rises to the top of the urgent stack and I fail to get around to it. The only style of backup that I have consistently managed is the nuke & pave — when I’m reinstalling, or moving to a new operating system, then I fish out the really important things, am surprised by how little I really can’t live without, burn a couple of CDs and hope for optical media integrity.
I really should have worked it out by now. Likewise, I should have gotten good enough at ssh etc to be able to just transfer files from one machine to another. But still I find myself emailing things across.
I’ve decided to stop feeling bad about it though. I’ve decided to think of it as a human solution. Because now I have 2GB of Gmail storage, every email is just accidental backup.
My watch broke last week. This was a major event for me, since I a) love the watch and b) check the damn thing every 2 minutes because I’m so busy I have to live by the clock. So I sent it in to get sorted (the lovely people at Animal have replaced the broken strap for free twice now, because they think that watch straps shouldn’t break) and they rang me yesterday to let me know what was up with it. I was in the middle of something and so not really in info-receiving mode when I spoke to them. I remember the key points (that my watch is being fixed, that they’re also going to whack a new battery in it and check the mechanism), but not the details (when I’ll get my watch back!!).
So, my personal organic memory has failed me. I wonder though, with Moore’s Storage Law resulting in affordable storage like 1 Terabyte harddrives, how long it will take before my cellphone has the capacity to record every conversation I have automatically, just IN CASE I want to go back and listen to something again.
The real point of leveraging solipsism is this:
If you can let your users do what they want to do anyway, but get some sort of emergent behaviour that is more broadly useful, then you’re on to a winner.
This is why the old corporate groupware angle so seldom took off — people won’t do things for the good of the group unless there is a distinct personal benefit to themselves. The only example I can think of where this DOES work, is the calendar functionality of some corporate email packages. The group benefit is that when setting up a meeting it is evident when the entire group is free. The personal reason to keep your electronic calendar updated, however, was primarily driven by the ability to sync Palmpilot with primary computer — people wanted to have one calendar including both the meetings arranged by email and those set up on their palms, so they synced, which allowed the group benefit.
Over on the brilliant new Fight The Bull blog, there’s been an ongoing saga about Amazon sales ranks. It culminated in their receiving a reply (of sorts) to their questions from some underling that failed completely to give clarity. The observations in the entry about this rang so true with me that I felt I had to propagate them:
It’s worth noting that we give Jeff considerable props in our book. He is one of the few CEOs we point to as beacons of clarity and personality. I have even been lucky enough to meet him, and he is indeed a humble, witty guy — full of spunk and character. I am a big fan.
Which is why this interaction with him is so distressing. Because in a million years, on his worst day at the office, if Amazon was bleeding cash, if the stock was in the toilet, even if he just found out his wife was leaving him, he never would have responded this way.
At the beginning of every conversation we have about the book, the other party invariably asks, “So, why do business people speak like idiots?” Well, this is precisely why. Because we outsource our voice to people who don’t have the confidence or clout to communicate with humor or humanity.
People are worried about outsourcing work. I think they need to worry more about outsourcing their voice, their personality and their spark. Perhaps this is where it all goes wrong in the progression from startup -> massive company.
Over in the Guardian’s blogging section there’s an interesting question about whether professional blogs need to try harder for accuracy. I’m not a professional blogger, I’m not a journalist and so I don’t really have a major opinion about this, but I will say one thing:
So often when I read a mainstream media story about something that I know about, it scares me how vague, inaccurate or downright fabricated it is.
It makes you wonder if the accuracy is similar in those articles where you DON’T know the background or the reality. Fact-checking for the mainstream media appears to just consist of calling up some intern in the office in question and getting them to agree to your representation of events. I’m not sure that this is something anyone should be aspiring to mimic.
