Planet Afterlife @ Seldo.Net

By at 20:45PM

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By at 23:30PM

Okay Twitter, it's time you stopped getting a free pass. You have fucked up your interface, and it's time to fix it.

Before we get to the UI problems, let's reiterate the bigger, older problem, captured just a second ago:

This was cute when you were tiny and still getting over early technical mistakes on the back-end, but you're over that now, you've taken over a billion dollars in funding, you are basically CNN's only news source at this point. You can't be throwing 500s anymore, no matter how cute the whale is. But your problems go much deeper now: even when it renders, your actual user interface is significantly less useful and elegant. Allow me to rant briefly about a few issues. While I'm waiting for the whale to go away so I can take screencaps, here's a shot of the old-old Twitter (via):

Problem 1: right-column layout

The new layout puts tweets down the right, and a mish-mash of useless junk down the left. I know why you did this: you needed to increase the amount of attention paid to promoted followers and trends, because that's your business model. I don't care. You are deliberately distracting your users from something they want to see with something they don't care about. This is the wrong way to do advertising.

Problem 2: tweet composition

Can you tell me the difference between these two ways of composing a tweet? This one is accessible from the left nav:

This one comes up if you click the blue button in the top-right:

The answer is: there is none. They are totally different-looking ways of doing the same thing, both accessible from the top of the front page. Why would you confuse your users like that? If you think the top-right button is too hard to find, why is it there at all? If you think it's useful because it stays visible as the page scrolls, why not make the easy-to-see compose box fixed? Instead you have this weird dual-interface solution that reeks of committees and compromise instead of the great, simple design that you started with.

Problem 3: tweet controls

The basic tweet layout is pretty much unchanged since the beginning:

The friendly "posted X minutes ago" has been replaced by the context-free "27m", but that's a tiny matter. On hover, as before, you get some tweet controls, plus the new "open" link:

And here the real trouble begins. This is what happens when you click "open":

My payoff is that the controls jump to the bottom of the tweet for no clear reason, and I get a more exact timestamp. Is that worth a click? Then why is that link there at all? The answer is because if your tweet has more interactions, like retweets and favourites, you get those here too:

But that's an explanation, not a reason. It would be quite simple to not bother having an "open" link unless there was something interesting to show. But instead we have this weird cruft in the name of consistency. Again, it's a small thing, but all these little things are beginning to add up to a UI that isn't cared about.

Problem 4: conversation view

If a tweet is part of a wider conversation, clicking "open" gives you a lot more context, like so:

Display of larger conversational context is a good idea. But there are two issues: first, the back-end implementation sucks. If I respond twice to your tweet before you reply, that second tweet is lost from the conversation. Sometimes you get the whole conversation, sometimes just the immediately preceding tweet. It's inconsistent and confusing.

And the UI is also inconsistent and confusing: two of the tweets have short timestamps, one has a long. The "hide conversation" close the whole conversation, but uses the same icon as "reply" and is right next to it. In the top-right, where you'd expect the "close" button to be in any other context, there's nothing but a timestamp, unless you hover, where you get this:

So now I have controls for this tweet, and also a "details" link which... closes the conversation, in total defiance of its label. Unless you right-click and open in a new tab, in which case you get the details page for a tweet. Why have a link that only does what it says if you right-click? Why can't I get more details of this tweet inline?

Here's how it should work: I'm looking at a list of tweets, and the bottom one is highlighted. If I want to close the list, there should be a close button in the top-right. If I want details about a tweet other than the last one, I should be able to click it. Is that so hard?

Incidentally, there is a close button for the conversation that's correctly labelled. You get it if you hover over the final tweet:

...right where the "details" link is on the other tweets. And it does the same thing that the already-visible "hide conversation" link did anyway. What on earth is the point?

Problem 5: interactions

This one is so obvious I can't believe it's not been fixed already. This is the default view of the (poorly-named) "@connect" tab:

This view is clumsily mixing together two totally different use-cases. The first is @replies: these are frequent, personal, and demanding of your attention. They are high-value. The second is retweets and favourites: these do not require response (good, because the UI doesn't let you respond anyway), and happen asynchronously: you don't care when a particular retweet or favourite happened to any degree of precision -- so why is it in a timeline? Not that Twitter actually tells you when it happened anyway, since the UI batches up reponses:

It's not like there's not a great, usable UI for handling interactions that already exists to model from: Favstar.fm nailed it years ago. Show tweets in the order they happened, batch up all responses. It's not hard.

And as another tiny little thing: if the "Mentions" link lets you filter down to only @replies, why is there no equivalent "responses" link that lets you filter down to only retweets and favourites?

TL;DR

The New New Twitter has dozens of small, irritating design choices and UI inconsistencies. None of them by themselves is worth a whole post, but together they add up to enough brokenness to complain about. I've tried to keep things constructive by suggesting how they should look instead.

The new look has been out for over a month now and there's been no sign of iteration to fix these things. We wouldn't put up with this crap from Facebook. It's time to fix it.

P.S. Dear commenters, before you immediately point out the many, many UI flaws in this blog, I reiterate that Twitter has a billion dollars, while I maintain this blog in my very rare spare time. I expect more from them, and so should you.

By at 20:07PM

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Charles Babbage, one of the father of computers, once wrote:

I will yet venture to predict that a time will arrive, when the accumulating labour which arises from the arithmetical applications of mathematical formulae, acting as a constantly retarding force, shall ultimately impede the useful progress of the science, unless this or some equivalent method is devised for relieving it from the overwhelming incumbrance of numerical detail.

He meant that one day his computer -- at that time seen as a costly and useless device -- would be not just useful but required to make further economic progress. He was right in all but one respect: he thought that day was in the future. In fact, he was already living in it. Scientific and economic progress have always been limited by the available computational power -- but until quite recently, the level of power available never changed, so the limit was imperceptible.

Now that computing power routinely grows by orders of magnitude, it is easier for us to grasp the idea that we are limited by available computation -- it would be nice to decode genes faster, fold proteins quicker, make more accurate weather predictions. We understand these things will get better, in the same way that Babbage could grasp that calculating logarithmic tables (the primary purpose of computation in the 1850s) would someday be quicker.

What is more difficult for us to grasp is that we are still horribly limited by our lack of computational power. We cannot see how limited until those limitations are lifted. Take, as the shadow of an example, the way that one can browse live online maps from one's phone and already scarcely remember how one got by before that ability. In the future, ubiquitous and mind-bendingly powerful computation will make these tasks seem as divorced from utility and convenience as grinding gears to create logarithmic tables seems now.

Human beings are bad at predicting phase changes. We can predict iteration but not invention, so we write stories about giant spaceships that have wired telephone lines. You have no idea how amazing the future is really going to be.

By at 01:05AM

I’m not often drawn to new male artists (just look at the streams of girls below) and certainly not ones born out of the *spit* folk *spit* scene, but take a look at King Charles.

New on Island Records, King Charles has hair that I guess makes him noticable, but you wouldn’t want it anywhere near you. He first launched in 2009 but, as seems to be the curse of Island, then had a huge accident which put him out of action for two years. Now he’s back with his first single ‘Bam Bam’. I kind of want to hate it but it’s just too much fun. Plus his favourite subject at school was Latin. Win.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By trixie at 05:36AM

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to Abbey Road Studios for the EMI 2012 showcase. Lots of people from radio to digital to press to tv and so on were all gathered together for a few songs from lots of artists across the Parlophone / Virgin / EMI stable on what was the last day before EMI was sold. On the bill was Leeds band To Kill A King, Morning Parade, The Good Natured, Professor Green, Emeli Sande and Kylie headlining and revealing her orchestral album for 2012.

Emeli Sande was an utter superstar live and I can’t wait to see her do a full live show, but the most obvious radio hit out of the lot of them was the new one from Chiddy Bang.  The duo from Philadephia released the brililant MGMT sampling Opposite of Adults and Passion Pit sampling in 2010 but nothing else seemed to happen. It’s all go now though with the release of their debut album Breakfast set for Spring 2012. This is the lead single and it’s a smash. Craig Charles can certainly make a good jingle out of it for his radio show if nothing else.

By trixie at 11:08AM

US r&b producers love to come out into the spotlight at the moment, and the latest are The Stereotypes now performing as Jon MCXRO (amusingly pronounced Jon McEnroe).

They’ve just released their debut album for free download (get it legally here) and a video for the fun electro-rap of LEGO.

The standout track for me though is ‘Somewhere in Italy’. Featuring former US boyband member Travis Garland (he was in a group with Artie from Glee), it samples Piero Umilani’s Crepuscolo Sul Mare, composed for the Ocean’s 12 soundtrack, and is just 4 minutes of a lush r&b groove.

Utterly gorgeous

By trixie at 08:11AM

The name Tanya Lacey is probably a little familiar thanks to her feature earlier in 2011 on Loick Essien’s How We Roll. Signed by RCA earlier in the year she’s just about to start releasing her own material starting with the incredible ‘Letters To My Ex’. Super soulful, Tanya started her career in Bristol reggae band, Laid Back, when she was 16 and after learning her craft went her own way a few years later.  Now she’s been working with Roc Nation and Labrinth for her debut album and we’re told we can expect some of her reggae rapping abilities to present itself on forthcoming tracks. She can also play the steel drums! Bring it!

Currently she’s being introduced via specialist media, but the old school Alicia / Mary J / John Legend / Lauren vibes to this track feel like it would be enough to break her through so hopefully they’ll return to this song next year when it’s time to go mainstream.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A sound of 2012 contender for sure.

By trixie at 06:23AM

MG Siegler on Google integrating Google+ into Chrome:

Right now, Google bakes G+ into most Google properties via the black nav bar. This undoubtedly spurs a lot of usage. What if the next phase is to take it a step higher? Go right to the browser itself? ... They already have users logging into Chrome now for syncing, etc. We’re already much closer to this happening than most probably realize. ... From a business and integration perspective, these would ... be smart moves. But they’ll also remind people even more of 90s-era Microsoft. Google has to tread carefully here.

I think most people agree that Google should try to avoid being like 90s-era Microsoft, if only because everybody hated 90s-era Microsoft. But there's a bigger reason than Google's long-broken promise of "don't be evil", which is that this strategy doesn't work. You cannot make a bad product popular by integrating it into a good one; all you can do is ruin the good product.

Microsoft, of course, is famous for this. They integrated their awful browser deeply into their operating system. On the face of it this would seem like a vindication of the strategy: Explorer became the dominant browser for years. But while everybody used Explorer, they'd ruined Windows: Explorer was one giant security vulnerability, leading to a huge decline in public confidence in the operating system, making Apple's locked-down approach more attractive. It was a public-relations nightmare, over and over.

And there are lots of much clearer examples. Yahoo's integration of, well, everything into everything else. You name it: they integrated Mail into the front page, News into Mail, YAP into both front page and Mail, My Yahoo into everything. RealNetwork's integration of so much crap into their media player that everyone abandoned them. More recently, Apple's integration of Ping into iTunes was met with derision and further complaints of bloatware. None of these integrations made the crappy products any less crappy, they just made people abandon the popular products in favour of cleaner, simpler alternatives.

Of course, making use of the popularity of your existing, popular products to boost the popularity of your new product is a sensible strategy: you get a burst of traffic and can reach critical mass fast. But if it turns out the new product stinks, you need to turn it off fast. Google tried it with Buzz and it was a disaster; they tried it with Plus and so far it's been working, because Plus is a much better clone of Facebook than Buzz was a clone of Twitter.

But the shine seems to be wearing off Plus, and they're not turning around the APIs they need fast enough to bring developers onto Plus as a platform, a crucial plank of Facebook's popularity. If they build notifications into Chrome to artificially boost its popularity rather than beefing up the APIs to genuinely improve the product, they'll find they have a revolt on their hands, with users abandoning Chrome.

Hopefully, Google knows better than to make that mistake.

By at 01:03AM

I have a rather unfair opinion of Annie Lennox as a woman who doesn’t half bleat on. Thankfully it tends to be about amazing, worthy things that she’s upto or supporting. She’s certainly the most obvious AIDS activist I can think of. Had however, I have been about (in non toddler format) at the height of her fame I suspect I’d be a huge, huge fan and she would have been right up my street.

A strong, confident woman with able to manipulate her image, play with her sexuality, become an icon and put on a fierce show. What’s not to love? I’m a fan of the Eurythmics and solo songs I’ve just come across in my life but they’re another one of those bands that are on my very long list of people to properly invest time in when I have it.

This weekend I happened across The House of Annie Lennox at The V&A. We had half an hour in the museum and were quickly running through to see what we could find. I’ve only ever been around the fashion galleries there (currently closed until April 2012) and my childhood memory was that that was the entire museum. How wrong I am. I need to go back there and do some proper exploring.

This time however we were lucky enough to discover this nearly hidden room. It’s a gorgeous one room display, curated by Annie herself, that pumps out songs and displays some of her famous outfits, her awards, and various handwritten lyrics, notes and memories. Centered around what looks like a small wendy house, it’s really worth popping in quickly and checking it out if you’re in the area. It’s definitely reignited my interest and jumped the Eurythmics to the top of my bands to listen to list.

The exhibition is free and runs until the end of February 2012.

By trixie at 08:46AM

… even possibly in name. Meet Phlo Finister – her real name is Elijah (even though she is a girl!). 19 years old and from LA, she’s obsessed with Edie Sedgewick and has reversioned Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Bang Bang’ with a bassline sample from Mobb Deep’s ‘Shook Ones’. It could still do with a bit of an Audiobully’s DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN breakout.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Classy American swagger without the surgically enhanced lips.

By trixie at 07:57AM

Yeah it's gone a bit quiet here, mostly because I've already exported all my posts into a new wordpress development environment to work on the next design of the site, so I'll have to copy-paste all this across when I'm done writing it. But omg new blog! Exciting, right?!

Well actually, not so much. I'm spending hours and hours just getting my head around the very basics. I needed to upgrade my hosting, work out subdomains, the export took a while all by itself, then there was finding out what a "theme" is made of, how posts work, the different taxonomies. In some places it's bafflingly freeform, allowing several ways to achieve the same thing, in others it's strangely restrictive; things that are done with a click in Expressionengine being ostensibly impossible. Now I'm at the unenviable stage of having to individually categorise, tag and set the format for each of my seven hundred and fifty posts, and after that's done I have to set up some custom menu thingies before I can finally get my hands on the dreaded "loop"... Except there'll be at least three of them, because I like making things difficult for myself.

So yeah it's going pretty slowly, and it's playing second fifth fiddle to seeing my lovely boyfriend, socialising, deleting four fifths of the resulting photos and putting the rest on facebook, and playing a ton of different computer games (which needs a blogpost of its own). Also there's a merger and a complete refurb ahappening at work, and I turn the big THREE OH in a week and a half, so there's a lot on. But I'm keeping at it, in dribs and drabs. Dribs and drabs.

By at 21:17PM

This is my response to the UK Government’s Open Data Consultation, which I submitted via email today.

Although I wanted to respond earlier, I’m glad I waited, as my experience assisting (or at least trying to assist) with data gathering for Gail Knight’s Great British Toilet Map has been pretty instrumental in shaping my views.

Of the three London boroughs I put my query to, one (to their credit) explained that they didn’t hold data on such a thing, another required a legal approval process for re-use which still leaves me with some doubt on the terms under which I can re-use the information, and another for my local borough sadly seems stuck in an ongoing FoI request.

This is the sad reality of open public data in the UK today, that most of it is not open and with large swathes of ignorance among the very people who are the biggest stake holders in all of this – those people who work for local Government.

So here’s my response below – if you have any interest at all in this field or at least an understanding of the benefits that open data will bring, I’d urge you to submit something yourself before the consultation closes at midnight tonight.

–BEGINS–

I am an independent software developer and open data advocate and have been actively involved in a number of collaborative projects aiming to bring the benefits of free and open data to a wider portion of society.

Most recently I have been involved in the Great British Toilet Map a project which seeks to provide a single map of all public conveniences in the United Kingdom. This has involved me making requests for open data from a number of London Borough Councils, a process which I have found extremely difficult and only partly successful despite the trivial nature and very low volume of the data concerned.

In light of this experience I am supportive of the idea that a “right to data” is helpful for citizens, developers, entrepreneurs and ultimately our wider economy and societal well-being. My experience to date has been of public sector organisations with little or no knowledge at all of this important new area of information governance, and with few resources and little inclination to assist those of us who are currently trying, despite the substantial barriers, to develop innovative services which not only create value in themselves but also expose the ‘bottlenecks’ within our public sector. This is a win-win scenario for all parties concerned.

Clearly, there is work to be done to improve this situation. Although I believe education of public sector organisations and those acting on their behalf will help to address the lack of knowledge, I believe immediate and concrete action is needed from Central Government, which also needs to do more to ‘lead from the front’. I hope to provide some further views on what shape this action may take in the detailed response which follows.

How we might enhance a “right to data”, establishing stronger rights for individuals, businesses and other actors to obtain data from public bodies and about public services

A right to data is of vital importance to establishing a vibrant open data ecosystem in the United Kingdom and the associated economic benefits that numerous studies have shown this will bring.

Since such a large volume of data is held at both a national and regional level relating to public services, by public bodies, it is vital that such a right to data applies to all bodies providing services to the public utilising public money, in full or in part.

However such rights must fit in with the current Freedom of Information (FoI) landscape and in particular the Reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI) guidelines which govern how this information may re-used. These alone are not sufficient to provide a “right to data” but does provide a useful and similar example which has been generally successful in its implementation.

Existing FoI legislation provides the broad availability of information to individuals, businesses and other actors and this is also a key requirement for a right to data. However FoI does not adequately address other concerns connected with requesting open data from public bodies. In particular,

• FoI does not encourage the re-use of released information, and in fact most organisations prohibit this without explicit and additional approval. This often in my experience requires a legal review which introduces unnecessary delays and costs. Under a right to data requesters should be granted the ability to re-use the data by default, rather than as an exception. The re-use should not require disclosure of the purposes of the re-use or the intent of the requester, instead the information should be explicitly granted under a standard licence such as the Open Government Licence (OGL). Requesters should have the right to request release under an alternative open licence if required.
• Most often data supplied under FoI is derived data delivered in unstructured formats, even where this exists in a structured form within the organisation. A right to data should shift the focus to providing the full and raw information, with the exception of any personal data that falls under the scope of the existing Data Protection Act. There should be a presumption in favour of publishing the full raw data unless it can clearly be shown that this is not possible (see below).
• It is not always made clear what related data is held by the organisation, or where information has been not included in the response. Organisations should publish an open list of the data held by them internally, for what purposes, and who has access to each system, in order to allow requesters to place suitable requests in the first place.

Although the structures provided by FoI are helpful in allowing citizens access to public data, the limitations above mean that is currently a rather blunt instrument for requesting open data from organisations. The Government must therefore strongly consider bringing forward additional primary legislation with the view of setting up a similar framework for open data, or modifying the existing framework to overcome these deficiencies.

How to set transparency standards that enforce this right to data

Transparency is an end goal of the greater openness which a right to data seeks to deliver. Organisations should understand their responsibilities and duties around transparency, but a greater level of openness should also be seen as a way to deliver increased involvement of citizens around public issues, and greater levels of engagement with the bodies themselves.

Although openness itself is difficult to measure, qualitative measurements of external engagement levels and of transparency in decision making should be used to provide comparisons between organisations.

Within local government although excellent levels of transparency and accountability often exist at the executive level, less is to be found at the departmental level below that, and therefore this should be particular focal point for comparisons.

How public bodies and providers of public services might be held to account for delivering Open Data

The Information Commissioner Office (ICO) guidance provides a useful model for dispute resolution in FoI requests. The process could be similar for the new right to data, providing an option for requesters to request an internal review if they are unhappy with the handling of a particular case, followed by an external review by the ICO should this not be sufficient to resolve the situation.

Although a new body could be considered to police the system and hold organisations to account, the ICO has a great deal of experience in this area already and may prove a more effective – and cost effective – solution.

Penalties should be applicable for organisations which consistently fail to deliver on their expectations, but the design of these penalties should ensure that money is not taken away from the field of open data. For instance, if it is deemed that a financial penalty is appropriate, this money should be channelled into a central fund for other open data projects in the public sector.

How we might ensure collection and publication of the most useful data

Sites such as data.gov.uk act as a useful focus point for coordinating the release of new open data. The Requests section in particular offers a way of gauging which data sets have the most interest around them, but the current implementation contains too large a number of requests, many duplicated, and requires more active management. The ability of users to vote on other requests is key in determining the level of interest, but there is no requirement on the Cabinet Office to respond to requests when they reach a certain level of interest and more generally it is not clear how this list translates into action. This should be rectified immediately.

Although some data may be published pro-actively by organisations on sites such as data.gov.uk, this alone is not sufficient, and therefore the focus must be in giving citizens themselves the right to request any information held by any public-financed organisation as open data.

Since my experience has shown that many organisations today are not sufficiently enlightened in this field, it is necessary to examine the reasons why requests made under a “right to data” could be refused, and to mitigate against these.

Not all public data will be possible to publish in an open and machine-readable format. It may be that data exists in legacy systems which have not been designed with an open export format in mind.

However this alone should not be a sufficient reason for organisations to refuse requests. It may be possible that even where the organisation lacks the expertise or the budget to produce the raw data exports requires, that this expertise exists in other companies or organisations. Indeed, this could be used to stimulate activity in the SME IT sector if the work were offered through a public tender. Voluntary groups may also be interested in helping in situations where the commercial sector is unable to meet the challenge, and their costs could be met through a central fund where funding streams within the organisation are not available.

Only when it can be demonstrated that an organisation has done all it can to extract information from its internal systems itself and that it has also seeked external input and failed to come up with a solution, that alternatives to the original source data should be evaluated, or – where no alternatives are available – that the original request should be refused. Even in those circumstances, it should be possible for the requester to request a review of the decision should any of the circumstances change in the future (e.g. a change in IT systems).

Organisations also have a responsibility when procuring new IT systems to ensure that data is stored in open formats, or at the very least, can be exported in open formats in real time. Organisations should be accountable for this and should be able to demonstrate as part of the public tender process that they have taken this requirement into account for all new systems.

How we might make the internal workings of government and the public sector more open

Greater transparency must be recognised up-front as a key driver of the proposed “right to data”, to ensure that taxpayers are receiving best value for money and that officials are held accountable. Progress on this front should be actively monitored by central government and additional steps taken where necessary to ensure that periodic goals set by Government are met. Timelines for action should be published to allow citizens to further hold those in this oversight role to account.

How far there is a role for government to stimulate enterprise and market making in the use of Open Data

The Government and other public bodies under its control have a clear responsibility to make all public data openly available as the default option. It should not attempt to influence the open data ecosystem which remains at an early stage of development and shows considerable promise that it will develop as a world-leader in the field.

However, Government has a role to play in ensuring that the data itself is made freely available and should prioritise the release of the ‘base’ data which it holds such as mapping and weather information, which is required in order to give context to the majority of the other data sets published.

Lastly, the government can help in the longer term by encouraging the use of open standards by data publishers and in providing more general education and best practice to them.

–ENDS–

By wabson at 10:24AM

Earlier in the year I was very excited to put new girl duo Oh My on our Future Hits Live bill. Since the summer, the Example managed girl group have beenslowly building themselves up with buzz releases like ‘Run This Town’ and ‘Kicking & Screaming’ but now they’re launching properly with the girl power smasher ‘Dirty Dancer’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A great video and a perfectly timed release to push them further in the mind of Sound of 2012 voters. Jade’s face / hair / everything is packed full of attitude and together they happily combine cuteness with some kick-ass moves.

By trixie at 06:06AM

Think about a movie that you're downloading via BitTorrent*. Better yet, visualize it using this amazing BitTorrent visualization. Where is the movie stored? Well, on the hard drive of the person who started the torrent. Except they might have left the swarm by now. So instead, on the hard drives of a couple dozen other users. Except none of the ones you're talking to may actually have a full copy of the movie, just the pieces of it you happen to need.

Instead, stop looking at the nodes. They come and go, none of them are vital. Instead, look at the center of the simulation: the mass of bits flying from one node to the next. That's where the movie is. This is the cloud: the real cloud, not the marketing term. The movie isn't on a device, it's on the network, perpetually in transit, stored in the very wires and routers that compose it. And as long as enough nodes exist to bounce it around, it will stay there. Already, there are some torrents that have stayed alive for over seven years, almost from the birth of the protocol. And as the size of the online population increases, the volume of data stored in the real cloud will increase.

Search engines like The Pirate Bay, currently used mostly for purposes of dubious legality, will become the first guides to this new, amorphous universe of disembodied content. Content independent of storage, independent of source, stored in the body of the network itself. No vendor can rent this cloud to you by the hour, nobody can buy it or sell it or control it at all. That's part of its power. That's part of why the real cloud is so very different from the way data has existed before. You don't decide what gets stored on the real cloud: the cloud does, in the ultimate participative democracy. All you can do is feed new things to the cloud and hope it likes it, and provide new tools for getting data in and out.

This is a big deal. It is a phase-change in the nature of data, from liquid to gas. We are only just beginning to see and understand the implications of this transition. Serious research into the real cloud, and tools built around it and on it, are being stunted by the association torrents have with illegal behaviour. But that's going to fade. If you're looking for a blue-ocean field of emerging technology, where you can do new, exciting things and make a big difference, look at the real cloud.

* which you obviously don't do, since you use BitTorrent only to legally download free Linux distributions. So imagine a hypothetical movie.

By at 01:59AM

I tweeted a Guardian article the other week, in which John Naughton looked at the Raspberry Pi and it’s potential, along with several other projects, to fix the broken way in which kids are taught about technology in schools.

A key driver of this new tech resistance movement is a desire to rescue kids from the fate that the Department of Education has in mind for them, namely as passive consumers of information appliances and services created by giant foreign corporations. Where governments dream up projects like the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), the resistance seeks to grant kids a “Licence to Tinker” – to demystify the technology by providing tools and ideas that enable them to understand how modern networked devices work.

Although seemingly not his own words, John uses the interesting phrase “Licence to Tinker” to describe the laudable idea that children should be taught how to understand technology, rather than merely using it.

The catchphrase is slick, but to me it worryingly implies that you need a licence in order to open these things up, and comparisons with the dreaded ECDL seems hardly likely to inspire confidence in this small revolution.

Fortunately, Emma Mulqueeny, in her blog post on the same topic, comes up with the fabulous rallying call “Teach our kids to code”, also the name of her e-petition, which you really should sign if you’ve not already.

As she notes, there’s a collective responsibility on us all to keep pushing this message. Eric Schmidt may worry about the future of the UK’s tech competitiveness, but “teach our kids to code” shows us the simplicity of the solution to these apparent problems.

Most people would recognise the importance of teaching children how to think critically about a piece of literature, and even writing their own pieces, as well as merely reading it. Yet we don’t do the same with software, which like mainstream literature and journalism tends to be written by a small-ish set of people (at least compared with the overall population) with a certain set of principles, and often an economic interest in doing things a certain way.

We should teach kids to code because it’s essential that they have the skills to examine and question the digital world we now live in, and when they really don’t agree that they can do their own thing.

If you agree with this sentiment, then please sign the petition.

By wabson at 11:03AM

I'm still eyeball-deep in the explore phase of my new site redesign, which has meant a lot of research into the state of web design trends. There's clearly two big ones going on at the moment and they're both tricky to visualise without a lot of examples, so I'm going to whittle down my overflowing bookmark bar and point out the dozen best examples I've found.

Parallax!

Linking in with the 2010 craze for one-page websites; these are sites where the backgrounds, foregrounds and/or midgrounds animate relative to the position of the scroll bar to make it look like they are moving faster or slower than expected. It started with the Nike site, and now everyone's doing it. Easier shown than told though! Click and scroll up and down to witness the nifty.

• Mark Lawrence Design is the personal site of a designer, it's pretty arty and freeform with things swooshing in from every direction as you scroll down. Nifty!
• On the other hand Quality Cabinets is a "just" a commercial, almost brochure-ware site, but it still uses a restrained parallax on their homepage effect to very nice effect.
• I can't decide if Dentsu Network over-uses the parallax, but it's certainly very striking when you use the left hand navigation to get around the page.
• A charity appeal on a sector jobs site Authentic Jobs uses a well-drilling analogy to get through the page, striking water at the end.
• The Nizo sign-up page is slick and minimal...
• While swiss design firm Ala decided to go in the opposite direction, showing off everything you could ever possibly want to do with scrolling-based animations. It's a leeetle busy.

Responsive design!

In a nutshell these are sites that change depending on the width of the device, which is becoming critical in a time of increasing web device plurality. Technically they're a combination of three techniques: auto-sizing columns (using % widths instead of px), auto-sizing images (by setting their widths to 100%), and using Media Queries to serve up a different styles at very wide or very narrow widths. To see the changes you'll have to vary your browser width.

• The website for the dConstruct 2011 web conference by the inestimable ClearLeft is predictably one of the quintessential responsive design sites. The columns shrink, the images resize and flow and at narrow widths it switches layout to a more "mobile friendly" design.
• Stephen Caver has another true responsive site, using three layouts instead of two. This one's interesting because of the CSS3 used to get some pseudo-parallax texture effects when you widen and shrink the portal size.
• Andersson-Wise has BIG PICTURES YAY. Slightly basic layout but this demos the technique of stretching an image to fill the space, where usually the images have a maxwidth.
• Forefathers doesn't actually use resizing columns or images - focusing instead on Media Queries - so this an example of adaptive design similar to what I already use on my site. It's much less fluid so it needs four distinct layouts at different widths to get it looking as good, and it's a bit less future proof as it's difficult to predict what portal sizes new web-enabled devices will have. Still, at the moment it still looks great. Plus there's a monkey.
• Andrew Revitt's page is another example of adaptive design with four layouts. It also uses a double background to make a better use of what space is left over at the sides.
• The Happy Bit is a lovely little adaptive design site, but it uses five CSS layouts at different widths... On anything but a tiny site it's a bit much.

At first I got very excited about the parallax-type sites, but looking under the hood the markup behind all those different scrolling elements is actually pretty ugly and unsemantic. I'd never be able to compress my site to one page anyway. So instead I'm going to focus on responsive design, which certainly has more longevity, though I still hope to throw some subtle parallax elements in there.

Dauntingly. what both these techniques have in common is they're a big step away from websites being frozen HTML interpretations of static Photoshop documents; they move, they change, they flow. It makes my next stage - amateur wireframing - kinda tricky.

By at 14:54PM

Though last week's dConstruct conference was a little more high level and blue sky than I'm used to, it still had more or less the same inspiring effect as it always has: once the second cup of coffee was safely put away I quickly found myself scribbling ideas that were only tangentially related to the speakers. It's perhaps predictable then that I'm now planning a total redesign of this site.

I mean, it's needed! It's not really fit for purpose anymore. I originally built it primarily as a collection of my various web presences and secondarily as a archive of all the old posts on a blog I'd stopped writing on. Yeah, the one you're reading now. If you look at the home page, it's mainly a place to send you elsewhere: big links to my twitter (which is irreverent, irrelevant or both), last.fm (which since I mostly listen to music on my frustraingly incompatible blackberry is now completely inaccurate) and my photos.

See, I have the opposite problem with my photos. While I never used to update them, now I do often, and I'm really getting into photography as a hobby. Similar story with the blog, it's not the redheaded stepchild it used to be. I didn't even have a cv and portfolio section at first, and though they're both now up-to-date content-wise, they could really do with some sprucing up. And as for the "info" pages, in spite of my adding some shiny canvas-based graphics I still think they're kinda dry. Ideally they'd be boiled down to a less tedious series of h'amoozing infographics, but that's for another time.

So I need to get a some more HTML5 action going, tighten up the basics and rework everything as a triptych of blog, fotos and work. Time to dust off the designer hat.

By at 16:41PM

Delilah – what a brilliant name to be given if you’re thinking about growing up to be a popstar.

You might have heard the temptress in question when she appeared on Chase & Status’ ‘Time’. Now signed to Atlantic Records the ‘Ain’t Nobody’ sampling Go is her debut solo single.

Dark and brilliantly wobbly, Go creaks with so much sexiness it’ll take only one listen for it to head straight on your down and dirty playlists.

By trixie at 11:18AM

I was idly playing Assassins Creed: Brotherhood the other day - collecting flags, chests, feathers and whatever other non-plot-essential side quests they generously scatter through the game - when I realised the sequel Revelations is out fairly soon and maybe I should hurry up and complete the game instead of gathering pseudo-rosebuds. Not only that but Skyrim is going to be out in the same week and by all accounts that's going to be AMAZING and MASSIVE. Your average RPG will take me about 50 hours which I guess is about average; I'm hardly a completionist but I'm a sucker for a side-quest. Games can take a lot longer than that if it's open world with a lot of exploration though, like Skyrim. Fun as Brotherhood is I'm also rather tempted to just drop it and instead pick up the very well received Deus Ex: Human Revolution: I loved, loved, LOVED the cyberpunk original back in 2000, but I know if I do that I'll probably never finish Brotherhood. I just need a little more time.

One game at a time Dan. One at a time.

A gadfly-like attention span makes it difficult to play the same game more than once: my attempt to work through Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 again to make "canon" savegames (for exporting into sequels) had to be completely shelved, it just drags too much when you know what's going to happen. The Witcher dragged too, this time because being poorly translated, so I never finished it. Which is really annoying because they fixed the dialogue and everything else in a subsequent uber-patch and the critically acclaimed sequel Assassins of Kings came out earlier this year. It sounds amazing but I just can't bring myself to play it with the prequel on a shelf unfinished. I've also given up on finishing the DLC for Fallout 3, but as soon as the last of the DLC and major mods are finished for Fallout New Vegas I want to get back into that as it's better written, more in keeping with the Fallout spirit and on top of the open world exploration there's also a lot of sniping, which I love. I'll find some sniping time.

I've not even really thought about the excellent Starcraft 2 or Portal 2, though I'm sure I'll get to them eventually. Probably next year when they'll be competing for attention with the likes of Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3 (both a guaranteed delight) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The latter is an MMO which is a little risky, them being so addictiveness and whatnot, but I figure I'll just play it like it's a single player game. At the other end of the scale Civilization V has been really nice to casually dip into; it holds your attention while you play it but doesn't demand it while you're doing something else. Maybe that's an RTS thing? Empire: Total War did that to an extent but it was way too easy to dominate once you began to pull ahead and the premise of global conquest in a pseudo-historical game strikes me as really silly, so though it chafes not to get my money's worth I've had to ditch it entirely. I'd love to replace it with Shogun 2: Total War though as it's supposed to be tighter and less buggy and the idea of merely conquering all of Japan is much easier to swallow, but y'know... Time.

To think there used to be a years-long dearth of good RPGs for the PC! It's an embarrassment of riches now, and relatively unrestricted by budget or computer specs as I am the only thing I'm missing now to play them all is time.

Glad to see that PC Gaming seems to be having a revival, just a shame I'm too BIZ-AY. ...Time.

By at 10:06AM

A bit of ‘Forget You’, a slice of Bruno Mars – this is the most immediate radio-friendly song I’ve heard in ages. It’s ridiculously so. Also he’s super cute – swoon!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Information is lacking – I think he’s just being launched in the States and hopefully will be out over here on Island next year. He’s from Miami, moved to Harlem as a teen and developed a passion for hats. I guess you can’t have everything.

By trixie at 06:52AM

I'm just back at work after a couple of weeks off, ten days of which was spent in Edinburgh during the awesome Fringe Festival. And awesome it was, in the oldschool "overwhelmingly huge" meaning of the word. Hundreds of venues and thousands of shows; I don't know how I thought "play it by ear" would work at all! Juggling seeing the shows and doing touristy things in the city and drinking with friends and catching up with the family was just too much, it would have been so much easier if I'd planned out more what I was going to do beforehand, or at least read around the subject some more. By the time I'd worked out that I wanted to see some revue comedy it was almost time to go home!

Still, we pretty much managed. My highlights for the holiday went a bit like this:

• Show-wise: easily the stunning Le Gateau Chocolat and the adorable Mae Martin
• Drinking highlight was accidentally meeting the owners of an actual good gay bar in Edinburgh (IKR!?) called The Street, followed by more shots and dancing and the hall of mirrors that is CC Bloom's.
• Family-wise was chilling out, dog-walking and the unexpectedly delicious vegetarian cooking. Also they loved Dom which is nice.
• Tourist-wise we didn't get a lot done, so the highlight was probably napping in the short-lived sun in Princes Street Gardens.

I'm not sure how to categorise the extremely surreal dinner with a Harry C-W and a bunch of comedians including Scott Capurro and Margaret Cho, so I'll just file it under "lolwhat".

By at 12:52PM

Dear dead Bizzy Wizzy. You were seriously unhinged, hated and tried to attack strangers and had a really stupid name, but I'm going to miss you scaring the dog four times your size and getting hair on all my things. You'd totally mellowed out in your old age, which was nice, though it's sad that you passed just as you were finally about to get your own garden.

Hope you had a nice life of sitting on plastic bags and purring. Rest in peace, old cat.

By at 20:38PM

I still don't know how to use my new camera. While I understand the basics, they way they all interact is tricky, the layers of jargon impenetrable and the automatic functions of the camera add more complexity. I'll get there eventually... Meanwhile I'm mainly using automatic mode and continuing to progress with nifty post-processing. My free copy of Lightroom arrived yesterday so I should be able to advance to taking pictures in RAW which is exciting

I got to thinking about the EXIF meta data embedded in my photos last week, and wondering if there's anything interesting I could extract from it: with a bit of work and number juggling I put together a graph of how many photos I've taken and how many I've kept with my various digital cameras, since the start of 2004. It's pretty nifty, and far too much effort for a single blog post so I've also used it the new photography info page I've written. (That's a demo of deeplinking which is also new. Woop!)

Pics taken per month

Realising I've taken fourty thousand pictures in the last two and a half years is a bit scary. It also doesn't count the hundreds I took at uni with my uber-retro film camera, but that's a story for another time.

In other news, I'm off work for the next 17 days, including 10 days in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, which is AMAZING. Longest non-Christmas holiday since uni. Yes.

By at 10:03AM

The only skills gap bigger than the one for programmers is the one for statisticians.

The whole web industry is accumulating vast quantities of data and storing it, magpie-like, as if it has intrinsic value, aided by ever-falling prices for storage. But the data isn't valuable. It doesn't mean anything until somebody who knows what they're doing looks at it, sifts through it, and produces a tool that lets others use it to draw valid and useful conclusions.

But hardly anybody does this. Instead we apply the most absurdly basic analyses and build whole businesses around them. We are messing around in the shallows, while the ocean of data gets bigger every day.

If you want to find yourself enormously over-employed for the next decade, learn a bunch of statistics. As a bonus, find a way to fit machine learning in there, but we even have way more people who understand machine learning than understand what it is we should be teaching them.

By at 17:48PM

I tweeted about ORM last week, and since then several people have asked me to clarify what I meant. I have actually previously written about ORM, but it was in the context of a larger discussion about SQL and I shouldn't have confused the two issues. So here I'm going to focus on ORM itself. I'm also going to try to be very brief, since it became very apparent from my SQL article that people tend to stop reading at the first sentence that makes them angry (and then leave a comment about it, whether or not their point is addressed later on).

What's an anti-pattern?

I was pleased to discover that Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of anti-patterns, both from within the world of programming and outside of it. The reason I call ORM an anti-pattern is because it matches the two criteria the author of AntiPatterns used to distinguish anti-patterns from mere bad habits, specifically:

1. It initially appears to be beneficial, but in the long term has more bad consequences than good ones
2. An alternative solution exists that is proven and repeatable

It is the first characteristic that has led to ORM's maddening (to me) popularity: it seems like a good idea at first, and by the time the problems become apparent, it's too late to switch away.

What do you mean by ORM?

The chief offender that I'm talking about is ActiveRecord, made famous by Ruby on Rails and ported to half a dozen languages since then. However, the same criticisms largely apply to other ORM layers like Hibernate in Java and Doctrine in PHP.

The benefits of ORM

• Simplicity: some ORM layers will tell you that they "eliminate the need for SQL". This is a promise I have yet to see delivered. Others will more realistically claim that they reduce the need to write SQL but allow you to use it when you need it. For simple models, and early in a project, this is definitely a benefit: you will get up and running faster with ORM, no doubt about it. However, you will be running in the wrong direction.
• Code generation: eliminating user-level code from the model through ORM opens the way for code generation, the "scaffolding" pattern which can give you a functional interface to all your tables through a simple description of your schema. Even more magically, you can change your schema description and re-generate the code, eliminating CRUD. Again, this definitely works initially.
• Efficiency is "good enough": none of the ORM layers I've seen claim efficiency gains. They are all fairly explicit that you are making a sacrifice of efficiency for code agility. If things get slow, you can always override your ORM methods with more efficient hand-coded SQL. Right?

The problems with ORM

Inadequate abstraction

The most obvious problem with ORM as an abstraction is that it does not adequately abstract away the implementation details. The documentation of all the major ORM libraries is rife with references to SQL concepts. Some introduce them without indicating their equivalents in SQL, while others treat the library as merely a set of procedural functions for generating SQL.

The whole point of an abstraction is that it is supposed to simplify. An abstraction of SQL that requires you to understand SQL anyway is doubling the amount you need to learn: first you need to learn what the SQL you're trying to run is, then you have to learn the API to get your ORM to write it for you. In Hibernate, to perform complicated SQL you actually have to learn a third language, HQL, which is maddeningly almost-but-not-quite SQL, which then gets translated to SQL for you.

A defender of ORM will say that this is not true of every project, that not everyone needs to do complicated joins, that ORM is an "80/20" solution, where 80% of users need only 20% of the features of SQL, and that ORM can handle those. All I can say is that in my fifteen years of developing database-backed web applications that has not been true for me. Only at the very beginning of a project can you get away with no joins or naive joins. After that, you need to tune and consolidate queries. Even if 80% of users need only 30% of the features of SQL, then 100% of users have to break your abstraction to get the job done.

Incorrect abstraction

If your project really does not need any relational data features, then ORM will work perfectly for you, but then you have a different problem: you're using the wrong datastore. The overhead of a relational datastore is enormous; this is a large part of why NoSQL data stores are so much faster. If your data is relational, however, that overhead is worth it: your database does not merely store your data, it represents your data and can answer questions about it on the basis of the relations captured, far more efficiently than you could in procedural code.

But if your data is not relational, then you are adding a huge and unnecessary overhead by using SQL in the first place and then compounding the problem by adding a further abstraction layer on top of that.

On the the other hand, if your data is relational, then your object mapping will eventually break down. SQL is about relational algebra: the output of SQL is not an object but an answer to a question. If your object "is" an instance of X and "has" a number of Y, and each of Y "belongs to" a Z, what is the correct representation in memory of your object? Is it merely the properties of X, or should it include all the Ys, and/or all the Zs? If you get only the properties of X, when do you run the query to fetch the Ys? And do you want one or all of them? In reality, it depends: that's what I mean when I say SQL is the answer to a question. The representation of your object in memory depends what you intend to do with it, and context-sensitive representation is not a feature of OO design. Relations are not objects; objects are not relations.

Death by a thousand queries

This leads naturally to another problem of ORM: inefficiency. When you fetch an object, which of its properties (columns in the table) do you need? ORM can't know, so it gets all of them (or it requires you to say, breaking the abstraction). Initially this is not a problem, but when you are fetching a thousand records at a time, fetching 30 columns when you only need 3 becomes a pernicious source of inefficiency. Many ORM layers are also notably bad at deducing joins, and will fall back to dozens of individual queries for related objects. As I mentioned earlier, many ORM layers explicitly state that efficiency is being sacrificed, and some provide a mechanism to tune troublesome queries. The problem, I have discovered with experience, is that there is seldom a single "magic bullet" query that needs to be optimized: the death of database-backed applications is not the efficiency of any one query, but the number of queries. ORM's lack of context-sensitivity means that it cannot consolidate queries, and must fall back on caching and other mechanisms to attempt to compensate.

What are the alternatives?

Hopefully by this point I've made some kind of case that ORM has fundamental design flaws. But to be an antipattern, there needs to be an alternative. In fact, there are two:

Use objects

If your data is objects, stop using a relational database. The programming world is currently awash with key-value stores that will allow you to hold elegant, self-contained data structures in huge quantities and access them at lightning speed. There's no law that says Step One of writing any web app is installing MySQL. The massive over-application of relational databases to every data representation problem is one of the reasons SQL has acquired a bad reputation in recent years, when in fact the problem is lazy design.

Use SQL in the Model

It's hugely dangerous to claim there is One True Way™ to do anything in programming. But in my experience, the best way to represent relational data in object-oriented code is still through a model layer: encapsulation of your data representation into a single area of your code is fundamentally a good idea. However, remember that the job of your model layer is not to represent objects but to answer questions. Provide an API that answers the questions your application has, as simply and efficiently as possible. Sometimes these answers will be painfully specific, in a way that seems "wrong" to even a seasoned OO developer, but with experience you will get better at finding points of commonality that allow you to refactor multiple query methods into one.

Likewise, sometimes the output will be a single object X, which is easy to represent. But sometimes the output will be a grid of aggregate data, or a single integer count. Resist the temptation to wrap these in too many layers of abstraction, and deal with the data on its own terms. Above all resist the fallacy of OO, that it can represent anything and everything. OO is itself an abstraction, a beautiful and hugely flexible one, but relational data is one of its boundaries, and pretending objects can do something they can't is the fundamental, root problem in all ORM.

In summary (TL;DR)

• ORM is initially simpler to understand and faster to write than SQL-based model code
• Its efficiency in the early stages of any project is adequate
• Unfortunately, these advantages disappear as the project increases in complexity: the abstraction breaks down, forcing the dev to use and understand SQL
• Entirely anecdotally, I claim that the abstraction of ORM breaks down not for 20% of projects, but close to 100% of them.
• Objects are not an adequate way of expressing the results of relational queries.
• The inadequacy of the mapping of queries to objects leads to a fundamental inefficiency in ORM-backed applications that is pervasive, distributed, and therefore not easily fixed without abandoning ORM entirely.
• Instead of using relational stores and ORM for everything, think more carefully about your design
• If your data is object in nature, then use object stores ("NoSQL"). They'll be much faster than a relational database.
• If your data is relational in nature, the overhead of a relational database is worth it.
• Encapsulate your relational queries into a Model layer, but design your API to serve the specific data needs of your application; resist the temptation to generalize too far.
• OO design cannot represent relational data in an efficient way; this is a fundamental limitation of OO design that ORM cannot fix.

By at 17:47PM

You may have heard about Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, an app that lets you explore the giant trove of geolocation data your iPhone has been collecting since iOS 4.0 (and possibly before).

You may not know that the grid on Pete's released app is the result of his app deliberately aggregating the datapoints to a grid, in order to be a little less creepy:

if you zoom in you’ll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately.

But hey, why should he decide how much we want to expose our location? Let's get super creepy! Following some instructions from a clever friend, I made the very simple change required to increase the granularity of the data shown on the map. Before:

Woah! Neat, right? If you want to try it out yourself, you can follow Nicole's instructions on your own downloaded copy of Pete's source from github, or if that's too much trouble and you trust me, you can download your own copy of the extra-creepy version of iPhoneTracker. I'm not very experienced with compiling desktop software, but this works for me, and I use OS X Snow Leopard, so it will probably work for Leopard OS X too.

Important note: "granularity" is not the same as "accuracy". Your iPhone is frequently wrong about where you are, by up to half a mile or so. So your data points will show on average about where you were, but there will be plenty of random outliers -- which is why I appear to spend so much time swimming in San Francisco Bay, for example.

Enjoy!

By at 17:46PM

When you say "agile", I hear "cargo cult".

Agile is a process for managing software development. If you have a great team of smart people who communicate well and trust each other, they can use agile techniques to release lots of small iterations on a software project very quickly. This pattern of software release is often useful for startups. None of this is in dispute.

The problem is that with its rise in popularity, it has been both misunderstood and over-applied. If you have a good software team you can use agile, but if you use agile you will not automatically get a great team. If your team members communicate well and trust each other they can use agile, but if they communicate well and trust each other they could use any other methodology up to and including no fixed process whatsoever, and be equally successful. Agile changes your release pattern, not your people.

Bottom line: great teams produce great software. Great teams using agile release software every two weeks. Bad teams will produce shitty software. Bad teams using agile will release shitty software every two weeks.

By at 17:46PM

Dear Parents of the World -

There is a phrase used often, when talking about portrayals of homosexuals in the media, by people who say that it's okay for people to be gay in the privacy of their own homes but they don't want to "expose their children to homosexuality". No offence, they say. I just don't want to have to explain boys kissing to my 4-year-old. To some people, it seems like a reasonable request, and you often get your way. Like the censorship of the gay kiss in Katy Perry's Fireworks video in the UK.

On behalf of the gay people of the world, let me say: get over it.

Let's not beat around the bush here. Yes, we want to expose your children to homosexuality. We absolutely do. It's important that we expose your children to homosexuality. But not because it makes us feel better. Not out of some desire to be politically correct, or inclusive. But because it is potentially vital for their psychological well-being.

Your children are already exposed to heterosexuality on a near-constant basis in advertising, in music, in television, in movies, in books. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves exposes children to heterosexuality. She kisses the prince! That is some full-on heterosexuality going on right there!

But homosexuality is much less well-covered. Sure, homosexuality is not as common as heterosexuality, so, sure, I'd expect straight kisses on TV to outnumber gay kisses. But by hundreds, not by millions. Every romance is a straight romance, every teenager's tale of self-discovery ends in their getting the girl. The princess always marries the prince, not another princess.

The reason there are confused kids who don't realize they're gay until their late teens, causing them much anguish and heartache, is precisely because they are not exposed to homosexuality. Some are just unaware that it is a possibility. Others know there are gay people, but because people like you request that images of loving gay couples not be shown to children, they get the clear impression that there is something Wrong or Bad about homosexuality.

I know lots of you, if asked, would say there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. You may even believe it to be true. But your stance on this issue indicates differently. It's the softest form of bigotry, but precisely because it seems so innocuous it remains unexamined and damaging to the psyche of the 4-8% of kids who, no matter what they see on TV, are going to turn out gay anyway. Not knowing the word "gay" won't stop them being gay, it will just prevent them understanding why they feel so different, and that lack of understanding can be traumatic.

You don't want to explain boys kissing boys to your four-year-old? GET OVER IT. You had to explain boys kissing girls to them last week. Whatever level of explanation you gave then ("they like each other") will do just fine. If they ask questions about how gay sex works, then you can always say "I'll tell you when you're older". You don't have to give them the full blow-by-blow the first time they ask. Whenever you explain how straight sex works is fine. (However, I recommend you first find out how gay sex works before attempting to explain it. Apparently a lot of you still have some pretty weird ideas.)

Even if you are 1000%, completely, totally sure your kid is straight -- his first words were "I love vaginal sex", or something -- do it anyway. Because the second-worst thing to gay kids who think being gay is wrong is straight kids who do, and pass that mistaken belief on to their peers. You don't have to sell it to them. You don't have to convince them that being gay is a thing they want to do. They just need to understand that it is a relatively uncommon but entirely natural way to be, like being left-handed.

And sure, some kids, when they hear that some people are left-handed, try writing with their left hand too. They soon discover it doesn't work for them, and switch back. So maybe your teenagers, hearing that homosexuality is an equally valid state of being, might try it out. But so what? They'll discover it's not what they're into, and they'll move on. Believe me, there's no chance they'll get confused about it. Either you like boys or you don't. And if the thought of your children trying out gay sex scares you more than the thought of them trying out straight sex, you might want to examine your own beliefs for a second.

So go on. Expose your children to homosexuality today. It's for their own good.

Update 2010-12-24 clarified language to avoid giving the false impression that sexuality is a conscious choice. Also corrected a typo.

By at 17:45PM

So I read this tweet by Tim Siedell over the weekend, which made me think: hey, that is a lot of birds, isn't it? I mean, he's bringing her a partridge every day for 12 days, that's 12 partridges. But by the end of the song he's also bringing doves, hens, geese, and more. I started running the numbers. Then I told my friend Ricky, and together we packaged it up into this Christmas-themed infographic. Hope you like it! (Click to make it bigger!)

By at 17:44PM

As you might have heard, I bought a shiny camera last week. It's a lovely CSC, like an SLR but smaller and a bit more techy. Here's the pictures I took with it this weekend, with Flickr's awesome slideshow viewer that I don't use often enough.

It's my first "real" camera, and with a few tips from photographer friends I'm quickly learning how to work it, but I'm still only scratching the surface. It's exciting. Maybe I should get a book or go on a course, but I'm totes poor now.

You know what else is exciting?

I BOUGHT IT WITH A CREDIT CARD. AND THEN I INSURED IT. What with the pension I started earlier in the year I feel so very grown up now.

By at 07:30AM

The whole Disney doing music with pretty young things escapade has pretty much passed me by as I was too old for High School Musical which is when everything really blew up. Jonas Brothers-wise I only care about my hope that Nick never returns to his ‘trying to squeeze a poo out’ acting face as Marius in Les Mis. Miley though admittedly did raise the game dramatically with the absolute excellence of ‘See You Again’ and then the not quite as good but still ace ‘Fly On The Wall’.

Selena Gomez, despite her fabulously pop star name, has never quite made it into my musical radar. She’s a beautiful china doll but the only real interest I had with her was the decision to curiously name her pop outfit ‘Selena Gomez and The Scene’.

Regardless of her background – if you were a the two seminal pop albums of our time (State of Mind & Come and Get It) then you need to hear her new single.

‘Love You Like A Love Song’ is furiously icy and robotic. Selena however reckons it’s ‘talking about how crazy you are about someone whenever it’s the beginning. It’s the honeymoon stage if you will.” Of course we all know that frigid pop music is the best kind particularly when it’s paired with a video that must have been storyboarded when someone was completely high. In contrast her last single ‘Who Says’ was warm and bubbly but absolutely diabolical.

Click here to view the embedded video.

COLDEST GIRLFRIEND EVER.

By trixie at 06:05AM

I've never really been one for getting the latest gadget to hit the highstreet. I never had games consoles growing up, I shunned iPods for years before eventually getting one (and I didn't really like it when I did) and my phone was always been laughable. I don't know what's changed but last November I got a top-of-the range (albeit the blackberry range) smartphone, in March I upgraded my computer, and yet already I really want a Kindle (new relases of books only come out in annoying tome-like form) and I'd quite like a chromebook (my very flawed but free from work laptop has gotten me used to the luxury of reading long webpages in bed), but most of all I find myself seriously considering a £600 quid hybrid/SLR camera. It's not entirely stupid; I think my pics have seen some real improvement lately as I become accustomed to post processing stuff, and it would be really nice to have a choice of which camera to take out.

Feels like I've been taking pics forever (though I actually took a two-year break around 2005). Here's some old collages of uni friends I must have put together in about 2002.

Ciaran

Darren

Mikey

Seldo

Will

Matt

giles

Jamie

Carly

James

Alex

Someday I should take a scanner to my hardcopy collection of oldschool photos. Not that they're very good, but might be lol.

By at 08:06AM

No, probably not. But then Hotmail isn't dead either, despite being demonstrably shit (I mean they send an advert with every email, it's that bad), ditto Myspace; sold last week for only 6% of what it was supposedly worth six years ago. They're slightly laughable, outmoded, archaic, past it, but far from dead.

Back in 2004 everyone used Hotmail (*cough* and Yahoo!); it was the most widespread and accessible browser-based email, nicely tying into messenger and all the rest of it. You could only hold 1 megabyte in your inbox though, and if it got full you had to start clearing stuff out. On top of that it also seemed to attract spam like flies to shit. It sucked, but we really didn't know any better. When gmail came out that year with a flawless spam filter and a 1 gigabyte(!!!) inbox limit, everyone who cared about these sorts of things said "LOL BAI!" and promptly jumped ship. Microsoft Hotmail scrabbled around to increase their storage, and even amusingly blocked gmail invites but the damage was done.

I feel like we're in the same place now with Facebook. It's obviously got huge traction, with half the country having an account, but I don't think anywhere near that proportion actually likes it. Lets be honest they seem to delight in dicking around its users; changing layouts and features for some users and not for others, not telling anyone about it in either case, not always for the better, and always needing yet another set of notification boxes to unclick. All the message threads that once started are impossible to add or remove people from. The number of times I've attempted to upload a bunch of pictures only to have it say "upload failed" after an hour, or spent an hour using its purportedly nifty tagging systems only to hit submit and find only about a dozen of the hundreds of tags actually stuck... It's glitchy, to put it kindly.

So now Google Plus is suddenly on the scene, the interweb giant finally answering Facebook's gradual encroachment on Google's "we are the web" turf. I was sceptical after their lame Buzz and Wave efforts, but it really looks like they're going all-out on this one. It's already pretty comparable to Facebook, who actually made the news yesterday when it announced video chat, something that's already available on Plus. And Skype, and Messenger, and whatever else.

Plus minuses:

• No walls. It's debatable whether walls are needed but it does mean no birthday spam which kinda sucks.
• No direct messages. I guess they'll integrate it with gmail at some point, which makes a lot of sense, but at the moment it looks like something is missing.
• Ditto events. This could be a killer feature if they sort it and integrate it with Google calender. Here's hoping.
• Paucity of invites. It's still in beta (whatever that means thse days) so not everyone who wants to get in, can get in.

Plus pluses:

• Circles. Some people don't like the overt social stratification but only you can see how you're categorised your contacts, so I don't think that matters. For my part I like that it's not hidden under several sub menus a la Facebook, and the interface is much, MUCH better.
• Speed. Everything's faster. You only really notice when skimming through photos but it makes Facebook's theatre viewer thing look like it's grabbing everything by dialup in comparison.
• No adverts. They'll probably change this eventually but frankly I think they're much more interested in uptake than revenue for the moment; Google have deep pockets. Besides this is all about how it is now, not how it will be, plus Google ads are always less obtrusive and more relevant than Facebook ads. Fact.
• Integration with googledocs / gmail / gcalender. In the top bar for these sites you can now see how many "red squares of joy" you have pending on Plus, and not only this but when you click on it you get a dropdown that shows you the relevant content and allows you to add comments as if you were on the page. You can also use the chat function on gmail too, so basically you can stay completely uptodate without leaving your email page.
• I'm told the web app is outstanding from everyone that's used it.
• Picasa: Google Plus images is essentially picasaweb, which is already integrated with a desktop version. Things tagged on the web are tagged on my computer, and I'm pretty sure I could upload all my 19k photos onto Google Plus (at no charge), something I wouldn't dare even think about with facebook. In fact yesterday I deleted 50 photo albums on facebook. It took 45 minutes, and I left ones that were either too epic or too recent, but I want to do a little bit to wean myself (and my friends) off it.
• You can delete. Completely. Sounds silly but you can't on Facebook. I think that speaks volumes about their relative ethoses. Is that a word? We'll go with it for now.

Either Facebook stays rubbish and all but the blissfully ignorant bail to Plus, or they up their game in response to their first real competitor. I know which one I'm betting on, but either way we win. I'm excited.

By at 08:24AM

I really need to stay on top of my photos. I whittled 1000 pics down to 200 and tweaked them within an inch of their lives last week. Exhausting though it was I’m kinda chuffed with the results, though it does make me wonder what I could achieve with a “real” camera. My new favourite thing when I’m working on a pic and it still looks a bit rubbish is to make it black and white and whack the contrast and clarity up. I SO ARTY. Good times. Anyways this week it’s getting a bit silly as I’ve been trying to do the same with another 600 pictures, including ones from Dom/Dolly/Chris’s birthday night out which was amazing. Any night out that features a lot of facepaint or makeup is amazing, it always improves the vibe, I don’t know why.

I’ve updated my set of favourite pics and made it so those are the ones that appear on the front page of this site, which is pretty nifty. The portfolio section is complete too, with improved navigation that I’ve extended to the other pages, and the CV page is ACTUALLY up to date for the first time in years! I’ll probably trim and prune at it like an errant bonsai for weeks yet - the compulsive editor that I am - but it’s nice to have something done that’s been “pending” for so long. Added to the recent work on how the site looks at varying widths, and the whole thing’s kinda finished! It’s a slight embarrassment really, I’m going to have to think up more things to augment. Perhaps a bit of jQuery.ajax shenanigans next?

But for a brief moment the site is done. It’s been a long road and shit. Here’s some of the Best Bits! I.E. some mercifully low quality screenshots of what my site used to look like in its previous iterations. Also my first use of images in the blog for an age, I should do that more. It’s not like I’m short on jpegs.

Mynciboi: done in dreamweaver. Sorry. To be fair it was 2002 and I had no idea what I was doing.

Mynciboi 2.0: don’t remember how I coded it but it was a Blogger back end.

Mynciboi 3: Ugly.

Mochaholic I moved to Movable Type coz I was a GROWNUP.

DanGovan 0.5: never actually coded up! Shame. I liked it but most people said it was awful.
They were wrong, right?

DanGovan 1.0: Simple, classy, ever so slightly plagiarised.

Cya next month for more stuff you don’t care about! AND OMG STOP JUDGING ME.

By at 11:31AM

As I walked up the High Street in Maidenhead today I was pleasantly impressed to see a small market there, with a greengrocers, deli and crafts stall. It seems to be a growing trend, with a number of Welsh towns reviving or extending their on-street markets.

Among the stalls was an information stand, giving out leaflets (scanned copy of the one I picked up) and information on the new Kings Triangle development, which is being promoted as the solution to the town centre’s current woes.

The improvements are long overdue. Despite being the main pedestrian corridor linking the train station to the town centre the space is currently occupied by a mix of fast food outlets, chain pubs, low-rise offices, the monstrous Broadway multi-storey car park and a load of derelict land.

But as James Farquharson points out in a considered response on his blog today, the plans in their current form are based on the crucial assumption that retail development will provide a panacea to town centre decline, and at a time when analysts predict a continued retail slump for many years to come.

What I noticed, looking at the glossy leaflet, was the new shopping streets on the plan. Besides Debenhams, I wonder who will occupy the new spaces. Perhaps existing businesses will move in from other parts of the town centre, but in that case the development is merely shifting the problem from one place to another.

With the existing commercial centre around the High Street already having a number of vacant premises, a lot of new businesses will be needed not only to fill those but the new premises too. That would mean drawing in a large number of new visitors to Maidenhead, and with Reading, Wycombe and London providing plentiful competition, one wonders to what extent this is possible in reality.

The remarkable thing about all these towns (possibly London aside) is the degree to which they compete with each other, each trying to out-do the others in the quest for growth and economic expansion, but contributing little in architectural merit or in any general character. The same is true of my local area in Ealing, with various developments (some approved, some not) constantly being touted as the magic pill that will stop people heading to Westfield (15 minutes away on the tube) to do their shopping. We’ll see.

As James points out, something else is needed. Ealing at least has a number of green and open spaces at it’s centre which act as a hub for entertainment events, draw people in and above all create a unique sense of community. Maidenhead, sadly, has few of these, and those that it does have are mainly out of the way, separated off from the rest of the town by the almost impassable A4 bypass. Like the Broadway car park, another great 1960s planning failure.

So, back to my starting point. Street markets are on the up, and provide a great way for the entrepreneurial outfits that the Government is trying to encourage to generate revenue, without the long-term commitments of leasing premises and paying business rates. What better way to encourage this at a local level than to create a new space in Maidenhead, a single open space where Maidenhead can define it’s own unique social, cultural and of course commercial heart.

The alternative is a web of near-identical shopping streets, occupied by the usual mix of mobile phone stores, discount stores, fast food outlets and charity shops. With perhaps the odd tree, bit of grass or market stall for decoration. If we’re going to continue on down this route on new developments like this – when more effective and sustainable alternatives exist – then Mary Portis will have her work cut out.

Thanks to Mike Hatfield for pointing out James’s blog post.

By wabson at 12:35PM

My new computer, which I dutifully blogged about almost two months ago, has come with few changes. Surprisingly I've not been rushing to buy all the latest shiny games, instead I've been getting into current RPGs like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Dragon Age:Origins and Dragon Age 2, and despairing at the difficulties of mods and DLC. Gone are the times when you only had to wait a couple of weeks after release before buying a game to give them time to patch it. Now the optimum time to buy is six months or a year later, to get all the DLC and make sure the mods are at least half stable. This realisation has somewhat dampened my otherwise rabid anticipation for the upcoming Skyrim.

A unexpected side effect of a more powerful computer is a renewed interest in photography: having switched to some better software to do all my post-processing and with the new hardware juggling thousands of edits to hundreds pics without raising a sweat, I find that while I still spend the same time, I can do much more with it. I'm trying to raise the bar though; being more picky with which pics I keep. Given I look back at albums from a couple of months ago, deleting some and seeing things I should have done differently with others, I guess it might be working? That would be nice. I'm learning. It's quite exciting.

Facebook's image viewer is ropey and small so I've been uploading pics to flickr first, which means I can see how many people look at them; it's nice getting a few thousand hits from people curious to see the damage over the weekend. It must it give them time to get used to them too as there's been less whining about photo tagging recently, but maybe will pass. In the continued spirit of self aggrandisement I've also set up a set of my favourite recent pics to try and see some progress and showcase pics that I like individually and outside of the usual narrative documentary context.

In other news, I've also been working on this here website: The portfolio page now has actual content like you might expect of an bona fide web professional, and the layout changes at four different page widths. Change the browser width, go on, you know you want to. Oh, wait, you're using Internet Explorer? No shiny nift for you; get out.

By at 13:53PM

As I mentioned in my last post, so long Oscar, hello Atlas, my brand-spanking new computer. It was meant to be an upgrade, but if you want to use the latest Intel Processor you have to get a new CPU fan and motherboard, and if you do that then you might as well add faster ram, and you need a 64 bit operating system to use that extra ram, which means it's a good time to get a bigger hard drive to put the new Windows 7 on... See, it all makes perfect sense!

That was as far as the plan went, unfortunately it turned out that the old CD drive wasn't compatible with the motherboard so I had to rush off to comet to get a new one, and to add insult to injury I've just received delivery of replacement case fans; having been given a sweet sweet taste of a silent gaming machine I really want to make sure it stays that way. After all that the only thing that hasn't been upgraded is the power supply and the box they all go in! Having most of the components for a computer just lying around feels like a bit of a waste, but I don't want to spend £130ish to resurrect a computer that I'd never use. Given I recently started paying into a pension, bought tickets to Malaga, four Threadless tees and Dragon Age 2 on top of all this hardware, I really need to stop spending.

Some pics on flickr: Boxes of shiny technology!, Oscar + dust, Old GPU vs new GPU, OMG that's a big heatsink, Build success!

This being my first post-XP machine I've been nerding up on Lifehacker, researching Windows 7 tips and tricks, and I stumbled across something called Rainmeter. You can apazzles use it to srsly mod your desktop, and as I used to spend days customising my UI in World of Warcraft in lieu of actually playing it, the prospect of giving my PC the same treatment is veeery interesting... I haven't had a chance to tinker with it yet though; been spending too much time using those two extra terabytes to do a massive computer spring clean, including getting all my pictures together, deleting duplicates and sorting by year. There are about 16,000 in total, about 4000 from 2010 alone. ZOMG SO MANY PICTURES.

Which reminds me, I need to get to work on those. Or I could play more Dragon Age 2... Hmm decisions decisions.

By at 12:30PM

I was telling a friend recently about my computer upgrade and being smug about the awesomeness therein, and he said "This is all just to play WoW isn't it." I replied "WoW? No I quit that for good." He feigned a stroke in surprise and disbelief. Yeah, trufax, the seven year love affair is finally over.

Back in 2004 I had been a big fan of Blizzard and Warcraft 3, particularly multiplayer mods for it like the now-famous DOTA, so I was on tenterhooks watching the drip-feed of information on the upcoming "World of Warcraft" MMO. I got into the US open beta and was blown away, but it was only a week or two long, so I got into the EU open beta a couple of months later too. I was amazed. All the characters and beasties I'd seen in the previous games were brought to life, and I was running around with them! The lore solid was solid and the immersion was like nothing I'd seen: I was totally hooked.

When release finally hit in early 2005 I played a Night Elf feral druid. It was a horribly gimped character class due to terrible imbalances, but I didn't really care, after all it let me turn into a kitty and scamper about at 130% running speed which was awesome, plus I somehow got into an awesome guild who didn't stress at me if I wasn't healing every (read: any) raid. After reaching level the then level cap, 60, I got into PvP instead of dunegoneering, hiding in bushes and ambushing warlocks in the massive rolling battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill was so much more fun than spelunking in the Molten Core for a random chance at lewtz. When PvP moved into a Warsong Gulch - a then-new competitive capture-the-flag type battleground with actual objectives and scores - I moved with it. With a combination of charm and 1337 skill I got into the top Alliance team at the time, which was great. We became known for steam rolling the Horde players so badly that many tended to AKF'd out of the match rather than lose to us... (Which given how long alliance players had to queue for a match was really annoying to be honest.) Still, the epic clashes against the Horde guild Mortalis were the stuff of legend. At the peak of my playing I was the 3rd best druid on the server and the 5th best player on the Alliance side. Random people would run up and ask me where I got the orange armour I was wearing as I was the only person on the server with it. Good times. However the constant queueing and BG camping that was needed became too much and I burnt out, cancelling my subscription for the first time after 10 months.

I was back in early 2006 though; Blizzard had released Ahn'qiraj; a new dungeon full of giant bugs which had some hitherto unknown feral gear in it! I swapped out the tedium, camaraderie, banter and coordinated tactics of hardcore PvP for a more laid back but very structured PvE. It made a nice change for a while but being tied to a strict raiding schedule was tiresome and the cruelty of RNG loot drops was a needless stress. Plus my previous PvP achievements had been not only surpassed but nerfed in my absence, they were now achievable by scores of people instead of a handful: lamers were running around with MY armour! So I quit again.

The next time I rejoined was for a full expansion called The Burning Crusade in December '06, with 10 new levels and a whole new continent! There was so much to do with more battle grounds, arenas, reputations to grind and loads of new dungeons. Also, feral druid was finally a viable choice for fulfilling either the tanking or DPS role in dungeons, which was amazing. I wasn't that interested in hardcore PvP or PvE this time, so though I played a lot I played like a "casual", grinding reps or money for cheeps. Eventually I switched most of my play to meta-gaming: "theorycrafting" in spreadsheets to find the optimum feral gear configurations and rotation for the other more active druids in the guild who were much more used to a Restoration spec. I also spent time customising my UI playing on the in-game auction house, but eventually even that got dull and I quit yet again.

October 2008 I was back for the next expansion: Wrath of the Lich King, getting to the new level cap again, exploring some of the new dungeons again, grinding the right reputations and profession skills again. Again I quit in the spring, and rejoined in the autumn. For something to do I started collecting in-game pets and mounts and racking up achievements points, a new system Blizzard had introduced for tracking how many virtual hoops you get your character to jump through. Random dungeons took away the bellyache of having to organise a team to do the five-man content, so that was yet another area of the game opened to me. For most of 2010 I watched the community news on what was going to be in the next expansion, new races, new levels, new skills dungons, areas, mechanics, they were even going to overhaul all the old questing areas that had lain untouched since 2005. I started a few alts in preparation, and levelled up their profession so I could make a lot more money on the AH. I also stockpiled commodities that I thought would gain value on release of the new expansion in anticipation.

The Cataclysm expansion finally hit, and it's amazing. The overhaul of the levels 1-60 questing areas are brilliant; I played a few alts (including the new werewolf race) and had a blast. I also sold all the short-term speculation stock and made 70k gold; 5 times what I'd ever had before. Everything was looking rosy on paper, but when it came down to playing my main characters I just couldn't be bothered. I think much of the unique attraction of World of Warcraft for me was the implied longevity, I've had Lews for 6 years and his litany of exploits could continue yet, but I no longer know how long for. With Blizzard working on a new as-yet unnamed MMO, and my other favourite games company Bioware releasing a Star Wars MMO in the autumn (which I HAVE to try), not to mention new kid on the block Rift apparently kickin ass, WoW just doesn't have the invulnerability it used to. Though it's better now than it's ever been, its days are self-evidently numbered, it's time we parted ways.

Between going out and processing pictures of my goings out, I barely have any time anyways. A month ago I cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription and deleted it from by hard drive. Last week I sent a farewell email to a few guildies. Bai Lews. I'd link to picture of him on the online armoury but he's been "inactive too long" so I can't. The fuckers.

By at 14:57PM

If you know me at all, you'll know I heart my computer. Or at least you do now. I HEART IT. There's nothing to beat the sensory overload from playing a game, video chatting, surfing the web and watching a film all at once and on the same machine, and though it's much more fashionable to have separate devices for each, nothing but a decent computer could process my weekly deluge of photos, facilitate weekend web development or satisfy my occasional urge for obscure anime, so I'm fully comp4lyfe.

Unfortunately my dear machine is almost five years old now, and getting a little long in the tooth... It still runs everything fine, but no longer at max settings, and it's begun to complain with the over-the-top multitasking I always put it through. It's time for an upgrade, especially with the new and reasonably priced Sandy Bridge Intel processors outperforming even their high end predecessors. It's also long past time I upgraded to Windows 7 with its DirectX 11 graphics goodness. It's a shame the uber fast and shiny solid state drives are in such a state of flux; they're improving so quickly that anything I get now will have me kicking myself in only a few months... So having passed on that (and also resisting the temptation to get a third monitor), I've settled on this lot, using my old case, power supply unit and optical drive.

• Intel Core i5 2500K
• Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced CPU Cooler
• Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3
• 1GB MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II/OC
• 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600
• 2Tb Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home

Unlike last time I shelled out for a computer, I'll be building and possibly overclocking it myself! Excitement!

By at 19:23PM

• Bless you and all who sail in you. As said to those pining, fawning or being a slut, but in an endearing way. Always followed by protestations of topness or versness.
• That’ll do pig. God only knows where it comes from but the number of unrelated people who have told me this is unnerving.
• It has recently been drawn to my attention that I love... POP CULTURE REFERENCES! It’s the new “I’M READY”.
• I struggle. As said by those finding simple things difficult.
• Life is hard. As said to those struggling, in lieu of sympathy.
• I was [rhymes with born] this [rhymes with way]. Because it’s fun to be meta ironic.
• ...all over your face. The smuttier version of “your face is”, applicable as an omni-response in 99% of situations. See also “that’s what she said”.
• That’s not even a thing is now totally a thing. I mentioned metairony right?
• Nobody likes a hateful ho. Girl you gotta be sweet. Words to live by, as said by a bloke in a dress.
• Fuck and let fuck. Because life’s too short.

By at 13:23PM

Back in dim and distant mists of time, people texted on mobiles (or didn't), talked by email (or didn't), or chatted by Windows Messenger (or didn't). Keeping in contact was pretty simple, and though the old methods still apply there tons more to content with.

BBMs a nice alternative to texts but they're exclusive to blackberry users. Facebook chat is utterly godawful but annoyingly ubiquitous, Skype is decent enough but the videochat isn't a USP any more, while Gtalk seems like the mid point of all the others. Flickr is great when I remember to upload pics, and last.fm used to be amazing but recently stopped scrobbing tracks played on my ipod, which sucks. Steam would be really useful if I knew more PC gamers but at the moment it's not. Sadface. Twitter belongs in an awesome league of its own, I <3 it.

Anyways I thought it might be good to throw out more comm lines to people I see out and about pretty often but never speak to in the week, so here's some deets!

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Steam
• Flickr
• Last.fm
• BBM PIN: 21EAf3C1
• gtalk/email: daniel.govan [at] gmail.com
• msn: mynicboi [at] hotmail.com
• skype: daniel.govan

By at 12:05PM

A month and a half in, and 2011’s been pretty excellent so far. But I did have some aims at the outset so a quick overview might keep me vaguely on track.

• Work out more FAIL. 4srs. When I have the time I don’t have the energy and vice versa. Need to MTFU and work on that, even if it is only a couple of times a week.
• Work harder Uncertain. I’ve been working harder, and have gotten the opportunity to do some really nifty jquery stuff, but it’s not been enough. The thingbox blocking idea didn’t last this time.
• Moderation with alcohol. EPIC SUCCESS! I’ve been out 15 nights so far this year and remember it all! Partly due to the realisation that excessive alcohol makes an uncomfortable situation worse, not better. IKR? Obvious conclusion is obvious. Honestly though it’s been pretty easy to keep a reign on myself for some reason. I’ve also started taking taking epic numbers of social documentary type pictures again.
• More spontaneity. Part success. I even cancelled plans on Saturday and went to something else instead to make the weekend more balanced! Proved to be a good decision. That said, I still don’t really like going out in the week, and my weekends are mostly booked for the next couple of months due to some outrageous plague of birthdays. Perhaps doing two parties in the same night counts?
• Be social. And remember it. Definite success. Tried to up my remote socialising too with a continuing effort to get more BBM or msn/gtalk deets, I miss the days when everyone just had msn and that was that. It’s a shame I don’t have more time and energy; there’s a lot of awesome people I rarely see because it’s “inefficient”, but there’s probably a whole blog post in that and the strange butterfly-type monster I’ve become.
• Learn how to use a frickkin phone. Part success. Dom likes the phone.
• DANCE Win. Obvs. Most of the weekends so far this year have been epic.

By at 11:18AM

When I was a n00b at uni I was still getting used to knowing a lot of people; I found small-talk tiresome and could only repeat the answer to "how was your weekend" a couple of times before getting so bored with what was coming out of my mouth that I wanted to curl into a ball and rock. That's pretty much the reason I started this website malarkey, or rather the reason I continued a week after starting. Want to know the pseudo-amusing story of my mongrel lineage? Read the blog. See the photos from last Friday? They're on the blog. Find out how my Christmas was? It's on the blog.

Now of course there's facebook to do most of that, plus I'm older and wiser and more able to autopilot the same bullshit anecdote as many times as is necessary if it means coming across well to some acquaintance who may prove important down the line. That said, some tales are just too tedious; the ones that though not actually that interesting I'd still have to explain at length with far more uses of "I" than I'd like to employ in polite company. My last two posts are good examples: My new year's resolutions and the reasons for them? Generic beyond belief. Shaggy phone story? Dull as fuck. If I was the kind of person to recall and relate dreams, they'd be on here somewhere. It's all pretty awful really. Why does anyone read this shit?

A few more things mind-numbing things I'd like to get around to posting about, most of them already half written, but I certainly wouldn't dare talk about where anyone can hear:

• My Threadless collection and why they're awesome.
• Love, and why anything you could have to say about it is bullshit.
• My pithy "philosophies" and where they come from.
• Photo tagging, and why you need to man the fuck up.

Or I might just spaff another stream of consciousness across the page, like this one. WHO KNOWS? Oh and if anyone has a crackberry hit me up for BBM shiny goodness.

By at 16:02PM

Happy New Year everyone! Time to get a grip! Some of these resolutions are repeats of previous years but hey.

1. Work out more. I already know all the exercises and have even gotten whey protein supplements, so I’m hoping to build on that.
2. Work harder at my job and on other web-based stuffs. Banning thingbox during the day seemed to help a lot so I’ll go back to that.
3. Moderation with alcohol: Less of the “oh fuck it” attitude at house parties and other places where the barrier to getting another drink is perilously low. If I’m hosting or have other responsibilities I find it easy to maintain tipsiness, there’s no real reason why that shouldn’t go for every night out, right?
4. That said: more spontaneity, less stress. Less looking, more leaping. (Just not into a vat of sherry.) Sounds prosaic but it’s a new one for me.
5. Be social. And remember it.
6. Linked to the above; learn how to use a frickkin phone. This is actually the one I’m most sceptical about succeeding at, it’s close to a phobia at the moment. Having to call someone up makes me really nervous and tense and I hate to do it. Sigh.
7. Edit: blates stolen from Chloë Sevigny: DANCE.

By at 00:31AM

In September I decided I wanted a shiny smartphone. With some research the better battery life and keyboard pointed me at a Blackberry, and the shiniest Blackberry at the time was the Bold, so choice made! Being a long-time orange customer I went with them, so in early October I filled in all the thingies on the website and hit “order”. They denied me! Possibly because I’ve never had a contract phone or a creditcard, possibly because I’d just moved house, but the fact I’d been a pay as you go customer with them FOR A DECADE apparently didn’t enter into the equation. Bastids.

So then my mum kindly offered to get one for me, what with my Birthday fast approaching and all. She grabbed one from the same people and network that did her phone and quickly sent it down, but in her haste only used first class. Days later it hadn’t arrived. We had to wait two weeks before my mum could claim on the insurance and get another one sent.

It arrived as planned, just in time for my birthday party! It was awesome and all was going well until people called me to get directions or just be let in the front door; I could hear them but they couldn’t hear me. The phone was busted.

After the party-based dust had settled I went to a vodafone store to inquire about swapping it for a working one. They were quite helpful, but on consultation it turned out the phone was from phones4u, so I was barking up the wrong tree. My mum had a long conversation with the manager of her local store who was very clear that all I’d have to do was pop into a local branch and I could swap the phone no probs. Yay! So I pop in, and they tell me to come back with the charger and box. I duly return the next day (during the student demo that later went on to brake some conservative windows) but after a lot of pouring over a computer and phone calls to Edinburgh it turns out she was wrong; as this phone was sent by the insurance company it’s their responsibility to swap it.

So more phone calls. My mum arranges for them to send me an addressed envelope from me to send them the defective phone. They send it to my mum instead. My mum sends it to me. I send the phone away. They don’t have replacements in stock. They eventually get them in stock after much insistence from my mum, and she makes treble sure they send it to me. They send it to her anyway. She wraps it up ready for sending down and puts it in the post room, but the snow means the post van can’t get to the office. Eventually they do and it wings its way south. Delayed of course, due to the ice on the roads etc.

I still don’t have a phone.

By at 16:46PM

WARNING: THIS ENTRY CONTAINS NAVEL-GAZING

On Saturday I freaked out and kinda jumped the tracks a bit. It was just a party, I just drank (WAY) too much, and my friends have just chalked it up as a messy one and no more need be said. But I feel like it was a several-year low: I normally trust myself drunk and to have that undermined was a blow. In the day-long hangover and 3-day lack of appetite there was a lot of time to ponder many different variations of "wtf?, that's not me". Eventually I came round to the obvious question: "Well who do I want to be then?" Yesterday while waiting for the tube the answer came to me: TOTALLY FECKIN HAWESOME.

Yeah you heard! That's what I want. It's (probably?) not as stupid as it sounds, I've been working on being totally awesome on and off for years now, plus I only have to be totally awesome in my own eyes so the bar's not really that high. I've got a feeling it'd get higher if I got too close but that's fine too. So yeah, time for a bit of self improvement:

• Communications Yeah I go out a lot, I see a lot of people when I do and it's great to have a wide circle of friends, but the fact is when I'm not out I'm actually pretty uncommunicative. Messenger is still my favourite method which a) is non transferable to IRL, b) less and less people actually use it and c) it ties me to a computer more than I'd like. Solution? SMART PHONE. A Blackberry Bold to be precise! It makes texting SO much easier, having twitter and facebook on the move unshackles me from my desktop, and what with the contractyness and free calls I might even talk to someone once in a while! Yeh it's all pretty obvious but I'm well late to the party.
• Working out Embarking on my usual self-improvement plan I weighed myself to see how much I'd have to lose, only to find I'm lighter now than my target weight's been for the past five years. Perhaps having so many stairs in the new house has its upsides?! So instead I've decided to try using protein supplements after workouts to see what I can do on that front, as I've seen that work well on others. Being close to a body I can be confident of it is pretty exciting, that thought might even help me stick to a routine.
• Geek out Making webby-type stuff makes me happy. Dossing about (though fine when my batteries are low); not so much. After a few redundancies work's very much picking up, so that should take care of that. Though it'd be ace to get back into pottering about with my website there are only so many evenings in the week!
• Do cool stuff I've been keeping pretty busy with this one, so no danger. That said it does kinda conflict with the previous two; I'm running at capacity! I'd like to add a bit of travel but it looks like I've got a trip to DC coming up so that's all good.
• Health Like, I haven't been to a dentist in SO LONG. I should probs do something about that. And register with a gp at my new place, boring but should be done.
• Emotional constipation UGH! IKR? It takes me hours or days to put feelings or desires into words. Which is fine if I don't particularly want anything, i.e. most of the time, but when things begin to "matter" to me I clam up and turn into a helplessly frustrated mute. Good times! It's probably not rare but it's so time to get over that, amirite?

By at 21:31PM

I was horrified enough at Ed Vaisey’s terrible sentiments he expressed over Net Neutrality last week, to write to my MP on the issue. Hopefully Angie will be more responsive to letters from constituents than my last MP was. Still waiting for a reply on that one…

The letter’s based on Open Rights Group’s template, but I added my own Tory-friendly additions in bold. Sending a generic letter is better than none at all, but given you’re writing to an individual it’s clearly better to tailor the argument for them.

I’d strongly encourage you to do the same if you care about universal access to information.

Dear Ms Bray,

I am writing to ask you to sign the Net Neutrality EDM 1036 first signed by Tom Watson MP, Julian Huppert MP and Peter Bottomley MP.

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=42025

Today the Coalition Government has taken a huge step towards increasing the transparency of Government by announcing the release of all central government spending data over £25,000 for the first time. You may have seen that the Prime Minister has stressed his support for this drive via a video posted this morning on the Number 10 web site.

This is a significant move which will help reduce the waste inherited from Labour and help drive the growth of an information industry which Francis Maude estimates could contribute up to £6bn to the UK economy. The work which his department has done over the last six months is making the UK a world leader in this field.

Last week however, Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, stated that the UK will allow Internet Service Providers to decide which websites and services can reach their customers at what speed.

This threatens the idea of free access to information to all. If traffic from established media operators is prioritised above others then this threatens the ability of independent organisations to help government find where inefficiencies exist in the system, using open data. It promotes centralism over localism and diversity in our information instructure and is a backwards step in Britain’s development.

The change – often called removing “net neutrality” or introducing ”network discrimination” has already led to complaints from companies including the BBC and Skype, an Internet telephone company, that their content may be slowed down by Internet Services Providers. ISPs, including BT, Sky and Virgin, provide TV and phone services which would give them a reason slowing down certain Internet services provided by competitors.

The danger is that, while some “traffic management” to prevent congestion may be reasonable, allowing ISPs to do what they want, with no checks other “transparency” to customers, will lead to significant market abuse and loss of innovation on the Internet. New services may not start up if they cannot be guaranteed fair access to UK Internet customers.

There are ways this problem could be prevented. One would be an industry agreement by major ISPs not to discriminate against competitors, such as has been put in place in Norway. Another would be to require “minimum service guarantees” including an Open Internet.

Please sign the EDM, and raise this issue with Ed Vaizey, as the Minister responsible.

Thanks,
Will Abson

By wabson at 06:19AM

As I wrote, a couple of weeks ago I had just gotten a cold, but I didn’t let it stop me; I had an amazing Halloween weekend regardless. FRIDAY was drinks and dress up/facepaint at Dolly’s then Popstarz followed by late-night lounging at Basty’s. SATURDAY was ANTM at Basty’s again, lunch in brick lane, drinks, facepaint and x-factor at Josh’s and a houseparty at Stuart’s. SUNDAY was a lie in and whatnot followed by X-Factor and a scary film at Josh’s. Goodtimes. Felt like a slice out of 2008, only better.

The next weekend was just silly though; I had time off work so it was a long one. THURSDAY was with hilarious ikea construction with dolly and jono, massive pasta dinner, tekken, drinks & dressup at dolly’s with a few other peeps for Alex’s leaving do, getting lost, dancing G-A-Y Late. Hot mess. FRIDAY was quieter; round Rob’s for sausages and chat, clapham fireworks authentically viewed from the pavement under trafficlights, then a couple of drinks in the two brewers before I escaped the awful and went home. Apparantly they ended up at Speedwagon which might have been fun, but you just can’t be doing with a hungover host, so I went to bed. SATURDAY was my birthday party thing which, i dunno, 60+ people came to? Humbling. It made great use of the space downstairs and the cosy “smoking yard” too. SUNDAY was mopping and clearing and then lounging in bed, followed by a beef roast at Josh’s then the vicky park fireworks, then some random pub, then josh’s again for the end of xfactor. Poor wasserface never stood a chance. Epic Birthday win.

I spent all Monday just trying to recuperate but it wasn’t enough - I’d had a cold the whole time after all - and this week the cough’s gotten worse rather than better. Gallingly I’m now on my second day off work sick; instead of being productive and social I’m stuck indoors being pathetic and losing all the manpoints I gained with the flatpack construction. Also my ‘tache looks absurd, and apparently makes me look French. UGH.

By at 12:53PM

A few workmates are doing Movember as I mentioned, and here’s the “Before” shot:

I’m the one in the middle with the red t-shirt in case you’re having trouble recognising me. I went from full beard to goatee to smooth-faced this weekend; my cheeks are decidedly drafty and I can blow up my own nose for the first time since 2008. The reactions I got for my red-devil or ghost-faced Halloween costumes were nothing compared to the abject horror that the sight of my bare chin elicited, but hey it’s all for a good cause. And I can grow it back, right? RIGHT? I might collect the beard clippings just in case…

So yeah, SPONSOR ME.

By at 16:21PM

Hates it!

We finally sorted out the heating at home after weeks of massive jumpers and double duvets, and now I've got a cold. But not because of the singleglazedness and tiny heater of my bedroom; because of the overzealous air-conditioning at work! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Feeling totally crappy my (not-so) grand plans for tea and scones (or yeah probably beer) with people, putting together a (highly derivative) presentation and fixing my site (the RSS seems to be fucked) all just have to wait; I'm far too busy with the vitally important endeavour of sitting about, plus the sleeping and the moping. So much so that I've had a day and a half off work to let me do more of it. It's funny that while ill and single I find myself idly wishing for some nice boy to make me soup and tuck me in, given that out of a little over five years total relationship time I've never asked for or wanted it even once. The realities of dealing with the other half while a grumpysnotmungous are just much less glam than the fantasy.

Beardageddon

In other mildly more interesting news I'm doing Movember this year, along with quite a few people at work. Basically it involves growing a moustache for charity, for which I'll have to shave off my beard of one and a half years! It might look awful for a while but hey, it'll be lol, and I've never had a moustache before. I also plan to trim down to a short-lived goatee tomorrow for Halloween, so it's topiariotous action all over my face! Well, y'know, it passes the time...

So yeah, go donate! If y'all give now I won't have to keep spamming that link all month.

By at 12:13PM

Bad things

• IKEA delivery time. I have to wait 2 weeks til I can properly put my room in order.
• Royal Fail: after a month or so of trying to get a shiny contract phone via various means I’m currently being thwarted by a backlog at Royal Mail. It’s been en route almost a week, however it was only sent first class so is untrackable: it might just be “lost”!
• Internet: To be fair it currently works (slightly) more often than not, but that unreliability is really frustrating. Unsettling even. I needs me my connection! An upgrade to Sky was meant to happen a couple of weeks ago. Slow.
• Lack of focus at work. Lots to do, lots of trouble concentrating.
• Missing Luke. The second opinion, the partner in crime, the hungover grumbling etc.
• Adjusting to singledom. A much more holistic issue than it first appears; I’m in a weird limbo atm.
• It’s cold out.

Good things

• I have a long weekend now. And another next week, and a very long one the week after that.
• I have a pile of good books I’m quickly working through.
• I’ve bought myself so much online stuff that I’ll be getting fun presents for weeks.
• Teething problems aside the new flat is awesome, as is living in walking distance of several friends.
• I’m getting back into working out (arms still hurt right now).
• I’m out more evenings than not, and will hopefully be hosting a party in a couple of weeks.
• We got a job at work that’s long-term and will use exactly the kind of web-crunching infoviz stuff I’ve been getting excited about lately.
• I can go abroad without feeling guilty: gonna do D.C. and maybe Toronto next year.
• It’s sunny out.

By at 13:58PM

Well it’s been an eventful few months! Two of them spent enjoying the summer and generally having a good time, one of them spent massively overwrought about finding a place to live. First time I’ve not moved in with the the uni people I moved to London with six years ago: nerve-wracking. It worked out in the end though, I’m now based in a massive eight-person house in east London (E1!) with a bunch of randoms. Great big room and stuff, now if they just fix the tv and internet and clean up a bit that would be perfect. In other news I’ve jumped back on the conference bandwagon, having been to also been to FOWA, FOWD and dConstuct, the latter of which was truly excellent and has gotten me very excited about information visualisation in the increasingly data-rich web. Seems very Zeitgeisty at the moment. I even volunteered to give a presentation on it at work, which is very likely to bite me in the ass later but hey, it’s a growing experience.

On the downside me and my bf of almost two years broke up a couple of weeks ago, which totally sucks. In spite of our best efforts we never really got the hang of talking things out, a few things were more papering-over and then blowing up, which only got more hurtful as we grew closer. So I guess it’s fair to say that it ran its course, pouty though that makes me. Which means at the moment I’m mostly acclimatising to singledom and trying to work out how to furnish my massive room. I’m thinking a big Ikea delivery of Expedit shelving, even though ordering online takes forever to arrive. I also have a few nifty posters still to be delivered. And threadless tees, but that’s pretty much a constant with me.

I also decided I need to join respectable society and get a contract phone, preferably a shiny one. I went with a blackberry as I’d like something I can type fast on and the battery life of the iphone and the HTCs seem to be ridiculously bad, however my attempts to purchase one were denied: credit fail! Probably down to my having just moved and thus not being on the electoral register and never having had a credit card. So as much as it irks me I’m filling out a creditcard application form. Le sigh. In the meantime my mum bought me a phone in her name - coz yeah I’m 13 apparently - which SHOULD be winging its way over to me as I type. My first technologically uptodate phone. Excited.

By at 09:02AM

SCORCHIO! It was amazing being without the rain and the wellies at Glastonbury this year, but the sun provided its own challenges. The tents became unbearable by about 8 am, so no lie ins in spite of only getting to bed at about 6. Shade was like gold dust; every fence had a line of people squatting to get out of the sun. After a day of the relentless heat I caved and borrowed a friend's sunblock as I didn't want the complication of burning, and deciding hats were mandatory I bought a terrible one with "Sheriff" on it in red plastic like something out of a lego set. The Camelbak type thing I'd bought on a whim a few days before proved invaluable, whether filled with water or vodka orange, either washed the dust from my throat nicely.

Highlights included:

• Camp fires every night thanks to manly Gareth
• Rolf Harris, though he's 80 years old he was showing a whippersnapper MC how beatboxing's really done.
• Miike Snow's album shows only hints of the phat electro noize they pump out live. Loved it.
• Shakira was just filth. Sexy sexy filth.
• La Roux + Heaven 17 doing Temptation (not the rest of their set, it was shit.)
• NYC Downlow was filth of a very different kind, East London party times inna tent. Mind you the rest of the party village was just insanely awesome. Ohai Gomorrah! Thank god you're only around a few days a year or civilisation would like totally fall.
• Napping in a hippy tent. Wasn't even planned, it was just humid and comfy and we all drifted off.
• Scissor Sisters + Kylie (so SO gay). The rest of their set was good too, crowd pleasing hits interspersed with new stuff carried off on Jake Shears' drug-fuelled energy.
• Pet Shop Boys were surprisingly amazing. Great set. Fantastic dancers. Tune after Tune.
• The Kinks (well, 2 out of 5 of them). Gobsmackingly amazing. Several "Glasto moments" all rolled into one set, including Sunny afternoon, Waterloo Sunset, Days and Ray Davies being furious at having to cut his set short.
• Excellent food. N00bs assume that everything out of a van is shit, and certainly if you grab the first thing you find you won't be disappointed, but there's serious noms around if you keep a look out.
• Crossword solving. The easy one though obvs, we were hungover after all. Guardian sponsorship was apparent everywhere.
• Stevie Wonder was unsurprisingly amazing. Michael Eavis, however, can't hold a tune in a bucket.
• Pea soup mist and popup-tent-folding at 5 in the morning on the way back to civilisation.

It was a little weird being out and about without my camera but it was also oddly freeing not having the responsibilities of both looking after it and of documenting everything. Being with a bunch of friends all suffering from sleep deprivation meant a lot of hysterical nonsense was talked, which was similarly relaxing. It was just an easy breezy time, and in the days since I've had to stop myself dancing in the street to my iPod and skipping when I should be walking. Good times.

Though it sucked that it took 7 hours to get home there wasn't really any time for post-party comedown, what with the charidy gig on Wednesday where I knew everyone playing, London Pride on Saturday where we watched the parade, drank in soho then dressed up in 60s gear for Duckie's Gross Indecency and partied till dawn, then on Sunday was Tommy et al's massive BBQ.

On top of all the expensive party times I've just shelled out 400 quid to go to a web design class (and the dConstruct conference) in September! After thinking about it for a bit I decided I just couldn't pass up the opportunity of a day being taught by one of my favourite web designers, plus it can go straight on my CV, so there.

I'm now tired and poor. Hurrah!

By at 08:29AM

So in the past month I've had a hectic period where I've been too busy to think, and then a slightly calmer time when I managed to finish off this website! The initial scope anyway, there's always going to be a list of tweaks and improvements. I need to add an "all" and a "close" button to the portfolio page, find/take and stylise a picture of myself for the about page, ajax up the tips on the landing page, add some css3 to the mouseovers there, typography on the blog area, yada yada yada.

Something that's really helped me stay enthused is walking up and down the Thames listening to podcasts about the web like the Big Web Show, which has been surprisingly exhilarating. It sounds dubious but seriously: sun + awesome scenery + three mile walk + mini web seminar in my head = amazing. It leaves me energised and relaxed but at the same time filled with the post-conference ambitious tension that keeps me thinking about the web. With that sort of daily injection of buzz it'll easy to keep the webdev side of things ticking over with nips and tucks moving forward, in spite of this site moving out of focus a bit now.

That's needed though; the next couple of weeks are going to be very busy with the Glastonbury Festival and London Pride on consecutive weekends, so I think this is a good place to draw a line under it. Also my PC is grinding to a halt, and in the dirge of smartphone and ipad info I'm hopelessly out of touch with PC tech; research needed towards getting a shiny new one. The other big thing is I need to look into finding a place to live come September: I like the idea of moving east, from Wapping to Bethnal Green to Bow, but beyond that I've no idea. For the first time in forever I'll need to move in with all-new people too! Scary!

By at 09:25AM

Yesterday evening I had my first of eight physiotherapy classes to help sort out my back. It was a surprisingly exhausting affair which amounted to a supervised round-robin type gym session with some awful group therapy tacked on at the end. Some embarrassingly novel experiences: working out in public, trying out an exercise bike and a treadmill. I feel like going to a real gym would be less of a big (read: unknown and scary) step now. After that I felt a little braindead so just whiled away an hour or two playing flash games. A spectacular waste of time to be sure, but arguably not more so than games like Mass Effect 2 or back-to-back Star Trek: Enterprise episodes.

Today I spent at the Future of Web Design conference (London 2010). I went in '06 and '07 too, though in those days it was a smaller event, and MUCH cheaper. It's scary numbers now, but thankfully the company I work with are sending me, providing I can cobble together some learnings to spread among the tech and creative departments in a presentation or two. There's a lot to take on board, plus a couple of key talks I missed due to a clash that I'll have to stream when they put it online, and there's another whole day of it tomorrow! MY POOR HEAD. I'M NOT EVEN A DESIGNER. But then again the main subjects were HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, which is exactly what a Front-End codemonkey like me should be learning, perhaps I am a designer. It's confusing.

In any case "dossing around with flash games" + "new experiences" + "inspiring talks from luminaries" = "thoughts". Though I'll have to reflect more carefully on the speakers and the subjects when I digest them for the MRM London audience, there were a few small easily-forgettable things I wanted to jot down before they're buried under the wisdom of tomorrow's speakers, mostly under the theme of "Keeping Score", by which I mean a sort of IRL-metagaming: staying goal oriented in order to keep productive, fresh, enthused, interested and interesting. I'm fighting the temptation to over-analyse but as that's just the adult equivalent of colouring in your revision plan I'm going to try and avoid well-meaning procrastination, skip the theory and just take stock.

Fresh: Change is a good thing to keep score on, and new sources of info. One that's gone stale is blogs, I just don't read them any more! My google-reader goes unnoticed and the things I do read tend to be list articles. I need to unsubscribe from 90% of them and start again. Similar story - though not as severe - with ipod tracks; they need a good pruning. Quality not quantity! Tangentially, I should look at grabbing podcasts or audiobooks for Thameside walks at lunch.

Fitness: I've relapsed into old eating habits in the past couple of weeks which is perhaps regrettable, and I've stopped walking at lunch which might be fixed with more interesting reading material, but as workouts are going fairly well I'm not too cut up about it.

Funtimes: I've no ambition to cut games books and sci-fi out of my life, but there are other non-productive things with are much more self-evidently a total waste of time, usually when I'm bored. I need to learn to recognise and avoid these troughs as they happen.

Social: As I've stopped using a couple of social-networking sites I feel a little isolated sometimes, which could be fixed by going out more than the once or twice a week I do now, but again it's not a disaster. Keeping busier would help too.

Website: It's going well. Light at the end of the tunnel, etc. A few of the talks today provided some good insights into nift of the UX or jQuery variety that I will definitely follow up.

• Tone: Jocular? The cv section is a little informal which might be ok, but it still needs way more work. Giving my penchant for editing to the nth degree I probably won't be totally satisfied with it for weeks so I need to shortcut to the next stage.
• Typography: Vertical spacing/gridwork is a mystery to me, I need to find out about that. Finding non-standard fonts to showcase would be excellent if I can find a monospace pretty enough.
• jQuery: Fade out the "working" gifs, then get rid. Condense the "tips" section, and bring in the html from another page to reduce clutter and also demo another bit of pseudo ajaxyness (does that count as ajax? Find out). Have the "previous" tip fade out faster than the "next" fades in to give the impression of more whitespace.
• UX: fade in the dangovan logo onload as a cue to the user that things change. Introduce some more "discovery", perhaps more graphically rewarding on mouseovers? If that can be done without losing the simplicity.
• Portfolio section: title at the top, on mouseover the year slides down from top, the blurb slides up from bottom and the left/right button slides in from sides. Some possible sections: pride stuff, HTML email, localisation, design work, ITM3, big names, etc. Include link to live?
• Design: #999 background on the last.fm pics? Make top-border thinner? Work on a me-pic, similar to obama/hope but in red/grey/white and dashed.
• Nice-to-haves: Mobile version? Yoink simple tools I use anyway?

By at 16:03PM

Closer and closer I get to completing all this, maxing out the nift, groking jquery and finishing the content. Ok not that last one; writing a cv and portfolio is tricky when you don't know what you want it to look like, and vice versa. I've had to start with old content and style it (though the pages aren't yet navigable) and now I'm at the stage where I need to re-write it all. It's been a crazy couple of weeks with two long weekends and the general election hilarity, but I'm trying to get my head down again and it's going pretty well.

It's also been extremely gratifying that I've been able to use so much of what I've learned tinkering with this lot in a professional capacity. "Twitter feed you say? Oh I did that last week. Twice." "json? Oh yeah I know all about that." When (if) this is all "done" I should create a playground section to keep mucking about in!

Still todo:

• Work out nift-factor for portfolio section: eg mouseover behaviour, flicking between images.
• Compile portfolio screenshots according to appropriate themes and put them in as blog entries
• Find a decent/amusing photo of myself (perhaps impossible) and posterise it for the about page.
• Re-write CV
• Combine hover and focus for the mainNav slide
• Create a fastHover function as part of hiHover
• Then an awful lot of design/typographical fine tuning

In other news: 3 day weeks don't give enough time for my body clock to normalise. Who knew? Going out at the weekend, all-night vigils for elections, Mass Effect 2 tempting me to stay up in the week... NEED SLEEP. Also I dropped my camera on its front a week ago, breaking the telescopic lens and ending two years of devoted service. Knowing from experience that it costs a lot to replace that part I decided to just get a new one. I want a bit insane though, and got a top-of-the-range sony tx5 as a replacement. But it's so shiiiiiny! And also, ostensibly drop proof, which might help.

By at 12:20PM

Whoa, it has been ALL GO on the webdev front. The homepage is done and all nifted up, though there's room for more work. The blog is looking all nice right down to the blockquote styling, the return of "random thoughts" and an awesomely compact archive navigation which leaves no need for jquery shenanigans! I'll have to use them elsewhere instead. The info page done with an overly detailed site history that nobody in their right mind would be even vaguely interested in, the 404 apology page is done and pointed at, the only big pieces missing are the CV and the "past work" page. The former's going to take a while to get up to scratch and I've been collecting screenies for the latter.

Other things I'd like to add:

• Navigational "here" state that also turns off the link, with a js/css combo.
• Dynamically swap out the intro text on the front page for nifty hints on mousing over other parts of the page.
• Pull out date of last blog post somehow?
• Get that and other hover-behaviour to fade in and out.
• Draw in more tweets and get the area to scroll down on hover
• Homepage details: border along the top etc.
• Poster-ised photo of myself on the info page.
• Both "work" and "cv" will probably featuring a nested-list nav on left and entries on left structure.
• Hide "commenting not allowed" copy from single-post blog pages.
• Snaz up the 404 somehow. Giant punctuation?
• Style the (horrible) blogsearch section. For some reason ExpressionEngine makes it a separate, table-ridden subsite. Ugh.
• Contact details? Though I don't want a spammable link and email forms always feel crude...
• Suddenly become a genius at typography and refine all the fonts throughout.

By at 14:03PM

I'd delete from thingbox if I could still bagsy the relatively early account number, but I can't. So along with my recent endeavour to stay away during office hours, I've also cut out the blurb from my profile, leaving it blank. This was it:

Photo-snapping, foot-stomping, "music-loving":http://www.last.fm/user/mynciboi, gig-going, computer-game-playing, web-mongering, black-wearing, over-analysing, quiet-speaking, loud-laughing, terminally-curious, rabidly-relativistic, hyphen-abusing muppet.

My name's Dan, I'm a meandering web-geek born and raised in Edinburgh, now living in London, playing things by ear and generally checking out this and that.

I'm at a computer more often than not, whether at work putting websites together or tinkering with photos, playing games, trawling for infos, conducting illicit downloads and/or chatting on messenger. I'm online a lot.

I much enjoy chatting shit over drinks or dinner before heading out to an indie/electro/pop-type club for dubious dancing. Houseparties and PiE&MASH are aces too. I tend to be the designated documenter/photographer for such ventures which can be fun but leaves me with a lot of photoshopping to do.

Sweeping generalisations/assumptions/tribalism wind me up no end. That and X-Factor. Soz.

Music, last.fm, film, cinema, subtitles, internet, computer games, RTS, RPG, WoW, photography, flickr, indie clubs, cake, coffee, indie, electro, popstarz, ghetto, trash palace, design, history, mythology, sci-fi, fantasy, Song of ice and fire, Nightwatch, computer games, canasta, books, black books, eddy izzard, Bill Hicks, pop-psychology, philosophy, zen, websites, futurism, lolcats, anything shiny, naps, naruto, true blood, dexter, heroes, photoshop, mimbling about, CAEK.

By at 06:29AM

Coding: A combination of a lot of downtime and quitting thingbox at work means work on the website has moved forward a lot recently. I’m settling into a kind of iterative pattern of working; there’s still a lot of tweaking I’d like to do on the landing page but it works for now, and as there are other pages needing attention more I’m going to shelve the shiny jquery-API-fetching php-twitter-caching goodness that is my homepage. There’s a been a steep learning curve with both, particularly just the utter confusion of getting php to work due to various clandestine permissions on the web hosts side of things. Still to do: hatched border at the top of the page, re-jig the layout so it doesn’t hang to one side, fix the last.fm script in ie6/7 and get rid of its superfluousness, and maybe think up some other niftiness to be done with the feeds. A clicky to make the flicker pics random might be fun. Mouseover panels with more details on the pics and albums is another idea.

Next up, blog front page and similar single-post page including concertina-d archive links. Then CV page, then a Work page with a lot of screenshots in some sort of gallery arrangement I haven’t thought through yet.

Gaming: I tore through the single player campaign of Supreme Commander 2 in a few days: not bad, though not that interesting. Better than Command and Conquer 4 though, I deleted that in frustration, I wish I hadn’t bothered. The “single player” campaign can actually be done with two players, which is nifty I suppose but it means it’s really frackking difficult to do with one. Balancing fail. The multiplayer bits seemed like a crappy version of Dawn of War 2 so basically: game fail. Similarly I finally got around to reaching the tier 3 ship I wanted in Star Trek Online, a nifty little one with four nacelles, and was disproportionately disappointed when the warping animation only lit up the top two. The bottom two nacelles stayed dark. It’s nicely indicative of the laziness of the game, and already disillusioned I deleted and unsubscribed. Browsing Steam I saw called Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, a Hungarian-made near-future sci-fi space ship game a couple of years old. So far it’s surprisingly good, and after the fail of Star Trek little details like directional thrusters firing to manoeuvre your cumbersome ship in a physically plausible way are much appreciated.

This hasn’t stopped me watching lots of Enterprise though.

Books: Again with the tearing: I read the sixth book by Trudi Canavan, the last in her first trilogy. Easy read but you can tell she’s a noob, the ending was rushed and clichéd. Her second series is much better, and I’d be tempted to give her future work a look. Having read so much recently it’s given me a nice run up to finally get my teeth into a massive hardback tome that Laurie got me a year and a half ago: Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I found it frustratingly impenetrable until now but am suddenly enjoying the jarring metaphors and drip-feeding plot.

Fitness: Well I’m walking 4 or 5 miles and doing about 45 minutes of weights exercise 4 or 5 days a week, which is good I guess… Not doing too well resisting pizza and/or pasta for dinners though, and I’m finding it difficult to push myself beyond “exhaustion” to an hour exercise… So I’ve levelled out at 71kg, but I’d love to get down to 70. Sigh, so close! Gngngngngn!

By at 07:53AM

My second letter, with hyperlinks. Please feel free to use this as a template to contact your own MPs.

Dear Mr Sharma,

I wrote to you recently outlining my concerns around the Digital Economy Bill currently before parliament.

You may be aware that Harriet Harman MP announced last week that despite widespread criticism of some parts of this bill from across the creative and technology sectors, it will receive it’s second reading on Tuesday April 6, leaving only 90 minutes for the bill to be scrutinised by the House of Commons.

I hope you will agree that this is not acceptable for a Bill that seeks to define the technological landscape of Britain for the next generation. The Bill has undergone considerable scrutiny in the House of Lords and it is only reasonable to expect this same scrutiny from our elected representatives in the Commons.

I see from your web site that you have welcomed Ms Harman to the constituency on more than one occasion. I would therefore ask you to use your influence as the member for Ealing Southall to oppose the Government’s plans to rush through this Bill in the period before the election and that ensure the provisions receive proper debate and scrutiny in a new Parliament.

I am writing as one of 17,000 people who have also written to their representatives on this matter. I am sure you will have received many letters on this subject and I would ask you to take these views into account and make these known with ministers and party managers.

Yours Sincerely,
Will Abson

By wabson at 04:22AM

In about July last year I finally got off my ass and began to pursue medical solutions to my chronic back pains, arthritis type stuff, along with a couple of other things that made it more imperative. It’s frustrating that after so long and so many appointments, there’s really not been much progress. Far from having a cure I’m now *more* restricted in the painkillers I can take. The only thing I’ve taken away from it so far is a very slightly better understanding of my own body. I’m starting physio again soon though which is good; an increasing theme seems to be that exercise is the key to solving a lot of problems. I bought dumbbells a month ago and have been taking tips from Luke, who’s all of a sudden a keep fit enthusiast and has the protein supplements to prove it. I really need to keep it up, in spite of the time and effort it takes.

In other news, I spent a few days in Spain visiting Abuella, Alberto and Ignacio. Was good to catch up, especially with Alberto, but kinda depressing too, sad to see them so down on themselves.

Work has been busy, I’ve read five Trudi Canavan books in as many weeks and have been storming through Assassins Creed 2, so I’ve paused on my tinkering with this site for now, hope to get some done in the Easter Break though.

By at 11:28AM

I tried to catch up on Gordon Brown’s surprise appearance today on Number10.gov.uk exclaiming the virtues of ‘superfast’ broadband and the semantic web, but sadly I was disappointed.

The player is not supported by this version of Flash. Please install the latest version…

Reading the transcript, perhaps I needn’t have bothered anyway. Aside from the release of the DfT NaPTAN data (which was made available to OSM some time ago) via data.gov.uk, and a promise to force transport operators to open up their timetabling information when their franchises come up (every 10-20 years) there wasn’t much news on the open data front.

Further justification for releasing data in this way probably wasn’t needed to convince most of the audience, but to illustrate how open data can be used to push the boundaries of innovation, Brown picked a New Labour favourite.

…Independent developers are using the information we’ve published for innovative new websites and mobile phone applications such as ‘asborometer’ – built by one person in just five days. It finds your position using GPS and tells you how many people have been served with an asbo in that area.

ASBOs? Seriously? Surely there must be better examples out there of how citizens have re-used public data to increase transparency, accountability and participation in government?

There was an announcement that @timberners_lee and @Nigel_Shadbolt will he heading up a new institute to study emerging web technologies, although no explanation of why our universities aren’t able to do this themselves (lack of funds, perhaps?). Also a new Digital Public Services Unit is being formed to advise departments on how to ‘transform’ their services for the web, with @Marthalanefox at the helm. Fortunately for her, she gets to keep the word ‘Champion’ in her job title.

The Digital Economy Bill was mentioned only once, in a section defending the 50p phone line tax and emphasising the importance of maintaining a strong regulatory presence in the form of Ofcom, the two parts of the bill most opposed by the Tories. So more electioneering than setting out a future policy vision.

There was no mention of the crippling effect of Clauses 17 and 18 of the bill, which threaten to cut off users and censor free speech on the Internet. The Government can invest as much as it likes in Public Services 2.0, but if individuals, families and businesses are unable to access them because their connection has been blocked then that investment is effectively useless.

So if like the Labour government of the past, you believe that digital inclusion is more important than the BPI increasing album sales in 2011, write to your MP, contact your local paper or make your voice heard at this Wednesday’s protest.

By wabson at 13:55PM

Turning into a political week, this one. With the Digital Economy Bill threatening to to take us back to an analogue age (oh, the irony), I’ve penned a letter to my MP highlighting the widely-held concerns that the Government look set to try to ram the thing through during wash-up.

If you’re reading this and you wish to continue using an open Internet where freedom of speech is not threatened, I would strongly urge you to do the same.

Virendra Sharma MP
Ealing, Southall

Friday 19 March 2010

Dear Mr Sharma,

I am writing to you concerning the Government’s Digital Economy Bill, which had it’s first reading in the House of Commons this week.

I have been following the passage of this Bill as it has progressed through its various stages in the Lords, and as a technologist myself I am mindful of the significance of the Bill in it’s potential to improve the way in which Britain uses information technology to it’s best advantage in an increasingly global and competitive age.

Like many others who work in the profession however, I have been alarmed by some of the clauses in the Bill, which seek to impose penalties on Internet users who are alleged to have engaged in copyright-infringing activities, with no legal recourse or right of appeal through the courts. This is especially concerning as recent cases in the news have highlighted the inaccuracy of methods used to identify wrongdoers.

Although there are many legitimate concerns around issues such as copyright and intellectual property which the Bill rightly seeks to address, in it’s current form the Bill risks damaging our economy by imposing unnecessary additional monitoring burdens on organisations as diverse as hotels, libraries and universities who provide Internet access, as well as the Internet Service Providers themselves.

As the member for Ealing Southall I hope you will appreciate the deep divide in access to technology that exists within our constituency. The Government has declared it’s intention to tackle such inequalities, but many of the provisions of the Digital Economy Bill will only hinder this, by increasing the cost of Internet access for families as ISPs seek to recoup the costs of monitoring users’ on-line activities, and others choose to stop providing public access altogether.

Further debate and scrutiny of the bill is required within Parliament to ensure that innocent families are not targeted or feel threatened by a flawed identification process, and that the cost of accessing information technology is not driven up unnecessarily in the current economic climate.

I would urge you to resist efforts by the Government to rush through this legislation before the General Election without the full oversight and scrutiny of the normal Parliamentary process, and in particular to vote against Clauses 17 and 18, which threaten to take us backwards, rather than forwards in our use of technology to improve the lives of local people.

Yours Sincerely,
Will Abson

By wabson at 06:02AM

I finally got round to completing some responses to the Ordnance Survey Free consultation being run by DCLG, which closed yesterday. Not that I like to leave things to the last minute, of course.

When I first signed up to the data.go.uk beta last year it was a pretty basic site and was password-protected. There’s been some amazing progress since then, but there is still work to be done in persuading public bodies like OS that they should provide their data on equivalent terms to the datasets already released.

I got an out-of-office auto-reply, which apparently constitutes acknowledgement that I’ve officially had my say.

Question 1: What are your views or comments on the policy drivers for this consultation?

As the Cambridge Study shows there are clear social drivers for releasing many of the ‘unrefined’ products. As noted, there is clearly a cost associated with making this information more widely available and in order to ensure that benefits are maximised it is essential that the OS engages with external stakeholders before determining the format and licensing applied to released data.

I strongly disagree with the suggestion that contributors to the mapping data should be charged in order to update geographical data, since this may act as a disincentive for providing this data which is so valuable for ensuring OS maps are up-to-date.

Question 2: What are your views on how the market for geographic information has evolved recently and is likely to develop over the next 5-10 years?

The arrival of the Internet as a mass distribution channel has fundamentally changed the way mapping information is accessed and has the potential to greatly increase accessibility to this data for a wider variety of purposes at a low cost. Therefore the changes that have occurred in the last few years have changed the way in which mapping data is consumed.

Although this trend is expected to continue as licensing changes accelerate the usage of data, the next 5-10 years will see bigger changes in the way mapping data is collected as the Internet moves from a model of mass publishing and consumption to a more collaborative model. This second model is generally referred to as Web 2.0 and heralds significant changes for any organisation involved in the collection and publishing of information.

Groups such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) provide a good example of this model in a cartographic context. OS should increasingly look to leverage external groups and individuals such as this in the collection of data if it is to lower the cost of data collection, which could offset any short-term loss of revenue caused by the proposed licensing changes.

The goal of OS from it’s conception was to provide a comprehensive set of mapping data for the United Kingdom and crowd-sourcing models such as this have the potential to significantly widen this coverage to cover the entire globe. Such a database would not be possible for a single organisation to put together, but the distributed nature of contributors in OSM has allowed previously poorly-mapped countries such as Haiti to be surveyed to the level of detail required to conduct relief operations, at zero cost.

However, in order to allow contributions from diverse organisations to sit alongside each other in harmony, changes are needed to allow a more permissive licensing arrangement.

Question 3: What are your views on the appropriate pricing model for Ordnance Survey products and services?

Generally, the existence of any price-based model for providing access to OS products acts as an inhibitor to innovation and maximising the use of those resources, since it not only limits their availability to those with the necessary financial capital, but also (even where a low price is charged) places additional restrictions on the reuse of products in order to ensure that future revenue streams to OS are not compromised.

The dilemma presented is therefore how to provide free access to OS data on reasonable terms, while continuing to retain a profit-making function in order to recoup the substantial costs of maintaining that data. Therefore in the short term at least a differential pricing model may provide the best way forward for all parties involved. Such an arrangement might perhaps provide free access to certain ‘raw’ datasets while continuing to charge for others, providing free data to any non-commercial entity while continuing to charge profit-making entities, or a combination of the two approaches.

Question 4: What are your views and comments on public sector information regulation and policy, and the concepts of public task and good governance as they apply to Ordnance Survey?

The regulations outlined provide a broad overview of the legislation affecting public sector bodies such as Ordnance Survey who produce data in the course of their day-to-day activities.

Increasingly regulations such as the IFTS are focussing on how maximum benefit can be obtained from this data through re-use by others. Since this affects data which has been collected using finances from the public purse, in my view this even places a moral duty on OS to make the collected data available to the entire public audience on a non-discriminatory basis, regardless of their ability to pay or otherwise. But the clear pragmatic argument is also made that wider re-use will produce larger incomes as innovative uses of data allow new businesses to succeed, who will in turn pay their own taxes and business rates.

On the question of Governance, a larger role in driving OS policy should be given to external stakeholders in the organisation such as those using the data. This could take the form of an elected advisory council, who are able to make their own recommendations to the board.

Question 5: What are your views on and comments on the products under consideration for release for free re-use and the rationale for their inclusion?

Providing access to gazetteer, boundary and postcode data is essential as no authoritative nationwide database exists at present to provide this information on an unrestricted basis for re-use by others.

Raster data should be provided at the outline level, as given the many different ways in which raster views may be generated from different data sets and layers, it may be preferable for OS to leave the diversity of such content to be defined to the marketplace. Provided that the raw data is available, others will be able to produce their own raster versions as required.

Question 6: How much do you think government should commit to funding the free product set? How might this be achieved?

In the short term, Government should commit to the necessary capital required to compensate for any short term fall in licensing revenue from Central or Local government departments. This can be justified by the reasoning that the extra costs are being offset by savings within those departments, and due to the reduction in administrative overheads would likely provide a net saving overall.

Government should also, as the sponsor of these changes, commit to providing any required funding to aid with the transitory period, such as new IT systems required to host the data.

Given the current economic situation, any costs met by Government should be costs that can be demonstrated will be paid back later down the line, either in savings in other departments, or as efficiency savings within OS itself.

Question 7: What are your views on how free data from Ordnance Survey should be delivered?

It is essential that the data is made available in open formats as electronic files in order to allow re-use by the widest range of individuals and organisations. Where a choice exists between providing information in a widely-used proprietary format and a lesser-used but open format, the open format should be chosen since it represents a lower risk to the publisher and ultimately will enable greater choice on the part of the consumer.

Data may also be made available in other formats such as DVD and a reasonable charge could be made for such formats.

As stated, it is essential that the OS engages with external stakeholders before determining the format and licensing applied to released data.

Question 8: What are your views on the impact Ordnance Survey Free will have on the market?

Providing some or all of OS’s data under a free license may affect other suppliers who have previously relied on such data being available at a premium only. However, Ordnance Survey, although still the dominant supplier in the UK market, is not the only supplier and other lower-cost or free data sources such as Google Maps, Bing and OpenStreetMap are already ushering in these changes and will continue to do so, regardless of what action OS may take itself.

Question 9: What are your comments on the proposal for a single National Address Register and suggestions for mechanisms to deliver it?

A single National Address Register is currently needed in order to ensure level access to address data by all individuals and organisations. Address data is becoming fundamental to many localised services being delivered via the Internet and many of these services do not have the means to pay for the currently available commercial alternatives.

At present access to this data is available only from a single commercial supplier and significant limitations are places on it’s re-use. It is not appropriate for such a valuable asset to be in the sole control of a single commercial entity with few safeguards to ensure that access is made available on reasonable terms.

Question 10: What are your views on the options outlined in this consultation?

A wide variety of options have been presented, but it is disappointing that no consideration has been given to the benefits to OS of making data more widely available, such as the increased ability for local residents to report changes to the physical landscape in their area or even to modify features themselves.

Question 11: For local authorities: What will be the balance of impact of these proposals on your costs and revenues?

N/A

Question 12: Will these proposals have any impact on race, gender or disability equalities?

N/A

By wabson at 08:06AM

The other night I went to my first real unashamedly political event, a session organised by the “progressive conservative” bright blue (so new they’re yet to appear on Google) at the British Library, discussing the role of education in 21st century Britain.

The event deliberately went back to first principles on education, focussing on why we bother to send people to school/college/university in the first place, then going on to look at how we need to change our current approach. Hence the title, above.

The speakers really made the event for me, especially as Toby Young’s presence on Newsnight last week had motivated me to put down my own thoughts on the matter.

It must be said that Anthony Seddon generally out-shone Young in terms of stage presence, but the former came across much more so as someone who really wants to make a difference, rather than one who simply offers a critique of current policy.

The two were united in their criticism however, with Young pointing to various studies which have shown how measures such as social mobility (which, if nothing else, education should surely aim to improve?) have painted a worsening picture over the previous 50 years, and Seddon lambasting targets and exams in encouraging a sort of herd-like behaviour, where all effort is focussed on the short-term goal of achieving the best score, rather than in maximising purer academic performance.

As the arguments were developed further, the point was made that the education system focuses too heavily on teaching children to recall facts, rather than to develop the sort of critical thinking and logical reasoning required in today’s fast-moving world. PSE in particular was noted as form of indoctrination, where pupils are taught item-by-item what is right and wrong, rather than being given the chance to decide this for themselves.

There were disagreements between audience members and the panel and at times between the two speakers themselves over how best to formulate an overall educational policy and how to measure it’s outcomes, but there was almost universal agreement that the current system which has served us so well for the previous century is now looking increasingly out-dated, and that despite the personal interest of two PMs and many more high-profile education ministers, the massive investment made over the last few years have not delivered the improvements hoped-for.

The argument was therefore presented that another approach is needed. Seddon was particularly critical of policy for deliberately excluding parents from the education process, arguing that schools and parents must be in line with each other and that a failure to bring the two sides together causes alienation reduces the sense of belonging. Young’s school, if successful, could change this.

As Seddon surmised at the end, we are all common stakeholders in the process of education. We have all been educated, and many people have or may in the future have children who will go through the same process. Current circumstances provide a once-in-a-generation chance to get things right this time, and so now is the time to act.

By wabson at 13:06PM

Interesting report on last night’s Newsnight over Tory “dreams” to bring a Swedish-style schools system to the UK, with independent groups receiving funding to operate within the state sector to increase competition and choice.

Radio 4 covered the same topic recently, interviewing actor Toby Young about why he wants to set up a new school here in Ealing. According to Young,

“Our parent group, which is about 250-strong, would apply to be the main sponsor of a new academy… Ours would be the first parent-sponsored academy.”

Doing a bit more digging, it seems Young kicked things off last year with an opinion piece in the Observer. The Ealing Gazette picked this up shortly afterwards and put a local twist on it and more recently, the Guardian and Newsnight re-opened the debate with their own further coverage on the subject.

Labour have taken us so far down the academies route, and (perhaps surprisingly) the juggernaut shows no sign of stopping.

But this is a scheme dreamt up in the heady days of the boom years. Underlying the academies scheme is a belief that the state (in combination with suitably wealthy donors) can play a central role in tearing down the old and replacing it with shiny new facilities, with scant regard for what is there already. Academies have done for the education system what the 1960s did for urban planning, to the extent that bodies like English Heritage now feel compelled to issue warnings.

In Education as in IT, the days of the all-enabling state are well-and-truly over. People have lost patience and the system has run out of money.

As Young’s example shows there are a huge number of people on the ground who think they can do it better and are motivated to do so. These are parents, teachers and others in the community who want to take back some of the control that’s been taken away from them over the last 60 years, first by central government and the LEAs and more recently by the academies. As Antony Seldon says in the Radio 4 piece:

“We’ve had a pretty state-run system for the last 100 years where schools have been run from the centre… and parents have been marched off to go to this school and it’s been pretty ordinary… We need to abandon the factory schools that served us so well in the 20th century and move towards a much more individualised system…”

The Newsnight report shows that the Swedish example is not perfect. Standards must be enforced (this being an ideal  role for the state) and non-profit status should be required for any organisation wanting to set up a new school, but bearing these in mind we can surely do things better by opening the process up further and allowing “individuals and organisations to flourish”.

By wabson at 13:24PM

...in no particular order...

• Cued up flights to Gibraltar but got distracted before I managed to press "buy".
• Wrote 680 words about an emo vampire.
• Brushed up on my CSS3 and went "oooh" at some JQuery nifty woo.
• Compiled my notes on the upcoming website overhaul in a Wave. Design next.
• Read about hundred pages of Priestess of the white, lent to me by Keith.
• Worked up a sweat jumping around my room like an idiot for all of 20 minutes. Weak.
• Watched 2 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager.
• Played some Mass Effect. Meant to roll a biotic this time but snipers are just too awesome.
• Pretended to be a megalomaniacal super being on Thingbox.
• Ate two bowls of cereal, one bowl of soup and a tuna sandwich.
• Downloaded 5 new films that I might never watch as they're probably all rubbish.

• Boned up on Shy Child in preparation for seeing them tonight.
• Read about Howard's weekend, told through the medium of dinosaurs.
• Asked around for some work to do. Failed.
• Signed a couple of anti-pope petitions.
• Looked for more nifty blog designs.
• Played with the "My Maps" bit of googlemaps. Ambivalent.
• Measured how much I've sworn on twitter.
• Walked 3 miles along the Thames (in the rain).
• Spent a coffee pontificating about shrinks, films and vampires with Mikey.
• Tried again with the work thing, succeeded. Woop(?)
• Undid some code that I misguidedly thought was really clever in 2006.
• Got terrified that they had put the deadline for paying for Glastonbury tickets back a month and not told me.
• Realised the difference between 2009 and 2010. Paid for ticket.

By at 09:38AM

Stream of consciousness ahoy. It's 2010 and time to overhaul this half-finished website, so I'm trying to work out exactly what I want to do with it. I don't spend a lot of time blogging so much these days so I should tuck that in the back somewhere behind a splash page or some such, while I tweet a fair bit so that should be brought in front-and-centre. It needs a combined cv / portfolio area too, instead of having that separate.

Anyways that sort of stuff is relatively simple, what's trickier is what I want it to look like. A palette of red, white black and grey is a given, because, well, it's my site and I like those colours. But beyond that, it has to be SNAZZY! (But doable.) I've been looking through blogs and web pages that are ostensibly nifty looking for something along the right lines. Here's a few that I thought were Plus Nift. I was just bookmarking them til I thought it'd be useful to note down why

• denisechandler Love the header, the wacky bees and the menu reaching over to the side of the page. Simplt but really impactful. Is that a word? Oh sod it.
• sursly.com Ok, this looks like nothing, til you click a link and you're all like WOAH WHAT JUST HAPPENED. Hiding the scroll an putting a bunch of stark graphics between the "pages" is fully nift.
• mikeambs.com Very simple. I like minimalist stuff and this is that. Similarly blog.squarespace.com, I've seen the little marks on the edges like that in a few places now and it's a nice touch. I'm sure there's a better word for it but hey.
• jeffsarmiento.com Wee details are also good though, and this has loads of that. I particularly like how the secondary column feels undeniably secondary.
• colly.com Probably represents the my idea in webdesign. I'm not aiming anywhere near that high, to be honest, but it's good to keep a benchmark of awesome in the back of your mind.
• northtemple Love the NORTH widget thingy. Awesomesauce.
• urbanlandscapelab Minimal colours, nice use of negative space, love the header/footer and the bright green blip when you click a link. Nice.
• matthamm Textured background vs flat foreground + slight bevel = subtle text that pops sufficiently anyways.

With any luck I'll add some more sites/ideas/etc here. Woop!

By at 15:26PM

So I've been playing WoW again, probably the most hardcore playing since the fabled pvp grind of 2005, but I've got much more out of it for the same effort this time around, the game is just so much better in so many ways. There's still a absolute ton of legacy content lying around though, after all the game just celebrated its 5th anniversary so the original content is looking pretty frayed around the edges. That's the reason I'm so looking forward to the next expansion, probably more than I have done for the other two: In "Cataclysm" it's resetting and redoing all embarrassingly old content, making the whole game shiny and new. If bliz can manage to renew properly, so that it doesn't just feel like a slapdash coat of paint on the same tired stuff, then it's difficult to think how any other MMO could ever take Warcraft's crown.

For the moment though, I've hit a gear wall. Until the next patch hits in a few weeks the only thing I can reasonably upgrade is my weapon, which Bliz seems to enjoy making as rare as rocking-horse shit. Apart from logging on every week for a Raid to try my chance with the drops, I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins instead, easily the best RPG since Neverwinter Nights 1, or Gothic 2, maybe even the best since Baldur's Gate 2 back in 2000! Good times. Some how I also need to find time to process the 300 pictures I took while out last weekend, plus the 200 from my holiday in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, plus read the latest Wheel of Time book, which by all accounts has not suffered at all from the death of its original author. Woop!

In other news, I'm now 28. Probably undeniably an adult. Woe.

By at 11:28AM

Oh oh oh so I found the list of games I'd played over the past few 3 or 4 months! Kinda slowed down/stopped now though as am deeply entrenched in Steven Erikson's Mazalan epic, currently on book 2 of 10(?) each weighing in at seven to nine hundred pages. Yes. I like my epics to be epic. So far it's like Jordon meets RR Martin, very convoluted and it pulls no punches with the mountain of (refreshingly original) Lore, but unusual protagonists and decent characterisation so far. High magic high drama. I like. So yeah, no time for computer games really.

Summer in London has been kinda rubbish weather wise. Yes there's the heat and ok storms can be fun the first couple of times, but generally it's just hot and muggy, with occasionally breaks for cold-and-wet or hot-and-sunny, depending. For example Glastonbury was perfect (or so I hear, sadface) but Brighton Pride this Saturday was a complete washout. I'm a little sad we didn't persevere a little longer with it as by all accounts there was great fun to be had in spite of the weather, but we were late to the party, slightly hungover, completely sober and almost posse-less, so after getting soaked we went home, showered and cooked, like old people.

Was really nice to have Luke over for a long weekend too, good times, fun wanderings, much snuggles, though it's ridiculous how much we bicker, given my previous opinion on couples who do that.. I think after the deceptive calm of the relationship with Si I seem to have gone to the other extreme: interesting but tiring. Plus he ate all my food. Damn him. Oh! And someone submitted a picture I took on Saturday to Look At The Fucking Hipster starring my *cough* beautiful *cough* boyfriend. He seems to be taking his new-found fame well.

I finally registered and went to the doctors recently about my upper/mid back pains, which I used to attribute to my arthritis and just grin and bear but I'm no longer convinced; it seems more muscular. I'm hoping to get seen by a physiotherapist soon to see what, if anything, I can do about it. I really want to try and get in decent shape and I can't when flexing any part of my back gives instant cramp-like pains :-( The short term involves a crap-load of tests though. I've already had blood tests (many vials filled, erk) and a couple of x-rays taken, next I'm going to get some sort of endoscopy thing to find out how much nomming ibuprofen like it's candy over the years has screwed up my insides. Probably lots. SADFACE. I've been banned from taking my beloved ibuprofen tablets for now so I'm relying on deep heat and ibuprofen gel which is kinda awkward. Still though, it was nice to be able to walk in and out of hospital unaided.

Work is pretty good right now, the all-company meetings sound slightly corny and are easily dismissed but I really get a feeling of where we are and where we are going as a company, and it all sounds good, even if I do take it with a pinch of salt. There's clear evidence of progress, from the report on the company Vision and Values that I helped put together and present to the London office FINALLY having a web presence at www.mrmworldwide.co.uk. I did the markup and styles for that as well which is a nice touch. At the last all-company meeting I learned that one of the websites I've been working a lot on recently (on of those projects that just won't go away) is to be on store PCs on the shop floor of every PC world in the country. Which is nice. On the other hand it's odd to have so many new faces in the tech department, what with the redundancies and redundancy-fears earlier in the year, as well as a couple of people leaving, part of that is down to us going from a .net house to .net and Java. Interesting times. I still walk to work every day which is awesome. Hopefully we'll stay at this address for another year to keep that lovely perk.

Oh yeah, here's the list of games.

• The Last Remnant Didn't grab me in the first hour. Fail.
• Demigod Good, but it's just DotA
• Fallout 3 Not that awesome really. In any sandbox game like this I always get sidetracked making my fortune. I never care enough about the main plot.
• City Life Delux Confusing.
• Crusader Kings Damn confusing. And old-looking.
• Europa Universalis 3 AWESOME. With the Magna Mundi mod this game keeps me coming back.
• Europa Universalis: Rome Didn't catch on.
• Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 Silly but fun.
• Overlord Silly fun. Frustrating sequentiality given the lack of a map.
• Empire: Total War Kinda easy when I first played it. Shelved it waiting for patches.
• LotR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Decent.
• LotR: Conquest Shite.
• Universe at War Good. The differences between the races kept it fresh in spite of the old-school UI
• Warhammer Dawn of War 2 Good, but I didn't get the big deal behind the multi-player which is clearly its main strength. With only 1 race single player quickly became dull.
• Civilisation IV I have trouble remembering which civilisation is which. The same flaw I find with every one is that the AI produces hundreds of units and I don't, because shuffling around hundreds of units is DULL.
• Chris Sawyer's Locomotion LOL
• Elven Legacy I can see some people liking this but hex wargames are a little oldschool for me.
• Sim City 4 Classic. I think Cities XL might steal it's crown though, god knows Sim Cities Societies damn well isn't.
• The Sims 3 After Sims 2 with all the add-ons Sims 3 very feature-poor. I'll have another look in a few years when the money-grabbing bastards have pumped out the obvious expansion packs that they already did in 1 and 2.
• Prototype AWESOME. Smashy smashy game with a decent plot. Didn't like the protagonist at all but I'm sure empathy would get in the way of all the smashy.
• Far Cry 2 Promising start, though my computer might die.
• CoD 4: Modern Warfare Really really good for the handful of hours it took.
• Overlord 2 Much better than Overlord. Made me realise I love having a palace/castle/den to upgrade and have ever since Civ 2 and BG 2
• Stronghold Legends Baffling.
• Sacred 2 - Fallen Angel Awful. Diablo and Dungeon Siege have a shit child.
• Plants Vs Zombies Good arcadey fun. Desktop flash game basically.
• The Witcher - Enhanced Difficult to get into it a second time, I wish there was a way to skip the tutorial bit. Yes my attention span is that small.
• Left for Dead Shot some zombies. No big whup. I assume you have to play it online to care.

By at 19:06PM

Well I’ve played Prototype all the way through and had a brief, slightly disappointing dalliance with The Sims 3, so now I’m more or less waiting again, as far as games go. I can’t remember the long list of games I was going to post last time, but I think it included Spore, Fallout:3 and Empire:Total War, all of which were a bit meh. Call of Duty 4 was short but Sweet.  I keep coming back to Europa Universalis 3 with the Magna Mundi mod, it’s extraordinarily deep and I get massive geek thrills from uniting Italy 300 years early.

In other news, I’ve been taking a royal fuckton of photos of gays and their drunken antics, such that I’ve damned myself to dozens of hours mucking around on photoshop and wrestling with the evil that is Facebook Uploader, and my friends refer to me as their paparazzi, and then complain when they find out who sweaty they get after dancing three hours straight in a basement that’s never heard of aircon. Part of me wants to take a break from that, another wants to shell out for a DSLR and do it properly.

I’ve been failing badly when it comes to live music this year, I think the only stuff I’ve seen has been accidental, and looking through people’s Glastonbury photos I’m quite jeluz. I hope working Bestival works out but having not heard anything about it for months I’m not at all hopeful. I was going to try and go to Field Day, but it clashes with Brighton Pride. And Lovebox clashes with something else. Sigh.

Started using twitter properly now. A little while back I finally knew enough people that are on it *and* (shock) USE IT to make it not a waste of time. Slightly mourning the death of flickr to facebook and the death of last.fm to spotify. Oh well. Keep on movin’.

By at 13:44PM

I’ve been playing a royal fuckload of pc games lately.  A combination of discovering I can buy and download games without leaving the house, having given up World of Warcraft a couple of months ago and generally maintaining a very short attention span.

I’ll put up a list later of all the games I’ve played recently, but these are the ones I want to play. They’re not out yet.
Sims 3
Diablo 3
Starcraft 2
Dragon Age
Prototype
Champions Online
Knights of the Old Republic Online

By at 08:40AM

I was on a short hike a few miles north of San Francisco a few weeks ago. I had thought to bring a full bottle of water in my satchel but hadn’t thought to make sure the top had been securely attached. It came off, and my bag became a lovely little lake for my phone to swim around in. There was also a small moleskine notebook and one of my my hiking companions exclaimed “Oh no, your diary!”. I explained that it was empty.

Empty diary. Sadface. My life is measured in google calendar and facebook fotos.

By at 09:20AM

I'm actually working on my blog today. Strange huh? It's all a bit simplistic compared to my original mockup but hey ho. I'll see what I can fix without ripping it all up and starting again. Hopefully.

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By at 12:49PM

It's a dreadful way to start an entry but: I haven't really been blogging much. My life is documented in other ways now: everything notable that I do is in my google calender, and every weekend a new album (or two) of my recent exploits goes up on facebook. On the other hand, this blog thing might have more longevity so I should probably write a summery of 2008...

January

2008 sucked to begin with, mostly a continuation of the emotional hangover from the breakup in November. I'd been doing cool stuff and gotten back into Warcraft to keep busy but the grief was still a constant companion and New Year's was a mediocre washout, by comparison to most other NYE, a failure. On the plus side, January was where I began to turn things around. It had been a particularly lardy Christmas and I decided I needed to lose wieght, so I started exercising and watching what I ate. In the name of getting out of the house I started a regular Orange Wednesday film night with a few friends. I re-opened comms with Ciaran and his posse that I'd been friends with at uni. I got talking to and met a couple of guys off OKCupid (not as sad as it sounds) and was out every Saturday with Giles and Will in a refusal to bow down to the depressingness of January. Also: West 5. Lol.

February

Was mostly more of the same, though a bit less partying and was kinda seeing Rich. Highlights: Eddie Izzard at a tiny venue, the new Popstarz venue. Lowlight: getting ill twice.

March

Involved five days in Paris visiting Mikey and a weekend revisiting Warwick for the "End of the Union" event. I also re-quit Warcraft and hit my weight target (70kg), which I've stayed around since then. Clubs and parties continued on Saturday nights, exploration of cinemas continued on Wednesday nights.

April

Saw Portishead and We Are Scientists, went to the The Future Of Webdesign conference, Laurie visited from SanFran, James turned 30. Also: snow!

May

Ken lost the election, I saw the Wombats and went to Edinburgh for a few days, Mikey returned from Paris.

June

Mmmm sun. Glastonbury. Stonking. Avenue Q. Start getting active on thingbox more. Drastically misrepresent myself to a posse of new friends by pulling two nights running. Also fun and frolics at Thorpe Park.

July

London Pride, Lewis, Week in Malaga, Mark, Javascript training. Meeting lots of fun new people.

August

Brighton Pride, Singing in the Rain, Anglesey, Manchester Pride, my first Pie and Mash. More of the same.

September

Shitty month, due to having to stay in Kev's (lovely) spare room in Watford and living out of a backpack. Randomly went to Bestival. Apart from a few lunches and dinners there were no midweek funtimes. On paper things were fine but it was very depressing, with too much time to myself to think. Perhaps as compensation I began going out on both Fridays and Saturdays as the norm, rather than one or the other, crashing on spare beds, futons and couches of more centrally-based friends.

October

Having finally moved into the place at Elephant and Castle things began to look up, though it was frustrating how long it took to get and assemble all the Ikea Furniture. Film Wednesdays had died a death but the heavy weekends continued. Had my first (and as yet still only) bona fide club pull. Amusing but meh. Annoyingly in spite of the facts of the matter I seemed to be getting a "reputation", though it was true I had tripled my sexual experience in less than a year, that really wasn't saying very much.

November

The two-nights-out weekends (including my birthday) culminated in a my taking advantage of time off work to go out four nights in a row. A record for me, and a bit of a milestone. I was clearly much better at this malarkey than I used to be. Excellent fun, good times, but tiring, and it changed my point of view on a couple of things. Firstly, I was kinda tired of night buses. Secondly, I decided I wanted a bit more "grins and snuggles" in my life. Given I had been pretty busy and social recently I had a few possibilities for dating, but that proved irrelevant as my first choice agreed to what was a lovely night of drinks and dancing. The rest of the month, and the first couple of weeks of December, was mostly spent being ill and/or playing Warcraft. The expansion had been released so I rejoined after a break of 9 months. Between that and Luke's pennilessness, I didn't do a whole lot, especially in comparison to the previous few months. As I discovered later everyone had had colds or flu of some description over this period though so I didn't actually miss anything.

December

Mid-month it was off to Edinburgh for the season's familial festivities. To be honest I had been really dreading it, but it turned out to be really good. Almost issue-free and pretty cheery; it was great to catch up with everyone. I had also been stressed about NYE, after the previous year's flop, and I had resigned myself to tagging along with some friends to a houseparty. Which proved awesome. Lots of people I knew and kinda-knew, was drinking and talking shit til 7 in the morning. My New Year's nights have always been good and I was very glad to find that 2007 -> 2008 was a glitch.

By at 15:44PM

Last year Christian think-tank Theos argued that because most of us know the Easter story, therefore most of us literally believe in the Easter story.

From the same people who brought you this unfathomably crap interpretation of their own, agenda-ridden research, now comes a sparkly new survey on the public attitude to evolution.

Or so say rubbish science journalists who didn’t even bother to look at the research, blindly trotting out their own version of the Theos press release all round the internet today.  (You’d think science journalists would be the one kind of journalist most likely to do their fucking job and go and look at the so-called science, but no.)

The research never actually asked people a fair, balanced question about their belief in evolution, defined simply as a process of natural selection.  Oh no.  Do you want to know what it actually asked them?
What the actual survey actually asked about evolution was two separate questions, one on “theistic evolution” and one on “atheistic evolution”.  The latter definition and question read:

Atheistic evolution is the idea that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary and absurd.  In your opinion is Atheistic evolution: [and then the choices]

Just confusing the two separate issues of a/theism and evolution was obviously going to result in weird answers from the start, especially since they don’t even bother to spell out simply what the actual theory of natural selection says or associate it with either view.

Moreover, when people were being asked to assent to “atheistic evolution” they weren’t just being asked to assent to evolution-minus-God, they were being asked to assent to the view that evolution necessarily implies that there was no God.

Now, I think that evolution is true and I think that belief in God is unnecessary and absurd, but I still might well have said that “Atheistic evolution” as defined in this survey was probably not true, because I don’t think that one does necessitate the other.  Evolution has nothing to say about the origin of the world, for example.

Answering this survey, I might well have been waiting for a third, good, neutral statement of evolution before I plumped for it.

Worse still is the interpretation which Theos then puts on this already flawed data.  Having found probably even lower levels of general assent to the theory of evolution than we should want and expect – and would get if we asked better questions – they go on to conclude (in their press release) that the hopeless confusion we’re all is the fault of atheists:

Unfortunately, he [Darwin] is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause. The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.

“Darwin has become caught up in the crossfire between creationists on one side and certain public atheists on the other. It’s a battle in which everybody suffers.”

That’s right.  Who’s to blame for Creationism and ID?  Is it the proponents of Creationism and ID?  No.  It’s atheists!  And why should we blame the atheists, Theos?  Well, because they conflate Darwinism and atheism giving people a false choice between the two, says Theos. Oh, right, I get it, exactly like your survey cleverly demonstrates by doing exactly that?  Um, yes, yes that’s what we, um, intended, says Theos.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of reasons why Darwinian evolution is associated with atheism.  This isn’t a story about evolution getting “caught in the crossfire” between warring fundamentalist theists on one hand and marauding atheists on the other, as if Richard Dawkins (doubtless the intended ring-leader of the “public atheists” mentioned) has single-handedly warped a theory which was otherwise neutral with regard to God.  The reason evolution is associated with atheism is because prior to Darwin the church said quite emphatically that God created the Earth and all living things in seven days.  During the bronze age!  Religion got caught with its panda’s thumb up its giant red arse on this issue, forcing them ever since to either dig in and become full blown fundamentalists, or to pass off centuries of previous heretic-burning as a crazy, mistaken, drunken game, because they didn’t really literally believe in Genesis, no, no, it was an allegory all along.  For something.

The dawn of evolutionary theory is the great naturalizing moment of the last two centuries.  It completely reversed the way we had to think when trying to explain the construction of living forms.  It blew away the need for design, and a designer, previously the greatest single argument for the existence of God, with an idea of simple beauty and devastating cogency.  Atheists didn’t manufacture a wargame here – if anything it was the vicious response of religionists in Darwin’s own time which show exactly why so many people regard evolution as literally bringing the riddle of life back “down to earth”.

But none of this means that when you ask people about evolution you should imply that they have a choice between “theistic evolution” and “atheistic evolution”.  That’s just bollocks.

Theos is basically attempting to do exactly what it pretends not to be doing.  They are accepting that it’s not okay to be a biblical literalist, but also trying to blame anyone who expresses both atheism and evolution for other people’s confusion and ignorance, thereby leaving “theistic evolution” as the only option on the table.

Well, no, damn it!  We must be free to express the fact that evolution leads us to thinking about life in a naturalistic way, without being branded some kind of intellectual warmongers.  Being free to say that evolution is part of our atheism is like saying that Galileon cosmology leads us to thinking less anthropocentrically about the nature of the universe; and like saying that Newton leads us to think that maybe there is a coherent underlying structure to the universe, which is not interfered with by capricious deities.

Theos point the finger.  But they are the ones shamelessly playing games with science.

By Bob at 16:17PM

So, I have now moved to London.  I started moving in a few weeks before Christmas, and now I live here in Highbury, just round the corner from Boris Johnson apparently, and right in the corner of Highbury Fields.  Which makes my flat sound grander than it is.  I live in just one room.  But it’s a nice room with wooden floors and I have a large kitchen (big enough to have a dining table and sofa in it) which I share with three friendly housemates.  My own room is too hot.  The stupid underfloor heating seems to be on all the time whatever I do with the thermostat.  There’s a door right onto the kitchen so I sometimes get disturbed at night if someone wants to make a curry at three o’clock in the morning.  And there’s something else.

There’s something else lurking.  Like a living thing.  But alien. There’s something else in the room.

It is electricity.  Static electricity everywhere.  Far, far too often I become a sort of involuntary, miniature Thor.  In a particularly powerful shock which I was half-prepared for I could actually see the white bolt of electrons discharging as I touched my chair leg.  I get shocked from the wardrobe door handles and the door into the room and from my chair.  The other day I somehow even took the charge with me all the way to work and electrocuted a colleague.  But by and large it only happens in the room, and only this side of Christmas, not before.
So I am trying to solve the puzzle like a sort of rubbish, less-motivated Columbo.  I have done careful research by reading the page “Static electricity?? HELP” – a veritable compedium of advice compiled by the delightful Mamasource.com (”Connecting  moms in your community”.  Don’t laugh. This is a valid source of scientific advice.  And getting electorcuted every five minutes isn’t unique to child-bearing women.)

Now, according to “Static electricity?? HELP”, multiple factors may come into play in the build up of electrons about my person. Footwear, synthetic clothing, synthetic carpets, dry air, dry skin…

The first thing I thought was that possibly the slippers I got for Christmas were causing the problem, perhaps rubbing on the carpet;, except that I don’t have a carpet, I have a wooden floor, and even when I remove the slippers and walk barefoot I still get shocked.  I thought perhaps that the wheels on my chair were generating static somehow as I slid about the room; but switching to a stationary chair has not helped – in fact I just seem to ground myself on its metal legs all the time.

I have not tried rubbing my clothes with a damp cloth ever half hour!  But then, I change my clothes on, well, almost a daily basis, and this seems to have no effect.  The fact that the heating is on all the time means the room is hot and therefore presumably too dry — and I’m sure this must be exacerbating the problem.  But I have tried drinking lots and lots of water to keep my skin hydrated, but this just means that I get shocked on my way to the bathroom.

I have been wracking my brains to think what else is new, what else could have started the static build-up since Christmas.  And only one thing remains.

Over the Christmas break I got lazy and let my facial hair grow.  My goatee has expanded into a face-girdling bear mask.  It’s still quite stubbley, but this means it’s all bristles and fur, not unlike a synthetic carpet!

Could it be that the furriness spreading outward from my chin is somehow rubbing on, like, the really dry air and generating all the static?  Every bristle a miniature lightning rod?

As Sherlock Holmes wrongly said, ”When you eliminate the impossible, whatever you have left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Anyway, I need to solve this riddle soon before I accidentally discharge my unwanted superpower into my computer and wipe out my harddisk.

By Bob at 11:01AM

The most amazing thing about the Atheist Bus Campaign is that, by and large, the internet has responded good-naturedly.  Obviously, there are lots of critical comments, and even outright nasty comments.  But given the topic (religion versus atheism) the ratio of good comments to bad comments is astoundingly positive.  You’d expect the nasty to comments overwhelm the pro comments, but they really don’t.

What is the case, though, is that – both back in October when the British Humanist Association re-launched the Atheist Bus fundraising appeal, and today now the buses have officially hit the roads – many, many people comment on use of the word ‘probably’ in the phrase “There’s probably no God”.

A few people comment that they like the ‘probably’, because it’s a bit funny-sounding and casual and not quite as churlish as the alternative: “Fuck off, there’s obviously no God”.  However, most of web 2.0 commenters are critically-thinking freethinkers and (god bless ‘em, I’m one of them) we’ll stick our two penneth in whether you like it or not, and there’s a valid philosophical point to be raised that since all knowledge is ultimately conjectural anyway, we shouldn’t have to qualify every metaphysical statement…  Yadda yadda yadda.
But there’s another category of ‘probably’ criticism, perhaps even the most dominant strain in the Atheist Bus-commenting culture-virus.

Numerous articles (just one example) are not merely offering a philosophical objection to ‘probably’, but outright crowing over it, implying that anyone who supports the campaign must be a wavering, quavering agnostic of the most wishy-washy variety.  Journo bloggers and commenters all over the place are writing to the effect that use of the word ‘probably’ beams a glaring light through the thin veil of our bravado; even as the slogan was concocted somewhere behind Ariane Sherine’s omni-smiling face, she must have been telepathically absorbing the doubt and existential angst of every hedging heretic and every iffy infidel up and down the land.  So the detractors argue.
This is of course tosh.

As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, if he uses language – with reference to religion – which is less harsh, less personal, less cutting, less rhetorical, than the kind of language you can read all the time in trashy magazines, restaurant critics’ reviews, political debates and so on, then he is nevertheless reprimanded for being a hateful miser who doesn’t understand basic human emotion. He regularly receives far harsher, more personal, more cutting, more rhetorical counter-attack against his relatively nuanced criticisms than his words could possibly deserve.  Religion engenders a peculiar kind of wailing pedantry against us (happy millions of) non-conformists.

Snide attacks against the word ‘probably’ in the Atheist Bus Campaign are another example of this language which – because it happens to be remotely critical of religion – is held to an absurd, pedantic standard, by people who know better under almost any other circumstances.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Imagine, for example, an analogous criticism made against the Alpha Course’s latest adverts.  These were run all through 2008, at least across London, far more widely than the Atheist Bus Campaign will ever reach.  These adverts asked, “If God did exist what would you ask?”
Now, I can imagine lots of criticisms of these adverts.  Like “Why did you leave a big, white, empty space underneath which was ripe for hilarious graffiti, you muppets?”

But imagine for a moment that someone, somewhere, made the following criticism of this advert.  Imagine (it will be difficult, but try) that they might mean this criticism seriously:

“Ooh, looks like they don’t really believe after all!  Ha ha, their faith must be fading away.  Look! – their slogan is in the interrogative form!  They must be seriously doubting themselves.  Ha ha… I am so clever.”

I think everyone – whether inclined toward being an atheist bus passenger or an Alpha Course attendee or anywhere in between – would recognise such a criticism, immediately, for the infantile, pointless pedantry that it was.

“If God did exist…” is conditional.  “There’s probably no God…” is qualified.  Other than this the entirely comparable in terms of being a kind of staged equivocation.  Given the context of mass-appeal marketing, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone why that is the case.  Only the latter slogan, though, is lumbered with the cuckcoo criticism that it is actually a signal of failing confidence.
Not that the bus campaign should really need defending from the rather sad, weird criticisms of ‘probably’ that have dogged it, nevertheless here’s the best statement I’ve seen – from Ariane Sherine herself – of why ‘probably’ makes sense, and what might be hoped for from greater public understanding of the humanist position.

By Bob at 18:16PM

My third blog at the Worcester News is all about how daft the annual spate of new stories on the topic of Christmas being banned is.  How this myth persists and gets re-invented every single December — despite the millions of fairy lights bedecking thousands of buildings, the tons of wrapping paper taped around billions of pounds worth of presents, the millions of Christmas turkeys consumed around most dinner tables in the UK — is beyond me.

By Bob at 08:14AM

America

Britain

In triumph, and redeemed, American has united behind a president whose race differs from the majority of Americans, a president who promises change, and who does not hide his intelligence or his power. Inspiring.

We, in Britain, have got behind an old man who can’t dance.

The legend that is John Sergeant rivals Robin Hood for his anti-authoritarian riposte to Aunty Beeb.  Armed only with his lack of coordination and an expression perpetually hovering between bemusement and curmudgeonliness, Sergeant has single-handedly (or two-left-footedly - haha) unmasked the charade that Strictly Come Dancing is strictly about dancing.

It has actually been quite a success story.  A warm story.  The public conspired, depending on your view, in order to support the weaker contestant, or because they recongised something of their own flawed dance steps in the old duffer, or even because they wanted to make a national TV program less saccharine by forcing upon it an arse-backwards plotline so surreal that Monty Python could have invented it.

But there are always left-fielders, and some commentators are just more lateral-thinking than others.  One in particular has been lateral-thinking about the John Sergeant voting pattern so long and hard, that his opinion now originates from somewhere near the planet Mercury.

According to Justin Thacker, “Head of Theology” at the Evangelical Alliance, if you voted for little Johnny, then you are a selfish egotistical relativist who hates God and rejects the whole concept of objective truth!

“How does Justin Thacker know my innermost secret motivations?”, I hear you ask.  Well, Justin Thacker has a very good argument.  First he asks why people would possibly vote for Sergeant.  Justin Thacker knows it can’t be because Sergeant is a “soap star” nor because he’s “good looking”, because Sergeant is neither. (Bloody nice of you, Justin.)  Justin Thacker rejects that it could be Sergeant’s “wry sense of humour” or his “certain charm” or even “the great British tradition of supporting the underdog”.  No.  It can’t be any of those things.  Justin Thacker knows the best theory is that people wanted to “spite the judges”.  Okay… And do they want to spite the judges because the judges were mean to people?  Or because it would be a bit of a joke to get one over on them?  Oh no, Joe-public, I’m afraid not.  Your spite runs much deeper than that, and you know it.  And Justin Thacker knows it.  Listen to Justin Thacker.  Justin Thacker has privileged access to what you were really thinking:

The reality is that in our individualistic, consumer-driven age, the reigning Zeitgeist loves individual autonomy over public authority. We can’t bear the notion that there exists some external, objective standard against which things should be measured – whether in respect of dancing or morality or anything really. Rather, we want to be King, and all authority must rest with us. So, we get to be the arbiters of what’s true or false, good or bad. The idea of being held to account by some absolute standard is one that rails deeply against our current mode of thinking. Hence, we reject it whenever we can. It’s not necessarily that we think the standard is a bad one, we just hate the idea of there being one at all.

Watching TV with Justin Thacker must be a really fun night in.

Sounds about right, though, doesn’t it. You probably didn’t realise at the time, but you voted for John Sergeant because you hate the concept of truth! It’s so obvious now.  When you picked up the phone you were thinking; “Objectivity? Correspondence theory of truth? Pah! I’m going to vote for John Sergeant.  That’ll show them theologians, trying to force their concept of a mind-independent external reality on me.”

Justin Thacker’s most wise inferences know no bounds.  Believe it or not, the following sentence directly follows the above quoted passage:

Given this, it’s no wonder that the Christian gospel has a hard time being heard.

Yep, God hates the nation getting together to watch people doing lovely dances, because it exacerbates their hatred of objective truth, and the Bible is objectively true, and if they stay in watching light entertainment together as a family then people will miss their Saturday night Bible classes, damn it.

If Bruce Forsyth would only lead us in prayers at the start of each episode that would be fine, I reckon - but every week Justin Thacker tunes in and… no, still no worshipful obedience to the Lord.  Who does Bruce Forsyth think he is, an entertainer?  All this light-hearted community of enjoyment is antithetical to Justin Thacker’s God.  God would rather you read Leviticus at the weekend. Because it’s objectively true. Justin Thacker knows.

There’s no build up to this next complete non sequitur by the way.  You might not be able to see how it follows from the previous statements, but Justin Thacker is better able to grasp the subtle logical connections between things than you are:

For whatever else it is, it [the gospel] involves humbling ourselves before the creator of the universe and acknowledging that he is Lord, not us, that he is the only Rightful Judge. The problem for us, though, is that on that day when we stand before him there won’t be any public popularity vote to rescue us. Simply the Judge and us.

Is it me, or does the leap from Stictly Come Dancing to the FEAR OF GOD THAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL JUDGEMENT DAY BEFORE BEING CAST INTO THE FIRES OF HELL, imply that Justin Thacker might be taking it all a little bit seriously?

Justin Thacker obviously knows all about “public popularity contests”, of course.  Himself a true fisher of men, he insults pretty much the entire country. You don’t like Justin Thacker’s Truth? Then you must hate all truth! And this abstract philosophical hatred of truth controls you even when you’re watching Strictly Come Dancing.  Next you’ll be telling Justin Thacker you liked Bagpuss when you were young!!!  Justin Thacker won’t like that.  Justin Thacker is horrified.  There were no cats in the Bible, you bloody infidel.  And that means that every time you watched Bagpuss, that was another nail in Baby Jesus’s crucifix.

This whole pile of crock, coming from the “Head of Theology” at anywhere, is insane.  I mean actually mad.  I mean, just for starters you have to admire the take-out-my-brain-and-mash-it-into-a-loaf-of-unleavened-bread craziness of the twin line of reasoning that Thacker’s argument is based on. Firstly, that the judges on Strictly Come Dancing are in themselves comparable to The Literal Arbiters of Objective Truth, and the British public (consciously or unconsciously) think of them exactly that way.  Secondly, that the Lord God is merely the divine analogue of a judge on a Saturday night entertainment show, basically just passing out aesthetic condemnations on the inhabitants of His universe (”Hmm, your day was quite productive, mortal, I really believed your heart was in it, but you only managed one small charitable act, and hardly a pirouette in sight the whole day. 3 out of 10.”)

Some people just hate a feel-good story — in this case about how the public can unite behind a bumbling old man — if that story doesn’t even remotely involve Baby Jesus.  Justin Thacker’s mind boggles; however comical or warm the story may be, if it doesn’t have Baby Jesus in it then how could it possibly not be EVIL?  (I wonder, by the way, how many of the Sergeant-voters were Christian?  On Thacker’s argument you’d expect the good Christians, who all value truth so much unlike the rest of us, to vote diligently only for the best dancer. Because of course it would be un-Christian to feel, you know, what’s that word, compassion, for the contestant who dances like someone’s inebriated granddad.)

Judgement Day:  For your atrocious theology, your plain bad manners, and for having no sense of rhythm, Justin Thacker you are awarded… 1 out of 10. You are the weakest theologian, now please leave the house.

By Bob at 08:12AM

So, I’m technically homeless.

Well that’s not quite true.  In fact, it’s even worse.

I am now “living with my parents”.  It’s just like Failure to Launch, except my version is called Limping Back to Port.

Actually that makes it sound much worse than it is.  Housemate Suzie and I were both looking to move out, so we ended the tenancy in Worcester and I simply haven’t found some place to actually go and live, yet, so I’m only temporarily at the ‘rents.  Also, when I’m at home, I’m cooked for and mum does all my laundry.  So it’s pretty nice really.  Well done, mum.

Anyway, I’ve been commuting from Worcester to London at the start of each working week for eleven months now.  So despite the return into my life of the pleasant homecooking and the big TV in the nice middleclass village, I’m still scrabbling through the online services looking for a livable-in room in London.  I’ve seen a place with a carpet so stained it looked like a colony of rabbits had been left to breed and urinate all over it, before being individually crushed, their corpses subseqently rubbed into the threadbare weave.

I also found another place which was lovely (no dead-rabbit carpets), occupied by the live-in landlady and her sixth former son, and I decided to accept it.  But then the live-in landlady said she had reconsidered the situation; I would have been their first male lodger and she felt anxious about it.  On hearing news of this disappointing retraction, my temporary housemate/mother tried to console me.  She said:  “Oh.  Never mind.  She was probably just worried about paedophiles.”

There are no words.

In other news… Shortly before all this, 10 days before our year one anniversary, in fact, the girlfriend and I broke up.  Not for any of the normal boring reasons (loss of love, irreconcilable future plans, having an affair with some other woman’s avatar in Second Life, etc etc) but because she went travelling, and — part of me still can’t believe this is even true — she is now somewhere in the lower reaches of the Himalayas.  A lot of friends have said how sad or difficult this must be and how they can’t even imagine how horrible and tragic it must be.  You know, helpful things like that.  But I think — I hope — that we both have something of a bit of a “humanist” attitude toward it.  We only have so much time on the earth and being oriented towards an impossible goal — trying to pretend that a relationship is a relationship when you’re thousands of miles apart for months on end — probably isn’t going to help anyone.  We were great.  Things were good.  And there is always change.

Anyway, this all adds to an overriding feeling of the surreal I have at the moment.  Two weeks ago I was personally ranted at by a B-list celebrity (a household name) who said some awful things I can’t repeat.  It wasn’t a nice experience, but it was a fairly unique experience!  Yesterday I gave a talk to the South Place Ethical Society telling them rationalism isn’t what they think it is.  It felt great to dig out some of my Karl Popper, and tell them that in trying to justify what they believe they were actually terrible rationalists.  I love confronting people with the counter-intuitive consequences of Popperian rationalism.  And I’ve been living on couches and in “pods” half the week for nearly a year.  I’m more comfortable living out of my rucksack than most people are sitting in their front rooms.

Life is strange, is what I think I’m saying.  But I’m sure it will settle down a bit once I find a place to live down here and actually go back to the same place in the evening once in a while.  I love change, but if everything changes all the time it’s very difficult to focus on anything.

By Bob at 13:25PM

The summer is over, winter slipping on. It’s getting chilly out so I can wear my winter coat again. Joy. In spite of this, after three years of faulty failings and a massive “repair” bill, the aircon at the office still only seems to work every other day. I have to wear a t-shirt and a jumper into work just in case. It’s not working today. Sweaty foetid grimness, without sunshine or a light breeze to make it tolerable. Sigh.

I recently moved to elephant and castle, but I haven’t really settled in yet. Most of my stuff is still in boxes and disarray, and we still lack real internet. It’s 15 minutes walk to work though, which in London is just astonishing. Feels pretty good generally, hopefully I’ll be able to get everything sorted and get back into the swing of things. BBQ season is over, it’s time for the house parties.

By at 14:16PM

There’s nothing intrinsically sinister about the title above, but probably a lot of people would interpret it somewhat negatively.  It illustrates the point that too much fear can make harmless situations overly suspect.

Last week a self-described “old man” wrote a letter to the Worcester News about how he felt about being suspicious in the park.

When my wife Joan died in the spring of 2006 we had been together for more than 62 years. One of our joys since moving to Barbourne was a stroll in Ghelevelt Park looking at wildlife and children playing on swings or splashing around in the paddling pool enjoying innocent fun.However, since becoming a widower, the park has now become out of bounds for old men like me. Why?

It has become very uncomfortable to sit in the park and enjoy the ambience of the place, owing to the weird knowing looks I get from young mothers with children.

I wrote back.

H A Kendall’s story is very sad (September 29) and he is honest and brave for speaking out.

Obviously, we must accept that diligence is due whenever we consider adults with responsibilities over children, and anyone taking advantage of any vulnerable person is to be abhorred.

But due diligence has been greatly over-inflated if a widower cannot sit in a park without receiving accusing looks. If the parents Mr Kendall mentions cannot imagine any reason beside sexual predation for why an old man might want to sit in a park, then their imaginations have been horribly warped. There is a climate of fear which affects not just old men in parks, but younger men, teachers, passers-by, even relatives of young people.

On a train last week a girl of about five started talking to me. I think the presence of my Nintendo DS broke down the social barrier!

Perhaps some of the looks we received across the carriage were, in part, due to surprise that two strangers should hold an open conversation on the tube at all, let alone an adult male returning polite enquiries from a child who is unknown to him. But that doesn’t fully explain the prolonged glares and my own absurd, fleeting sensations of danger.

Parents should worry about their children, yes.  Concern is understandable, yes, especially in a climate where sexual predation and sexual abuse are discussed more openly.

But people should realise that, in a sense, nothing sexualises children more than if we are constantly thinking of them as the potential victims of sexual predation.

Also… the music debate rumbles on, in the hideous form it has reached.

By Bob at 08:41AM

This increasingly unfocused, largely-syndicated-from-the-Worcester-News, hotchpotch mind-dump of a blog that I call Bob: Popper’s Troll-man Thing, now has a little brother over at — you guessed it — the Worcester News website.

See Bob’s Worcester News profile which should come complete with a short bio some time soon. My first post is “At Somerset House” and here’s a short extract:

I’ve never liked crowds. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic. I just hear “crowd” and I picture grey-faced suits stacked up on escalators closer than dominoes. Or I feel the crushing collective narrow-mindedness of a Nazi rally. And there’s something so sycophantic about a throng of gig-goers gyrating at the feet of some short-burning star, something so obsequious even about fans at a public lecture gushing as they line up to get their hardbacks John-Hancocked by the latest, greatest celebrity intellectual.

I had wanted to coin the term ‘celebrillectual’ for the end of that sentence but it didn’t quite fit.  There were no other hits on google for it though, so I really did invent it.  So I’ll coin it here instead: ‘Celebrillectual’. There, I just coined it.  It means anyone a bit famous for being at least a bit clever, but how famous/clever are two cumulative factors so that if you were really clever but only a celebrity to a particular niche then you could still be a celebrillectual, while if you were very famous but not really very clever then that could count, too.  But obviously some times these thigns go up and down together, where people are only a bit famous (for exampel if they’re only famous in the UK but not the US then that’s rubbish) and also they’re only clever in a narrow or not very academic way.  So at one end of the scale you’d have, like, Carol Voderman, Trevor McDonald, and Johnny Ball. Then up the top there’s folks like Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky.

It will probably be quite a long time before my Worcester News blog has anyone classify me as a celebrillectual.  In fact it probably disqualifies me because even if I was really, really famous in Worcester, I’d have to be very, very clever to compensate for my relative lack of fame.

By Bob at 08:10AM

The vivisection debate rumbles on.

Obviously, in between trying to develop medical technology via vivisection, scientists should wherever possible work toward replacement development processes.  There is a complex cost-benefit equation, here.  How much time can we spend speculatively developing new ways of testing and developing medicines without non-human animal test subjects, when any such effort may be at the cost of actually developing cures right here and now?  Assuming that greater and greater theoretical understanding, computer modelling and so on, could eventually replace all animal testing, that’s great.  But right now that’s not the reality, and I don’t want to die of something potentially curable, because rather than using vivisection now we held off in order to develop a theoretical model, when actually tests which killed some mice might have achieved the same results.

I don’t get how people who are against vivisection can cite, as someone in this ongoing newspaper debate has cited, the study of human corpses as one of the viable alternatives to testing on animals.  I’m not denying that autopsy is sometimes a good way of understanding a disease.  But the point is that there would be many more human corpses to study if animal testing was stopped today.

Anyway, here’s today’s letter in the Worcester News, unedited text below.

Apparently, despite being subject to continual assessments of efficacy and benefit, and despite being conducted under multifarious laws and codes of ethics ensuring rigorous review, the truth is obvious to H Handy (Letters, 8th September).  Vivisection is “archaic” and completely unnecessary.

In saying so, Handy contradicts three independent enquiries in the last five years (the House of Lords Select Committee, the Parliamentary Animal Procedures Committee and the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics) which all found that animal testing was scientifically sound and worthwhile.  (Despite this, anti-vivisectionists continue to call for “an independent enquiry” as if none had ever taken place.)

The Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to researchers who used animals 71 times in the last 103 years.  Is the Nobel Prize committee hellbent on rewarding fruitless and unethical research?  H Handy must think that they are.

Handy asks us to imagine all the pain that laboratory research animals endure.  And allow me to agree that we must indeed accept this.  Just as surely as we should thank the veterans of just wars, just as we should be aware that each turn of the ignition key brings flooding and destruction ever closer, we should be aware that many of our medicines and medical procedures come to us at a terrible price.

But if H Handy can ask us to imagine the animal suffering again, I must ask one more time that we summon in our minds the would-have-been suffering and deaths of millions of people from, for example, smallpox if it had not been eradicated by 1979 (300-500 million died before 1979 in the 20th century alone).  Multiply out that hypothetical unnecessary suffering by the numerous other diseases and conditions cured or alleviated through animal research, far sooner than they could have been by conducting all research via human autopsy and the like.

No one said animal research was an intrinsic good in its own right.  No one said it was flawless (no research is). But vivisection is, by far, the lesser of two evils.  And that makes its pursuit an ethical imperative.

One final point.  H Handy is right that research animals themselves never (or only very rarely) benefit by the research.  However, it is worth pointing out that animal testing has resulted in numerous drugs and procedures which are used routinely by veterinary surgeons, day in and day out, to the benefit of pets, farm stock and wild animals the world over.

By Bob at 07:24AM

Remember the Bishop of Worcester basically saying that music pretty much gets its power from his favourite god?

Apparently, “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

Which is of course true - he is entitled to say that.  But that’s completely besides the point, isn’t it.

Some people can’t stand any criticism [Worcester News, 3 September 2008, unedited version]

At the moment it seems like every time someone hears a criticism they don’t like, rather than either taking it on board or offering a counter-argument, they instead react as if someone is trying to actually ban them from holding their view.  It seems to be a defence mechanism.  People would rather say, “Hey, I have every right to my opinion,” than to actually think about the criticism offered against their opinion.

John E Iebole (August 22) notes that “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

I didn’t say the Bishop wasn’t “entitled” to say anything he likes.  I’m not a censor.

But there is a world of difference between having the right to say something on the one hand, and being right in saying it on the other!

The Bishop had said (August 13) that “music has the power to move human beings deeply because it speaks … of the God who created us.”  I expressed that his statement felt to me like an over-confident gardener erecting a fence across a public footpath.  Music is a near-universal aspect of the human condition and associating it with monotheistic beliefs which we do not all share is a kind of metaphysical territorialism.  In other words, I said I didn’t like what the Bishop said.  In didn’t say he wasn’t “entitled” to say it.  Basically, Mr Iebole simply failed to address my points in any way.  Rather (probably without realising it) he simply threw up a completely irrelevant decoy about “entitlement”.

One further point, Iebole says he sensed “some anti-Christian barbs” in my letter, then he points me at the Bible!  Again, this kind of attitude seems to be nothing more than an attempt to shut down honest debate.  Just because I make a criticism of something a Bishop said, does not mean I’m “anti-Christian” in some kind of prejudicial way.  We hear much worse, much more personal criticisms than mine made in other domains (politics, theatre reviews, school playgrounds) all the time.  It is only the domain of religion which is so protected from debate that even a mild rejoinder is insinuated as a kind of hate speech.

That’s one thing I’m afraid you’re really not entitled to: you have no right to be protected from perfectly legitimate criticism.

This prompted a reply from one Linda Roberts who, frankly, I think just didn’t really read what I said.  So I wrote back again, published today.

Misunderstood for the second time [Worcester News, 15 September 2008, unedited version]

For the second time I am misrepresented with reference to the Bishop of Worcester’s comments on music.

Linda Roberts (10 September) believes “the Bishop of Worcester is correct in saying the playing of sacred music in church brings us closer to God.”  Well, okay, but this was very clearly not the part I objected to.

What I objected to was the further implication that all music, whether designated “sacred” or otherwise, derived its power from God.

Roberts also says I should “temper my views” and my “ways of expressing them”.  This is unfair.  Yes I was voicing a criticism (a mild philosophical criticism at that!) but unless you think religious representatives are exempt from criticism this shouldn’t be a problem in itself.  And if my words seem harsh, it’s probably just that religion is so often protected from normal standards of commentary.

Finally, Roberts expresses sadness that I “cannot experience” mystical feelings induced by church music.  Ms Roberts, there’s really no need to feel sad for me. Different musical genres appeal to different people, and there is probably plenty of music that I appreciate, even profoundly, which you would appreciate less.

By Bob at 13:15PM

A discussion with a friend the other day got to think about my axioms. My core beliefs, and principles that although in many cases are self-evidently irrational nevertheless go on to form every other decision and conclusion in my life. So I think I'll note them down for my future self to either laugh at or nod in agreement to. I'm sure I'll add to these as I think of them.

I am immortal.

Never had any evidence to the contrary. Never been in a traffic accident or been seriously ill, never had any broken bones or needed to be in surgery. I'm not saying this actually means I'm immortal, this just means I find it impossibly hard to get my head around the fact that I'm not. As fear of my own mortality is not an aspect of my life I want to expand on I don't really dwell on it much.

Morality is bullshit.

It portrays itself as a series of absolutes, but with a little knowledge of anthropology you can see that it's clearly entirely subjective. It's just a collection of customs and shouldn't be idolised as much as it is. I prefer causality. Do what you damn well please, just be prepared to accept the consequences.

There are no absolutes.

Everything is relative. Perhaps an odd thing to say in a post about supposed absolutes, but hey there are always exceptions.

I don't do anything I don't want to do. (And neither do you.)

There is always a choice. The exception is probably waiting; I'm really not a fan of waiting.

Apathy is the death of the soul

Boredom being the most common embodiment of this. As an ever-living immortal (hah) I do of course fear only boredom. Being entertaining is fun, But I don't really get any validation from it.

I don't care what other people think.

I dress for me, I do interesting stuff for me, I live for me. The point of life is to have fun and leave it with interesting memories, and I owe it to myself to do that.

...but I hate being hated.

I can live without love but I can't deal with being hated. I try to live life fairly humble and reasonable, so can't stand it when some misunderstanding unjustly earns me someone's wrath. Unless they're a twat anyway, in which case who cares?

99% of people I don't give a shit about.

Every crowd I pass through I'm always searching for people I know. I'm ridiculously good at it, I can tell people by their walk, or the back of their head or their mannerisms. Failing that I'll look for attractive or interesting people. Everyone else I just don't see. To quote a friend: "You're all blobs to me".

Lying is to be avoided

At almost any costs. If you're really lucky and are not found out then it constructs walls between people. Fake people, people who are not truly perceived by anyone, almost do not exist.

I'm ugly and uninteresting.

I don't find myself attractive, so if someone else tells me they do I find it hard to take them seriously. Likewise I never assume attraction as the cause of other people's actions. If new people choose to spend time with me or talking to me I'll always put it down to their own boredom.

But I'm funny.

Being somewhat witty and charming comes fairly easy to me. To what extent I succeed depends on various factors, regrettably few of which are ever under my conscious control. Perhaps that will change.

I can be addictive.

This is how I explain away that the more people get to know me the more they like me. After all it's fairly easy to get under someone's skin.

Admiration = attraction

For me the best way to pick up good habits by a LONG way, is to have a crush on someone who has that habit and copy them. It doesn't even have to be a big crush. This one works both ways though, and I'm not sure which is cause and which effect.

Men are more interesting than women.

I've had two sisters, but one died in cot death and the other was much older and I never knew her growing up. I went to an all boys high school, I went on to study engineering, I mostly go out on the gay scene, all of which points towards a very male orientated life.

I'm a work in progress.

I change my mind about things very regularly. It keeps things interesting.

By at 13:02PM

I just shelled out £25 for another two years of Flickr membership. I wasn’t going to bother initially, after all there’s always facebook, but after two years of membership I’ve become accustomed to the perks. The unlimited upload isn’t that useful as I process all my pics before I upload; I could easily get by on with the limited 100 megs a month. However with the free account you can only see the 200 most recent pictures, and even then only at low resolution, so upgrading was a no-brainer. It probably helps that one of my pictures of a recent Portishead gig was used in some random music review. Or so they tell me. It’s in Croatian so it could be anything really. Perhaps it’s a Yahoo! plot to stroke my ego and have me pay them money.

Ideally I’d like to set up my website to display flickrd pictures on the front page, tucking the blog away somewhere else. At the moment not many people actually look at my favourite photos, never mind the larger versions, which is a shame.

Here’s another pic that was used, this time for a travel site. Or something.

By at 12:37PM

Not sure I care enough about this blogging stuff at the moment. I think I need to rethink the whole idea. I used to blog primarily to avoid telling the same things to many people again and again. I hate repeating anecdotes. Six years later I find I’m much more inclined to enjoy telling the story, and much less concerned that some stories are forgotten and left untold. Besides which, few people actually check this site, fewer still that are not in touch through Facebook.

Then it became a personal record of how I am and what I’m up to. Which is much more valuable in the long run. Facebook for all it’s transparency doesn’t have much of a history beyond the photos. I should be relating my changing opinions on life the universe and everything in this interesting period of transition. After all I’ve learned a scary amount in the past six months, where nothing much happened in the six before that. In retrospect it seems that my life was very dull, for all that it was content, living vicariously through my ex as I was. I find the fact I was so happy doing so rather disturbing now. Although it requires much more effort to achieve the same level of contentedness overall, I think I’m actually happier in myself, which is a real surprise to me. And having to put more into living isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all you reap what you sow and all that. Though I’m not certain it’s entirely good either. Maybe it’s just a thing.

I think I’ll shove this all into some archive at the back of the site, and use the front page to showcase flickr photos or something nice. That’s one thing that annoys me about flickr, the default display size for the photos is never enough to really see what’s going on…

By at 15:03PM

Oh hai! I spent last weekend in Paris visiting Mikey. Here’s the pictures, with some commentary attached.

So I’ve been slack with things on here, big shock there. I’ve been meaning to add linklog functionality to this site for ages, and then I was contemplating moving the blog part off to a sub-page and replacing it with an updated random quote generator of old… But none of that is very high priority at the moment to be honest. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I need to clear the decks a little I before getting back into the proverbial swing of things this week. Hmm.

By at 23:53PM

People often ask me: "Rik, why on earth do you buy all that rubbish from the Oxfam bargain bin?" But that's another story.

What I want to talk about is when people ask me "Rik, where does a guy like you listen to music from these days?" After all, when you're an ex-teenage rave freak, used to work as a student DJ, have more than a passing interest in all things synth, and own a Jive Bunny album without shame, where do you go to satisfy that nagging urge for new music?

Well, the answer is that for a while, I didn't. Instead, I revelled in the warm neon glow of Radio Nigel. With the help of Nigel (run by a bloke called - wait for it - Steve), I rediscovered the 80s.  Contrary to those "party classics" that immediately spring to mind, there's actually a lot of "forgotten" 80s music out there that's actually not terrible. Martika, anyone? The Other Ones, New Order, Wang Chung, Murray Head, The Assembly? I could go on, but I'd rather you tune in.

And slowly but surely, you make your way back into the land of the living, to find artists like Rex The Dog, Tepr, datA and Trademark keeping the dream alive, albeit with a 21st Century twist. (Who knew that the Human League were still touring, by the way? Blimey.) But where can you, the poor impoverished reader, find and listen to all these people before buying an album or three? Simple. Pig Radio is your friend. Merely visiting their website will guarantee your face is flushed magenta with excitement, and that's even before you wrap your ears around the eclectic mix of new new things that burst forth from their playlist.

Finally, I know I'm about a year late, but this has been making me smile all week. Whatever happened to the Hardcore Cleaning Sensation?

By at 18:24PM

Another one of those resolutions in progress. Last year I gradually realised that I eat a lot of rubbish for no real reason. I tend to eat “just because it’s there” or out of habit, rather than out of any hunger or particular craving. When sitting down to dinner I will finish what is there even if it makes me uncomfortably full (after all it’s only polite). None of this would concern me but I had people commenting that I’d been getting a belly and suchlike, which was rather alarming. To be fair I tend to wear clothes were any belly-dom rather obvious, but still. So last year I began to take an interest in these things called “calories” and other such arcane shenanigans, gradually becoming more aware of what foods are good and which bad. At around new year I got a new set of (working) bathroom scales and found that things were getting out of hand so I figured it was time to see if I could make a change.

As it turns out, I really can. I’m kinda surprised how easy it was. Basically I’ve lost 10% of my weight in 2 and a bit months. Going from 78kg back to 70ish, which is around where I feel comfortable being. Which is nice. Being narcissistic in the mirror and generally tight clothing have both made a welcome return. (Not that tight though. I’m skinny not a student.) So here’s how:

• No sugar in tea or coffee. I drink a lot of these beverages and used to put in several spoons of sugar into every one. No longer. Sweetener if needed, but getting used to going without altogether as often as not is pretty good too. Obviously skimmed or semi skimmed milk where possible.
• Fruit for breakfast I used to either kip breakfast altogether or east a pastry thing and a full-fat sugar coffee. Apparently that’s not so good! Who knew? So now I bring in a few pieces of fruit, plus maybe porridge or a sandwich if I feel like it.
• If you can’t be arsed cooking, don’t. I get a relatively big lunch on south bank every day, either something salady or a wrap. I’ve stopped with those cheesy grilled sandwiches. So most of the food I eat is now much earlier in the day and cooked by people who do it better than I do, and with all that goodness dinner is very light and/or optional. Massive pizzas and troughs of pasta at 9 at night are now rare exceptions rather than the rule.
• Don’t eat it just because it’s there. If you don’t actually want a sweet, don’t take a sweet. That goes for everything, eat only what you actually want to eat. If I want a packet of chocolate biscuits I’ll still go get one obviously, why shouldn’t I? It’s just that I’m far more aware that if I eat all of them I WILL feel sick, plus the sugar crash etc. in fact I can barely manage half the packet now, where before I’d absent-mindedly chomp through the lot of them. Oral fixation much?
• Exercise I’ve been bouncing around my room a lot in an aerobic stylee. Not sure what the next step will be really. A gym maybe? Ugh.

There’s nothing draconian or even virtuous in what I’ve been doing, and no diet par se; I’ve just been exercising more choice. Just choice. It’s funny; I read Existentialism And Humanism by Sartre at Christmas and I think I took a lot of it to heart ;-).

By at 12:01PM

(This isn't the blog post I was planning to post, but I thought I'd throw this up while it was fresh in my brain.)

This is the second time recently that someone I know has remarked about how Thunderbird is worse than Outlook Express. It was an odd enough coincidence that I thought it worth a quick mention.

Now, I've used a fair few mail clients in the past - Pine (mmmm) and Netsc(r)ape Messenger, for example - and I used to be an Outlook user, of both the Express and "proper" flavours,. Conversely, I was glad to see the back of it. The Express version felt fragile and flaky (not to mention its Swiss cheese-like nature), and the full version was too enterprisey. I just wanted to do email - surely it's not too much to ask! (Eudora at the time wasn't free.)

Mozilla Mail was my next stop of choice, and it struck the balance far better for me. It was, however - like the Mozilla Suite in general - suffering a bit from the all-in-one clunkathon syndrome, and you did get the impression that it could have been more, well, alert, and generally a bit better than Netscape Messenger. Mozilla had the same idea, and smashed it all into bits, which brings us circuitously to Thunderbird.

I like Thunderbird mainly due to it's Ronseal-like qualities. Simply, it's a solid, no-nonsense mail client. It reads mail and newsgroups*, and it does it well. Since version 2 in particular, it's had decent filtering and search capabilities, and it's uncluttered and responsive. It even integrates with Google Mail so you can avoid using their hideous web interface.

What is Thunderbird "actually quite poor" at, then? Well, it's not crap at reading mail, that's for sure. It is quite poor at having flowery email templates. (As a rule, I don't use HTML email, so that's fine by me.) Against Outlook, integration with other services is poor. There is an integrated Calendar plugin, but it's not finished yet. But then again, the same goes for the free version of Outlook, and there's no changing that at all.

Steve mentions a "memory leak" which I thought sounded interesting, so I left my copy of Thunderbird running for a while. It's been sitting there for quite some time at around 82MB (I've got some big .msf files), and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Thunderbird for sure has a larger memory footprint than Outlook Express, but I'm not yet convinced it leaks memory in the same sieve-like fashion that Firefox does**.

So... thoughts? What else is Thunderbird rubbish at? No doubt there's more, but I'm not awake enough to remember. Comments appreciated!

*If anyone does that any more, that is.

**Yes, I know that's not really a memory leak; it's the tab caching being enthusiastic.

By at 22:31PM

It's going to be a busy month, really. Turnmills is closing down, so I'm off to see Mr Ferry Corsten play there in a couple of weekends time, accompanied by a plethora of people named Steve. It should be pretty good, but there's always the problem that the headliner DJ is always on at about 4am, by which time you're invariably too shagged out to stay awake, let alone dance enthusiastically like a loon.

Also, I'm going to be leaving these urban shores to head back to the balmy rural paradise of home during the Easter weekend, which should make for a nice break. I have a fair inkling that what I'll be doing will include at least this:

Mix in some Six Nations matches, a birthday lunch or two and some mates visiting from back home, and suddenly the old Moleskine is practically brimming with appointments.

Right, I'm off to do some late-night flat-scrubbing. If I get back in time, I'll blog about some of the software stuff that I've been looking/hacking/swearing at recently.

By at 19:32PM

When you’re a kid it’s easy to point at a colour and say “this is red” or “this is blue”. Who’s to say everyone sees red the same way? It’s impossible to tell. But given everyone has the same reference point it doesn’t really matter. (colourblind people would mess with my metaphor some I’m leaving them out of it.)

But nobody can point at a painting and say “that’s forgiveness” or “that’s regret”. Or love or pain or or joy or sorrow. Everyone has to figure all of that out for themselves. And who’s to say that one person’s idea of sorrow is the same as another’s? On the contrary, I’d be very surprised if they were. The same goes for the rest of these fluffy ambiguous and entirely subjective terms. You can’t know it until you feel it, and even when you do, it won’t be in the same way or with the same intensity as the next person. You’ve got to make it up as you go along.

By at 21:39PM

So the last couple of months have been a lot of fun, as well as a bit of an eye-opener; being out four nights a week is hugely different from two or three. It's kinda slowed down a little now though, and I've got time to take stock and draw conclusions. Which I'm going to note down here, for future-me to peruse at his leisure. Waffle incoming.

I find good nights out are something you have to leave yourself open to, rather than something to seek out and count on or plan for. When it all comes together it can be a hell of a lot of fun, but then when one is banking £50ish, a good night's sleep and the possibility of losing the next day to a hangover, anything less than an excellent night out is a pretty shitty ROI. On top of that to have even a hope of a good night I've also got to have a few of what is a small handful of friends willing to make a similar commitment. Too small a handful, really, I'm way too vulnerable to key people dropping out of circulation for whatever reason. (Being hundreds or thousands of miles away seems a popular one at the moment.) I'm not really sure how to fix that, but I'm sure awareness of the predicament is an important step. Being able to teleport like in Jumper would be sweeet.

Nights out are all making memories with friends, and with acquaintances you make on the way. Take away that and you're just drinking for it's own sake and dancing to whatever (possible) rubbish the DJ throws at you. Personally I find going to new places really helps a lot, due to some combination of novelty factor and the event being easier to remember when it's the only time you've been there. I really can't be doing with going out the same places as last week or even the week before. By the same token going to the cinema every Orange Wednesday as I have been recently is much more interesting because it's a different cinema every time. I guess that means both exercises are pretty unsustainable, at least at the rate I've been going. But then I've been completely neglecting gigs and coffee houses so hey, maybe it's their turn next.

Also I finally understand the loathing people have for first day of the week: Mondays totally suck when you didn't sleep on Saturday night.

By at 15:50PM

I'm writing this blog entry from something really quite shiny. Yes, after all this time, I've finally bitten the bullet and bought a new home PC. A completely new one, rather than my usual tactic of cobbling together any old electronics to produce some semblance of a working system, replacing any item that's completely knackered with one that's merely slightly broken.

Now, for the first time in a long while, I'm the proud owner of a PC that:

• Has a PS/2 keyboard socket that's not inexplicably broken and doesn't prevent the mouse from working when anything's plugged into it
  
• Has a soundcard that doesn't arbitrarily stop playing sound and crash the whole system
  
• Is running an Operating System that doesn't date from 1999
• Doesn't have all of its drives held upside-down in using gaffer tape
• Can reboot without randomly losing at least one harddrive when starting back up
• Doesn't have a non-working floppy drive stuck in it because it won't come out
• Has a proper case that's not fallen to pieces, or been dropped countless times
  
• Doesn't have the speed and urgency of a snail in treacle
  

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

By at 13:52PM

January is often regarded as a lean and boring month where people reflect on the highlights of the past holiday season and mope about the weather. I decided not to go with the mainstream opinion. Not including various drinks/lunch/dinner with various people, my January went a bit like this:

• NYE: Popstarz Quick visit to Darren's sumptuous soiree before high-tailing it to Popz. Was really fun to see NYE in a club atmosphere and the "Snow storm" and "backstage" were very cool, but between my not knowing many people out, and hitting the free alchy a leeetle too hard and crashing out at 2ish, it doesn't rate as one of the best NYEs ever ;-) Got to bed about 6, woke up about 4, ugh.
• 5th January: West 5 + randomness Put silly blonde bits in my hair. Stylist talked me into it. With that and the long black coat it's all very retro-me. Later went to Will's for impromptu cheese and wine followed by West 5 which was actually a lot nicer than expected. Rather than being cheesy and naff the Piano-side Karaoke was actually fun to watch. Am I getting old? Anyways it began to all go horribly wrong when after West 5 finished when we decided to continue the party at Will's with a random posse and too much alcohol. Hrm. I was on the roof at some point but I only know that because I took a picture of it.
• 9th January: I am Legend You're not Legend, you're a very naughty boy. This film seemed to deliberately miss the point of the book, replacing it with some weak-ass god-bothering. Meh. A let down.
• 11th: Ricardo's Birthday thing I had decided not to go out that night but in a spate of random a party came to me. Woot! They rolled in from the pub and commenced drunken cooking and Portuguese liquors, before rolling out to the club a few hours later. Sweet.
• 12th: dUCKiE Billed as a 30+ club night at the Vauxhall tavern. Noted by a friend of a friend as "the place where indie boys go to die". Good crowd, great cabaret, music extremely random and massively hit and miss. The place was rammed to the rafters and smelled of toilet, only worse. Great night in the face of adversity, topped off with a 3am visit to MacDonald's. Classy.
• 16th: St. Trinians Billed as a crap film, pleasingly it was actually very good. Many laugh-out-loud moments, and more than a couple of "Oh, Mr. Darcy!" moments too. Heartily recommended.
• 19th: Trash Palace > Ghetto Luke's Birthday thing. A few old Warwicky faces, a few I never knew at the time, excellent "Jager Bomb" things and a bit of a boogy. Good night, if cut a little short. Spent longer negotiating night buses than anything else :-)
• 21st: Pub Quiz Regular version of last month's music pub quiz, again with the sitting and the watching other people get points. Celeb spots: Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh and some dude from Hot Chip. Le shrug.
• 23rd: Gayer Nacht Few peeps round for wine and films, namely Broken Hearts Club (which was actually fairly terrible, in spite of featuring Superman and Whatsisname from Scrubs) and Another Gay Movie (which is brilliant if you can bear to watch it). Must do this again! *poke* Maybe with less psuedo-porn though.
• 26th: Unskinny Bop Due to a change of management at the venue the future of Unskinny Bop is in dire peril! They negotiated 2 more nights to prove themselves to the people in charge, of which this was the first. Considering we kinda didn't move from the same spot all night (it's a small place) it was excellent. Just plain old dancing throughout, old-school. Lots of pics here. It was all back to Darren's post-club for more drinking and a good few hours of talking shit.
• 30th: Charlie Wilson's War Heard there was rather a lot of singing in Sweeney Todd so saw this instead. Hmm. It was alright, but kind of ended on a bum note. *poot*
• 31st: BUG Adam Buxton does it again at the NFT. Sweet bunch of videos and way more directors than last time, including the ones who did the Hoosiers latest stuff. Nice.

By at 19:33PM

Another Resolution was to go out more, to Do More Random Stuff. "Nothing ventured..." and all that. It's been a reasonable attempt really; with a few friends, a bit of money and a smidgen of effort it's not difficult to find things to do in London. Since my last "Wot I did" catchup post there's been a unbroken chain of Stuff that finally and unfortunately ended last weekend, when a bad case of man-flu caused me to bail on Saturday entirely and spend the next three days in bed watching back-to-back US QAF. Ugh. I'm still coughing like an idiot. Grr it. So anyways it's time for another catch-up! In other words I'm going to blatantly raid gCal for most of the crap I've been up to over the past couple of months. December first. January next time.

• 5th Dec: Caroline's Soireé Very strange event in that it was all very posh, the average age was a couple of decades north of what I was used to and the amount of wine put away was astonishing. Very interesting. The older I get the more of my convictions are challenged revealed as subjective rubbish, but talking to these olds I assume there'll be some sort of turning point somewhere down the line I'll start becoming very opinionated about some utter tosh.
• 6th Dec: Darren's Birthday thingy Eagle Bar Diner - Milkshake cocktails: still very good. Crocodile/chicken burger: Not really very good at all.
• 8th Dec: Dansistor Uber-random disco/dance night in some sort of mini-warehouse type establishment. Seems disco is great because you don't have to know it to dance to it. Who knew? Also where I realised that what you like to dance to doesn't have to be what you like to listen to. I hear it's closed down now though. This was the night I walked home from Piccadilly Circus at five in the morning, headphones on, pacing along. Actually fun.
• 12th Dec: Work Christmas thing This was a bit dire to be honest, the cocktails looked very nice but were mostly water with flavouring and the "food" was an assortment of inadequate canapés. The vodka luge ice statue was kinda fun though. The masses of free drinks proved to be a little too much, and after leaving the venue for another Soho place that I don't remember much of, I decided to walk home in completely the wrong direction. I eventually hailed a taxi in Battersea. The best part about it was all the picturesque scenes I captured with my rubbish cameraphone as I wandered off, all the lovely landmarks that should have screamed "wrong way" and, "head back". Muppetous.
• 15th Dec: Mary's Mulled Wine Evening There was wine. It was mulled. There was also Glögg. It was soooo good. I could so do with that right now, to soothe my throat you see. Purely medicinal purposes. Lovely evening swapping gifts and catching up. Cut a bit short as we also had to go to:
• 15th Dec: JCW's Christmas do "Too much is not enough", cue random flashbacks to a similar party with the same theme in Leamington about 5 years ago. Brilliant to see JCW again, strange to see his peeps in their fabulousness. It's astounding these people that have so much money they can spend their entire lives just being beautiful and doing interesting things. I've also never seen so much champagne in one place, and I'm including retail establishments.
• 17th Dec: Christmas Pub quiz Old School pub quiz had a Christmas edition that mostly involved more prizes than usual and some free food. Apparently it was notorious in it's time but then it moved venue and now it's mainly a place for the team from the NME to feel superior by winning every week. Definitely a laugh though. Saw a couple of the Magic Numbers too, which was funny.
• 21st Dec: Giles' Christmas Party G lives in a lovely place in what feels like the middle of nowhere but assuredly isn't. Kinda "architectural" and odd. There was "a wonderful life" projected onto a wall and an old engine sitting around. The party was ace, starting with more gift-swapping, excellent nibbles and good company, then moving on to a bus to Ghetto which was excellent. Don't think I'd ever been on a Friday
• 30th Dec: BDD at Turnmills I've never been to a "proper" club (Wait, does Heaven count?) for fear that the music would be shit or the clientele twats (check and check for Heaven), so having the peeps from Button Down Disco take over Turnmills for a "Fuck New Year" party was a treat. The scale and variety of the decor was dazzling, the music was good, the crowd was decent. It's just a pity the drinks were so dear.

There were meant to be illustrations but I can't work out how to blog flickr pics. Which is annoying as I did it for the last post. Bah. Anyways January later. In other news, the RSS feed works now.

By at 12:45PM

After all this time, I've finally got past the stage of just thinking about blogging something here to actually doing it. Quite an achievement, considering the size of the interim period in which I've done, frankly, bugger all.

For the first time ever since this site started, for example, I didn't wish all my friends Merry Christmas from here on Shinypixel. So for that I apologise, but then again given the amount of texts that I sent out over Xmas and New Year, I don't think I missed many people. (If I did, then... bugger.)

To continue in the usual vein of posting stuff that I've knocked up, here's an extremely rushed flyer for something that I produced in December:

Now, the more astute among you might have noticed that the 14th December wasn't on a Saturday, nor the 15th on a Sunday. How could a stickler for perfection such as myself make such a stupidly obvious mistake (and not notice until a whole day afterwards, no less)? Cast your eyes toward the right-hand side of the flyer, and squint a bit. If you still can't read it, then here's a translation: Flyer whipped up the morning after the office party by a seriously hungover DJHC.

And damn, was it a good party.

Before I bid you adieu, with fleeting yet teasing promises about exciting events to write about in future - that flashy-looking CD compilation in the top-right corner of the page, for example - here's an excerpt from some code which I'd written last week late at night, forgotten, and found again just moments ago before deciding to write this blog:

// Any one X needs at least 7 Ys to work as my extremely
// dodgy code doesn't seem to work with less. No idea why.
// Maybe it's because I'm coding it at 2 in the morning while
// listening to Phil Collins.

// *sigh*

See ya around!

By at 17:20PM

About a month ago I was going to write the usual prosaic end-of-year stuff about what I was going to try and do better in the coming year, but the very thought of it bored me so much that I wanted to chew off my own hands to spare the world and myself such uninspired rubbish. You’ve heard it all before, I’ve said it all before. But I felt this time was a little different, so instead of a generic statement of purpose I thought I’d wait a bit and give a statement of progress. Or several, rather. One for each of the “resolutions”.

I’ll start with a quick one; Photography.

Problem: I found I had stopped taking photos entirely, due to combination of apathy and crapness of camera. I thought this sucked. Solution? Get new camera. Take lots of pics. Huzzah!

Progress: Camera got: Panasonic Lumix. Wide angle for a digicam and small enough to fit in my pocket all the time, even when out at night. It also has the fabled anti-shake thing and can take a string of photos in a row. Me likey. It’s taken a while to get used to having a camera on my person again though, so photos have been a little sporadic, but a few are on flickr now, including what might be my best/favorite picture ever, shown below. (Larger resolutions here.)

Still to do: RTFM! As good as automatic mode is on this camera I still need to read the manual to work out how to do things… well… manually.

By at 11:06AM

Early this morning I was having a pirate dream. A pirate captain was threatening me with a weighty cutlass while his crew looked on jeering. At some point I must have gotten bored of this scenario because the me-character grabbed the cutlass and starting slicing the captain up. He was most upset. Then I apparantly thought that the bloodyness was getting a bit grim and so I switched to banged him over the head with the flat of the blade in a slapstick manner. Then I woke up. As I flailed at my phone-come-alarm-clock I hit the wrong button and it switched into mp3 mode, half way through the song “I Need A Holiday” by Scouting For Girls, the part where it repeats the line “I wish it could be sunday when I wake up every day” over and over.

So true.

By at 09:58AM

So here I am at dangovan.com and here I shall stay! For ever more if all goes well. I haven't had a chance to sort out what the place looks like yet so it's still pretty ropey. I just took the out-of-the-box template that was closest to what I wanted it to look like and started ripping it apart, but I badly underestimated how much ripping would be needed. Finding such dodgy work put forward as a professional piece makes me feel both smugness and despair, but at least it saves me from having to start with an empty page, which I hate. I think it's going to be pretty good when it's done, which is really great because it's been a long time coming.

Unfortunately the massive amount of work that needs doing here means the actual writing of blogs is still on hiatus: I've got a small pile of would-be blog entries that I haven't yet written, and most of them probably never will. In the mean time I might write about progress here, or about how the inevitable new year's resolutions are going, or a random rant about the weather. It doesn't really matter because nothing's ready for "launch". As soon as that fateful day comes I'll up the witty and turn the insightful to 11 (For about a week.) but I'm in no particular hurry to get there.

By at 22:58PM

Christmas has been pretty good this year, but I can't help but feel I've left too much time for it. I'm pretty much done with it now but the tickets home aren't ‘til late the day after tomorrow, so while I could be in London making good use of a rare two days holiday instead I'm up here in Edinburgh just killing time. It probably sounds bad but to be honest it only takes so long to catch up with the family and get sick of watching TV, and between not having any friends in the area and the woeful weather it means there's not really much else to do. I do hate the sensation of killing time. Reading books and watching films are the stuff you pad out your day with, they shouldn't be the substance of it themselves. In any case I'm off to read some more Sartre. Love to your mother.

By at 16:00PM

So I've just had a wee gander at google analytics' overly-helpful stats machine and am surprised to see that people keep looking at this site, in spite of the dearth of content. Sorry! At the moment the time I might spend on blogging is actually spent experimenting with blogging systems, and trying to have a single original thought about what to do with all this. Impossible of course, but I can't not try.

If you're looking to keep up with what I'm doing my flickr stream has seen a bit of a revival so it's probably more reliable, if only in the vague sense that grainy camera-phone snaps can relay. Oh and Facebook I suppose. And last.fm, if you really badly want to know what I'm listening to (which has been mostly Placebo, Silversun Pickups and Kate Nash this weekend). So yeah, a few updates from the past month in rough chronological order; one last gasp on mochaholic before I put the old dear to sleep:

• Day Watch is a great film and a worthy sequel. Shame there's no third. I'm reading the books now, they rule also.
• Saw Stars at the Scala. Not only was it great to see a band I've been "squee"ing about for so long, but we got to write a review here! Sweet.
• Questionable punch should be mandatory at all house parties, and it should be always presided over by someone who has already partaken extensively thereof and totally forgotten what was in it.
• The Witcher is a solid RPG, but given it's so dialogue oriented the crap translation from the Polish really lets it down. I'm sure I'll finish it one day.
• Afternoons in coffee houses are just as fun as they were 5 years ago. With more money to spend on masses of cake; possibly more so!
• Primrose hill is a handy place to watch the fireworks across London from afar, but bring a hot drink. Or port.
• Ratatouille is much better than a Disney film about a cooking rat has any right to be.
• I'm 26 now. I keep thinking it's 27, but no; 26.
• Scouts are way better than Engineers. Snipers tortured puppies as children. They're evil I tell you! So yeah Team Fortress 2 is brilliant.
• Beowulf is awesome, but only when in 3D.
• Stardust is a very silly film that wouldn't be worth watching if it wasn't for stunning performances from Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.
• Pigeon Detectives were much better that I expected, partly because I wasn't hanging on their every word and could enjoy some serious moshing. Fantastic fun.
• In real life Will Self looks scarily like the food Critic from Ratatouille.

Hopefully drawing a line under this will help spur on the fiddlings with WP and EE, and a new blog will rise from the ashes. 'Til then add me on Facebook and Flickr!! ;-) -dan out

By at 14:35PM

By at 06:41AM

I've finally managed to get some free time. Well, free enough to start blogging again anyway. As luck would have it, there's another Hardcore Lives! day-long online beats-fest on to keep me company. I'd recommend that you tune in too if breakbeats are anywhere near your cup of tea.

The pbligatory lovely flyer - as designed by PennyCrayon alter-ego - is spammed below.

Click for a larger flyer, and here's that link to tune in again, just to rub it in a bit.

By at 08:13AM

By at 05:45AM

By at 06:15AM

By at 09:07AM

So it occurs to me that despite several false starts I haven't blogged for a month. ZOMG. There's plenty of drafts floating around but that doesn't really help If i can't be bothered to finish them. So here's a rundown of stuff I've been up to in the past month.

• 7th: DConstruct. Bloody good. Astoundingly good. Almost every presentation was extremely enjoyable and almost every presentation had useful and relevant take-homes. Very glad I was able to go to that. It's the kind of thing that reinvigorates your professional outlook. Crap freebees though!
• 8th: Mary's housewarming. Their house is great, and the party was too. Got chatting to some genuinely lovely friends of theirs as well as catching up with people. Felt a bit bad running off to get the last tube though; I'm getting old.
• 9th: AiH at Koko. Not the Scala.
• 13th: Met up with a bunch of old school blogger-types, most of whom no longer blog and a couple of whom gave talks at the conference I saw in the previous week. Very entertaining people, but a strange experience nonetheless. Much gadget swapping and meta-photo-taking.
• 14th: Dinner at the Canteen at the Southbank Center followed by a presentation of interesting new music videos there given by Adam Buxton, followed by a very empty Popstarz for Will's birthday.
• 15th: CHRISTIAN wedding. Where the word "wedding" is always prefaced by "Christian" and "secular parodies" are derided. Hmm, k. Both wedding and reception in the church, lots of tea, no alcohol, all over by five. Very pleasant but deeply alien at the same time.
• 25th: Reopening of Trash Palace, free drinks and such, woot! They've redecorated the place a bit, and put Simon on the wall. Hmm, k.
• 29th: Trip to Edinburgh with Si to see the parents. Went to Edinburgh Castle (which is more a citadel), The Royal Museum of Scotland (who have taken a leaf from the London Science Museum's book, hurrah) and ate at Biblos again, which is still one of my favourite bistros anywhere.

In the gaps I've been watching every episode of Dexter I can get my hands on. Really excellent; an unexpected combination of compelling aspects… That'd make sense if you saw it. Anyways it comes a close second to Heroes in my opinion. Go see! Also been playing a lot of

• Europa Universalis III, an historical strategy game (with the Magna Mundi mod, of course!), so I know all about European history from 1450 to about 1800 now. Go Italian unification 200 years early!
• Warhammer 40k: Dawn of war. Sweet futuristic RTS based on the Table-top Games Workshop game. You can get it and both expansions for £20 or less now, which adds a lot to the scope of the game. Go Tau!
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Hopefully I'll have the patience and commitment to get past the first chapter now, particularly as I've shelled out for the expansion now. Go questionable purchases!

By at 08:58AM

What is a blog? I was going to go through possible definitions from various sources but it turned out to be achingly dull so I'm skipping them. Suffice to say that a blog used to be easily defined as a personal website with frequent entries about personal thoughts, links or other minutiae often published in reverse chronological order.
Nowadays the most popular blogs are essentially online magazines; multi-authored and impersonal - corporate blogs even more so. Many others eschew reverse-chronological format. Minutiae have been banished to twitter and links are covered in linklogs, delicious-based or otherwise. Tumblelogs cover just about everything else, which leaves only articles and how you organise them.
I'm a big fan of "Robert X. Cringely"s weekly column speculating on the tech/online industry. Had it been launched recently it would certainly have been called a blog, though I don't think it qualifies.
Ever brilliant Stephen Fry recently started a "blog", but with the last entry racking nearing 9,000 words is that still a blog? He takes the middle ground, calling them "blessays". Nice.

So before I ramble further: serial content does not a blog make. Not that it matters, Facebook etc will soon subsume most of the blogosphere ;-) Also the above sites are brilliant; check them out. Apropos of nothing: check it out, I'm a music critic!

By at 07:08AM

Yesterday I was in Brighton attending a workshop on Microformats. I was foolishly there more than an hour before I needed to be, so and wandered around for a while checking out the town center (yeah ok I was totally lost). Anyways the workshop was lead by and zomg Jeremy Keith zomg Tantek Çelik. Talk about the horses mouth! Zomg Andy Budd was mimbling about with a giant camera too. Yay web celebs! TBH I was really surprised exactly how good it was, I think it really helped that attendees all knew their stuff and were on the same page more or less; more likely to disagree with a philosophical point than to not follow what was being said. As such the veritable web titans were able to cover a lot of ground, based on the various kinds of microformats, their history, uses and implications. I was shocked when I realised how many pages of notes I'd taken.

It was also really interesting to hear them discuss data portability and its impact on the future the web. They seem pretty certain that Facebook's days are numbered as log as it remains a walled garden, for example. I found this short post entitled "There is no social network" that explains it really well.

So anyways, except for going over these notes and expanding on them, that's day one over. Tomorrow is another trip down to the coast for d.construct proper, with an all-star cast including zomg Cameron Moll and a few people I've met through Simon, strangely. If yesterday is anything to go by it should be totally sweet. Can't wait!

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Finally, a CSS Framework, hurrah! I'll never have to dirty my hands with CSS ever again! Heh, well clearly not; I loves me my CSS! In any case it's really interesting, both as a promising framework and just as a library, drawing together many best practices including such joys as vertical grids, horizontal rhythms and Eric Meyer's recent reset. I've already learnt quite a bit about web typography-in-action, and I've only been messing with it for a bit.

With my latest blog design I've been trying to make it as CSSy as possible, and having such a clear-cut design-based css resource is great. It's not done yet, but it's already looking very sweet. And people in the know are loving it, so it's got momentum from the get-go.

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Keeping the Photoshop fingers in business in my spare time, here's the latest Hardcore Breaks/Old Skool/Jungle night I've done a flyer for:

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Like the infamous Norwegian Blue, I'm only sleeping.   Summer's traditionally that time where you're meant to be outside enjoying things rather than sitting inside plumbing the depths, pouring your innermost thoughts into some tiny text box and its perpetually blinking cursor.

So yeah, maybe next week when I've got some free time I'll wipe off the dust and clear out that backlog of blog drafts I've got lying around.  

In the meantime, these guys are great. 

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David Saw
Random acoustic dude we saw on our wanderings. Just him and a dude on a double bass. Really good stuff but only caught a couple of his songs. ****

Andy Parsons
We were only there because we had heard that Bill Bailey was to do a set at that tent, but I think we must have seen almost all of Andy's set, which was lucky coz it was bloody brilliant. Definitely my kind of humour, was aching from laughing so much. *****

Bill Bailey
Woot woot Bill Bailey! The material was old, audience participation was throwing him, and there was a constant ruckas from the edge of the tent as wardens kept having to remove people sneaking in as the tent was at capacity. It was still BILL BAILEY though!! #I got ham, but I'm not a hamster!# Sweet. ****

Shirley Bassey
Hahahahahaha! It's Shirley Bassey! Doing air guitar!! Bwahahahahaah! So she was brilliant and the crowd loved it. From opening with her cover of Pink's Get The Party Started to Gold Finger to Big Spender (TWICE). Hitting all the notes and winding around like a snake. Not bad for a septuagenarian! *****

Manic Street Preachers
Can't dis' the Manics, right? There was no way I was not going to go see them. But after a few songs it got uncomfortable. There seemed to be precious little chemistry between the band and the crowd; indifference reigned. And then of course you've got the fact that all their good songs are over a decade old! It was great to see Australia live, and it seems they played La Tristesse Durera after we left which I'm disappointed I didn't see; BUT OMG MOVE ON! So we did. I had planned to see the whole thing, but it was getting depressing and the go team were on at the other stage… **

The Go! Team
…Who were great! My pick of the festival. Their music is so upbeat and positive anyway, and it was really nice to see that they were even more so live, getting the crowd dancing and in the mud. As I've said I like it when musicians swap instruments, and there was plenty of that, it seemed like some of them were doing a circuit of the drum kits, guitars, and keyboard. But they took it to the next level; swapping mid-tune. When one of them suddenly dropped his guitar, pegged it across the stage, picked up a drum stick and did a flying jump to hit a symbol, before seating himself and taking up the second drum kit… Well that was pretty sweet. If you don't know what I'm on about or if you're just curious, here's the last song of their set; Ladyflash, on youtube. *****

The View
Admittedly we didn't really know who they were before we started watching them, but after a couple of songs we concluded that they were crap and we moved on. *

Radio Luxembourg
While everyone else was at the final headliners we went wandering through the dark and deserted mud fields and stumbled across a random band playing at a random stage being watched by about a dozen people, and were totally glad we did. These welsh kids were just great; kind of a cross between the Fratellies and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, which lots of random bouncing in welsh.*****

Gruff Rhys
(He's the lead singer from Super Furry Animals, if anyone's wondering.) The first set we went to on Thursday was a random welsh dude with a repeater, and so it was nice that we ended the festival on a similar note. He did go on a bit with a couple of songs but this might have been exacerbated by his set being cut short by the 12:30 curfew. Damn locals! Despite it being sooooo wet by that point I really enjoyed it, I guess the free 3-d specs handed out at the beginning must have helped. ****

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CSS
Not actually that good, shockingly! They were really trying, bless 'em; throwing bubble-makers into the crowd and generally trying their hardest to engage. They'd probably be much better in a smaller venue where that kind of infectious energy would be more appropriate and likely to take root in the audience. As it was their tunes were all over the place. Pity.**

Calvin Harris
I wanted to see this chancer with my own eyes. We arrived just as they were starting with that 80s song, which was excellent. We stayed for the one after out of politeness, but as we only really came to do gurning club-singer impressions of that one song: mission accomplished in record time, and we moved on through the mud lakes.***

Pirates of the Caribbean 2
Our explorations took us to the cinema tent! Where we watched some buckling of swash and had a rare sit-down. For 15 minutes or so anyway. Yay!

Guillemots
Sound was bad and we'd seen them before anyways, in a much smaller venue with much less rain. And they insisted on playing that "She's evil" song which everyone hated. ***

Babyshambles
After catching the start of their set we listened to the rest of it from our tent, where we went for a quick nap. I was just thinking that the libertine were so much better, when they finished on a libertines song. Hah! ***

Maximo Park
Passed by Maximo Park just as they were playing Our Velocity, so yet another uber-efficient set watching as that was pretty much the only song I wanted to see. Yay! ****

Patrick Wolf
Genius. Boy has a lot of energy, climbing on the scaffolds and jumping around the place. (Yeah the music was great too.) Apart from one act we saw on the Sunday this was far and away my favorite set of the festival. Totally blew us away. *****

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.
Suffered a lot from being just after Patrick, probably would have been pretty good otherwise, but in (unfair) comparison it was a little dull. ***

Iggy and the Stooges
We saw Iggy Pop hump a speaker stack! Didn't really stop to listen though.

Rodrigo y Gabriella.Took aaaages to come on due to "technical difficulties", and then were pretty underwhelming. Nice music and impressive musicianship, but hardly stadium stuff IMO. Maybe it would have been better if they weren't so late, or if it hadn't been so muddy/wet at the time, or if they had engaged the crowd at all. At the end of the day there's only so many things you can do with a couple of flamenco guitars, though respect to them for doing all of those and then some more. We totally should have gone to see The Killers, prosaic though that decision would have been. Anyways we soon cut our losses and took advantage of a friend's backstage passes to go check out flushable toilets and large amounts of beer. *

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Thursday:
Rod Thomas
One-man-band with few instruments and a repeater repeater repeater. This was only the second time I'd seen a repeater being used live, first being Imogen Heap (which I wrote about at the time and was all kinds of awesome) but even she had a band-on-a-leash for a bit of variety. Rod's got a great voice, a couple of excellent songs, a few meh ones, and probably needs a band-on-a-leash. ****

Lana
She was mental. We ignored her and got down to some serious cider drinking. *

Friday:
Modest Mouse
I like these guys a lot, but they're pretty laid back and the sameyness of their songs doesn't really bear close scrutiny, so I don't think playing to a stadium-like venue where the punters were getting pelted by some obscenely hard rain was really fair to them. Give us a drink, an armchair and some low lighting (indoors) and we'll see. We left to find shelter maybe half-way through the set. ***

!!!
(Pronounced "chk chk chk" BTW) They were going apeshit in a jazzy Primal Scream kind of way; I only barely recognised their songs. Fair enough if you're a big fan, but I've only been listening to them for a few weeks so we moved on pretty quickly. Also the drug-fuelled self-satisfaction of the people in the dance tent was just weird. **

Bloc Party
We'd been wanting to see these people for months so it was great that we finally got the chance . They didn't disappoint either, Kele was a great front-man with a good way with the crowd and a stunning voice, and most importantly he really looked like he was enjoying himself. The rest of the band were tight, though they hardly moved in comparison to Keke. All in all brilliant. *****

Rufus Wainwright
Rufus is the man! I think he carried this set off by sheer force or personality, he was beset by sound problems throughout, and the temptation to make jokes about cold remedies ruining his career proved too strong. (He has a really nasal voice.) I didn't hate his version of hallelujah, even though I'm all about the Jeff Buckley version. He ended on a stroke of genius though; dressing as Judy Garland and doing "Get Happy", while his band did the actions of her dancers from the film in a comedy manner. Predictably it's on YouTube so check it out. *****

Arcade Fire
I've never really clicked with Arcade Fire, they sound too similar to a bunch of other bands like the Decemberists or Broken Social Scene and I keep mistaking their songs for other people's. But they were stonking live, 11 of them (?) and their assorted equipment filling the big stage nicely. I like any band where people play various instruments throughout instead of just standing there strumming the same tired guitar; bring on the accordions! ****

Bjork
It was Bjork! ZOMG! AKA a really small pixie in a huge dress a long way away hugging people at length for no real reason… Was really surprised she did a lot of old favourites and it was a real treat to see them live, but I didn't know any of the new material. Voice was great, band was weird, electro-base GUI thing was sweet, her banter was odd though. As she is I guess. Very enjoyable, but it wasn't all that. ****

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I'm going to be spending some time listening to this all-day old-skool and nu-skool extravaganza today. It features some of the most popular DJs from the new hardcore breaks underground scene that I've mentioned before, and is likelt to be more exciting than most Sunday afternoons, for sure.

If any like-minded individuals fancy stopping by and joining me on IRC or just the stream, please do!

(Click image for a bigger version)

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As Seldo noted last night (and I was too tired to blog about), Safari has been released for WIndows. Shame it doesn't work - it does this on both of the PCs I've tested it on...

Ideas? 

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"With Last.fm, users tell the website what music they are listening to. The site recommends other music they might like and links to buy the songs. For music it doesn't have licenses to play, it offers 30-second samples.

"Music sales aren't a big part of the financial picture so far, and they might not be even when CBS takes control. The minimal advertising on the site, however, will be beefed up. CBS envisions channels for music backed by corporate sponsors that will pay for the privilege every month.

"CBS also plans to put versions of its existing radio programming on the website."

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I hate having colds. That is all.

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"We currently live in a world of live texture mapping and rag doll physics. And yet as web developers, we don't even have the ability to create rounded corner boxes programmatically. The W3C are so concerned with shaping the future, I'm worried that they may have forgotten the present."

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Here's a little something that I've had a small hand in (full credits are here, though I'm not on them). It's a fanzine that's currently being distributed with new releases and orders being taken in the burgeoning Hardcore Breaks music scene.

"Hardcore Breaks? Whazzat?" I hear you cry. Basically, it's a revival of the breakbeat-lead hardcore sound of '93-'95 (before it went all 4-to-the-floor and descended into shitness), except with 21st Century production values, a huge sack full of Old Skool samples and a friendly scene attitude.

Apologies for image size, but as a bonus you can read it straight from the blog.

Some related links if the idea of nu-old-skool gets you pumped:

• Hardcore Lives!
• hardcorebreaks.com
• nu-rave.com (yes, I know... but it's not that nu-rave... don't mention it)

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Last night I dreamt that I was singing All Around My Hat with Maddy Prior (from Steeleye Span) while chasing her runaway shopping trolley around a Sainsbury's car park.

Just as the shopping trolley disappeared under a car (!), Cliff Richard appeared from the sidelines and began singing a song entitled Knickers Between Us. It's probably just as well that I woke up as he started.

What could it all mean?

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