I’m writing this from Aarhus, Denmark, where I’m attending DIS 2010. Aarhus is a lovely city, compact and full of history. Unfortunately, Denmark has shot straight to the top of my list of tea criminals. So far this week I’ve been served boiling hot water in a glass tumbler with no handles, a pot of tea with so many leaves (and no way to remove them) that it turned to bitter sludge, and something green.
I’ve spent the last two days in the Heritage Inquiries workshop talking about preserving cultural heritage, storytelling etc. I wasn’t sure where my work would fit in, but it’s been well-received and I enjoyed hearing about everybody else’s work. Today was spent actually conducting some fieldwork around the city to inform heritage designs, which was a lot fun. Thanks to the organisers and other participants!
Full paper presentation is on Thursday morning, then I can relax and sleep…
I’ve been thinking about magic beans. I’m a sceptic and a rational thinker, and not so much a fan of things like homoeopathy and other “magic beans”. That’s a phrase that rational, sceptic writers tend to use a lot to describe some wonderful, scientifically dubious item that people will buy into to solve their problems or improve their life. It’s used as a derogatory term, because after all, everyone knows Jack was a bit of a fool for accepting magic beans in lieu of payment.
Except that story didn’t really play out that way, did it? I seem to recall Jack ended up rich and happy beyond his wildest dreams.
For many obvious reasons, Jack and the Beanstalk is a pretty dubious children’s story to start with, given that Jack steals from—and in some versions murders—a man who is treated as a villain purely on account of being a giant and trying to defend his home from an intruder. But beyond that, it can be read as a piece of anti-sceptic propaganda that every child knows by heart: the message is “don’t worry about those people telling you you’re an idiot, they’re wrong and you’ll find fortune with your stupid investment”.
It’s an odd message to teach kids, don’t you think?
EDIT: Coming back to this a few days later, I think I might have been a bit too harsh on Jack. It doesn’t take too much effort to think of a few entrepreneurs with stupid investments who really did find their golden goose…
I’ve been hearing a lot about Diaspora in the past few weeks, in the wake of Facebook’s fairly disastrous privacy changes. The idea is that Diaspora will be a new, distributed social network in which no single company, or anybody but you, will control or host your personal data. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that users will run a server on their own computer that hosts their personal data, transferring it securely to their peers on demand.
This is simply an awful idea.
Ignoring the obvious argument about Facebook’s value being that everybody uses it (because we’ve shifted social network en masse before), how would running a server even work? The designers probably have high-speed Internet connections and leave their computers humming in the corner all night. What about normal people who shut their computer down when they’re not using it and probably don’t have anything like the upload bandwidth needed to run a responsive server? Why would anyone other than a computer scientist ever go to this much trouble to use a social network?
Maybe I’ve got it wrong and they’ve thought this through. I’d like to hope so. But if they haven’t it’ll be behaviour entirely consistent with techies. A while back I saw an old lady at a computer workshop looking for help with her new laptop, which her grandson had helped her buy. For a start, the laptop itself must have cost £700-800 and far surpassed her needs, but then her grandson wiped it and set her up with Linux, because it was the ‘best’ operating system. This is typically of techy thinking, but guess what? Your grandma doesn’t give a damn about software freedom. She doesn’t want to tinker with the underlying system and isn’t able to Google answers to her problems. She relies on neighbours for tech support and they don’t know how to fix Linux.
Techies who do things like this should be forced to read Why Software Sucks by David S Platt. Firstly, it’s an awful, smug book written by someone who isn’t half as funny as he thinks he is and reading it will be their punishment. Secondly, it does a fairly good job of explaining exactly why techies do stupid things like this. It uses a great example of car gearboxes: in the US, where most people drive an automatic, a disproportionate number of geeks drive manuals, because they like operating a machine and doing things themselves. Everybody else just wants the car to do it for them.
That’s why Diaspora will suck.
This week I’ve been working on revisions to the WrayDisplay website, which involves a lot of fairly tedious PHP programming: form entry, validation etc. So I’ve been procrastinating and when I procrastinate I tend to mess about with my websites, because it still feels like work. I’d been wanting to redo the site for a while, to neaten it up and bring the blog archives into the main site, and I settled on WordPress to do that rather than sticking with Blogger. (Which led to more PHP coding while I hacked a theme to my liking. Go figure). I was a little sad to see the notepad design go, but it was looking a bit tired–and I think seven years is plenty of mileage out of an idea I stole off somebody else.
In recognition of the occasion, here are thumbnails of some of my dodgy teenage websites, scaled down so you can’t see the embarrassing, embarrassing text:
Speaking of big changes, all I’ve talked about on Twitter or Facebook for about a month is the election, so I think I’ll give it a miss here other than to say the result wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, though as I type its not over yet. The best thing about this statement is that, if I don’t post for another six months, we’ll probably be facing another election and it’ll still be true.
I’m writing this primarily so that the top entry on my homepage is no longer a hilariously outdated post laced with irony, given that two weeks later the entire country, including the bit I was standing in, got covered in a spectacular blanket of snow which subsequently froze into a miserable icy death trap. You probably remember it, it was on the news quite a bit.
There was going to be an entry about how 2010 is looking to be an exciting and terrifying year, but it seems a bit late now that a quarter of the year has vanished. There was also going to be an entry about how I was sitting down to write my thesis, but now I’m two thirds of the way through, so ditto. I won’t say the thesis is going well, because given the events described above, that might cause my computer to corrupt the file or something in two weeks time.
I’m sure 2010 has lots of frights left, notably in about six months time when I have to finally stop being a student, but I’ll probably forget to blog about them too.
I love snow, but it hates me. It avoids me like the plague, fleeing to opposite ends of the country at the slightest hint of my presence.
I don’t remember it ever snowing much in East Yorkshire when I was a kid, but since I moved to Lancaster it seems to get it by the bucketload. Last week it snowed in Goole and most other places except Lancaster. More or less the moment I drove across the Pennines, it stopped snowing here and, predictably, started belting it down over the North West. Meanwhile, I’m stuck with the treacherous icy dregs of last week’s snow bonanza.
Next year I’m going to market myself as a service: “Blizzards forecast? Flying South for Christmas? I’ll loiter around your chosen airport for up to 24 hours in advance, to guarantee clear skies! Dial 0800-NO-SNOWB. The B is for Bargain!”
Oh God, they won. The league of Internet idiots can do anything they want now. Lord help us all.
In case you missed it, there’s a campaign to have Rage Against the Machine reach Christmas #1, just to annoy Simon Cowell. In a shock move, Tom Morello, beneficiary of a huge royalties payout, fully supports the chart race. He plans to donate ‘some’ of his windfall to charity.
Seemingly, few people have noticed that Rage Against the Machine and the X-Factor winners are both signed to Epic Records, a subsidiary of Sony — the corporate personification of The Man if ever there was one. So apparently, we’re going to stick it to The Man by buying lots of his records and giving him both the #1 and #2 spot at Christmas. He’s going to be bloody furious when he finds out.
At the moment, the campaign supporters are celebrating being ahead of X-Factor in the iTunes downloads charts, so it also seems that none of these people realise how many kids will flock to buy the X-Factor on physical CD on Saturday. It’s probably the only single you can still reliably make money on in a physical format. Oblivious to this, they’ll no doubt bemoan a suspicious last minute surge in sales, as if Simon Cowell has been running round all the record shops cackling and buying every copy.
Supporters are quick to point out that they have raised much money for charity by encouraging participants to donate an equal amount to Shelter, which counters the portion of the X-Factor earnings that go to charity. Of course, they could donate twice as much and not bother buying the download, but they don’t seem to mention that.
It’s all a bit of fun, but I’m a bit sick of hearing about it from people who genuinely think they’re going to upset someone by giving them all this money. That said, I don’t mind at all hearing Rage occasionally on Radio 1…
I love Web 2.0. As soon as snow reports started coming in on Twitter, some guy launched a mashup which charted snow on Google Maps, based on tweets that contained a #uksnow tag, your postcode and a score out of 10 (0 for no snow, 10 for a blizzard). It’s brilliant that this sort of thing can spring up , displaying results that are probably more accurate than the official reports. (On a side note, I hate the new BBC Weather site).
Unfortunately, all the technology in the world can’t make it snow in Lancaster…
(Half an hour after I spotted this, the server had died.)
It was only a matter of time before Facebook needed to tackle death. I posted a while back about death and the Internet and the way that people will use social networking profiles as memorials for the deceased, and without wanting to seem morbid, it’s something that fascinates me. Technology in general and social networking specifically is providing new ways of approaching something that very few people are comfortable talking about and I’m pretty interested in seeing how that pans out.
The Facebook development is the ability to report somebody as deceased and have their profile turned into a sort of memorial. The reason for this was a new feature (which I’m not fond of) that suggests people you haven’t spoken to in a while and might want to catch up with. Clearly if a profile goes inactive, you might get a nasty shock in six months’ time.
I just find myself wondering how long it’s going to take for someone to Photoshop a newspaper article and declare one of their friends dead…