Monthly Archives: November 2005

a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled

Cas is currently

Taking into consideration the (one, thank you JB) input I had about the new-format Sunday Roasts, here are my favourites from the past week. The del.icio.us tag ‘sundayroast’ is still very much up and running, so do subscribe to that as well, just to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Starters:
Japan photoset on Flickr. Flickr really does provide you with some visual treats sometimes.

Around China photoset on Flickr. Again, Flickr showing its wonderfulness.

Streetcards – Gaping Void. So hard not to just order a pack of these right now.

mamamusings: isowantone. This is linked to the next item and contains the story behind how it came into being.
I So Want One! Got that tween in your life who you just can’t think of the right present for? Everyone dreads that blank “thank you so much auntie cas, i’ve always wanted socks for christmas’ look you get when you’ve picked up something SO not cool. Well, this here might be the solution to all our problems. A blog written by an 11 year old, reviewing the toys that HE would want. An no, I wouldn’t have linked unless I thought it was a great idea and well executed. Kudos. Go, support the next generation 🙂

Barcode Art. Some of his portraits are mindbending. You’ll never look at the humble barcode in the same way again.

Guide to writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

Dr Who – animated series. From the BBC so they’re all official like. Got one written by Douglas Adams. I really wish I hadn’t found these – more blooming distractions!

Main Course:
Wikablog Home Page. I was tempted, mainly because it links two of my current favourite topics (blogs and wikis), but also because I think it is valid. Or not. What does it have that makes it stand out from all the other blog-listing things out there, other than that anyone can add blogs or change the description of blogs. In that sense, I like. Sharing what you know is good is always… good. At the same time, what if someone added you and you didn’t want to be added? There is no ‘delete’ mechanism. Wait and see. It is young yet. Needs a critical mass of people to make it work I think. I also think that there should be more expressed personality on the wiki. Just talking out loud here, but do think that on their homepages, people should put “and these are the blogs that I think are rather snazzy…” Get a community going. Hmmmm… *wombles off to have a quiet muse*
Five days later, I’m liking it, not only because it is (still) a wiki, but because it introduced me to the Scary Duck. Read the first post and laughed so much I sprayed Cookie Crunch all over the desk.

Wikipedia hardcopy for the developing world. Wikipedia in print… Does seem to detract some from the whole point of the site, but hey – if it is for developing nations. Only, there will be some kind of vetting of the articles used, won’t there? WE all know not to trust 100% what wikipedia says, but the thought of Wikipedia being the only/main source of information is a little scary. And I like wikis!

Jimmy Wales talking at SIMS about Wikipedia. Hear the founder in his own words. The file is large, but worth the download. I am not totally sold on everything he has to say, but it really is a treat to hear him.

JB’s nanowrimo2005 blog. Go, read, support. I will be doing just that once the Beast is fully tamed and handed in.

Megatrain.com. For London/So’ton/Portsmouth people, this is great. You can get to London on the train for £1. Yes, that’s right, £1.

apophenia: growing up in a culture of fear: from Columbine to banning of MySpace. More thought provoking goodness from Danah.
For American youths, life is an open book, via blogs – Technology – International Herald Tribune. A good counterpoint to Danah’s previous words.

Sleep – An Insight. I get grumpy if I don’t get my full 8 hours (and with the CC on lates, I am currently only getting 7, hence Cas = a bit snarky right now). This is a Nature (the journal) special all about sleep. Some pretty interesting facts actually.

An open letter to Disney Store UK. *Is nodding head in agreement with all said*

Blogger – turning on comment moderationTurning on the word verification has stopped 99% of my blog-spam, but a higher volume site might find this useful.

Afters:
Heated USB gloves. Tried to think of some snappy caption for this, and I really can’t think of anything to do them justice. I really am speechless,. I can make note only of my speechlessness.

Pastor electrocuted during baptism. This is just too bizarre NOT to be included in the Roast. Especially considering I just typoed it as ‘baTpism”. No idea what batpism is, but it must be dangerous…

Edible toaster. Why?

Walk like an Egyptian zombie thing… More zombie goodness, this time courtesy of Mata.

Designer creates wall of breasts. I couldn’t decide if this was worthy of serving in the Roast, or leaving for Leftovers. But the sheer glee in the CC’s eyes when he saw the headline told me it had to be main meal material. Actually, the reasoning behind the design is a good idea.

And for the best of the rest, go to del.icio.us tag ‘leftovers’.

Also, for more on both sides of the whole Google Print/online book debacle, keep an eye on del.icio.us tag ‘onlinebooks’, which is the tag under which I will be stashing stuff relating to that topic.

i am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it

Cas is currently

(I was going to serve this up as part of the Sunday Roast, but as I got typing I realised I had more that I wanted to say than could be fitted in a snappy two line summary. This is a topic I felt was deserving of its own post.)

Google Print gets going.

There has been a lot of kurfuffle lately about Googles plan to digitize every piece of information on the face of the planet and make it searchable, with a lot of good arguments presented on both sides of the debate. There has also been a load of complete dross spouted by proponents of both camps.

I figured it was about time I made my position clear.

I love reading. Nothing will ever persuade me that curling up in bed with a cup of tea and a good (print version) book isn’t one of the most pleasurable experiences known to mankind. Curling up with the laptop and an e-book just isn’t the same – eyestrain aside, there is the constant worry that I’ll spill the cup of tea, as I have been known to do on occasion. Books and bedsheets dry out. £2000 laptops tend not to. I find it hard to ever think of a time when I won’t want to be surrounded by books, if for no other reason than access to my entire library should not depend on remembering to charge my laptop battery. Nor, computer-saints preserve us, will it all be wiped out when (not if, when) my hard drive explodes. Barring fires and certain other natural disasters, my physical library should survive, and you can be pretty sure that a computer wouldn’t survive such events either. It is very telling that you can still read books written before the invention of the printing press, but frequently run into problems with media only a few years old if it is in the wrong format.

All of which might lead you to think that I am averse to the idea of digitising books.

You would be wrong. I think knowledge should be shared and, especially with more obscure texts, the average person simply doesn’t have access to a physical copy. My current research would have been impossible if I had had to rely on inter-library-loaning every single obscure journal article, instead of logging onto JStor or Google Scholar. The number of times I have read a print-article and gone ‘oh, if only I could search within the text for this one word…’ As a matter of fact my entire current thesis is based on the idea of open access to information. And Google Print isn’t really about reading novels online. It is far better suited to the person in search of information. Where is this quote from? Who wrote that? What were the findings of the 1936 Glastonbury Historical Society? *1*

I can see why there are some rumblings of discontent in the publishing industry – this is just one more in a long line of nails in the coffin of the conventional publication model *2*. As it stands, publishing houses pay authors a sum for the rights to their work, they publish it, charge people to buy copies, and (hopefully) get a profit. The mechanisms currently out there for publishers to get their money back when things are published/accessible online are clunky, often obtrusive, and wholly over-reliant on software/hardware dependent solutions that almost certainly won’t work in a year or so.

It is understandable why the thought of free access to the content of their books sends these people into a tailspin, but at the same time, just think on the benefits. Number one being FREE advertising for the work. Equate it to people dipping into the book in the bookstore to decide if they like it before they purchase it, because that is what most people are going to use it for. Finding information, trying it on for size, before committing to a fairly non-trivial purchase. It is one of the more galling features of modern life when you buy a text book online and get it delivered only to find that the one thing you needed it for is 1) not mentioned in the book or 2) only mentioned once or 3) completely and utterly wrong (all of which has happened to me more than once).

Publishers don’t charge people to get books out of the local library which, you have to agree, is one of the major attractions of the local lending library in this day and age. Is what Google Print trying to do really so very different?

I am grossly over simplifying, and gleefully ignoring copyright, and many other issues, which will keep legions of lawyers for both sides very happy for a very long time. At its simplest, the publishing houses are fighting tooth and nail for their very existence.

Rather than fighting, they might be better served accepting this new way of doing things, and evolving into something new that makes the most of the brave new world. The Internet, online access, and the drive for transparent access to information aren’t going to go away any time soon. I am not sold on the idea that Google are the best people to be in charge of this. They have shown a few tendencies which indicate they are not as appreciative of the whole ‘transparent data’ idea as they claim to be. But it is being done, right here and right now, and hiding heads like so many ostriches really isn’t the solution, nor is trying to freeze progress in its tracks.

A phrase I really hate does spring to mind right now – you can’t make an omlette without cracking some eggs. They said that VHS would kill the movie industry. Hollywood seems to have done alright. Give Google Print a chance. Or, better yet, start your own programs. Just because Google have decided to do it this way, doesn’t mean it’s the right way.

Endnotes:
*1*I’ve had to track down that last piece of information before, and it took me about a week, searching through ten different libraries, to find something that might have taken five minutes if the data had been online, not in a water-damaged box in the basement of the GHS’ HQ which hadn’t actually been catalogued. I only actually found the data because of a chance phone conversation with the chap who cleaned the office. Long story.Back
*2*Oooh, there’s some gloriously mixed metaphors!Back
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when a man is wrestling a leopard in the middle of a pond, he is in no position to run

Cas is currently at life, but at the reviewed piece of technology

Mata, this morning, flagged a new service, Pandora, as one that is worth a play. It’s a streaming radio-player with a difference – you put in a band/track you like, and it will automatically create playlists for you based on that. The people behind it have done it a little differently though. Rather than rely on genres, each individual song is analysed, catalogued, and the selections are based on things like influences, the key the music is in, the beat, vocal harmony, instruments used, and all sorts of other stuff I have no idea about.

I was dubious, I will admit it, but I couldn’t decide on what to listen to whilst I beat my head against ‘Electronic Publication‘, so I fired up Pandora and decided to make the most of their 10 hour free trial.

I plugged in “Matchbox Twenty”, *1* and, skeptically, settled back to see what was presented for my listening pleasure.

I have to say, I’ve been listening to Pandora for most of the day, trying it out, and at most it throws up something I don’t like every ten or so tracks that I do like. And when that happens, you just tell them ‘I don’t like this’, and your preferences get adjusted accordingly. About every third or fourth track, I adore, and I’ve added two new bands to my “must by their album when I have disposable income” list.

The implementation is spot on, the service has skipped just twice in the entire time I’ve been listening, unlike many other Internet radio stations, and I am seriously tempted to pay the subscription fee.

If I have a niggle, it is that even the ‘small’ version of the player is fairly hefty when you only have a 12 inch screen, and it requires pop-ups to be enabled. You don’t realise how many pop-ups are out there till you’ve forgotten you’d turned the blocking off. But that’s one niggle and there’s no law that says I can’t just leave the full version running in another tab, or minimize that one window. Maybe a nice little standalone app could be made at somepoint, though that does defeat the portability of such a sweetly coded in-browser flash application.

This, ladies and gentle-beans is what Flash should be used for, not for infuriating headers/display elements/flash-only sites that take an age to load and do nothing that standard HTML couldn’t have done for a fraction of the overhead and annoyance value… *2*

The nicely integrated ‘buy this at amazon or iTunes’ links are remarkably tempting, but I must practice my willpower, damnit!

So what has Pandora taught me today? Well, it turns out I seem to like music that features:
electric rock instrumentation
country influences
mild rhythmic syncopation
a subtle use of vocal harmony
major key tonality
With the occasional side order of:
mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation
acoustic rhythm guitars

They do say that, whilst your musical taste changes over time, certain forms and arrangements of music will always be your favourite. You’re just wired a certain way. Whatever kinked me along the road, I do seem to favour middle of the road lyrical light rock. With male vocalists. I can’t think of one track it’s given me today that had a female singer. Huh.

I do know why I am in a major beat today – I feel all down, and just the thought of listening to stuff in a sobbing minor key is enough to have me bursting into tears.

I wonder what will happen when I ask it to play me stuff related to Sweet (some good old fashioned glam rock, and the first band I ever remember actively liking. I wore the casette tape out I listened to it so much when I was younger) and

Oh.

My.

God.

Sweet also it turns out have mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, electric guitar riffs, and vocal harmonies.

So I know who is to blame for my musical taste now. My father.
Damn him playing T-Rex, Sweet, and Queen at full volume every time we went on a car journey.

Just goes to show, you never know what is going to scar your kids for life.

*UPDATE – 11th November 2005*
It is now possible to use Pandora without paying, as they have introduced an add-supported version. Currently this is only licensed for the States, so you need to plug in a US zip code to show where you live. I am a law-abiding citizen so I will refrain from pointing out the obvious holes in this system. Fingers crossed for international licensing soon!

Endnotes:
*1*A band whose babies I have wanted to have since I first heard ‘Rest Stop’ in Torks’ car on the way back from the cinema in Taunton, July 2001Back
*2*Don’t get me started on my Flash rant, please, life really is too short.Back
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