Duke Street Alley

I thought for some time about doing a 2007 retrospective post, but I just don't really want to. I'm much more in a mood to look forward at the moment.

I don't like to do resolutions. They're kind of like a to-do list, which is a good thing, but they're also either things I would do anyway, or things which, at some level, I know I won't do. So instead, I'm going to talk about a category of future speculations I like to call prospective plans. These are not things I'm planning to do, but things I'm thinking about doing. They may become actual plans at a future date, and they may not. Having them out here for people to poke at and discuss helps me examine them for practicality. So here goes.

( Prospective Plans )

If you all have spare clicks over the holidays, you might consider poking at Ballydehob for me. It's an instance of MyMiniCity, which seems to be a sort of slow SimCity on the web deal, which has as its main resource incoming clicks.

I'm a little bemused - if very pleased - by this morning's frost. The most reliable weather service, Metcheck, was giving 7°C for this morning at 09:00, and the local temperature here is usually about 2.5°C higher. Instead, it was under 2°C in the back yard this morning, and there was frost on roofs and grass.

We went into town for various errands, and ended up walking down the still-frosted boardwalk and quays to the 12 Days of Christmas market, which is rather good this year. They have the same sausage and beer stands as last year, and the rost bratwurst, at least, was excellent. They also had a merry-go-round, on which we went. I approve entirely of merry-go-rounds, but do wish I had a top hat to complete the thing.

We also bought a stack of magazines, and for market research for a new website I'm considering, I even bought one of the rather repulsive papercrafting ones - to be found only in the "women's interest" section, and with a cover in pink and pastels. I considered buying a copy of Hustler or something to balance it out, but decided that Focus and New Scientist would do instead.

And now there is a comfortable afternoon of spodding. This is how December should be.

We were away in Finland for the weekend for inannajones' grandmother's 80th birthday.

I'm very pleased with the trip, not least because we had snow - about an inch on Friday night - and then a glorious cold clear day on Saturday, with temperatures down around the -7°C mark.

There was also a very fine black dog at inannajones' grandmother's house, and while he seemed to understand even less Finnish than I do (or, more likely, my accent is as incomprehensible to dogs as it is to humans), we eventually settled on an arrangement where I would say "Sit!" in Finnish, and he'd drop the stick he was carrying, and when I said "Sit!" a second time, he'd actually sit. After which I'd throw the stick, he'd charge after it, bring it back, and we'd repeat the process, sometimes with a few more repetitions of the command bit, as my accent wandered in and out of comprehensibility. inannajones' goddaughter and her uncle's girlfriend did very well at concealing their amusement.

There is also a prospect of having horses there - the uncle and girlfriend are building a house, and will keep horses and teach riding. I haven't been on a horse since I was about 16, but I look forward to the prospect again.

We're going to be in Finland again for New Year. I'm looking forward to it greatly, and intend to mount a massive raid on the Tiimari craft chain.

(inannajones will be posting pictures soon. I shall be getting icons from some of them.)

The 10th Edition Encyclopedia Britannica describes a different planet, really. It was published in MCMII, or 1902 for the Roman-numeral challenged. There's a lot of sound good sense in there, much of which appears to have been forgotten, or made impossible, in the intervening century:

"In ideal conditions the homes of the people, and especially the poor, must be in the country. Air, light, low rent, ground to till, and wholesome recreation for children can only be had by scattering the working population of a city into the surrounding country to sleep..."

-- Railways, Vol 32.

This was in support, essentially, of the idea of a good public transport network, an idea that Dublin is only reluctantly arriving at again.

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

The general lack of usefulness of careers guidance teachers has come up a lot in conversation recently. I know that the one we had in school was, while well-meaning, absolutely no use - it should, for instance, have been perfectly clear to anyone who looked at my academic record that I was more suited to arts than science, but she went along with the standard view of “intelligent boys should do science”. Although, being honest, she was a nun, and had other priorities; the number of guys in my class who reported that they’d been told she believed they had a vocation was impressive.

But thinking about it, what the hell can they do? How do you determine what a 16 year old might be good at, when a sizeable fraction of the jobs potentially available at 22 don’t exist yet? “Game testing” is now a perfectly valid career path - I know three or four game testers - but anyone proposing that in the early 90s to a careers guidance teacher would have got a blank look, and from the better ones, a gentle reminder of reality.

The job I’m doing now did not exist at all when I was 16, and barely existed by the time I was 19. I’ve been around for the invention of it, essentially. Most of my friends work in jobs that similarly did not exist. Careers guidance teachers did not know terms like “systems administration” in the 90s, “computer programmer” was barely on the horizon in their terms.

And it’s not just my techie friends, either. I can see a guy right now through the office window who’s cleaning the stonework with a very high-tech looking steam gun. He looks like he’s enjoying his work. Given that he’s driving a very shiny black SUV, with a registration plate from this year, I’m thinking he’s doing pretty well too. But I’ll bet his careers guidance teacher did not say “steam-cleaning stonework for corporate buildings, son, it’s a licence to print money”.

Go back another ten years, and the default assumption was that most of us would do the same jobs as our parents. I went to school with kids who lived on farms that their families had owned and worked on for four generations. The concept that any of them might not be farmers was both alien and unwelcome. There were a few non-farming families; instead, they’d been shopkeepers, steel cutters, or carpenters for similar lengths of time.

So, given that by the time the kids currently coming out of 2nd level education get into employment, the jobs they are doing will be things like “search refinement engineer” or “nanotechnology compensator”, or “bioinformatics controller”, or whatever, how can careers guidance counsellors possibly do anything useful? No wonder they’re all bitter.

And yet you can’t just get rid of them - kids need some guidance about college courses, or they’ll end up opting for an easy course in whatever college their best friend is going to. So… how do you offer careers guidance these days?

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

Something that I see over and over again is a confusion regarding descending date pagination. That is, when you have the newest item in some particular context at the top of the page, with older ones further down. Like most blogs, for instance. But when you get to the bottom, of, say, your last 20 posts, and you want to give a link to another set, the 20 you posted before them. Are they “next”, as in next page? Or “previous”, as in previously posted? You can argue either, and I’ve seen both in steady use. Try as I might, none of the design principles I’m aware of can guide me on this one. Anyone got any solid ideas on which is better?

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

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for SnapNames‘ Most Active Live Auctions email. Basically, this service emails me every day around noon, with a list of domain names that are being bid on in SnapNames’ system. It’s fascinating. There are names in there that were plainly grabbed on speculation, names that could only belong to real companies that have gone out of business, and just plain odd stuff.

sniffmagazine.com, for instance, is currently available. These are two English words stuck together; an awful lot of domains are formed that way. You could do a very fine blog about perfume, BPAL, or scratch-and-sniff technology on that domain. Perfume advertising is big business, so you’d have no problem monetising it. A nice modern design, some swirls and patterned backgrounds in the latest web styles, and you’d be off at a run.

Likewise, anglerandarcher.com is available. If I was rich, I’d buy that for my father, because it matches his interests very nicely, and it’s a great domain name. An outdoor sports blog could do very nicely indeed off that, and there are lots of affiliate things you could work in to cover your costs.

And then there’s gangofneon.com. That’s begging to be an EVE Corporation site, or maybe a Shadowrun campaign. Or maybe a flickr/Google Maps mashup concerning neon signs in South-East Asia. I’ve had a notion for years about a blog of photographs of Dublin street ironwork. You know, the covers over sewers and utility maintenance thingmajgits. They say things on them like “Hammond Lane, 1888″, or “Brewster and Major Ironworks”.

s-i-n.net is good to go. Ideas for that one shouldn’t be hard to come by; I’d envision a webcomic about heaven and hell, but maybe that’s the Sinfest influence. Or possibly there are goth cheerleading groups out there who could make use of it. Or maybe we should snag it as a promo site for Graylion.net…

Here are the answers to my questions of last week.

( Answer Unclear, Try Again Later )

Alright. There are a bunch of posts wandering around containing "common knowledge" questions about various countries. These appear to have originated somewhere in the black morass that is fanfic-meta-fandom. A lot of people appear to be missing the point. The point goes like this: each person's experience of any place is subjective. I've read some of the ones about Ireland, and I'm amused, though not surprised, that they don't describe the Ireland I know, or knew growing up. Nor, in many cases, could I answer the questions being asked.

I don't live in Ireland anymore; I happen to reside in Dublin, which isn't the Ireland I grew up in, and further, I live in a world of my own creation and commute to work on a global network of computers. Here, however, is my set of "common knowledge" questions, from where I was brought up, Protestant in north Wexford in the 80s and 90s.

( Wild Wild South East )

Many of those are questions to which not knowing the answer would have been embarrassing. In some cases, mortifying.

I'm sometimes a little bemused by how book distribution works in this country. I've been keeping an eye out since the publication date in all Dublin's major bookshops for the paperback of Kim Stanley Robinson's Sixty Days and Counting. And there's been no sign of it. And then the ever-wonderful inannajones, even while exhausted and overworked, spotted it in a bookshop in Galway and brought it back for me. I am very pleased, and you can expect to see my style of writing drift over toward KSR's clipped stream of consciousness over the next few days as I assimilate this latest, and possibly reread this whole trilogy.

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

We’ve some server down time in work, so I’m clearing off tabs I’ve had open for a while, meaning to record them someplace.

I have Design Melt Down on my sidebar, but I’d like to draw your attention to it now as well - it’s a site that looks for trends in web design. There’s some fascinating stuff there; I’m particularly enamoured of the Ornate Backgrounds.

Serious Eats is a well-designed, well-written food blog, focussed on New York. Quite apart from its content, I really like the design and layout - the multi-column, content-filled footer fascinates me, and makes me want to rip apart several of my sites and redesign them. In fact, I might just do that…

open_design pointed out that a writing sample might help convince people that I can string enough words together to produce something useful.

So here we go: Nebbish's Demon.

For those of you who didn't like the pricing structure I suggested, what would you like?

A point I didn't make clear is that if I turn out to be unable for one reason or another to finish the novel, or provide significant progress, in a reasonable time, everyone will get their money back. The actual metrics for that are subject to discussion with the Tier 3 people and voting by the rest, but I'm thinking that producing, say, eighty thousand plus words, deemed by the patrons at large to be halfway decent, inside a year, would be a useful measure.

(Part of my brain says, "Hah! I can churn out 40k words in a month!", and another part is going "You're mad. Bedbug. Hatter. Insane." We'll find out who's right, I suppose.)

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

I borrowed a book from the library a few weeks ago, called Getting Things Done. I’ve been poking at a few of these marketing / business / management / organisation books lately, because I’m pretty certain my use of time hasn’t been what it could be.

This book has blown me away. It’s got some very simple principles, no corporate gibberish, no affirmations, and completely dodges the “prioritising” bullet in favour of context.

The basic idea is that people have difficulty getting things done because they have too much in their heads. You sit down to answer an email, and find you need to research something, which means you have to ask someone, which means you have to send them an email, and then you see another email reminding you of a meeting, and all the while you’re aware of another project that you’ve done nothing on, and the need to buy milk on the way home.

The simple solution is to get everything out of your head and onto a very simple system of tracking things that need attention. This centres around making a great whacking list of projects, working out what the next action is on any given project, doing it if it’s short and easy, or putting it on a contextual list otherwise. The contextual lists could include things like “Near phone”, “Near computer”, “Things to buy”, and so on.

The idea is that once you have everything you need to attend to in some sort of trusted system, where you’ll be reminded of it at the right time, you can get down to what you’re doing in the moment without wasting RAM, as it were, on irrelevant things. If something does come to mind, you put it in the appropriate place in the system and go back to your current task.

The effect is rather stunning. I don’t have a huge amount of stuff to manage with this in work; we have an excellent project manager who makes sure we don’t have to bother with anything other than the task in hand, but I have a good-sized pile of projects at home. 78, actually, at the moment. The difference it has made to have these out of my head is absolutely huge, and I’m getting things done at a rate of about three times as many per day as I was before, with more time to kick back at the end of it.
So yeah. Huge recommendation for Getting Things Done.

(Wikipedia,  Author’s Site)

Has anyone out there any recommendations for a device which:

(1) I can take notes on, preferably via a small keyboard or some easy-to-use stylus thing?
(2) Can play MP3s to earphones?
(3) Has a decent battery life?
(4) Will not cost more than a finger or two?

It does not have to be able to do wifi, email, web-browsing, etc. I do need to be able to transfer data from it to a PC very easily - something with a cradle and auto-synching of some kind would be ideal.

Anyone who plays World of Warcraft, or even knows someone who does, please be aware of this scam, which I received in email earlier today.

I have just archived everything in my gmail inbox. I have notes to contact a few people about a few topics, but the actual inbox is clear, for the first time in months. If anyone is waiting on a response from me about something, or otherwise wants some piece of my online attention, now would be a really good time to mail me, or comment here, and let me know.

(This post brought to you by newfound enthusiasm for David Allen's Getting Things Done.)

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

I’ve had this conversation a few times recently with various people, and I figured I’d get it written down. I don’t like podcasts. This is not because I have some concealed Luddite tendencies, nor because I’m looking for something popular to dislike and be controversial over.

Putting it simply, podcasts are slow, irritating, and inconvenient - a step backward from the efficiency of text. No, I don’t like radio either.

Slow: I can read way faster than anyone can talk. I can read the transcript of a podcast in less than a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it, and that assumes the speakers aren’t stopping to hem, haw and um their way through a conversation. My time is valuable to me - give me the transcript.

Irritating: With at least one podcast I listened to a while back - and this was a twenty-something Irish male - if you removed the word “like” from the stream, it would have been about half as long. Other accents can be difficult to understand, or just plain unpleasant, and people who are perfectly well able to express themselves in text end up incomprehensible in speech. Sound quality isn’t always what it might be, and having to listen very carefully to make out what someone is saying is, well, an irritation.

Inconvenient: First, I have to get the podcasts onto some piece of equipment where I can hear them. Since listening to voice takes a huge amount of my attention, I can’t do that in work, and I usually have better things to do at home, so it has to be something portable. I have a small MP3 player, but the rigmarole of downloading the file and transferring it to the player and so on is tiresome. Then, unless I actually am concentrating all the time, I miss bits. I can’t just look back up the page; I have to rewind a bit, and hope I got the right spot. Neither can I easily flick forward through the bits I’m not interested in. “45 minutes in” is no use unless I can see a timer, and my MP3 player doesn’t have one. For that matter, finding 45 minutes in on Winamp involves messing with a slider.

So, in essence: give me writing, dammit. Sound is for conversation and music.

When you're lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about the kinds of economic activity you'd get if squirrels were sentient (nut indexes? hoarding as a normal economic behaviour?), it's time to get up and blog about it.

I have no idea what drives my occasional insomnia. I'll be perfectly comfortable in bed, tired, on the verge of sleeping, and something clicks over in the brain and boom! I'm as awake as I'd be in mid-evening, which is usually as good as it gets. So I'm up, eating crunchy organic peanut butter on toast and peering at the internets.

It's been a good weekend. inannajones was working on Saturday, so I got up when she did, poked the internet until it became clear that it wasn't going to do anything entertaining, and went out in search of things to cook, after doing some housekeeping bits that needed doing. I had a vague idea that sausagemeat would be a good foundation for a pie-filling, and so tried a few butchers. "No," said the pork specialist on Camden Street, "we don't have it, but you could do that with stuffing. I've some good stuffing here." So I bought stuffing, and also some pork chops, smoked bacon (excellent smoked bacon, I might add), and then meandered around the Camden Street area acquiring carrots, potatoes, beans, and Jusrol pastry. And I found that one of our local Middle Eastern shops stocks jalebis. And all the while I was reading while walking - which I can manage perfectly well, and do a lot of - Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below, which is rather excellent. Some of it pleased me so much that I came home and quoted it on my Winter Blog, and then inannajones called to say "Bull Island".

So I threw a frisbee and some jalebis in my bag, and went to catch a bus to Drumcondra, to meet inannajones where she works, and get a short tour of the place. It's a gorgeous old theological college, with a campus that has lots of green, and indoor areas that have lots of wood. We drove across to olethros house, and walked down to the beach on Bull Island, and drew things in the sand, and talked about gaming and the internet and other important topics, and watched kite fliers and kite surfers, and then got fish and chips on the way back. And then an evening at home in front of the computers, where the internet did indeed provide some entertainment.

Sunday morning, I woke up snuffly and sore-throated, and unable to stay lying down comfortably. So I got up and flew a few missions in EVE and then started the process of pie-making. That took some time, and when inannajones got up, I split off some of the smoked bacon for breakfast and we made coffee. And when the pie came out of the oven in a satisfactory state, we went off to Bushy Park, parking the car nearby and going to wander around. The idea was to collect leaves, which I'd then use in collage things, but it started to rain while we were there. Soggy leaves are not good for collecting, and they're not in full colour yet anyway. So instead we walked in the rain, and talked about the Gods, and found and ate huge numbers of incredibly good blackberries.

We got back to the car just as the rain looked a bit like easing off, and decided that we'd hold off on going home and eating pie to wander southward a bit into Wicklow, and see if there were any useful spots for blackberry picking there. So we drove off under the M50 and around tiny steep windy roads, and stopped to walk and explore a bit near Tibradden, and then back in via Kilcullen and a traffic jam at Dundrum shopping centre. And then we got home, and ate pie, which was deemed good, and drank cider, which was also good, and spodded for the evening. I found fascinating blogs, and figure that Pirates of the Burning Sea is going to be my next game. And then bed, and finally the squirrel economics, and now I'm here.

So I think some more reading about PotBS, and then another mission or two in EVE, and then maybe I can sleep.

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

There’s a story on SEOmoz at the moment, detailing how an “upper member of regional management” in a radio company told employees that:

if you want your page to show up in Google, you need to pay, say, $30 to be listed on maybe the 200th page, but you can increase your bid and show up on the 7th or 8th page, and you can pay even more to show up on the first page of results.

Good gods. And this guy’s company have a “partnership with Google”. Now, chances are, given this guy’s comprehension of how search engines work, that the partnership consists of carrying Adsense ads on the company website, but even so… the level of sheer misunderstanding that’s in there is unbelievable.

I know, at some level, that this is one more manifestation of the news-reporters-know-nothing-about-my-area phenomenon. This is the one where, when there’s a news report on your area of expertise, you cringe and shout at the TV, “that’s not how it is, you idiots!”, but then in the next report, they’re talking about someone else’s area, and you’re going, “well, it’s on the news, it must be true”.

The thing that bugs me is that if this guy - and the newsreader - can get things so utterly wrong about areas they’re not familiar enough with, it follows that I must be, on a near daily basis, producing statements that are so far from being accurate that they’re out of sight. And I don’t know. I try hard to be accurate in everything I say. So, uh, if I’m spouting bullshit on something (aside from the times I’m winding someone up, mind, in which case you’ll just spoil the joke), could you do me a favour and call me on it?

inannajones has already posted a narrative account, as it were, of the surprise trip to Edinburgh for my 30th birthday. So I'm going to skip merrily through and pick out a few highlights instead.
( Where are we going? )
( OMG Suite )
( Conspirators )
( Pub! )
( Shops! )
( Whisky! )
( Dinner at the Witchery )
And all weekend, I had this slightly stunned, terribly happy feeling. Enormous thanks to inannajones for arranging it, and managing to keep it secret, and to everyone who turned up, or couldn't turn up, or sent birthday wishes by any medium at all. I'm still not too coherent about the whole thing...

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

There’s a BBC report about the Amazon Mechanical Turk effort to find Steve Fosset’s missing plane from satellite imagery. One of the bits of information in it is a bit mind-boggling:

The search in Nevada by the Civil Air Patrol and many private pilots has discovered six previously unknown wrecks - some of which were decades old.

This is a part of one of the most completely mapped, intensively satellite-covered countries in the world. Further, a lot of it’s desert - rock and mountain, not much in the way of trees to conceal a crash, or water to crash into and sink. One plane taking days to locate is bizarre enough, but to find six others that nobody knew about in the process? Were they ones that were searched for before and not found, or are there planes falling from interdimensional rifts over Nevada?

EDIT: A bit more information on the other wrecks.

inannajones has arranged something for my birthday. So far, it has included my taking today off, having a very fine breakfast in Hobarts, and packing a bag which includes the necessities for two nights away, including my suit. I still have no idea what we're doing, where we're going, and which bits of these arrangements are distraction and which are necessary.

I suspect some of you people of knowing what's going on. grutok in particular, because he enquired what I was doing this weekend. He disguised it as a possibility of my coming over to help with DIY stuff, but I know him well enough by now to know that that's either something he sorts out weeks in advance, or calls about at the last minute. One week in advance is suspicious.

A further two of you have nothing marked in Google Calendar this weekend, and you usually do. And you know well I can see it.

I'll post when I can, assuming we're not going camel-trekking in Mongolia. But if ye don't hear from me for a few days, assume I'm enjoying myself immensely or recovering.

I am very definitely a candidate for World's Worst Photographer. But inspired by frostious, I'm willing to give this thing a go.

Ask me to take pictures of any aspect of my life that you're interested in/curious about - it can be anything from my favorite shirt to my cell phone. Leave your requests as a comment to this entry, I'll snap the pictures and post them tomorrow sometime. It's like a glimpse into my world!

Requests from players for pictures of my campaign notes will be treated as they deserve.

EDIT: Where "tomorrow" is a nebulous term involving chunks of next week.

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

There’s a lot of talk across the ‘net in the last couple of weeks concerning Facebook. An article from Read/WriteWeb, Is Facebook worth the hype? queries, well, just that.

I’ve been using Facebook for about a week now. I’ve made contact with people I hadn’t heard from in over ten years. Some of my less technically-minded older friends are using it with as much enthusiasm as the kids who can’t remember not having email.

The Read/WriteWeb article essentially questions two things; the stickiness of Facebook and the monetisation.  It notes that (according to the people who run MySpace) MySpace handily beats all comers in nearly every metric: visitors, page views, stickiness, etc.

What’s stickiness? AdServer Solutions says it’s “A performance metric based on the ability of a web site to hold a visitor’s attention. A web site’s stickiness is average duration per user session or per unique visitor.”

MySpace is “sticky” in those terms precisely because it’s badly designed, badly put together, and hard to navigate. Most MySpace profiles look like they were ripped directly from GeoCities around 1997. You have to spend a long time on MySpace because getting to the information you want takes time. On Facebook, by contrast, the information you want is there on the homepage, and a few clicks gets you pretty much everything else necessary. Facebook’s design is better, cleaner, and more usable, and over time, that is going to make a difference.

As for monetisation, well… Facebook’s ad placement is, putting it kindly, sub-optimal. They’re currently using untargetted ads, placed low on the left-hand side of pages. Once they start to target ads based on what’s in user’s profiles (and why they’re not doing this already is a mystery to me), and place the things a bit better, their advertising benefits are going to rocket.

In my opinion, MySpace’s days are numbered, and Facebook will win out - at least until the next big thing.