July 2003 Archives

Blogstop is a game played on a weblog, or in a comments section of a weblog entry. You must write an entry using the last word of the previous entry as the initial letter for each word of your entry. Have a look at the orginal game on blogstop, where there are some further rules and the metafilter post on it. Thanks to Ben Hammersley, on whose site I saw it first.

Funny game from Dan, based on the news that Arial now dominates as the standard font for everything for those not in the know. Mention of this prompted a round office discussion on fonts, showing a wide disparity in views, with the exception of Comic Sans, which was revilled.
Play here and help Helvetica win
Once upon a time I learnt an awful lot about glyphs, character encodings and fo(u)nts whilst working in localization, this taught me that fonts are kind of cool, not that I really know how to use them.

On this picture you can see two of the harder climbs I've done. On the left of the buldge is alledgely my hardest climb "Lieback". On the right, up the crack is "Ringo" I felt that this was harder at the time.
The feeling of satisfaction you get from climbing to the top on a lead is wonderful. It is a combination of problem solving, physical power and managing fear.

Lucy choosing gear on Wobblestone Crack


Lucy just before the crux on Wobblestone, with a nice line of gear below her

The clouds look fake, I know, but the weather was gorgeous. The climb is so named as the small block in the middle of the crack in the lower picture rocks as you put your hand on it, but it hasn't moved in 70 odd years. This nicely shows lead climbing, as you can see the rope running up to her and the protection in the crack below.

We are buying a rack and are going to climb on gritstone again. Leading means that the first climber is tied onto one end of the rope and places protection to keep him / her safe in the event of a fall. For more information see this glossary. A rack is the collection of bits of protection you place in cracks in the rock.
In fact we are going to climb on these cliffs at Burbage North. Here are some pictures of others climbing at Burbage North.
More on Monday...

MSNBC creative of a bag scanning game, I missed one threat.... it is a lot harder than it seems.

Is it inevitable that technological tools feature creep. Mobile phones started as a tool to make a call, with a small facility to store numbers. Then SMS arrived and gradually phones have had more and more things added to them. So much so that the basic talking to people function is not the focus of the device anymore.
I have also been reading an article on the possible future of camera like devices and some thoughts struck me - is there a market for a simple phone or simple camera and what do I carry with me and what do I really need and use.
I have my camera, a Canon Powershot A70; my phone, a Sony Ericsson T68i and my PowerBook. Bluetooth connects them together via a D-Link USB Bluetooth Adapter DBT-120. I tend to carry my PowerBook, phone, camera and of course I bring my iPod (30GB, 15GB and 10GB) virtually everywhere with me. The new ones do look very nice, particularily the ability to use AA batteries with them.
My palm pilot sits forlorn and dormant at home, until I get moblogging ideas from time to time. It has been displaced by my phone and a sheet of paper.
I did use my palm quite a lot, but with a powerbook, there just isn't the call for it and it is just easier to use paper to keep my todo lists on. I've found that a folded bit of A4 in my jeans pocket is perfect for running my life, much faster to use than a pda. It affords use, there is virtually no user interface to it, the idea is almost funny. I can check it anywhere, to integrate with everything else, I manually transfer tasks from it to my laptop from time to time, usually when rewriting it. Most of the jobs on it are transient tasks, like call someone etc, so there need be no record.
My phone keeps my numbers and a snapshot of my calendar via iSync with my PowerBook which is the home for everything. With a digital camera I do take a lot more pictures than I did on film, but it is still quite in fits and starts.
I think that three to four devices is my limit, one to communicate with, one to listen to and one to capture pictures with. Plus my computer for writing, organising and storing all of this. Realistically I cannot see any of these devices disappearing.
I like taking pictures too much to loose the amount of control that camera phones represent. I need some manual control and a decent lens, this is present in the A70, but my film camera is still much more of a picture taking tool. I cannot imagine putting a bulky device like a combo pda phone in my pocket and carrying it around with me everywhere. I dislike the P800 or the new three phones for this reason, much too big.
The iPod is pretty perfect, even better now it is smaller and lighter. the design has been thought about clearly and it is just right for use as a music playback device. It would never work as a camera, though it could have a radio or video playback added without spoiling it too much.
So for me it is focused devices that do one job well and do not obscure it under a morasse of other functionaility. Certain features might be handy, GPS can give me location and then with internet access this can give me local information. However this is an add on, like word processors, phones have got to the point were they attempt to do everything badly.
This seems to be turning into an anti-pda and or smart phone rant and it sort of is I suppose, laptops are getting cheaper and better, so a phone, laptop and camera dispenses with the need for a pda smart phone type device. I can't see the point anymore, I'd rather have a decent screen to read and a large keyboard to type on. I know that my pda can offer me amazing things, but are they really just a glorified notebook for the laptopless. I don't want to have to carry another device around and keep it up todate with everything else. Technology is meant to solve problems, not create them. More on this and short reviews of some things I like in the next few days.

Lucy: the whole insurance business is based on a combination of fear and inertia, they scare you into buying it and they hope that inertia will keep you paying the premiums year after year.
So we have been doing something about it, checking car and house and travel insurance. Re-mortgaging our house and moving credit card debt yet again to another zero percent card. Utility bills are next maybe and then there is always ebay. We have saved several hundred each month to spend on holidays. Make some calls and fill in some forms and it is quite easy really.
Thus endeth the public service announcement.

We've finally managed to put up the climbing finger board that Lucy bought me. It is from Metolius and is for training at home. Some people convert whole rooms, but we have a small bit of the room off the kitchen. It is growing mind you (bought two packs of these), now that we have mastered drilling holes for boards in brick. Given a larger house, who knows what we might create.
The installation guides, as supplied by Metolius, are for wooden buildings, not brick ones, so some experimentation was required. Drill straight and when marking off the board use some small nails so that the board does not move whilst marking where to drill. I used 4 inch deck screws on three-quarter inch plyboard. Measure twice and cut once and all that.
So this will be the training regime for the rest of the summer, plus climbing at Mile End and outdoors at Stanage.

I like the Tour de France, I think it is a fascinating event. I have always enjoyed cycling and a few years ago Lucy bought me the Lance Armstrong autobiography, which is an interesting book. It covers the inside view on the professional road cycling industry and the politics of the Tour. It is also a personal history of a fight against cancer and wonderful success story. The title "It's not about the bike" is very apt.
The BBC are covering it in quite a bit of depth on the news site, with a quiz too. ITV have the TV coverage this year.
On Friday the was a Radio4 programme on 100 years of the Tour de France, I managed to miss it, but Lucy enjoyed it. A journalist sits in a cafe and experiences the Tour, a wonderful example of Radio 4.
I'm sure that Lance will win it again this year, making it five times in a row. When he recovered from cancer he rebuilt all the muscles in his body purely for cycling and he takes training very seriously, so he is competely optimised for cycling. He is quite an amazing person.

I've found out how to link to your wishlist and include your associate tag in the url, so that in theory I get five percent of the purchase price as well. The URL is below
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?
tag=takeoneonion-21&path=wishlist/27OKOUOWR4Z4G
To unpack this, my tag is "takeoneonion-21" and to get the right code for the wishlist, the 270 etc after in the url above you need to logout of amazon.co.uk completely. When you do this, if you click on wishlist on the amazon.co.uk website you will be offered a choice of making one or searching for one. Search for yourself and copy the code similar to the above into the url string.
For those of you without associate accounts, don't worry about this.

Dr Kelly possibly found dead near his home, he was the alledged source of the "sexed up" claim in the WMD inquiry.
UPDATE:
In hindsight this is unlikely to be anything other than the pressure getting to Dr Kelly, which is still sad. There is to be an independent judicial inquiry into his death.

Mobile burn review the SonyEricsson T610 and give it the thumbs down. The screen is poor, mobile reception is bad (at least in the US), audio quality is full of crackles and the camera has a low camera resolution (352x288). Other things are good, but these are sufficient to remove it from consideration. It is well built and has downloadable java games, plus a good bluetooth implementation, so it might work for some people.
However they like the Nokia 6600, so I might be moving back to a new Nokia in November, which might not be a bad thing, as long as Apple have sorted out iSync to work with it.
It is a hard market building mobile devices, they cost a lot to develop, build and then test for a often short market life. The t68 was quite incredible in this respect, as it was on sale for over 2 years. I'm sure that the landscape will have changed again in 4 months time, when I'm next replacing my phone.

When do you leave your childish dreams behind? Those of becoming an astronaut or something like that. Do we scale them back as we get older so as not to lose them or does realism set in and they become purely idle wishful thinking.
I'm turning 32 at the end of the month (wishlist, if you want it) and as, is now more common, it makes me somewhat thoughtful, assessing where I am and what I have done. I never did become an archeologist... but I still have some secret plans, just like I did when I was five.

The VoxPolitics event last night was interesting, see the commentry created by Tom Coates, Euan Semple, myself and others. See also articles covering the event from the BBC with a technology angle and a politics angle; plus one from The Guardian.
One issue that I feel was only lightly touched on was the people who run blogs with political content, the emphasis was firmly on the politicians. I think that many people who blog will naturally discuss political issues, there are relatively few purely political blogs from non-politicians. So you have two types the narrow single issue blog and the more normal general purpose weblog.
The single issue blog can generate interest and keep its focus, but people are much less likely to come across it. I don't think they are too common and they are a different animal from the hobby blog, like MacOS ones or photography. They are different as they span across interest groups, like the hospital saving MP, Dr Richard Taylor did in Kidderminster. The danger is that once the immediate objective is attained the group disintegrates. The group forms from an immediate common interest to deal with a situation pulling people in, often from a geographic area, on resolution there is little common interest to keep people together.
People who blog will discuss the issues that they feel important or interesting, this is a part of blogging. This kind of weblog is not a one trick pony with a short life span, for many people they are a long term means of communication and self-expression. Weblogs are a good way of highlighting an issue, see my East London line post for an example, it has started to get a good body of comments recently. People are more likely to become interested because they have come to know you through your weblog, your reputation and history are there for them to assess.
Weblogs are about people, a person runs it, your feedback tends to get a personal reply which builds a realtionship between the website owner and his or her audience. Part of it is about trust too, there is an expectation of what you might get from a weblog, sudden transitions in editorial content or style will diminish the relationship one has with the weblog.
The panel talks from last night missed some of this, too much of the emphasis was on getting some politicians blogging and all will be well. For me the focus was too much on the technology from some speakers and not enough on who and why. I wanted more on getting politically aware people blogging.
Politicians will suffer as bloggers, because only minor figures will be able to run a weblog, they will be hindered by audience scaling to too large a number and then they will end up with a broadcast model rather than a weblog. A minister with a blog is unlikely for several reasons, accountability is one factor, time and ability to respond to feedback is another.
I'd like to see more people blogging politically, I think that they are a good medium for expressing personal opinion and they encourage coherent thought about political issues, which can only be for the better. Whether this is expressed as "campaign weblogs" or part of one's own blog is not really the issue. If there are more people asking public questions of politicians then maybe it will encourage a more accountable representation from local council level right up to Government.

The new Transport for London website carries some updates to the plans for the extension to the East London line. The plans have been curtailed somewhat and the new map shows a "core proposition" rather than the earlier map I linked to which had a line to Wimbledon too.
Personally I think that the plans look great, but I live in Forest Hill, which will be served by the new lines. I can imagine that if you live in SW or S London then you will not be too amused by the changes. There do not appear to be any project start or end dates, but there are some contact numbers for the project.
Public liason manager Helen Robinson 0800 587 2441;
Project Communications Manager Peter Boxell on 020 7941 7422 / 07788 101795
or the Team Secretary on 020 7941 7773 (Office)

Last night, the VoxPolitics event left me with a thought that the increasing use of technology in politics will leave a large group of people behind. Several speakers mentioned that the public facing nature of blogging means that they reply to emails and comments ahead of the more traditional means of communication. Thus their attention will turn to the desires of the 40 odd percent of people who are online.
I think that this is a bad thing, but I suppose it is inevitable. Small pressure groups or lobbys have always excerted much more influence on MPs than the normal voter. Even the letter writers are smaller in number and will probably move to email more quickly.
A while back I commented that all this technology is great fun, but if it is accessible to only the top 10% then it is not very representative. A question from the floor last night raised the issue of literacy and how this, which is often coincident with poverty, stops people getting involved with politicians. It is a broader point rather than being directly about blogging, as illiterate people are just as unlikely to write a letter.
However they are more likely to fall to the bottom of the heap if the emphasis moves to more technology driven tools, as getting a PC or paying for time in a webcafe are not priorities for them.
If blogging enables an emergent democracy for only the wealthy, then what will it really have achieved for the whole population.

Last night at the VoxPolitics event I used Hydra to take notes with Tom and Euan amongst others, Tom has posted the notes we wrote along with a brief reaction to the event. Unlike Euan I wasn't sharp enough to actually blog from the event, instead concentrating on IM and Hydra.
Hydra does give rise to some interesting challenges, I have a somewhat patchy memory of the actual talks, as I was writing notes. Writing, listening and watching what the other 3-4 people are typing stretches ones attention quite thin, if you add in a bit of iChat, then you get quite narrow and selective attention. The trade off is that I have a better set of notes than I'd have made by myself. Glenn Fleishman notes using iChatAV and Hydra, very successfully, to do collaborative book editing.
Donald Broadbent in 1957 proposed a psychological model of attention, which states that we can filter the stumili around us and attend to one at a time with any quality. The model is a bit old, but still is a reasonable way of thinking of how we can try to multitask. The act of writing and reading seems to disturb the transfer from short term to long term memory of the actual speaker talking.
Still, using Hydra is a great experience and it is a very useful tool for this kind of collaborative note taking experience at conferences. Natural rules or behaviours do develop, a sort of turn taking with the points that are being made by the speakers and it is the best place for a quick joke, just as quickly deleted. It is the replacement for the notepad and the passed bit of post-it pad. I need to be able to type faster though.

A while back I posted about one box Wifi solutions and noted the Linksys BEFDSR41W (no longer available, buy similar NetGear DG834G on on Amazon) which is an excellent solution to getting ADSL and WiFi at the same time. Dan later posted his first happy experience of home Wifi, which is a bit like my own - "my kitchen table is on the internet and the garden seat and the bed and…"
Coming in the other direction is the Kensington WiFi Finder, noted by Joi Ito. I have been looking for a device like this for ages, though it seems to not yet be in the shops. It is so much less hassle to get out a keyfob than a laptop, might be the discriminant for choosing your cafe, if only it could tell the free ones from the pay for access points.

Tonight at the VoxPolitics event I'll get to try out Hydra for the first time. Hydra is a group editing tool that allows multiple people to write a document together. It recently won the international award at the 2nd OS X Innovators contest. I can get a chance to use it as for the first time ever there will be a wifi network at the House of Commons.

Tonight I'm off to the VoxPolitics event at Westminster, which should be an interesting night. Around 100-150 people are going to discuss Politics and Blogging, half the London centric polically aware blogging community will be there so it seems.
When I posted last week about this I was surprised how much I felt about this topic. I've been idlely discussing it with a variety of people over the past week and really think that blogging has caught the imagination of the single issue campaign groups. It is the right sort of low barrier to entry tool for anyone to use and makes people think about their opinions more clearly as they need to communicate them to others, more later as apparently we will have a WiFi network.

Human statues enjoying a glass of wine in Covent Garden, London. Makes a change from the stock still vague performance that you usually see. I think that they look almost comedic.

Some odd, funny and strangely intelligent grafitti I saw on a train last week, makes a change from the usual tagging.

Both of these are part of the 26 things project that I'm shooting pictures for this month,

London is hot at the minute, but it annoys me slightly (well enough to want to post this) that people confuse humidity with temperature. London is humid, as well as hot and this is what makes it unpleasant.
Last week in the Lot valley, I spent a delightful few days in Albas, with temperatures in the mid to high thirties, warmer than London, but lovely as it was not too humid. We had a barbeque one night and I noticed that the temperature had dropped to 32 at 10 in the evening. It had been 40 plus in the afternoon which is too hot, but then that is above human blood temperature, so is a different kind of thing.
So humid not hot - okay...

An interesting talk is happening next Monday, the 14th, at the House of Commons. The VoxPolitics group are hosting an event about blogging and politics, it is entitled "BLOG RULE - Can Weblogs Change Politics?".
This sounds like an interesting prospect, I'm not averse to discussing political issues on take one onion and I think that blogging has made me think more clearly about the issues around the Iraq War for example. If politicians become more approachable, by publishing their views etc on a website then their consitiuents will feel more connection with them. Certainly I've little idea what my Labour MP has been up to, as he is a back bencher, yet he is my representation at Westminster.
It should be an interesting talk, you need to RSVP though, so read the invite.

On Sunday, my PowerBook power adaptor stopped working, unfortunately at that point my battery was nearly empty, so I now have a PowerBrick rather than a PowerBook, as a laptop with no power is kind of useless and all my data is of course on it. Luckily I have managed to find an Apple authorized service provider in London who has the right power supply in stock. Apple changed the spec on the power adaptor to a 65W one rather than the 45W one that comes with the iBook and the older PowerBook G4 machines. So despite there being several PowerBooks and iBooks in work, not one of them will work. Well, they might, but I can't find an up to date compatibility matrix for the adaptors, other than a small comment that the 65W one will work on the earlier models. There is no indication of vice versa, so murky recall of o-level physics and fear of things going bang have stopped me trying. If Apple updated the documentation to this effect would be helpful.
Suffice to say that blogging is harder without a computer... and posting pictures previously transfered is well nigh impossible. Still off to France for a few days, more later in the week.

Slowly waking up this morning, as usual listening to the Today programme, I heard an article about the "British Library, which is planning to release its library of animal noises as mobile phone ringtones. I think this will be delightful and cacophonous. They have released 40 initially, at 4 quid each and have a further 10,000 they can release. You need a phone which can play polyphonic ringtones. Virtually every animal, snakes, lions, gorillas and lots of birds. I might even consider buying some of these.
They raised the delightful idea of associating certain ringtones with various people... full article on BBC news website and also on Newsround, the excellent BBC childrens news programme.

There is a cool project running this month called 26 things, it is being run by sh1ft.org. The idea of it is to take a picture representing your life in 26 different themes, each one with a possible liberal interpretation. The themes range from love through colour, footwear and transport to construction. A good range of prompts to make you go out and reinterpret the world around you. The idea is that you take the pictures and then post your 26 on your site, or a free hosting provider. Everyone to post them on the 1st August, so you have all month to take pictures.
I'm quite looking forward to running around London taking pictures with the themes in my jeans pocket. From the themes everything is a possible picture, thanks to Euan for a pointer to this.

On Friday, Lucy and I went to see "etre et avoir" (IMDB review). It is a delightful film telling the story of a school teacher in a small village school in the mountains near the Auvergne. The film was released last year in France and made a big impact, winning several awards.
The film is a documentary on the life of the pupils and the school. The classroom is filled with pupils from 4-11 and one teacher teaches them all at once. So in one corner you have pupils drawing, some learning maths and some learning geography.
The progress of time for the school is shown via the passing seasons, with beautiful photography showing the fields of crops, or snow on the trees, each shot held for several seconds giving a feeling of slow change and highlighting the impact of climate on this largely farming community.
What makes this film a joy is the natural reactions of the children, they barely seem to notice the camera and so you feel completely part of the scene. The editing of the footage is cleverly done, so that it gradually unfolds the scope of the school, introducing each character and age group slowly. Jojo, one of the youngest children steals the show, as he is seemingly in need of constant attention or amusement.
The story, such as it is, is a series of vignettes, a lesson, or some play or a fight. You start to know the children and then see some of them at home working on farms mainly. This aspect of their life is fascinating, as you see the whole family arguing over a boy's maths homework, then see him skillfully driving a tractor. You can see the different aspects in which the children as strong or weak, which changes your appreciation of each child. the interplay between the children gives you a picture of the society they live in. Over the course of the film you can watch the children growing up and some leaving for big school and new "little ones" arriving. Visually this is linked to the passage of the seasons and the cyclic nature of the life of the school is brought to the fore. The setting and cinematography give a timelessness to the story, which contributes to the warm satisfied feeling that it leaves you with.
A warm, lovely, carefully made film which simply relates life in a small village school, perfect for a rainy summers evening.
Buy Etre et avoir on DVD (VHS) from Amazon.co.uk.