This is not a protest
26/9/2008
Someone's doing something brave, thoughtful, and very well conceived.
As we all know, 30 minutes of brisk exercise a day is very good for you. So Old Holborn is going for a walk on November the 5th this year. It is a matter of minor interest that he has chosen to dress for the day in a costume inspired by a recent popular motion picture.
It might also be interesting, for those considering joining him on his cheerful autumn stroll, that the route to be taken begins in Trafalgar Square and heads for Parliament Square, before returning to Trafalgar Square again to make the round trip roughly the half-hour prescribed by medics. Now, I must reiterate that this is not a protest. Of course, the right to peaceful protest around Parliament (without permission from government-controlled bodies) no longer exists, so it would be highly irresponsible of me, or of anyone else, to encourage a protest in that environment. No, again I should say that this is merely a person (or as it may happen, a group of people) going for an afternoon walk, happening to dress in whatever fashion they may happen to dress.
Because the gentleman in question welcomes company to greaten the pleasure of his little jaunt, he's set up a facebook group for the event (although I'm afraid non-facebook members can't get to that page, it doesn't give any information not available from the previous link). If anyone happened to want to join him, it might be that you'd like to vary your usual costume for the day - some rather fetching masks are available from eBay. They're so the thing for this year, darling. Finally, for those who might not know the film that I mentioned earlier, I'm including an excerpt. Again, this should be seen as merely providing context, explaining the inspiration for the delightful costumes. Certainly it is not a rallying call for protest.
So all that remains is for me to wish the gentleman, and any companions who may join him, a pleasant afternoon. You know, it sounds such a delightful prospect that, if my timetable allows, I might go down and join him. Would be most gratifying to see you there, too.
Hair trouble
20/9/2008
As anyone who's seen me since Africa will know, while I was out there I got my hair braided. I rather liked it - I thought it looked OK, I was bored of the old haystack thing that I've been known for these past few years, and more than anything else it reminded me of Africa. However, things are never quite straightforward... In Yamba, it cost me the equivalent of 40p to get it done, so I tried quite a few different designs, and I got it redone at least once a fortnight to make sure it all stayed in place. Back here, a hairdresser told me it would cost £35. I've never been a great fan of hairdressers, and spending £70 a month in one was not something that was ever going to happen. So, for what must be at least 8 weeks now, I've been hanging on to the last bit of Clemencia's work, and trying to decide what to do next.
Enter stage right Joy, one of Luci's friends, who's happy to have a go at my hair. I'm going down to Cardiff next week to present it to her, but before I go I've had to undertake a bit of preparation. When the braids are in, you can't really do more than soak your hair in hot water, in terms of washing it, since shampoo wont absorb properly and, despite the claims I've heard from various of the dreadlock fraternity, my hair did /not/ start washing itself after 6 weeks. And, as I've no desire to try to persuade someone to put their hands in my hair after 2 months without shampoo, I had to take the braids out to give it a proper wash. It takes a little while to get the braids out, but that's no problem at all - until the moment when I realised that I was removing the last bit of me that felt authentically "of Africa"... It seems all too likely that I'll never be able to boast hair styled by Clemencia Richard again. It hurts to lose anything that connects me to Yamba, and particularly to Clemencia herself, who looked after me so well and with such warmth and energy.
Fortunately, just as I was beginning to get melancholy, along comes this on my stereo.
Just as while I was in Africa I could carry the best bits of home, back here I can keep a chunk of Africa in my head and in my heart. I was, frankly, stupid to think I needed some part of me to show the world I'd been to Yamba... It doesn't matter to them and, tho it matters hugely to me, I've got everything I need.
Don't always save
17/9/2008
There's a common mantra among geeks (and indeed others) that I've supported for some time. Save EVERYTHING. At first that makes a lot of sense - you never know when you might want a particular bit of info, and storage space on hard drives, DVDs and all is so cheap now it seems silly to throw stuff away just cos you can't immediately see why it might be useful. But now I'd like to suggest that there are limits.
It's all to do with the signal to noise ratio. You see it every time you use google - I have a gut feeling (and I accept that that's hardly conclusive) that it's a good deal harder to find what you want on google now than it was a few years back. That's not because there isn't enough information on the web to answer your problem, but because there's so much info that you can't find anything relevant amid all the noise.
Let me give you another example. When I came back from Africa I wanted to share some of my photos on facebook. We'd also said when we were out there that we'd find somewhere to keep all our pics, so that for instance Will could find one of my photos that was special to him, which I might not have realised the importance of. So on this site I've got a full gallery of every last one of my photos, but on facebook there are a couple of sets, each with only about 40 of what I thought were the best in. And I suspect that, for anyone who wasn't there at least, it's actually more rewarding to browse the edited highlights... I'm hardly one of the great photographers of our age, so there's a fair few on the gallery page here that are frankly a bit shit.
In both these cases, excess data means that people have to waste their time trying to find the good stuff. You could argue that perhaps in 20, 50 or 100 years' time our methods to filter and search data might be so effective we won't see anything irrelevant anymore. Perhaps they will be*, but in the mean time significant chunks of people's lives are being wasted, and human lives are short and valuable. Of course, these problems could be solved by retaining the data, but not making it publicly available - in these cases, keep the stuff on your hard drive and off the internet until we can search efficiently. But that risks destroying the purpose of the original "save everything" mantra - the owner of the data gets bored/dies/burns his house down and the data's gone. Quite apart from the fact that many people who're told to save everything assume that the best and safest place to put it is online.
So what am I advocating in the end? Quality control, I guess. I trust the judgement of the large majority of people to know what's likely to be useful. At least, I trust them a damn sight more than I trust the average computer to work it out. If you're keeping the last 30 years of your holiday photos on DVDs in a fireproof box in your basement, more power to you. Just don't put them all on flickr.
*I'm not sure, though, that I'm comfortable with the idea of a computer judging the artistic value of a photograph. Either we have a computer which has essentially a human intelligence, which might be great but needs careful consideration, or humans are always rating data in some way when they see it. The latter solution either wastes a good deal of people's time clicking the "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" buttons, or would I suspect be rather invasive of the individual's privacy.
Hand in your Geek Card
7/9/2008
I'm not wholly sure why I'm admitting to this, since I doubt it'll prove hugely interesting, and I do so in the certain knowledge that I'll never be able to claim to be a proper geek again. However, I just need a hole I can shout into, and this, I'm afraid, is my answer...
It's a classic, boys and girls - I've got network problems. Before we moved house, we ran a largely wireless network, using a Belkin F5D-7630 as our modem and router. As a modem it seemed to be OK (early on it would become disconnected for no apparent reason, but after we switched ISPs away from the frankly aweful Tiscali this problem stopped). As a router, though, it left a lot to be desired: the entire wireless element of the network would often disappear for no reason, sometimes returning only after a full reboot of the F5D-7630, sometimes not even then. We couldn't solve that problem by simply running a wired network, since it didn't have enough wired ports. This became rather tedious, so when we moved I researched the matter in a bit more depth, and bought a Netgear DGFV-338, which I thought would be everything we could ever want.
So it proved, at least at first. With 8 wired ports we had a large block of the network that was entirely bullet-proof, and the wireless network it provided was more or less as reliable as the wired. Add to that a much wider range of configuration options, many of which I hadn't even realised I wanted until I started playing with it, and I was well happy. Then, a few weeks after we moved, it started dropping the connection to the internet. Since we had chosen to stay with Dcomms, who'd proved very reliable after switching from Tiscali, I suspected that this was due to the modem, rather than to our ISP. This suspicion seems to have been confirmed, since, when the Netgear modem/router can't manage to conenct to the internet, the Belkin one can.*
So, we have a Belkin F5D-7630 which is a reliable modem but a crap router, and a Netgear DGFV-338 which is a flakey modem but a reliable router. Easy answer, surely, is to use the Belkin as the modem, and the Netgear as the router, taking the best bits of each. Since the Netgear has a port to allow internet connection through ethernet, that should work, and I've tried playing around with them to make this a viable option. I plugged the phone line into the belkin box, ran an ethernet cable from the belkin to the netgear, and plugged my server into the belkin and my desktop into the netgear box. My server was online, working exactly as it should. My desktop could connect to the netgear router, but not to the belkin modem or to the internet. The netgear router could ping the belkin modem and google. Somewhere in either the netgear or the belkin firewall, something is blocking through traffic, but I'm buggered if I can find out what it is...
So there you have it. Giles is going to have his geek card confiscated and shredded as he leaves the building, and his family are gonna enjoy the flakiest connection on our road, despite having invested in decent equipment and a decent ISP. I swear that the more you know about computers, the more stuff goes wrong, so that you never know quite enough ;-)
*In fact it may not be quite that simple, since the Netgear box seems to be disconnected at very regular times - each evening around 6 or 7 o'clock, just when the bulk of residential broadband users, with whom we contend for use of the infrastructure, come back from work and go online. So maybe it is a problem with the ISP. But then how come the Belkin box always connects successfully at that point?
Under canvas
4/9/2008
Greenbelt was as wonderful as it always is, to the extent that I occasionally stopped wishing I was in Africa! The build-week stewarding was a slightly double-edged sword, though: I loved it, as I always love stewarding, and it gave me the chance to be the first steward into a day-glo jacket this year, and the last one out... Which makes me far happier than it should ;-) The only downside, though, is that because I love greenbelt so much, I put everything I can into stewarding. So after 9 days of it I was well and truly zonked. Still, totally worth it :-D
That 9 days is, I think, the longest I've ever spent camping - certainly I was getting tired of not even being able to sit up straight, let alone stand up, by the Monday night... Then I had two nights at home before I headed off to camp again ;-) This time for Pratchett-related silliness at Wadfest, and given that I wasn't in competition with my family any more I took the BIG tent. I can't tell you how lovely it is to be able to stand up ;-) All in all a fun couple of weeks, but it does mean that it's taken me until now to get the rest of my Tanzania photos tagged and ready to roll. They're all there now, and I hope give a little bit of an impression of the place - though I can never hope to capture enough of it, of course. Anyway, enjoy 'em if you like, ignore 'em if you don't.
Baadaye