I’m in the process of having a bit of a spring clean around Bright Meadow. It’s been a while since I mucked about with things, and consequently things have got a bit bloated and dusty.

In need of a tidy up basically. Consequently, if things get even odder than usual with the blog, please bear with me. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Those of you who read the RSS, I would recommend you poke your nose outside of the reader this once.

We’ve got a new header, I’ve overhauled the sidebar, and the font size has been bumped up slightly. Hopefully it’s a bit more readable now! I hadn’t realised how small it was till I caught myself increasing the font within firefox. Not a good sign when you can’t read your own blog.

What else? Well, the BrightCast is getting its own page, and I’m giving a serious rethink to what’s really required on the other pages. I will also be tackling the display problem experienced in IE with regards the alignment of comments. That and a few other behind the scenes bits that you don’t need to worry your pretty heads about.

If there’s anything else that needs fixing, or that you feel needs changing, let me know, and I promise to at least think about it.

Ok, I have a question for y’all and I hoping that somewhere out there I have a reader who knows the answer:

Is there anyway I can set my Mac so that screenshots automatically get saved to a particular folder, not my desktop? If they can be saved to the folder and name themselves in some form of numerical order automatically, that would be even better.

I’m running OS X 10.4.6 on a slightly elderly PowerBook G4.

At the moment I’m taking screenshots, they are being saved to the desktop, then I am having to manually rename and move them to the “screenshots” folder. This bugs me – the extra steps seem unnecessary, and as a Mac user I am spoilt and don’t like unnecessary steps.

Proviso: Whilst I am computer literate, I am not used to crawling round in the code-guts of my computer. If your solution requires me to boot up Terminal, make sure you give me step-by-step instructions. Detailed step-by-step instructions. And are prepared to calm me down via MSN when it all goes wrong.

And yes, Minionhood awaits if you can make me one happy Cas 😀

Just saw In Her Shoes and it had me blubbing like a little baby by the end. I am so pathetic. A nice, predictable, well done film. Three and a half penguins.

Why are we so willing to accept the status quo?

Time for a little background:

At work, we are technically a hot desking office. We have to be – there are ten people and only eight computers, so we rotate tasks between us. Practically, however, there are three of us who always tend to use the same computers. The boss has hers and has to use that computer because certain things she requires on the network are only permitted on that workstation. Others of us have gravitated toward tasks that also require certain workstations, meaning that a good 90% of the time, both the Superhero and myself can be found on particular computers.

I like my computer. It’s in the corner, so I get a view out of two windows and a nice breeze when it’s stuffy. It’s next to the phone, so I have to answer that, but I don’t mind doing that because it serves as a change from the never ending data entry and scanning. I’ve got my little domain all set up how I like it, and have more or less trained everyone to stop nicking my pens. (I have a tendency to nest. I doubt I’m the only one – I challenge you to spend 9 hours a day, 5 days a week in one spot, and not get the teensiest bit territorial).

There was one wasp on the honeypot though – my computer was adamant that my mouse, though in reality brand new mouse with a scroll wheel, only had two buttons. You don’t realise how much you use the scroll wheel till you no longer have one. Anyway, I’d gotten used to not using it. Sure, it took a bit longer to keep lunging for the scroll bars, but you learn to live with these things, right?

Until this morning that is. I don’t know what made me, but finally I snapped, and I called IT. The nice man on the other end of the phone took over my PC, and I watched as he spent a good ten minutes rummaging through obscure settings, before he finally bullied my computer into accepting that yes, I did have a scroll wheel. Restart the computer, and… bliss! Absolute bliss.

Which made me think, why did I wait so bloody long?

With regards the mouse, I’ve been using this computer since late Feb/early March. Every single extra mouse action I have to make moves me one step closer to an RSI flare up. Every single mouse action I can remove from the workflow speeds things up fractionally. The extra 30 milliseconds it takes to move a window up/down using the scroll bar doesn’t sound like much, but multiply it by around 500 events, and you have a significant amount of time that could be sliced from my day. Quicker inputting means we get to our target that little bit quicker, and getting to our target quicker means fewer OAPs baying for my blood on the phone. That, and I’d have a happy boss, and we all know happy bosses are good news.

I was thinking in broader terms however, whilst drinking a cup of tea and staring out at the view over the train station to the docks (I said I had a view, not that it was a good view), about our tendency to just “go with the flow”. Most people will accept a situation, deal with it, and pretty soon forget it was ever a “situation” to being with. Awkward quickly becomes normal, and even if they think “oh, things could be better”, it invariably takes too much effort for them to make that change.

The impetus to change can be some tiny thing – the proverbial pebble rolling down the mountain that causes a landslip that buries a whole town – and frequently when you look back you think “why didn’t I make that change sooner?” That isn’t to say that change isn’t without risk and sacrifice. In my case I had to sacrifice fifteen minutes of my morning, time that could have been spent scanning ten or so images, but I have more than made up for that sacrifice. It was a small thing that Rosa Parks did, staying seated on that bus, and the sacrifice that followed was huge for many people, but at the end of the day we look back and wonder how people lived for so long with segregation. No, I am not equating my getting the middle button on my mouse back with the American civil liberties movement. I am using the two ends of the scale to show it’s not just the little things we get accustomed to.

It certainly takes a special kind of person to see that the way things are is not the way things should be, and to have the personal strength to bust out of convention and tradition. The people who can, why, they are the inventors and the leaders of our world. The movers and shakers.

As I reached the end of my cup of tea, I started to think in narrower terms about what else there is in my life that I am taking for granted. What situations am I just putting up with because it takes too much effort to do something different? Where would I benefit from challenging the status quo?

So thank you, pensioners of Southampton: without you I wouldn’t appreciate the middle mouse button as much as I now do, and without you I wouldn’t be (once again) lying in bed unable to sleep whilst I reassess my life. Well, I did say change is never easy. Hopefully in a few years time I’ll be able to look back as say “yes, it was all worth a few nights of insomnia”.

Oh, the things you think about whilst doing data entry…

(clicky clicky on the picture to see it full size and see the notes attached).

A little while back, we did a roadshow in conjunction with our local fire service, the idea being we set up shop to sort out our stuff, then they nabbed the pensioners on their way out to talk to them about home safety. Hampshire fire service offer a wonderful service where they will come round to your home, check it over, make sure you’ve got adequate smoke alarms, fit you ones for free if you haven’t, and generally chat to you about home fire safety. The first day we were at the station was rather slow, so we got bullied into signing up for a visit as well.

It could have been worse – firemen, coming to your house… Come on! There’s months worth of fantasies in there if you just think about it! (Not for me so much, never really understood the thing for firemen, but *shrug* takes all sorts to make the world go round).

Anyway, long story short, the visit was scheduled for tonight. Neither Moose, nor I, were really in the mood, but there was no way to cancel and we had a few genuine questions about appropriate fire extinguishing equipment for the kitchen and carbon monoxide detectors.

7.30, the doorbell goes, and there’s three rather attractive firemen standing on my front doorstep (we were expecting an ageing one, because, well, they wouldn’t send around the ones who might get called out, would they?). They introduce themselves, explain that while Liam and Spud have a quick look round to make sure all our smoke detectors are ok, James will chat to us about the home safety stuff. 30 seconds later, before James has even got a chance to explain why it’s safer to leave the kettle unplugged when you’re not using it, the walkie-talkie goes off, and they’re on a call…

5 seconds later, three firemen are sprinting down the road to get to their engine.

3 seconds after that, Cas is leaning out her third storey living room window with the camera and manages to get a picture of the aforementioned firemen, running to their engine.

Hell, it was worth having the visit, if only for that. Had me and Moose in giggles for the rest of the evening!

I’ve tried to write this post many times, in many different ways. Each time it ends up with this long directionless ramble that never really finishes. So, sixth time lucky…

Why do I blog? What is this blog for?

Those are two questions that I am asked time and again. That someone who has been reading this blog for many months now feels he has to ask me what Bright Meadow is for indicates that I am not doing too good of a job of explaining to people. I don’t make money from blogging, it’s not helping my career, and it could even be argued that I blogged to the slight detriment to my recent study, so, let me try once more and explain why I blog.

I stand by what I said before on the matter. For me, this blog is a three-fold entity.

Firstly, I have always written. It is how I make sense of the mental and physical worlds which I inhabit. When I face a problem, I invariably sit down and write something, and by the end of that process I can frequently see my way clear. Writing is my release valve in the way that other people have kick-boxing, playing the guitar, or beating the crap out of others in computer games. Most of what I write never gets seen, but there are some bits that, at the end of the day, aren’t to shabby. Why put these online? I counter with why not? Everything I write is written in the spirit of a conversation with a friend, and I see everyone who reads Bright Meadow as a friend, or at least as a potential friend. By sharing my words I gain new insights and different perspectives on things. It is an old platitude, but a trouble shared, even if only shared with an unspecified number of readers, is a trouble made smaller.

The many iterations of Bright Meadow, from back even before the days when it was called Restholm and lodged on Geocities, have secondly always existed as a way for my friends to keep in touch with what is happening in my life. The “Cas, are you still alive?” emails really did fall with monotonous regularity into my inbox. It is appalling how bad I am at correspondence. When your nearest and dearest are scattered over the globe (in the days before Skype at least), it is handy to have a little personal space where you are more or less guaranteed to find me and be able to wrest a response from me.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Bright Meadow serves as a way to meet new people. I don’t actively seek new readers, but one or two have stumbled across this little corner of the web, liked what they saw, and have stayed. They have, in turn, become people I enjoy interacting with. It is a certain I would have never met them without this blog, and my life would have been the poorer for it. I have a tendency to dwell and go into hermit mode if I am not careful – this blog forces me to look outside the cave once in a while. Always thinking “me, me, me” is not very productive, nor is it very conducive to a positive mental state.

That answers the “why” of my blogging, but doesn’t really address the “what” that I blog.

As previously mentioned, I tend to see what I write as conversations with friends. Indeed, it is not uncommon for the ideas of posts to originate in actual conversations with people. I blog about things that have happened to me, things that I am thinking about, things that have amused me, or things that have annoyed me. As a rule of thumb, if it’s something I’d tell my colleagues about over lunch, it’s something I will think about blogging.

Falling under the “things I’m thinking about” category are the bits and pieces that used to fall under the banner of my research – social computing, mainly the dissemination of information, and participation. Just because I finished the MSc and am taking a break from academia for a while, it doesn’t mean that I’ve lost all interest in the field, or that I never want to return. It still excites me. I still get geeky tingles down my spine when I come across fun little pieces of new tech (take, for instance, my insane excitement when cocomment was released) and, being the kind of girl that I am, I want to share my excitement with every body else!

RIB straight out asked me why I wouldn’t get mopey on the blog about a certain personal situation I find myself in. I struggled to come up with a concise reason (this post is partly an answer to his question) but it boils down to two related things.
1) I am just not that sort of person, or at least try not to be. There really is nothing to be gained by dwelling on things for any period of time. The situation sucks, sure, but moaning about it isn’t going to change that, so why waste the energy? ^*1*
2) The one thing worse than dwelling is listening to someone else dwelling. It really goes contrary to everything I want Bright Meadow to be, which is a place where people have a nice time. This isn’t to say that every now and again something a bit more serious and depressing won’t find it’s way onto the sit, but in general I prefer things to stick to the brighter side of the spectrum.

So what do I blog about? Pretty much anything and everything that wanders it’s way across my mind, but with a slight bias toward the funny, social computing, and Archaeology.

Which leaves one last question – who do I blog for?

Do I blog for my readers, or (like Molly) would I blog anyway? The easy answer is that I would blog anyway. I kept Restholm going when I had no readers, and blogged at Bright Meadow for many months when the only reader was Moose, my long suffering flat-mate. I like having a record somewhere of what I have written. That it is online means I can search it at will, and it will always be accessible even if I’ve forgotten to bring my trusty notebook along with me. ^*2*

Things get slightly more complex though, because I must admit that I do tailor what I post on the blog to my (potential) audience. I take time crafting ideas and sentences to a degree unnecessary if it was just a diary for personal consumption. I edit myself much like Anne Frank did. The lure of an audience, even one not yet created, is a very very strong one. Whilst I would still write and post if I went back to one (or heaven forfend no) readers, I take pride in knowing that what I write and post is winning me over new readers on a semi-regular basis. My decision not to post about the depressing and overtly intimate is partly personal reticence (I’m British, we don’t talk about our feelings) and partly knowing that most people would just be bored by it. Whilst I don’t think I’d ever completely change what I wrote about just because someone asked me to, I might write more about certain things if it became clear those were the more popular things. That’s how the Sunday Roasts came into being after all, and they’re not bad.

So there you have it. Blogging is my internal monologue made external. Bright Meadow is a rambling conversation with good friends – we share jokes, and we share problems, because that is what friends do. I’d blog if I didn’t have you to badger me, but I do have you and I am grateful because it forces me to actually think about what I write.

Phu feels the most important thing to think about when you create a site is why you are creating the site. You’ve also, as he goes on to point out, got to think about how you measure your success (the rational being, if you’re failing, it’s time to rethink what you’re doing). How do I measure “success” here at Bright Meadow? Success is when someone comments for the first time. When people keep coming back. When I get an email saying “I like your site”. But perhaps what makes me happiest and keeps me doing it? When I know I’ve made someone smile or laugh. Just to know I’ve made someone’s day momentarily brighter? That’s worth the most to me.

So there you have it. Hopefully you’re a bit clearer on this whole “Why the frell does Cas blog, and what the jimminy-crickets is Bright Meadow all about anyway?” issue. Still a bit confuddled? Ask me questions, I’ll do my best to answer.

And now I feel it’s time to turn the tables. If you blog, why do you blog? Conversely, if you don’t blog, why not? I genuinely recommend doing the occasional bit of introspection – force yourself to really look at why you do things. Good for the soul. Just, don’t go overboard, ok? If your mind is anything like my mind 1) I feel sorry for you, and 2) it’s a dangerous place to stay too long 😉

P.S. – Finding out that Josh has jacked it all in has got me thinking. Will I ever stop blogging? That’s a post for another day, but if you want reassurance, the answer is probably not. I enjoy writing too much.

Endnotes:
^*1* I’m not saying I never mope, just that there’s a time and a place for it. That time and place is curled up on the Bond Chair, watching a crappy movie, with a bottle of red wine, a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, and a sympathetic listener. The time and place isn’t a public website. It may seem like I share a hell of a lot of my life, and I do, but there is stuff that is better left to more private venues.^Back
*2*Dependent, of course, on web-access. But in this day and age, most of the places I travel, there’s an Internet hookup available.^Back
blog, blogging, why blog, diary, anne frank, social computing, archaeology

Originally uploaded by birdyboo.

Saw this today on Flickr, and it was just too cute not to share with you all.

Happy St Georges day everyone 🙂