Duke Street Alley

We have arrived at Orbital. The con itself looks great; I'm not so impressed with the hotel. The "double" bed is of a size that made us go back down to reception to check that we hadn't accidentally got a single. And the buffet dinner wasn't a long way above canteen standards. (Later edit: and there's only one towel).

However, the convention is off to a good start by giving us free drinks pretty much as we came in the door. We've seen the art room, where there's some stunning stuff - I'll be bidding on a few pieces. And there are no less than three tables piled high with free fanzines, many of which are vintage if not antique - the first one I picked up was from 1966. I have a pile two inches thick here, and that's a tiny fraction of what's there. We're going to trot down shortly and see if we can find anyone we recognise, and assault a few people we know by name if nobody familiar is about.

So, this year's Eastercon is Orbital, which is conveniently happening in Heathrow. inannajones and I are going, who else is?

Thanks to olethros' efforts, my PC is up and running again. The problem seems to have been some bad sectors on the hard disk. Over the next few weeks, though, I'm going to be transferring a lot of data to online storage of some kind, as some bad sectors can be a bad sign for a disc.

Peculiarly, I got on fine without it. Most of my current projects are already online, via Google Documents, Gmail, LJ, blog software, and various message boards, all acessible via the laptop, and the only things I missed were installations of EVE and WoW. Further, WoW was playable on olethros' Mac Mini (fast becoming the designated emergency computer), and I have an installation of EVE in work so that I can change skills.

There are ongoing discussions wrt to backups and remote storage - mainly for images and media files. A lot of these are large files, work in progress, or just plain archival stuff, and as yet, I don't know of anything like Google Docs for images.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Whenever I’m interested in a new area, my first reaction is to hit the web. Usually, I find what I’m looking for not on wikipedia or about.com or any organised information site, but on various blogs. My next reaction is to acquire as many books on the topic as I can, but I’m trying to go for the library option on that instead. The latest interest to get hit this way is gardening, and specifically what I consider to be real gardening - herbs, fruit and vegetables.

So here are some of the blogs that I’ve been reading and enjoying over the last couple of weeks.

My Tiny Plot details the progress from a small allotment plot up through several more plots of land, to the current series on landscaping a garden for food production. There are plenty of photographs, and a good bit of useful and encouraging detail.

Henbogle deals with hens, woodwork, recycling, and gardening - a solidly interesting mix.

Future House Farm has similar topics, and a bit more emphasis on fruit.

One Straw: Be The Change deals more specifically with sustainability, both in farming and in the wider world. It’s fascinating reading.

Tiny Farm Blog deals with organic market gardening. There’s a post a day, regular-like, and I’m particularly enamoured of the pictures that have deep snow and cold. Not that I’m going to have to deal with that anytime soon…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Something I fervently wish existed is a standard “unsubscribe” method for mailing lists - both discussion and broadcast. Something that an email client could hook into, in order to display a great big “unsubscribe” button in the interface.

I’ve been cleaning up a few mailboxes during the early part of the new year, and looking at email tactics for our own marketing efforts. It’s becoming clear that the plethora of unsub methods is not a good thing. Some systems just want you to click on a link. Others want you to click on a link, then fill in an email address and hit submit. Some want one of the above, and then they send you an email which you reply to, or further still, click on another link in to fully opt-out. Some have a range of tickboxes about remaining on their alert list rather than their newsletter list, and so on, and so forth.

An awful lot of people resort to hitting the “report spam” button instead of making their way through the maze, and that doesn’t help anyone. The trouble is that with at least one major newsletter out there, I tried for months to unsubscribe - and eventually had to mark the thing as spam to stop it appearing.

I assume there are technical issues with introducing an unsubscribe standard - so what are they? Is there a way to get around them?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a fascinating article by Walter Kirn in November’s Atlantic Monthly, called The Autumn of the Multitaskers. It basically argues that trying to do multiple things at once is a fad of the current era, possibly caused and definitely accentuated by conceptualising the brain as a computer. And further, it seems it’s not good for you. There’s a level at which this appeals to me, because I’m very bad at multitasking. Unless I carefully prepare myself for it, I have difficulty switching from one task to another without a few seconds of blank staring in between. And if I do the preparation, then neither task is really done to the best of my ability.

There’s an argument that this is a problem most men have; women seem to multitask better. I can barely walk and engage in a sensible conversation at the same time; many women seem to be able to do both as well as, for instance, send a text message. I don’t know many men who can multitask well.

This is somewhat belied by the fact that as I write this, I have earphones on and am listening to my current favourite genre of epic metal music, and am holding two IM conversations at the same time. The music, however, isn’t really a distraction; it’s partly in use to block out surrounding conversation and noise from the workplace, and partly to make me comfortable - I’m not actively listening to it. The two IM conversations are about prosaic, day-to-day items in the workplace. Neither of them is requiring much from me other than quick bursts of information I have no trouble recalling.

Part of the Getting Things Done method that I’ve been trying, with some success, to stick with, is a principle that having other stuff in your head, background tasks, prevents you from getting on with the ones in hand. The solution there is to dump everything you can think of out to a set of lists, where you can come back to them later. In other words, you can concentrate better if you’re not multitasking.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator is a bit horrified by a motorbike repair shop where it’s clear that the employees are doing more listening to the radio than concentrating on their work, with poor work being the result - and moreover, it’s poor work that they’re not aware of; they think they know what they’re doing, and doing a good job.

I don’t know if I believe that multitasking is bad for you, but it’s an interesting line of thinking.

Hats, I am discovering, make an unreasonable difference to your experience of weather. Yesterday, there was a vague attempt at rain while I was walking home, with no hat. I felt chilly, rained on, somewhat soaked, and rather put out, despite the fact that I was heading home for a few hours of EVE before watching the first episode of the new season of Torchwood (review coming up on dukestreet later today).

This morning, I wore my winter hat, a black trilby-sort-of-thing, through the driving rain and nasty winds walking to work. I was warm, comfortable, and felt dry, despite the fact that I was, well, walking to work in the rain.

And yet, a good half of the people I passed had wholly inadequate hoods, scarves tied over their heads, ineffective umbrellas (many of which turned inside out at each street corner), or the old classic of a newspaper over the head. The people who were wearing hats were black, oriental, Polish, or quite old. Hats are not that hard to get - why do Irish people not wear them?

I'm sure someone out there has dealt with this before, so here goes. We have a process that outputs, once every half hour, a CSV file of the last X lines from a given log. The activity recorded in this log has peaks and valleys, so the last X lines might only cover the last hour's activity, at busy times, or might cover the last six hours, when things are quiet. The end result is that the output CSV files overlap unpredictably.

Is there a tool, script, process, or anything of that sort - anything in Windows, or shell scripts in Unix - that can unify a bunch of these CSVs into one CSV file? I can do it manually in Excel, but it's a pain.

I can probably work out something in the shell script line with diff and head, but it would be nice if someone has already got one knocking around.

So, ask me some questions. Try to make them ones I can answer interestingly, rather than "yes/no/last Tuesday", but other than that, fire away. No set number, not set topic.

In the last hour, I have had my entire train of thought looped through Mornington Crescent with a phone call, and am awaiting the public posting of the news. Your brain, too, will melt.

Now, see, that's how a theme should be handled. Good plot, great acting, damn fine explosions and running, hand holding, all the signatures, without reprising anything he didn't have to. I wish RTD's writing wasn't like a yo-yo, but his high points are most excellently high.

So I went looking for plain, ordinary ribbon for present wrapping today. The good newsagents/stationers/bookshop in Ranelagh was sold out, and none of the other shops around had any, so I went hunting down Camden Street. In the second small shop, I asked at the counter, rather than waste time looking around the place. They had none, but there was an elderly man in there who was also looking for ribbon. He leaned on the counter and addressed the rather bemused shop dude with "Do you, perhaps, have brown paper and string? I understand that with those, we could do something... retro." They only had string, though, so he tapped the floor with his walking stick, and addressed me instead. "I know a place where they will have ribbon, young man. We shall go to the ancient and noble house of Dunne."

So we trotted all the way down Camden Street, Wexford Street, Aungier Street, and South Great George's Street to Dunnes Stores. On the way, he poked people with his walking stick to move them out of the way, and told me that this year he was not getting any presents for any of his children and grandchildren that was invented "after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939." This had involved ordering a genuine working steam powered miniature locomotive engine from Hungary for one grandson.

We found good ribbon at half price in Dunnes, and at the door he wished me and all of mine a Happy Christmas, before striding on down the street.

I've just posted an article on The Wizard of Duke Street highlighting the decision for Billie Piper to return as Rose in Doctor Who. I've kept my commentary mild enough over there, but I want to get some sensible opinions here before the txt kiddies get loose in the comments.

Is it just me or is this an utterly pathetic move on the part of the casting and scripting people? I can't lay it solely on RTD, but I suspect a great deal of his involvement. There has not been one single notable event so far in the new Who, except the switch from Nine to Ten, that he hasn't managed to weaken by going over the same events and the same plots again. And I suspect that if he could get Christopher Eccleston to sign up again, we'd see the first (temporary, of course) reverse regeneration in the Whoniverse.

It's turning into a cross between a soap opera and a 90s Marvel comic...

Can I draw your various attentions to the first EVE Online Rags to Riches Competition? It's an EVE Trial Account competition, sponsored by me, with prizes of two one-month EVE Game Time Codes.

Due to the great generosity of radegund, we are now in possession of a nearly complete 10th Edition Encyclopedia Britannica. Expect many random quotes and much inattentiveness otherwise, as I struggle with questions of why everyone in the Navy hates Mr Childers so much, and just where Rumelia is or was. All the volumes are currently sitting on the kitchen table, pending me finding a more suitable home for them somewhere in the house. Visits may be arranged.

(I have to get some better icons; I'm getting very bored with most of mine)

It's cold and drizzly out there this morning, and I was taking a look at various weather sites. Metcheck's front page has a long ramble at the moment about current conditions. One particular line made me laugh out loud:

"... the silly season has now officially started for all those who like following the models to see if it will snow, chucking cups of coffee at the wall when the 1800z run has been downgraded and getting in the annual spirit of snow ramping on various internet forums when things are looking favourable is going to become a common occurrence."

As someone who's followed weather forums in winter for a few years, I can tell you, it's all true, coffee cups and all.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve just finished a redesign of The Wizard of Duke Street. There might be some tweaks to go, but the core of it’s done. Your comments and criticisms will be welcomed.

So the reason that I could not, for the life of me, identify the song lyric that was going round in my head last night, which went "I said yeah, yeah, yeah", was that the song was Amy Winehouse's Rehab, and the actual lyric is "I said no, no, no".

So, this evening I am going to go home from my job working on the internet, have dinner and play LotRO for a while with inannajones, sort out my EVE decks, and go out to Fibbers later on for the pre-Gaelcon drinking.

My fifteen year old self is DED OF TEH GREEN ENVY.

Some miscellaneous scheduling notes, since this is the easiest way to get in touch with indistinct groups of people.

Locksmith's Folly: olethros is away, and it's the start of the Gaelcon Weekend. No game, but we're back on next week.

Gaelcon: Who's going? What are you intending to do? Will any of ye be bringing EVE cards? Mine could do with some exercise; I've barely touched them since last year. I understand there's one of those pub quiz things on Saturday, anyone not going to that?

Fibbers: It's the Gaelcon weekend, therefore there must be a Fibbers visit. Are people planning to go on Friday, Saturday, or what?

Assault on November: If you're in Ireland and you haven't told me what things you're interested in doing in November, get thee hence and fill in the poll.

dorianegray was doing this, so in the manner of this reverse tag thing ("Pick me! Pick me!"), I'm doing it now with her choices from my list of interests. If you want, comment below and I'll pick seven of yours.

( Seven Interests, All Alike in Dignity )

Also, I have finally re-found my India notebook, so expect transcriptions of that in the near future as well.

Realistically, there are no possible comments: Teh Holiez Bibul.

So I'll just quote:

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat waz invisible, An he maded the skiez An da Urf, but he no eated it.

2 The Urfs wus witout shapez An wus dark An scary An stufs, An he rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stufs, An seperatered teh lite from dark An stufs but taht wuz ok cuz cats can seez in teh dark An not tripz ovr nethin. an Ceiling Cat sayz u mus hav da moneyz 2 git da milkz.

So, I have an idea. This idea has been seeded by a number of things. First and foremost, the idea is from Wolfgang Baur's open_design, which has worked out very well indeed. Second, Diane Duane is writing a novel for subscribers, to be published when finished. Third, I find I write more when people are expecting something from me. Fourth, I'd like to see if this idea can be made in any way commercially viable.

The idea goes like this. I will come up with some ideas for a novel - scifi, fantasy, or something of the sort - and people will buy in to the project to direct it, Renaissance Patron of the Arts style. Yes, with money. There will be multiple subscription options:

Tier 1: For $2.50, you get to vote in polls to decide what way events, settings, and characters go.

Tier 2: For $20, you get to make suggestions about how you think things should be, on which you, the other Tier 2 subscribers, and the Tier 1 subscribers can then vote.

Tier 3: For $100, you get to say things like, "I want it to be set in 19th Century Arabia, but steampunk, and with alien invaders," or "Write every second chapter in iambic pentameter," and I will give your suggestion every possible consideration - essentially, unless everyone else involved, including me, actively hates your idea, it will happen. Plus polls, of course.

Tier 4: For $500, you get to issue the same commands as at the Tier three level, except that even if everyone else hates them, they still get in. You also get to change your mind completely on what you want, once, which at other Tiers will make me complain bitterly and probably become uncooperative. And of course, all the polls you can eat.

All subscribers will have their names affixed to the final manuscript, in font sizes appropriate to your tier. The tier 4 subscriber, if there is one - and there can only be one, obviously - will have a bigger font than either the title or my name.

This following poll is in no way binding, it's just to work out if there's interest. If there's enough interest to get to about $500, I'll put together Paypal buttons and such. I may go ahead on less than that. Tell your friends. Tell your neighbours. Tell your cats they can have me write the novel in which they're recognised as our lords and masters.

[Poll #1068706]

No, I am not an established game writer like Wolfgang or a writer like Diane. Yes, I am some guy you know on the internet. But it still sounds like fun, right? Right?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve just posted six articles on making money from your website, something that I’ve been working on for a while now. This post is to serve as an introduction, and an index. The articles are:

Making Money From Your Website: Content
Making Money From Your Website: Analytics
Making Money From Your Website: Search Engine Optimization
Making Money From Your Website: Google Adsense
Making Money From Your Website: Link Sales
Making Money From Your Website: Affiliate Programs

This is a fairly basic introduction to the ideas involved; it assumes you can put together a simple website. It’s been published before on livejournal under a special filter; people who’ve been on that filter have tried out some of the stuff there and found it useful, so I’m now posting it for general use. I’m always looking to improve things, so if you’ve any extra ideas, suggestions, or the like, please do post them.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I posted stats for The Wizard of Duke Street and In Ranelagh for August at the beginning of September, and people seemed to like it. So here’re stats for September, and a note to myself to post more, because otherwise I’ll vanish into an auto-analytical black hole.

The Wizard of Duke Street: In the month of September, there were 15,859 visitors (up around 850 from last month), who looked at 19,945 pages. 95.88% of that was from search engines.

The top ten search terms were “torchwood season 2″ (2,883 visits), “torchwood series 2″ (1,075), “doctor who series 4″ (772), “doctor who season 4″ (496), “freema agyeman” (371), “world of starcraft” (273), “lotro music″ (261), “japanese monsters” (221), “dr who series 4″ (205) and “time and chips” (180). That’s almost the same as last month, save for the order, and a slight increase on the Doctor Who-related terms. There was a peak in the traffic around the 22nd for such terms, with most of it originating in North America, which trailed off over the next week. I’m guessing Series 3 finished showing on some US channel around then.

The referring sites are a touch over 2% of overall traffic this month. Notable ones come from imdb.com, where a discussion about Torchwood linked to my very short article on the Torchwood Magazine, and The Ancient Gaming Noob.

Inranelagh.com: In Ranelagh got 1,337 visitors in September, viewing 2,530 pages. Just over 75% of that was from search engines, 11.33% from referrals, and 13.65% from direct traffic.

The search terms are an odd assortment again, divided between the main site and the blog. “ranelagh” comes in first again (132 visits), followed by: “ranelagh dublin” (56), “superquinn ranelagh” (28), “mcsorleys ranelagh” (18), “css z-index ie” (15), “nevada plane wrecks” (15), “ranelagh ireland” (15), “dublin ranelagh” (12), “css ie z-index” (10), and “css z-index internet explorer” (9). I guess IE’s z-index stuff is bugging a lot of people.

Notable referred traffic (32 visitors) came in from virtualireland.ru, where something was presumably asked about Ranelagh.

Overall, there’s little enough change in traffic or interest, which is nice and steady, but probably indicates I should look to expand into a few other areas - steady is good, growth would be better. I’m noting a definite difference between the interest shown in articles by searchers, and the interest shown in articles by people who provide links. One article on Now Is A Long Time too, about disabling nofollow in Moveable Type, has more links to it than any other page on the site, and yet it gets very little actual traffic. Some of the difference there, I suppose, is between reference material and a quick solution.