Meriblog: Meri Williams’ Weblog

Tara is attentive

Originally uploaded by ellythompson.

I’m going on a business trip tonight. As a result, this is about to happen — Tara (our new dog, who we’ve had for about 8 weeks now) is going to come with Elly to fetch me from work. She recognises my office building and will sit very attentively staring at the entrance until I come out.

When I do she’ll madly wag her tail and go “arooo!” as I come towards the car. There’s a little ritual then when I let her out and give her a treat for waiting so patiently. Then we all get in the car and go home. Same as every day.

Except this time I’ll get home, pack my stuff up and then disappear for the rest of the week. I’m a little worried at how both the ladies in my life will cope.

I imagine you out there will be fine though. Especially since I bestow upon you all these photos of Tara that Elly recently uploaded.

Enjoy! I’ll see ya in a few days.

• Scott makes some very good points about how video content being available online can be good for everyone. So long as the sums are done right at the beginning
• However much I like Python, I have to agree that for web programming I would also choose Ruby. For similar reasons as Hans: it’s messy and it has Rails
• There’s a really cool interview with MJ on Sfist. Go read!
• Matt is leaving CNet. Can’t say I’m really surprised, but good on him for being brave enough to just go do what he wants!
• I think Joel is brilliant anyway, but I especially love it when he bitches

Today on Maggie’s Mightygoods blog, I noticed a product called Terrapass. It’s essentially a little green licence you buy for your car — the money you give is proportional to the environmental damage your car causes and is spent on projects that neutralise that damage.

My first thought on this was it was a bit too first-world-get-out-of-jail-free. Rich people can’t live without the convenience of a car, so they’ll just pay their way out of their social responsibility. Then I realised that it is one of the cleverest concepts I’ve seen in a long while.

I’ve written before about how being green needs to be easy. People need a reason to do things and the warm cuddly feeling you get inside from saving forests in a distant land isn’t enough for some people. That’s why more people will campaign to stop a local green belt (really just a strip of grass) from being developed than will try to do something to save the Amazon.

That said, if the effort to do things is pretty similar, but one action carries that “feel good”, or a moral imperative, or whatever factor that makes it more desirable, then it is more likely to be taken. So, for your average person who drives their own car to work, they might consider public transport as an alternative. They might even try it for a week. But then after it takes twice as long, seems more expensive and doesn’t allow them to sing along loudly to Queen on their way to work, they’ll probably go back to the car.

Projects like Terrapass give people an easy way to be greener. Which is bound to be more successful than preaching or getting between your kids and their happy meals.

• I was never really a dolls kinda gal, but now that there’s an Electra doll I might just change my mind! via GGA
• In Japan they’re talking about introducing compulsory microchipping for dangerous animals. Personally I think microchipping is a good idea for ALL animals, but then if people don’t care they might not keep the details up-to-date, so it might not be much help.
• It seems that dagga might make you smart! Since it’s an integral part of a variety of traditional cultures, I’m not exactly surprised by this
• The idea of getting real-time traffic data by tracking cellphones seems a very clever way of turning data into information. There are of course privacy concerns, but if it didn’t get too big brother it might just be useful
• I can’t believe that whether evidence obtained via torture should be used is even a QUESTION. Outsourcing torture should be abhorred, not supported

You know what bugs me? Having to keep track of comments manually. I’m a gregarious kinda gal, so if I read something that I have something to say about, I say it. If there are comments open, then that’ll be my medium of choice. But if I read a bunch of interesting things one day and as a result make a bunch of comments, keeping track of the conversation after that can be a bit difficult!

What I would love is something like Flickr’s “Comments You’ve Made” page. This show’s you all the photos you’ve commented on, as well as pulling in responses since you last said something. The big advantage is that you can go to one place to follow all the conversations and you also only need to revisit the original page if you particularly want to say something else.

I’ve often wondered why blog comments weren’t anywhere near as “sticky” as forums, emails lists and so on always were. I think a massive part of it is because of the distributed content, it’s much more difficult to keep up with what’s being said. The net effect is less participation, which isn’t much good for anyone.

Yesterday I ended up with a Firefox window within which all the tabs were new or nearly new web apps. I figured I’d do a quick round-up of funky stuff that had appeared in the last year or so, that I think is particularly cool:

• Gmail — this has seriously revolutionised my use of email. Massive storage, great features, nice UI, all add up to a great user experience. I absolutely hate going back to the desktop email software we use at work. Favourite feature: conversation grouping
• Bloglines — web-based feed reader. Brings together all the website updates you want to know about in one place. Great way of keeping up with things, but can be difficult to manage the information overload if you oversubscribe. Favourite feature: ability to “keep new”
• Writeboard — online document collaboration. Haven’t been able to use this extensively yet, but planning it!
• 43 Everything: first 43 Things, then 43 Places and now 43 People. I think MJ said it best:
  

  “One login. One id. Multiple obsessive todo/tovisit/tomeet lists.
  Your OCD in me is pleased. “

• Flickr! — this has changed not only the way I share photos, but how much I use my phone. Thanks to Nat for eventually convincing me!

Strictly Come Dancing is back and we are all set to get completely addicted to it again, as we did last year.

Highlight so far: Lilia appears to have turned Darren Gough into a dancing queen. Hilarious!!

• Greg Storey has written a great article about why having a strategy is so important for websites, entitled Never Start A Land War In Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason). Amazingly, neither the title nor the quote below is the best thing about the article. So you should really read it.
  

  “In a perfect world, the client would’ve had the business rules worked out prior to starting a project, leaving the designer to wallow in artistic brilliance while a co-ed rolls by on a Segway drinking a soy protein shake, but as you all know, utopia doesn’t exist and it’s almost impossible to drive a Segway with one hand.”

• There’s a great little tutorial about writing quick analytical programs with django. It’s a wonderful illustration of why doing things quickly and adhoc can be really powerful
• MJ has found some WONDERFUL tshirts. Go help her choose which one to get
• Dave’s put his full articles back on the front page! Yay!
• This little insight of Aaron’s is really quite scary
• Matt has written a wonderful, heartfelt, informative and lovely article about his son and his recently diagnosed ASD. Definitely worth a read. via Mr Haughey
• Over at DaringFireball, there’s a rundown of Wednesday’s Mac announcements — the most interesting thing to me is that the new iPods don’t have firewire. At all. This is quite surprising — I thought that iPods might actually drag the rest of the world into using Firewire, not that they’d abandon it. As iPod sizes increase, I would have thought fast computer < --> device transfer would have gotten more important, not less
• Jeremy has the best summary of what microformats are EVER. Incidentally, Mark Pilgrim rocks especially when he’s doing his battle-hardened standards warrior bit

Elly and I are proud to present I Love Belle & Herbs. It’s a tribute to Newcastle’s best cafe, which just happens to be just around the corner from where we live It takes the form of a group blog (anyone can register and post), the point of which is to document every item on the EXTENSIVE (as in 5 A3 sides) menu.

So, if you’re not able to get to Belle and Herbs to try it out, just go drool.

If you live in Newcastle, or just visit sometimes, then get yourself along to Belle & Herbs and try something! Take a photo, register and then post a review.

Alternatively, if you know us and just need that one extra reason to come and visit, well isn’t this enough?

Over a year ago, I started using an RSS reader. I chose to use Bloglines, because at the time I was actively using about 4 different computers, so having one centralised, web-accessible list to read was very useful.

My experience of using Bloglines (and I think this will transfer to any feedreader really) is that it’s great when you have enough time to keep up. If you know you’ll be able to unbold every post, every day, then everything’s peachy. However, when things start getting busy and you no longer have the chance to skim all 50 WorldChanging posts that have been made that day, or to catch up with various other high-volume blogs, then you’re a bit screwed.

The past year has been a bit hectic for me — first we all got mumps, then came the stress of multiple sets of exams and a dissertation to write. Once all the academic stuff was finished, we had to find a house, buy and completely remodel it and I had to graduate too. So all in all, this year wasn’t exactly awash with time to unbold things.

So what’s my point? Essentially that I am probably going to stop using an RSS reader in the near future. There’s too much of the good content that I really value that has piled up to an extent that I need to set aside hours to sift through even one. If I could be sure that life would get back to “normal” and I’d have the time to read my favourite blogs properly every day, then I’d probably stick with it. But I’m pretty sure that won’t be the case, so rather than become like a lot of people I know who really just skip through most of the things that they aim to read, I’m going to try to find another way around the problem.

Does it matter to you all if I no longer use an RSS reader? Probably not. So why am I writing about it? I think my point is that although the RSS reader is a useful piece of software, it has always been trying to solve the wrong problem. Letting you read all your blogs in one place, so you needn’t visit each site individually does save time. But it really doesn’t reduce the data overload that we all have from trying to keep up. Arguably, part of the problem is that we don’t feel we can rely on other data sources any longer — I mean how many people these days actually read tech news to keep up with what’s going on?

Another problem is that with more and more web-related conferences and blogger meetups, there are more blogs that we’re keeping up with just so we know what our friends are saying. The blogs that I did manage to keep up-to-date with over the past year almost all belonged to people I’d met in person, or which I regarded more as “light relief”. It’s easy to read a light-hearted, short article even if you have very little time.

I think my main point is that however much RSS seems a time-saver, we still haven’t solved the essential problem — we have too much information to process. Until we start focusing on this, rather than incremental increases in speed of processing, then we’re always going to be swamped.

• Schools are apparently having to actively focus on boys’ education because they are being so significantly outperformed by girls. On the one hand, I think it’s great that they’re seeing the problem and trying to address it — on the other, a little voice in the back of my head predicts that girls achieving better than boys at school might finally sort out the current imbalance in business
• This recent article talking about how children who eat school dinners are healthier than those with packed lunches does kind of miss the fundamental point — this doesn’t mean that the sort of school lunches that Jamie Oliver rails against are actually OK, it just means that parents really are completely useless about nutrition!
• Reading Gina’s recent article about moving from one coast to the other, I was suddenly reminded of how alien the UK seemed when I first moved here, almost 5 years ago now. For months I felt like I was in a dream, like I’d wake up and be back home in South Africa, complaining about the heat rather than trudging through snow to work. Much as Gina’s experience is a different set of opposite weather, I think she’s being really brave — moving from where you’ve been for all your life and your family have been for longer is damn hard. Good on ya, girl
• This quote made me laugh today. And reminded me of the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator
• I’m still gutted that I had to miss Web Essentials 05, but Doug has a nice write-up that makes me more gutted but somewhat mollified as well
• Yahoo’s latest smart move
• Astronomers have discovered a moon around the newly found 10th planet, Xena, so they’ve named it Gabrielle. Bless. Via Gabbahead
• The Bacon of the Month Club seems too decadent an idea to even consider. Wow. Via MightyGoods
• I love the Uncyclopedia
• This makes me slightly less concerned about our slightly obsessive coverage of the great breakfasts at Belle and Herbs

When Google Talk came out, I have to admit that I wasn’t massively impressed. The IM didn’t seem substantially different (although there are some great little UI details) and it was annoying that noone else seemed to be using it. I liked how well it tied into my Gmail contacts list and so on, but still the benefits didn’t seem overwhelming.

That is to say until the other day, when Elmyra and I needed to talk about something and decided we might as well try to use Google Talk’s call facility.

Firstly, it is seriously intuitive. You literally just click on the call button. That’s it. Secondly, the conversation quality once you’re talking is really amazing. I for one was using a crappy inbuilt laptop microphone and speaker, but with that on my lap the quality was just about as good as when I use my mobile phone. Admittedly, at times there was a little bit of echo, but I imagine had be both been using headsets that would have been mitigated.

The key thing though is that Google have delivered a product that I would happily teach my parents to use. Hell, I’m seriously considering just buying the entire FAMILY headsets for Xmas and giving them a little business card-sized set of instruction as to how to set it up. It’s that simple, I think they would all easily be able to use it, so long as they had the right tech.

The other rather clever thing that is part of the entire Google package is that because I think they’re basically not an evil company, unlike some we could mention, I will happily recommend them. This is because I can trust that it won’t come back to bite me later, when some horrible bit of spyware has ravaged the pc, leaving me spending the entire Xmas vacation reinstalling Windows.

All in all, every new move that Google makes has me thinking they’re just getting smarter and smarter.

This story about Sony losing the battle to stop a supplier selling mod chips for Playstations is very interesting. Essentially, the Playstation had the first real form of DRM — you couldn’t play copies of games without patching the hardware.

This ruling says that mod chips are not an infringement of copyright. I wonder how long it will be before we see similar test cases with CD players, DVD players and so on. I think this decision, however insignificant it might seem now, will potentially bring about the downfall of DRM.

But hell, what do I know?

Peter Snow is hanging up his swingometer. I’m afraid that the UK will never be able to have a real general election again. Is this the end of British democracy?

This really isn’t a blog about cats. It isn’t even a particularly personal blog a lot of the time — although a lot more “hybrid” than a lot of tech blogs, it’s still pretty far from a Livejournal.

Today, we have an exception.

This morning, Elly & I went to go have breakfast at our usual weekend breakfast place — Belle & Herbs cafe. We discovered it when we originally came up househunting. Along the way we found a cat, who decided to take us for a walk. It was a cute little thing and we stopped and played with it for a bit, then carried on to go have breakfast.

When we got to the cafe, though, we noticed a sign saying someone had lost a young black cat — pretty similar sounding to the one who was trying to adopt us and was following us around. Just then I noticed it trying to cross the road and only barely got to it in time to stop it being squished by a car — the roads around there are pretty busy.

We eventually (with the help of the cafe staff) realised that the cat did in fact have one of those little pendants that holds a scrap of paper with name and address on it and worked out it was not the lost cat of the sign. Since the home was a few streets away, across a few busy roads, we decided we’d take the cat home and then have breakfast.

Unfortunately, just as we got ready to go, the cat decided it had had enough of this game, gave a vicious scratch and jumped out of our arms and went running straight into the street. Watching, horrified, we saw it get hit by two cars in quick succession. I ran out into the road and stopped the third car that was coming just in time and scooped the cat off the road. He was covered in blood, pupils completely different sizes and from the horrendous noises when the cars had hit, I was really worried that he was dying.

A girl stopped and helped us, calling the numbers for the cat’s owners, whilst Elly called our vet and I tried to calm the cat. She couldn’t get through to them, but the second number on the paper turned out to be their daughter, who is now living in Edinburgh apparently. The daughter said she’d make sure her parents knew and we told her where the vets was that we were about to take the cat to.

Just then, the people from the first car that had hit the cat arrived, very distraught. They offered to take me to the vets, since their car was closer than ours. So I got in, cradling the cat which was shedding hair and blood all over me very rapidly. I seriously thought it was going to die in my arms.

Since we had rung ahead, as soon as we arrived at the vets the nurse took the cat in and looked him over. We waited around, a strange crew — the older couple who had hit the cat, myself & Elly and the student who had stopped and helped. After a short while a man arrived, somewhat upset, and explained to the receptionist that he’d got a call from his daughter in Edinburgh to say that his cat had been run over and was here. We all introduced ourselves and explained what had happened. He then went outside to call his wife and daughter and update them.

As he did so, the nurse came out and told us that she thought the cat was going to be OK. He was concussed and evidently shaken up, but had no fractures and apparently the blood was just from a nasty gash on the inside of his mouth. A few hours later I called up and apparently they’d done x-rays and so on and there really wasn’t much wrong. When I talked to them they said he was sitting up and just waiting to have stitches put in the cut in his mouth.

I have no idea how he survived being hit four separate times and thrown a good few car lengths, but I’m glad the little guy is OK.