Happily Imperfect November 2007

Spaghetti blognese*

Furtling around for inspiration I ran a few standard blogging fallbacks through some mental checks.

Too busy because – nope, did one of those recently.
Interesting referrers – my stats are way down as it is so I’ve been avoiding looking at my stats at all. Ohhh, actually that might be a topic I could tackle, finding out reader stats across website hits and RSS feed subscriptions… but others have done that one so.. moving on…
Spam comments – nope, didn’t that one recently too.
What do I have in draft – “How to grab TV episodes using torrents” – yeah started that one but need to be at home to finish it.

I guess all I have left is to ask for music/book recommendations, after all I have a “Dear Santa” list to fill and it’s only really got some camera stuff on it at the moment (and my groovy, self-designed Reebok trainers of course. And yes, that IS the longest URL in the world…). Suggestions welcomed..

Other than that, little of note has happened to me recently as my day is largely a set of predictable and repeated steps.

(intrepid bloggers will by now have realised that I’m falling back on the ultimate of all fall backs by posting about not being able to post and why I don’t have anything to write about, thus giving me something to write about in this post. Wise is the experienced blogger…)

Get up at 6.30am, go to work, try and not get interrupted (I’m failing at this one but that seems to be the way of things), go home, chill out for an hour or so, do stuff that needs done, then get some more work done and try to get to bed before 1am (just). Boring. Not really stuff wot people will find interesting.

(great, now this is turning into an “I’m too busy to post” post.. dammit)

Next week will be different as I’m off to exotic Warwick and will be delivering a presentation to a room full of my peers. Yes I am starting to crap myself a little but I know the topic well enough (Wikis) and will get a couple more rehearsals in before Wednesday.

Other than that, the main topic in this neck of the woods is football.

For those of you not au fait with such things if Scotland beat Italy on Saturday, we will have qualified for the European Championships. We haven’t qualified for a big tournament for 10 years so this is a very big thing especially when you consider that, really, we shouldn’t even be in with a shout of qualifying at all, having been drawn in a qualifying group with the two World Cup finalists from last year and with only two teams going through.

Two shock wins against France, and some good performances at home, have put us in this position and the nation (well the bit that cares about this stuff) is rallying. One of my co-workers has come to work in his kilt.

Which is odd as the game is tomorrow but I admire his spirit nonetheless.

We are watching the game with friends, and in my heart I hope we manage it. Our national team was a joke one year ago, and whilst I think it’s fair to say we are hitting above our weight at the moment, it’s reminiscent of the Scotland teams I grew up with.

After the game we are all off out to a highly reputed local restaurant. So if the worst happens, and we concede an injury equaliser (thus almost rendering it impossible for us to qualify (there are permutations beyond tomorrow but they involve the Faroe Islands beating current World Champions Italy… hmmm)) which given the precarious nature with which the national football team seems to operate is the most likely scenario, we will at least eat well and enjoy good company, lively banter and large amounts of alcohol.

Although part of me is wishing we hadn’t booked an Italian restaurant.

* SORRY!!

November 16, 2007

Regress my tech

Danah Boyd has been reflecting on her long lost handwriting skills.

“My ability to communicate without editing has decayed. My patience for creating text at a rate slower than I think has decayed.”

Are we getting lazy? Are we too reliant on technology or are we simply adapting how we work and think to match the new capabilities we have at our disposal.

Personal computers have been around for long enough now that they are a standard, obvious, piece of kit for a technical communicator. I’m 34, and those of you from my era probably won’t EVER have asked whether a PC is part of the provided tools or not, it’s just something that is presumed (asking for a particular spec is different).

So, whilst I still use pen and paper to jot down notes, I don’t ever write anything of any length that way. Contrast that with some letters I stumbled upon the other day, written to my Gran when we had moved to the South of England (there are few in number but her replies are treasured). Written in one go, by hand, I was obviously still capable of editing my thoughts before committing them to ink. These days my tendency is to write first, edit later, publish quickly.

Everything you read here has passed through that (somewhat wonky at times) filter, and it’s a luxury I’ve become so accustomed to that I no longer really consider the process. Editing is such a key part of my written communication, regardless of where it is manifest, that it is now just something I do. It wasn’t always so.

Writing notes at college required on-the-fly information structuring and text editing, due to the simple premise that the less time spent scoring through lines of text the better. I have notes from early training courses which show I still adhere to that principal for at least the first couple of years of being a professional, entire sentences written out by hand with nary a score or embellishment to be found.

Fast forward a few years and my notes quickly descend into random words and scribbled quotes. If I don’t type up my notes the night of a conference, training course or meeting then they take on the cryptographic qualities.

And I guess this is one reason why the prominence of laptops in meetings and at conference venues has slowly risen over the past few years.

The odd thing is that most people acknowledge that note taking works best when pen on paper.

So I’m making a concerted effort to rediscover my inner editor, to take a few extra milliseconds when jotting down notes and thoughts to make sure they mean something. It will take some time but, in the long run, I think it will be worth it.

Technology is wonderful, it has many benefits but sometimes it’s good to step back and rediscover the abilities you used to have.

November 15, 2007

You sound funny

Since moving jobs, Louise now has her own email address. We ping the occasional email back and forth, usually to confirm plans for the evening. A couple of recent emails were a bit longer and I found myself a little puzzled. My wife sounds very different in text. That is, whilst I can hear her voice, the phrasing and tone implied when she writes is quite different from her everyday voice.

Of course that is only to be expected, and frankly I’m a little embarassed to only really be considering such a thing after having spent a fair chunk of the last few years online. I’ve met a few bloggers and none have “sounded” the same as the way they write. Does that even make sense? Well, regardless of my ham-fisted attempt to grasp this topic, I’m sure most of you have an idea of what I’m waffling on about (that’s makes a change, eh!).

This, to me, marks the great writer from the good, the skilled wordsmith from the mediocre keyboard basher. The ability to capture nuances of the spoken word and display them in written form is an art, and I’m lucky to have been reading some wonderful proponents of such skill for a few years now. Some of them have, deservedly, gained book deals, others have moved into writing full-time, and one or two remain somewhat secret from the rest of the mainstream, all of them make me laugh, make me cry and generally remind me just how powerful the written word can be.

I wonder if they would have the same impact if I’d met them and spoken to them?

November 14, 2007

Internationally Speaking

Just visited the McAfee website and on one of the forms encountered a, shall we say, anomaly presented itself.

I am a patriotic kind of guy, and I’m not in any way anti-American (I’m well aware that the percentage of idiots over there matches the numbers we have here), and when you actually consider what I’m about to tell you isn’t really about patriotism, jingoism or somesuch.

Rather it’s a wonderful piece of bad programming that I’ve seen before, centred around the fact that (at least for the purposes of this discussion) the country I am identified with is known as both the United Kingdom (UK) and Great Britain (GB).

I’m Scottish, and my country is part of Great Britain (which is the main island mass which also includes Wales and England). Add in Northern Ireland and you have the United Kingdom. It confuses me but that isn’t really the issue here.

When selecting my nationality in an online form, invariably I have one option: United Kingdom. On some forms I am delighted to be able to select Scotland, and on others I have to hunt for Great Britain.

However, the McAfee form in question proved a little troubling.

On highlighting the Nationality list, and tapping the U key, I was taken down to Uganda. A few more taps of the DOWN arrow key is usually all that is required to get me to “United Kingdom”. Not this time though, so I clicked the list top expand it, just to make sure I hadn’t keyed too fast but no, there was no United Kingdom.

No problem, I think, I’ll just tap the G key to get me back up the list towards Great Britain. This time I expanded the list first and scrolled down to… hang on… no Great Britain either? Great! Must be an option for Scotland!

Nope.

Somewhat puzzled now I double-checked that there was no entry for Scotland. There wasn’t. United Kingdom? Not listed amongst the rest of the nations of the world that begin with U. Must be Great Britain then?

And there it was, nestled away amongst the Gs. “United Kingdom”.

Now technically I can figure out what has happened, the label which is displayed to the user is “United Kingdom” but the value, on which the list being sorted, is set as “Great Britain”.

I have to wonder if this was tested at all and if so they have missed a fairly obvious set of test cases. If you are a global company then you need to consider these things.

OK, admittedly it is a tiny mistake amongst a large and complex website but it does serve to remind me to take the unhappy path through our own software now and then. I have a tendency to check through screens and processes presuming a lot of knowledge and taking the happy path.

Footnote: I worked for Dr. Solomons for a year before they were purchased by McAfee. One of the projects (ditched by McAfee) concerned a global company update system, during which many long design meetings centred around just this kind of “international” issue. But hey, I’m not bitter that they made me and 250-odd other people redundant almost immediately after they bought us, honest…

November 13, 2007

Nice! Cool!

I miss spam comments. Running WordPress with Askismet means I see little to no spam here which is a shame because I received some real belters in my time.

I’m not talking about the large list of links to various shady corners of the internet, I’m talking about the somewhat random poetry-esque spam that would crop up about once a week. A random sampling of text from Byron and Keats or somesuch, it made checking my spam lists all the more fun.

These days there seems to be only 3 types of spam comment:

The Fast Show Jazz Man spam – Usually “Nice!” or “Cool!”. The most boring of the bunch, saved only by the image in my head of John Thomson in a smoky club.
The Honest I read every word! spam – “Wow, that’s fascinating. I’m sure you’d like to visit our blog too.”
The Feed Scraper Pingback spam – There appears to be an endless parade of feed scraping sites that list part of my posts with a link back to the original (which spawn a pingback). These are odd because they ARE usually targetted, my recent wine rack photo was listed alongside a page full of other, genuine, posts about wine racks.

Not entirely sure about the third one. Yes I still consider it spam but it is a bit smarter than most. I don’t see any traffic from these links though and as they are taking scraps of content from here then they are definitely being naughty… but as I publish a full RSS feed anyway, what do I care? Do I care that people are making money off of my content? Yes, I do. But do I care enough to do much about it?

So, fellow blog readers, what’s in your spam list?

November 13, 2007

It's time to stop when…

You take a break from work, fire up Google Reader and idly flick through a few feeds. Your eyes alight on a delicious link and you think, ohh must check that out.

Only then do you realise that you are reading your OWN RSS feed, and you’ve already bookmarked said link in delicious so you’ll check it out.

Sometimes the internets really is confussing, round and round it goes.

November 12, 2007