Monday, 30 September 2002
Stream of Unconsciousness
[infotech] Hi there. This is my test entry on my new Alphasmart 3000. Pretty cool, eh? Now I can type away anywhere, anytime, type to my heart's content, type until my brain melts out of my ears, type until the cows come home, type until my fingers bleed, type until bleeding-fingered cows come home with brains melting out of their ears. Typetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetype.
Doobedy-doobedy-doo.
Ooo, very cool. The files are preserved even when you take out the batteries, and saving is completely automatic for each and every letter. I think I'm going to like this a lot.
Hmm, it's a bit slow to send the text over USB. Like watching an old teletype. But when it's hooked up it works like a regular keyboard.
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Great Weblog Mysteries
[site news] How come when I take half the month off from blogging the number of visitors per week almost doubles—to triple what it was this time last year, in terms of distinct hosts? And yet still only half a dozen people ever leave comments?
To be honest, it was a pretty non-month for the 'snail. Never mind, I have a Cunning Plan for October.
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Sunday, 29 September 2002
[site news] Quite a few changes around here today, though you wouldn't know it to look at it: fixed various pages that weren't validating, added some forgotten closing tags, and so on. Also posted something I found on the pavement.
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Saturday, 28 September 2002
Bollywood and Bunburyists
[film] Somehow I've ended up seeing two romantic comedies two weekends in a row, which for a hardened cynic* like myself is one viewing of Notting Hill away from having to turn in my badge (Hardened Cynics Brigade, 3rd Division). But with Edinburgh's cinemas filling up fast with pale imitations of Porky's, you take the laughs wherever you can get 'em. And after the trapped-under-floating-logs scene in (the excellent) Insomnia, I needed something a tad less tense.
Fortunately, The Guru was better than expected. Its tale of an Indian dance teacher making it big in America as the 'guru of sex' managed to spoof Bollywood, dreamy idealists, porn films, self-help culture, upper-class New York, and stereotypical American ideas about the sub-continent, without being overly condescending towards any of them. Jimi Mistry was terrific in the lead, as were the American cast (the presence of Michael McKean an early indicator that this was going to turn out well), and to top it all off, the dance scenes were genuinely good.
Even better was The Importance of Being Earnest, the latest screen adaptation of Huonville High School's 1983 Grade 10 English class ("Ewins's reading of Algy sets new standards"—The Stage). I enjoyed it a lot—too much, probably, given that Frances O'Connor's Aussie accent showed through a few times, and Colin Firth's scenes of London exuberance seemed a little forced; but who cares, when Rupert Everett, Reese Witherspoon and Judi Dench were all excellent, and the lines of Oscar Wilde are perfect whichever way they're sliced. The real surprise, though, was realising that Earnest was the blueprint for the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse, with its city larks and country estates, haughty aunts, Jeeves-like butlers, and half-baked schemes coming unstuck in the pursuit of young women. Oscar created more archetypes, it seems, than Dorian alone.
*Erratum: for 'hardened cynic' read 'big softy'.
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[music] So, hands up who expected that the new Beck album would be laid-back orchestral country-and-moog?
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Thursday, 26 September 2002
A Simple Plan
[infotech] Re-reading an old piece of mine on web filtering, it occurs to me that the techniques described in Paul Graham's A Plan for Spam and being used in the newer breed of e-mail clients could also be adopted by filtering-software companies. A statistical analysis of porn pages, code and all, would almost certainly provide more reliable filtering than crude lists of keywords. Of course, there'd have to be some way of letting the software know whether the sample pages that it's analysing are porn or not, just as Graham's spam filter needs someone to tell it, at first, which emails are spam and which aren't.
So, you'd end up with filters (if you must have them, as many companies and schools require) that are far better at recognising porn pages, and, importantly, far less likely to block non-porn.
But only if filtering-software companies hire armies of surfers to sift through random webpages to identify which ones are actually pornographic.
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[weblog] As Jason Kottke says, this optical illusion is amazing. But even better, if you have Photoshop, is to select the two squares using the polygonal lasso, invert the selection, and then delete the background... then undo the deletion... and delete, and undo...
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[code] Seven tricks that less-technical Web users don't know [via Jill]. Some surprises in there worth keeping in mind for the next redesign.
On several occasions I've seen users click the browser "Home" button when trying to get to a site's home page.
That actually makes more sense than what the 'home' button is really for. Who uses it? Wouldn't it be more useful if it took you to the current site's root level? Particularly given that:
In testing hundreds of users over a period of several years, I've never seen a non-technical user navigate by modifying the URL. Not once.
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Monday, 23 September 2002
[music] Fascinating Guardian article about the new (old) world of pop, where songwriters-for-hire—sometimes former stars themselves—are the real power behind the throne:
If pop music in the 21st century seems to be carrying on as though the Beatles never happened, there's a good reason for it. The Beatles were never meant to happen.
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[comedy] You could forgive Jerry Seinfeld for feeling that he has nothing left to prove after the success of his Show About Nothing. But apparently he's spent the last few years re-inventing his act, which is also the theme of his forthcoming movie Comedian:
You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That's how you know you're still alive. Once you start doing only what you've already proven you can do, you're on the road to death.
[Thanks, provenance: unknown.]
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Saturday, 21 September 2002
I'm Gonna Live Forever
[net culture] It's not like this is one of those blogs where the author has a Sally Field moment every time it's mentioned or linked elsewhere. It's not even like I talk about other blogs that much here—even those regular reads where I prance about merrily in their comments boxes like a man possessed (by a strange compulsion to prance). But when you open up one of the biggest newspapers in the Second-Biggest English-Speaking Nation one fine Saturday and see an oblique reference to your very own labour of love, well, that's gotta be worth a mention.
True, the reference is very oblique. And strictly speaking, it's actually about one-ninth of an oblique reference. The real focus of the Guardian's attention is the fine work of Matthew Baldwin at Defective Yeti, whose evite to the war on Iraq recently won the Great Weblog Lottery, and who kindly shared the wealth. Bibi van der Zee wrote:
Yeti was as astonished as anyone else at the spoof's popularity (it only took him 20 minutes to write the whole thing) and he has taken the opportunity to guide visitors to a few other little-known websites—but who can be bothered? If half a million people haven't read it first, frankly we don't want to know.
Since yours truly was one of those Matthew linked, that means that I can add the following to my select list of Speedysnail press clippings:
"Other little-known website"—Guardian
which is right up there with another favourite review:
"Just another example of the mindless clutter already on the Internet"—john
Thanks, Bibi. And thanks, Matthew—and sorry to see that your site has temporarily been hosed by winning even bigger in the Great Weblog Lottery. (Whoever wins this is in bigggg trouble.)
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Friday, 20 September 2002
Dear Diary
[journal] The trouble is, these things always take longer than expected.
My PhD research, back in the early '90s, involved about sixty lengthy interviews conducted over four months. I planned to use excerpts from them throughout my dissertation, but after returning from fieldwork couldn't face transcribing them all. Instead I avoided that necessary task by doing more book-work, until finally I could avoid it no longer, and forced myself to sit at the keyboard for eight to ten hours every day with headphones and a foot-pedal-operated tape-deck. It took months to transcribe them. Three hundred thousand words. About twenty percent of those ended up in the dissertation.
Strangely enough, the experience left me with a severe aversion to transcribing interviews from tape; or transcribing anything, really. I hate even typing up notes from a meeting (which didn't help when I had to do a lot of minuting during my brief stint as a bureaucrat).
So I knew I was tempting fate by writing my Madagascar diaries in long-hand in a notebook; but what choice did I have? I was hardly about to entrust any kind of delicate equipment to a backpack slung on top of a rusting minibus; and losing such valuable information to a technical glitch would be disastrous. Paper was the way to go.
Then there was the matter of finding time to write the diaries in the first place. We were too busy living the trip, seeing things and talking with each other about what we were seeing, writing postcards and letters to family and friends; and I got further and further behind, ending the month with the diaries only a third or a half written. Then there were more urgent priorities, like finding work, until finishing those diaries was the most important priority, before my medium-term memory dumped half of the details into the ether. I took myself off to the State Library of Victoria every couple of days and forced myself to write them, filling the first notebook and then a second.
And then: a new country, new job, new home, new chores, new travel and so on. And new ideas for other things to write, but always overshadowed by the Unfinished Task of 2000: the Madagascar book. I had to do something with that story, or forever regret it.
But there it was, bound up in two notebooks full of abysmal hand-writing, too illegible for OCR, too analog for word processing. They had to be transcribed to be any use, but I hate transcribing.
There was never going to be a good time to do it. So I just did it. Three weeks later, the two bound notebooks are 62,548 words of flat text. A lot of those words are usable as-is; others need work, and with that work should expand to comfortable book-length. Finally, the hypothetical becomes plausible.
It took another year to turn those interviews into a thesis, but this is a different sort of beast, so it shouldn't take that long. But it's an evenings-only job, which slows things down. Three to six months? Call it six. End of March.
And it's all there. A complete story, with a shape, a narrative thread, a greater significance than 'what I did on my holidays'. I've read enough travel writing over the past few years to know that this will stand up against it. And the book will be better for having matured in my mind and settled into its proper shape, the details safely recorded months (years) ago but no longer overwhelming it.
There's a moment when writing a long work when you turn a mental corner and know that you will actually reach the end, that it will be finished and will have been worth the effort. In my experience the moment comes about three-quarters of the way through the total length of the project, and about halfway through the actual work. July 2000 to September 2002... eight months to go, maybe.
So if you're one of those who can remember when that trip was just an idea, and who wondered if there was more to it than these few stories, the good news is that it finally looks like you'll get the chance to find out.
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Same Same But Different
[language] My Madagascar notebooks also contain a few scraps from our late-2000 trip to Thailand. Being way behind at the time on my Mad diaries, I didn't write one for the Thailand trip—which was a shame, as at least a few days of it made a good story in their own right, and the whole trip was great fun. But for part of it, at least, I wrote down some shining examples of Crazy Thai English that give other dialects of Crazy English a rung for their monkey. Why just leave them trapped in a notebook when I can release them here?
Sign at Bangkok International Airport: "Welcome to the Land of Smile"
Hotel Menu: "Good Morning Breakfast—Fruit Jouce—Toast with Jame and Butter—Mussli with Yoghurt"
Name of a travel company: "Same Same But Different"
On a restaurant menu: "Chocgolect Ice Cream"; "Plan Pancake".
On a can of coffee-coated peanuts (which are delicious): "Keep Cool in Refrigerator for Better Crunchy"
Postcard captions: "A Lovely Family Elephant"; "Elephants Enyoi Ther Bath"; "The Monks—They Seek for Peace in Thailand".
Sign on a beach: "No Collecting of Coral and Marine Lives"
Ingredients on a bottle of drinking yoghurt: "yoghurt, sucrose, kiwi juice, food colourings, nature identical flavour."
Sign over a street: "BanPong Municipality—Welcome to City of Nice People"
T-shirt worn by a pretty girl on a motorbike: "SHITHEAD"
It is, of course, Evil to laugh at other people's honest mistakes in speaking such a difficult second language. Fortunately, these examples were all written, not spoken—and I freely admit that I can't pronounce anything properly in Thai, which gave Thai people plenty of opportunities to laugh at me. Also, today is International Be Evil Day.
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Wednesday, 18 September 2002
Woah.
[net culture] The trouble with taking time off from blogging is that it leads to moments when the urge to update the site, check the visitor stats, read what fellow bloggers have been saying, and compulsively scour MetaFilter for juicy topics du jour completely disappears. Freed from this burden, the blogger discovers sights, sounds and smells unknown to him these past months. But something is wrong. Disturbing images flash through his mind of wired plastic pods filled with foetal-curled comrades. The blogger falters, unsure whether to eat the blue pill or the red. Black-suited Evheads close in to plug the rebel back into the blogosphere. He snatches the blue pill, gulps it down, waits for sweet release into the clean air of reality... and realises that it wasn't web-safe, and #4D59F7 shows up red on Agent Ev's monitor. Life once again becomes an electronic illusion. His hiatus is over.
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Pages and Paint
[journal] Judging from the sparse front page this month it may not look like I've been writing, but the truth is that the writing has been elsewhere. Been transcribing my Madagascar diaries at long last, which look set to clock in at sixty thousand words (eighty percent done so far). The next step is to edit and rewrite them into a more polished narrative over the next few months. Between that and writing papers at work, there won't be many words left over for this site, but I'll try not to let it languish.
And I've been painting. Sadly, the kind that involves a step-ladder, not an easel; our kitchen and bathroom are now free of garish red tile paint and yellow and green walls, meaning that every room in our flat (bar the study, which was okay) is now repainted. Unfortunately, there is nothing entertaining about this process. Sure, the brochures make it look entertaining, with happy twenty-year-olds slurping flourescent purple onto their dining room walls without getting any on their designer jeans. But they lie. White satin matt is inherently boring; these days you can't even get off on the fumes, because it all washes out in water. Brushes bring no rush, and rollers are hardly roller-coasters. It's all about as exciting as... well, watching paint dry. Curse you, time-consuming-yet-anecdote-free chores.
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Tearing Down the Wall
Hadrian's Wall, 14-15 September 2002. We spent the weekend walking 4-5 hours a day along its central stretches, from Carvoran Roman Army Museum to Sewingshields Crag, taking in Vindolanda and Housesteads along the way; about ten or twelve miles in all. Clean air, silence, and sweeping views of remote Northumbrian countryside. The paths that were once patrolled by Roman centurions are now patrolled by incontinent cows, so you have to watch your feet, and the best views are at the top of the steepest hills, so you have to use your feet, but it's well worth it.
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Tuesday, 10 September 2002
Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?
[politics] William Greider was one of the better reasons to read Rolling Stone, and his article on the financial reckoning that could spell the End of American Empire is a good reminder of why.
(We apologise for this break in our break in our transmission, and return you to our scheduled lack of programming.)
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Sunday, 1 September 2002
Love and Haiti
[site news] I keep reading about all these bloggers who are on Haiti, and man am I jealous. It's ages since I was last in the tropics. Perhaps we could all meet up there: go snorkelling, lie on the beach, eat banana pancakes and drink pineapple shakes. Yeah! That's the ticket! I'm gonna spend a couple of weeks on Haiti!
Oh. Hiatus.
Okay, so I'm going to spend a couple of weeks on hiatus.
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[music] A rushed review of A Rush of Blood to the Head at Records Ad Nauseam [mirrored here].
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