Notes in the Margin

Recently I've noticed a that lot of my colleagues have become less helpful. It hasn't been a gradual change either. I think it's very probably linked to overall stress levels caused by increasing workload and increasing bureaucracy (or 'bullshit' as it's more commonly known). It's almost as if there's a threshold of stress beyond which attitudes switch from "can do" to "can't do".

I think personally I reached that threshold quite some time ago. When the emails arrive with the next level of bull my immediate reaction is anger and 'how can I prevent this from happening?'. Can't do, all the way.

But boy is it cold. We set the alarm and got up early today. Not usual behaviour for a Sunday. Our objective was to catch the sunrise from Danby Beacon (some high ground up on the North Yorkshire Moors, near to where we live). It wasn't much of a sunrise, unfortunately. This is probably my best shot.

The temperature up on the Beacon was around 3 degrees. Cold enough. Given the very mild conditions we've been having this felt very cold. Quite a warm picture though.

There's a lot of sport on TV at the moment so I've decided to get involved. My 'sport' is armchair based and it's called "The QVC Turing Test".
A Turing test is something conceived by Alan Turing, and it's supposed to be a way of detecting intelligence. The way it goes is that the test subject is in a room and you communicate with it via a keyboard and screen. You ask it questions and, depending on the responses, you can work out if the subject is an warm, intelligent, living human being or a cold, programmed, machine.

We were avoiding soaps and sport today and flicked the TV on to QVC, where they were having a 'sound and vision event'. We've always enjoyed using the net to find out just how pricey the QVC 'slashed' prices really are, and to have a smug laugh at the expense of QVC customers. This time we saw a glaring typo in the details for a set of wireless speakers. They were described as "2.4Hz" instead of "2.4GHz". A simple error, I know, but an opening for a bit of fun.
Logging on to the QVC UK website we started a live chat with agent 'LisaK'. You should try it. There are clearly a set of 'stock responses' which the agents can choose, and it's equally clear that the agents are not well versed in the detail of the products on sale. After a few attempts to determine what the 2.4Hz meant in the product name (initial answer "2.4 Hertz" - thanks. Very helpful.) we finally got LisaK to explain that "2.4 is how powerful the frequency is". In response to our suggestion that this probably isn't what it means we received "It is the frequency power".
So, we didn't find out what 2.4Hz meant, but thanks to Alan Turing we have ample evidence to support the view that LisaK is in fact a Sinclair ZX80.

I know it isn't very nice. But it is fun. QVC baiting - try it for yourself.

I'm an academic. I know that sounds like either I'm introducing myself at a meeting of Academics Anonymous, or I'm claiming some kind of intellectual superiority, but it's neither. I want to talk about the ongoing pay dispute which you can read about here, or here, or here, or even here.
I'm an active trades unionist and I'm supporting my union by taking part in Action Short of Strike Action (ASOS). Ooops! What a give away. I guess now that I've come clean my employer can dock my pay, if they decide to do so. And, if things don't improve pretty soon, they will be forced to do so, whether they like it or not.
I work for a University which is taking a very moderate line, and local union activists such as myself are taking an equally moderate line in response. Both sides, locally, can see no sense in damaging what are very good local industrial relations. This is a National dispute and the power to take things forward towards a settlement does not lie with me and it does not lie with my Vice Chancellor. In a very real sense we are both front line troops, being directed from afar.
My University is willing and able to settle, but this is a national dispute and local settlements are to be avoided. In fact neither the University nor the local union want a local settlement as the national bargaining framework serves us both well. Or it did.
So we both sit back and wait for something to happen. Eventually we both know that the damage to our students will start to kick in and that the university will be forced to take some more definite action against staff who are not fulfilling their contracts. We don't want this to happen and they don't want this to happen. We don't want to damage students and they don't want to damage students (although possibly for very different reasons). The resulting damage to local industrial relations is likely to last for many years.
We are heading for a train wreck and we can't do a thing about it.

I've been looking around the various online communities that I'm aware of to see what's happening and to pick up any useful tips that are out there. I have to say that there's not a lot of innovation to be found (caveat: I haven't looked too far. Maybe you know better).
What I have noticed is the huge number of dormant blogs, stale personal pages, out of date bulletins, and empty forums. In fact in onlnie communities I see dead people everywhere I go.
This leads me to some interesting questions. Firstly, I wonder if there shouldn't be the means to kill content where the creator has clearly expired - perhaps even as a built-in feature of the application. I appreciate that one of the clear benefits of the online world is the ability to archive content, but I feel that explicit archiving must be better than the implicit archiving that we have now. To have our online worlds littered with dead content just makes it more difficult for users to find people to interact with.
My second question is about size. The scale of our online worlds is huge (probably because it can be), but is this what is needed? I have been in virtual worlds like those in the activeworlds universe where, apart from the initial entry point where people tend to cluster, I've wandered around exploring for hours without meeting another living soul. This is not community as I know it, or as I want it to be. Perhaps what we need to do is to limit the size of our online communities and force more users to cluster together in a limited range of places - subject focused blogs and galleries rather than personal ones; small 3D virtual worlds rather than huge tracts of empty space. With the correct search and selection tools it need not be any more difficult to find specific content in these shared public spaces.
We shouldn't be too hung up on the tools we currently use. We should strive to make it work better and throw out anything that doesn't fit the bill. Of course we will need to archive it all first ...

Ouch! I'm feeling sore at the moment. Like a whole lot of other people I have a tendancy to sprout odd little nodules of flesh from various parts of my body. It comes with age I guess. Of course the little buggers only grow where the skin is soft and smooth and doesn't get a lot of exposure to the elements. The Doctors call these things (in my case anyway) skin tags, and they're totally benign and harmless.

Sometimes one or two of these nodules start to become a problem when they catch on clothing or get damaged by friction. I have (or should I say 'had') a couple on my right inner thigh which bled when they got a severe rubbing on heavy jeans during a six mile walk. Wearing heavy jeans for a six mile walk - madness. Never again.

Anyway, I digress (a particular skill of mine, but let's not go into it now for obvious reasons). I decided to go to see my doctor and ask him to remove some of my skin tags. He booked me in for 'minor surgery' where he planned to harvest a crop of tags with his frightening electric cauterising tool - in other words he was going to burn them off. Nice.

Amazingly I didn't let this news put me off going - to be honest the raw ones were a bit sore and not getting much better. The appointed day and hour arrived and Vix and I attended the nurses room to wait for the Doc. Imagine the scene. Me lying on my back, legs akimbo, with doctor and nurse standing either side. The doc injects at the base of each tag with local anaesthetic (not nice, in fact not nice at all). Then they fire up the machine and it starts to heat up. It looks horrible. Best not to think about it.

Vix watched the whole thing. There were around twenty or more tags burned off in that session, from both inner thighs. The smell of burning flesh was particularly gruesome, and even with the injections it wasn't exactly painless. However, I later discovered that from my particular viewpoint I had it easy. Poor Vix had the dubious pleasure of smelling my flesh burning whilst watching each wince of pain on my face and the blood coursing down my thighs.

That was last Thursday. It's now Tuesday and I'm still sore. I don't think these particular tags will ever grow back. Here's hoping.

There have been many innovative uses of technology coming out of the world of Community Media on Teesside. Most of these can be found, initially at least, on the Neukol site. A recent innovation with exceptional promise is a experiment in collaborative creative writing as a way of dealing with 'issues' - in this case a problem of long term bullying and harassment at work.

The participants in this experiment (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent and, unfortunately, to protect the guilty too) have all found the experience cathartic. The subject matter is dealt with through humour and more than a little anger, and the world of their particular workplace has been transported to a mythical realm. Their work is called "Disposal of the Apprentices", or DotA for those in the know.

The technology being used is a Wiki, which 'is a type of website that allows users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing'. This definition comes from the excellent Wikipedia online collaboratively written and edited encyclopedia.

We are experimenting with some wiki implementations for deployment on the Neukol server, but for anonymous creations of this type we prefer to use third-party systems. DotA uses a third-party (but FREE) tool at PBWiki, which is Peanut Butter Wiki (their tagline is:

We've just had a close call with our technology. For an unknown reason all of our blog systems (and we run quite a few of them) stopped working yesterday and didn't come back online until this afternoon. We don't know why this happened, and we never will know why. I'm a technology person, but this lack of 'closure' doesn't feel right to me and it makes me nervous. After all, if it can happen once ....
There are other things about this which concern me. The Teesblog Guru, Steve, contacted our web server hosting company about the problem. He didn't have a happy time. We host through a UK Company and we rent a full dedicated server, managed by the Company. Our server is actually in Germany. When Steve talks to 'technical support' (unfortunately I have to use that term loosely), he's discovered that he's speaking to people in The Phillipines.
The quality of support is not good, and probably the biggest problem is the lack of communication about what is actually going on. Computer technicians are the new priesthood. They have their own language and their own exotic tools and machines. They have a great deal of power over the rest of us and don't tell us anything about how things work. We rely on them and our reliance is based on pure faith.
We had not made any changes to our blog systems. The server, and the database were clearly working fine (other applications were still 'up'). Just the blogs were down and they were down in a very odd way. The initial position taken by the 'support' staff is that we have done something wrong. Our scripts are to blame. When asked if they have made any changes to the system they deny it. We have absolutely no way of challenging this - not intellectually (as we have no way of gathering evidence of what they may have done), and not physically (as we have no way of contacting anybody who will listen to us).
The only way of contacting the support clergy is by telephone (0870 numbers) or by email. The Company has a registered address, but no published phone number - apart from the 0870 one. Escalating your support request is at the whim of the junior Phillipines based 'curate' who probably has some difficulty understanding geordie English. Very frustrating.
Given that we are paying for a service, we find this quite bizarre. When the service works it's fine, but when it goes wrong we get no service and precious little support. Being unable to escalate the problem through more experienced and competent clergy is a big problem. Never knowing what is going on is a bigger problem.
During Steves final call today he was told that as far as the curate was concerned our blogs were working fine. Steve checked, and sure enough they were. Just like that. No explanation given. In fact worse than no explanation, there was a definite implication that the support priesthood had in fact needed to do nothing. The problem was all in our heads. It's this lack of honesty that really bothers me.
If the support priests have made a mistake and screwed up our server configuration then why not just admit it? During our own testing I attempted to install a full brand new instance of our blogging system. The install failed. This proved to us that it could not have been us inadvertently disturbing every one of our installed instances, and it could not be external forces such as a malicious system hack. The new install failing could only mean a server problem. This problem mysteriously went away and our support 'service' claim to have done nothing. We have no evidence of anything that they did. They aren't telling us anything. It's all very unsatisfactory and leaves us feeling quite nervous.

Ever since I started working in education I've had a problem with Christmas.
My problem stems from what the uninformed majority call 'long holidays' and what are, in reality, gaps in the flow of banality that makes up a good bit of University life. The change of pace brought about by the departure of the student masses (trust me, these days student numbers are LARGE) coupled with the time off over Christmas gives people like me a period of three whole weeks of relative quiet and largely self-motivated activity.
By the time it ends I'm desperate for a return to normality, timetabled classes, scheduled meetings, and all of the associated stresses and strains.

We spent the actual Christmas weekend down with my in-laws in Derbyshire. Fun, but not home, and I'm turning into a bit of what my mum would call a 'home bird' (but I'm really not sure why she would call it that). I think one of my perpetual problems with Christmas is that I don't feel settled. Knowing that we will be down visiting the Derbyshire clan for some of the time, visiting my family around Durham for some more of the time, and at home for the rest, doesn't make for a particularly relaxing festive break. Of course not everything from work goes away completely either, so there are always going to be other stresses too. I work for some of my time with private sector organisations, and they don't have the same Christmas closure schedule as the University, and often expect me to be at the other end of the Internet when they need me.

Taken together all of these factors make Christmas a bit of a drag and an unsettling time for me and I'm always glad to get back to work full-time. I'm looking forward to the time when this is no longer the case. If it ever happens.

If you had asked me a fortnight ago what my views were on trashy 'gossip', 'true story' type of coffee time magazines (such as 'Take a Break' and many many more in the same gutter press vein) you can probably guess by now my response. I've never been much good at building up the suspense.
Well those views have altered just a bit now. A magazine of that type (I almost said 'class' but that would have been a slip of the keyboard) found some of my pictures online and approached me for permission to use one in an article. They're later decided to use two and they are even paying me for them.
I have always believed that these magazines do have a place in the broad spectrum of intellectual stimulation available for readers (and those who merely look at the (exquisite) pictures). Now I'm getting my name in one.
I wonder how many of my freinds, colleagues, and aquaintances will notice?

Have my views changed? A little bit. I still see this type of publication as trash (don't ask me about the story in which my pictures will appear, you really don't want to know). I still have no intention of ever buying one (although I'll probably keep the complimentary one they send me with my pics in it). It is contact with staff from the magazine has changed my views. The person I spoke with, and exchanged emails with, was nice, friendly, and professional. Doing a job, and meeting a need. And deserving of my respect for that.

The Sony BMG 'rootkit' story (see the previous posting) has escalated. Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have started civil proceedings against them (and their software writers) and a lot more bad publicity is likely. Part of the lawsuit refers to 'unreasonable' terms in the EULA - that's the End User License Agreement. All software these days comes with one of these and you are supposed to read every word and be comfortable with the terms and conditions before you open the package / click through to the download page.
Now I've been around computers at home and in my career for more than 25 years and I consider myself to be better informed than the average citizen where it comes to things legal, but I have to admit that I have never read through an entire EULA. The thing is, if you want to use the software (need to use the software) then you pretty much have to agree to whatever the software company have put into the EULA. Regular readers (they do exist - honest) will know that I'm a keen supporter of open source software, but when you buy a product (like a music CD) which has embedded or otherwise supplied software then you would be daft not to use it even if open source is your thing.
The 'unreasonable' terms in question in this particular case include one that requires you to delete any digital copies of music if you lose the original CD through, say, a burglary. The argument would appear to be that since you've lost the CD, the digital hard disk copy (MP3 or whatever) can no longer be deemed to be a legitimate back-up. So by the terms of the EULA you have to delete it. This is plain daft. If I buy the CD and get the right to listen to the music and make my legitimate back-up, then why should some burglar who steals my CD be able to assume those rights for themselves? Mad.
I'm glad that EFF and others are taking legal action in an attempt to stop the software bullies, and I'm glad that there's a supportive community of Internet users out there who are prepared to read the small print for me.

I've gone and bought a digital audio player (DAP). Most uninformed people would describe it as an MP3 player but I don't go for MP3 as a format, preferring the open source Ogg Vorbis format. Audio file format snob I would hear you say, if that wasn't such a daft thing for anyone to say.

My DAP is a Cowon iAudio X5L with huge battery life and 20GB of hard disk. I ripped the majority of my CD collection and didn't even get close to filling half of this disk. I rip using the excellent Sound Juicer CD Ripper on Linux (my home PCs are Linux based - I would say that there's no Windows in my house if wasn't such a crap joke). The X5L supports MP3, WMA, ASF and WAV formats as well as Ogg Vorbis and the lossless FLAC format. This is irrelevant really. You just pick a format and stick to it. My DAP also does video and pictures, although the screen is pretty small.

I had thought that I might stick to my (not very) old Sony minidisk player for portable music, but the lure of getting all of my music collection onto one device proved to be too much form me and I succumbed. It does mean that I now have two (yes, I know, it's daft to have two even if I'm using one of them) redundant minidisk players. Nice technology too. Not as nice as my shiny new DAP though. It's amazing how us technophiles make shiny hi-tech baubles redundant in double quick time. Vix is worse than me though. Gadget woman.

Having the DAP and ripping CDs (legally - I bought all of them) has made me look more into the copy protection technologies that some manufacturers are using. Sony BMG are in particularly hot water over one of their finest hours (not). I have a protected disk myself (Flickering Flame Vol 1 - Roger Waters). Total pain. It will not play at all on any PC, so it can't be ripped except by playing the music into a recorder with the associated loss of quality. I don't know why I should be prevented from using content that I've legally purchased in any way I wish to use it. It just seems wrong.

Anyway, now I've got the shiny black thing attached to my head at every possible moment and I'm enjoying revisiting albums that I probably would have kept leaving on the shelf, just like I have been for some time now. Albums such as Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno, which I listened to at the airport (where else) only yesterday. It's definitely worth getting a DAP with the capacity to hold everything you've got. Try it. It's liberating.

I'm back. Don't know how long for though. Things have been very busy over the summer, with lots of activity in the world of Teesside Community Media. Involvement in all of these fun things has left me with no time for my personal blog. Or has it?

It occurs to me that I could easily have moved over to an anonymous blog. How would you know? I haven't, but I could just be saying that :-) I've been wondering if anonymous blogging might not be more fun. There a certainly a few people I could have a legitimate go at without fear of retribution. I could share a few opinions that would get me into hot water here in real space. I could even change my entire personality and become somebody else.

It might be quite liberating.

I may have done it already. Of course I couldn't tell you about it if I had.

With all of the good weather we're having at the moment (OK, GREAT weather) we decided it would be a shame to waste it and headed off down to the beach after work yesterday. Sandsend was quite busy. Obviously a lot of people having the same idea nd taking an evening stroll. One couple were even having a barbecue on the beach.

We opted for a paddle (the cold North Sea is good for my still swollen left leg) and a go at flying Vicky's 1.2m kite. The breeze was stiff so the kite flying was quite easy, although we had to be very careful about where it landed as it comes down with a hell of a thump. Not recommended for use in crowds.

The only problem was that the orientation of the beach, wind direction and time of day left us flying the kite while looking directly into the sun. My cool designer shades don't wrap around so I was left with one eye closed and streaming within seconds. Flying the kite one-eyed was tricky, but I didn't kill anyone.