Inchoate

An observation on self-mapping

Posted in: Drivel

Let's say you wanted to find out where a place was in the global or regional scheme of things. You're part of a community and folks volunteer their whereabouts and wanna know where they are. How far, what would it cost to travel and hang out, basic stuff like that. For argument's sake let's say you wanted to find out where County Tyrone is. I know a priori it's in Ireland. How would you do it? Of course, you'd probably lean on your favorite search engine, or if you were particularly savvy their map product. But even that probably wouldn't help as gmaps is regionalized and doesn't yet "do" Ireland too well.

But that's besides the point. The point is, when people make websites about themselves they often miss their own position in their regional or even global context. Pick a random place that's not a whole country (because Google Maps does that quite well; make it harder!) and try to get a sense of where it is, e.g. Bracknell Forest. Often you'll end up with a bunch of maps of the immediate area with absolutely no sense of where it is in its country or even the world.

It's incredibly frustrating. So it got me thinking why is this? And is it any insight into who we are at this moment in time, or as a species?

Ken Wilbur talks about levels of awareness from self to tribe to region to global consciousness, how actions and behaviors impact on others within that catchment. Landmark are another group who of all the people I've interacted with over the years seem to have this spiralling-out awareness of how we can affect our environment. Evolution of society and culture seems to proceed out through these spirals encompassing increasingly wider scope at the same time subsuming the inner spirals (this is the genius of spiral dynamics, that perception of our universe consists of viewing concepts as being whole and complete by themselves yet containing and being contained by others in that universe. For example, an atom contains quarks while being contained by molecules, but an atom is something on its own without being "subjugated" or necessarily categorised in a hierarchy).

So my takeaway from my lack of success in finding how regions are located within the world suggests first off people aren't too concerned about the world beyond their immediate borders, unless those on the other side of the border are particularly troublesome. (If you are inclined, check out the Slovenian coastline and ponder what the Croatians and Italians are up to. Yeah, you're still in Europe. Have fun.)

But also the tools to express any awareness are not particularly well understood either. Gmaps covers the world but in varying degrees. I am a great believer in tools enabling folks to consider and deal with concepts much like words in language enable chunking of ideas. But.. what else is there? What's the gap between local and global awareness? Why do some folks care about this and others not?

Where's the gap?

Cool new UK phone number

Posted in: Drivel

Thanks to a tip-off from Marta I snagged a SkypeIn number that fronts as, costs the same as, and is otherwise identical to a native Greater London landline +44 20 ... Dialling it connects you to my Mac in Dublin that's running Skype and I even get to see caller-id. Neat. What's really groovy though is that you can pick your own digits so long as they're in Skype's bank of available numbers. So my new phone ends in 7265 which spells PAUL. For the 2600 k1ddies, the number also contains the digits 1337. $\/\/33+!

One year anniversary

Posted in: Drivel

This time last year I was in hospital with two feet looking much like this,

That'll learn ya to go climbin' up the side a' houses after sluggin' 40s ya stoopid dumb shit!

One month in hospital, few months in a wheelchair, and since then gradually being in less and less pain walking. I can pretty much walk like a pro these days although it is still uncomfortable. Which sucks. Walking's a pretty basic activity, as is getting out of bed (although I don't do that so much these days) and being in pain the whole time is irritating. Still it's getting gradually better but I'm definitely into the long tail of recovery.

On the plus side, I can do about everything else again, even "running" very short distances. So, if you've got a calcaneal fracture it ain't

I heard from someone that after a neurological trauma learning to walk is the second last thing people manage - it's really pretty difficult. The first? Brushing your teeth.

Some heavy stuff

Posted in: Drivel, Food, Google, Sport

Whoa. According to the gym scales here I weigh 84kg / 186lb / 13st 3lb. This is the heaviest I've been in my life, and that was when I was training and eating like a freak at Gold's in California in '01-'02 (and I definitely don't have the body I did then). I haven't really done any aerobic work since my accident last year, and no strength work for a few months. Coupled with the free & decent food in google.ie this weight gain is looking like it has some solid foundations...

The food here in Google Mountain View is exceedingly good. It's mid-range restaurant quality, sometimes better, and there's a strong emphasis on using organic produce. The cartons you can use to take food away are recycled cardboard. I've come away from meal times feeling stuffed, which is very rare as apart from the occasional fried breakfast in London I tend to eat small meals.

So combined with the gym here and free, excellent meals I think I'll train for size & strength and leave the slimming to somewhere where the food's not as good :-) Ireland, for example.

As a random aside, I dropped by a local supplements shop and I was reminded the stuff you can buy in America is pretty amazing: over the counter hormones, powerful stimulants, and a range of "ordinary" supplements that boggles the mind. I stuck to a tub of blended protein and some glutamine (a particularly "good" protein). Leave the endocrine experiments to the freaks...

Happy St Paddy's Day!

Posted in: Drivel

Segway: actually pretty neat

Posted in: Drivel

I remember having two reactions to the Segway shipping, after all its hype. First was "wow, that's really technically impressive". Having a computer balance like that is seriously neat, and from an engineering perspective quite an accomplishment. The other was a sort of disappointment in a sense because I had a feeling it wouldn't catch on even though I wanted it to. They're really expensive. It's quite rare to meet people who've even tried one.

So there's one as an office toy here, on the secretive fourth floor. And after mucking around with it I'm even more impressed. It's one of those experiences where the real life physical experience goes way beyond the intellectual understanding of it. Also, it goes alarmingly fast. 12.5mph is not particularly fast on a bike, but when you're standing on it and can get up to that speed in almost no time, in an office, it's ... fun :-) I don't think I'm breaching any Google confidentiality by revealing there's a waaay dented metal plant pot on one of the back straights, er, office corridors.

One of the engineers here is rumoured to have hacked the starter key to release its speed restriction beyond the three factory settings. The plant pots and photocopier no doubt aren't delighted to hear this...

I love it when a plan comes together

Posted in: Drivel

Spent 13hrs straight packing the house yesterday with the help of Sophie March, the Order Restorer, and Dom Pannell. Dom was (and is!) an absolute star, arriving before 9am and leaving after 9pm.

Nearly 60 medium to large size boxes. Where did it all come from?! And more to the point, where's it all going? :-)

Plane flight was a little close for comfort, and had to empty one of my suitcases as it was too heavy. Not the case that I could just pay an extra fee, it was simply deemed too heavy for the personnel to lift! 36kg.

So as I write this, I'm sitting in the Gasworks, a new development adjacent to Google, snarfing a wireless connection from one of the apartments (node name, "NETGEAR", haha). Oh, and I have to be in reception in a few minutes so best go...

Valentine's in Paris

Posted in: Drivel

After coincidences in both location (Paris) and timing (Valentine's Day) I booked a trip to hang out with Karen as she's touring around Europe watching her nephew race karts.

Rows upon rows of two-person tables filling every terrasse, coy newly-minted couples looking anxious to those in adoring mutually-gazing relationships. It was disturbingly like a production line, the sheer number of couples in rows spookily reminiscent of scenes of the aliens harvesting humans' energy in The Matrix.

The day was spent mostly wandering around various sites, chatting, eating, and drinking. A thoroughly enjoyable time in great company. I turned out easily a day's work during the six hours back & forth on the Eurostar too. It's astonishing what more can be done without a network connection :-)

Apart from the aforementioned Love Factory, we could see virtually no commercialism of Valentine's Day at all in Paris. Almost to the extent that we were wondering if it were actually celebrated here, as though V Day was an English speaking-only phenomenon. This is probably a saddening reflection of how much these events are hijacked by corporate marketeers in the US and UK.

I stayed at Le Grand Hotel (at a heavily discounted rate; thanks guys!). It was absolutely bloody amazing, opulence on a grand and absurd scale, only fractionally let down by having to actually pay for a network connection. It was free in the lobby at The Westin (where Karen was staying).

One final scene that sticks in my mind as a sign of the times was watching a tour boat pass under the bridge by Notre Dame. As the cathedral came into view a sea of little LCDs lit up in parallel the dim shadows around the boat, the soft glow of several dozen digital cameras reporting on their owners' soon-to-be masterpiece.

Somehow I managed to forget my camera but will like to K's when they're online.

Google & Gillette

Posted in: Drivel

I've just learnt (ok, been told, and not bothered to look it up since its only mention here is as a lead-in to the main guts of this blog, but anyway...) that Google & Gillette were voted best places to work for. This got me thinking of an old The Onion story, one of their, IMO, best: Fuck everything, we're doing five blades. Fantastic!

Funny fare

Posted in: Drivel

Just booked a day (and night) in Paris on Valentine's Day and the fare came to £69. I dunno, I thought it was amusing...

10K Day

Posted in: Drivel

Emir came up with the idea of having a 10000th day party on your 10,000th day alive. A bit like a birthday but far less frequent, and much more decimal-centric.

Curious when mine was, since I knew it'd long since passed, I wrote a little calculator: find your 10K Day. If like me you're older than 27.5 you can check your 20K day. I don't think anyone's made it quite to 40K days...

Crazy dating

Posted in: Drivel

Couple of amusing stories about the quest for love (or lurrve).

``A parrot owner was alerted to his girlfriend's infidelity when his talkative pet let the cat out of the bag by squawking "I love you Gary".''

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4619764.stm
(Thanks Claire for that!)

This came up last month,

``MARSEILLES, France -- Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux spent weeks talking with a sensual woman on the Internet before arranging a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach -- and discovering that his
on-line sweetie of six months was his own mother!''

http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/news/wwn/20051209/113414040002.html

This one is staggering. Just mulling it over and how it would affect a family's dynamic blows my mind. Imagine what the father must think. Not a good one!

Paul

About paulm.com

Posted in: Drivel

A couple of years ago it occurred to me that one of the first pages I hit on finding an interesting website is its "about" page. Not always being the quickest on the uptake, it just occurred to me 'I'¹ don't have a specific "about" page. Thanks to the power of polyphasic sleep and procrastination of more important tasks (i.e. all of them) I now do: about paulm.com.

---

¹ Since of course these days we are no more than our web pages.

London: officially even smaller

Posted in: Drivel

I've documented plenty of chance meetings and randomness in this city of seven million people. Here's another that I found quite spooky. I met up with Eva a couple of evenings ago and she texted me the address. It was my brother's in Victoria, except not quite. It was the flat above.

New juicer

Posted in: Drivel, Food

My new juicer arrived today after its holding period at a neighbour's house. It's fantastic!

Juicer!

I assembled it in a matter of seconds (here's how) and proceeded to juice pretty much the entire contents of my fridge. The 509's a masticating (literally "chewing") juicer as you can see by the big screw,

The masticating type are low friction and low heat-producing which apparently preserves the nutrients.

An extrusion of veg pulp oozes out the end in synchrony with the satisfying chewing sound. It's surprisingly quiet. The amount of juice that comes out is not huge, but damn it's rich & tasty. The tubes of pulp look strange, I definitely need to get a pic up. Out of curiosity I boiled some water and cooked up the pulp - making an entirely pleasant pint of brothed veggies.

The whole thing cleaned up quite quickly too. This is the aspect I was most worried about, without equipment that's easy to clean it's hard to muster the continued motivation to actually use it.

And it makes pasta, sausages, and sorbet too...

London: world's most expensive city

Posted in: Drivel

Google made me an offer, and part of that discussion included a link to a comparison of the cost-of-living in major cities. It's based on a basket of goods typical of Western consumer habits (see also purchasing power parity). London's markedly more expensive than even the second place city, Oslo. Dublin, one of Google's homes, is broadly similar to Zurich and Paris. Some surprises for me were Brussels and Sydney, both a quarter less than the Zurich benchmark! I thought they'd be much pricier. What's perhaps even more amazing is that you can live on a quarter of what you would in London, in major cities in Eastern Europe. Wonder how long that'll last...

A job offer!

Posted in: Drivel

Seems like they're in the air right now... Got a call, yes a phone call, from a guy in Nigeria who "could use my expertise down [t]here". I would really like to go and do some IT work in a developing country; it feels like I would probably make more of a difference, say, getting some school networked with a linux system than any amount of small-pond projects in the UK.

What's sad is that Nigeria has such a reputation for fraud, kidnapping, and death that I would never ever get involved in a randomly solicited offer like that. There's just far, far too much risk :-(

Skating again

Posted in: Drivel

Somehow I've managed not to skate since my accident but tonight I was invited to a local-ish ice rink in Queensway. It was surprisingly un-packed despite all of London seemingly crammed with (I'm guessing) Christmas traffic. I used the rink's hire skates. And therein was the problem - they were so unbelievably painful I had to come off after about ten minutes. The reception rather graciously gave me my money back. I'm not yet sure whether this pain is down to disfigured feet or awful plastic boots. Nonetheless it was quite fun skating about on ice, something I haven't done for years (a brief ice crash at Santacon 2003 doesn't count).

After that we headed back and ate half a tray of Ferrero Rocher. It's a playboy lifestyle but someone has to live it...

In other news a certain search engine company reported my interview scores were "good", and now want references.

Fashion show

Posted in: Drivel

So tonight I went to my first catwalk fashion show, after being kindly invited by photographic ace and friend, Tom. The show was at the ever-fab V&A for a menswear collection by Ozwald Boateng, so parading back and forth the catwalk were quite the most tall, pouty, high cheek-boned, preternaturally beautiful guys I've ever seen. I bet they're a nightmare. Actually they didn't seem to be at all; rather, quite friendly & personable. I walked up to a group of them at the end and, craning my neck, asked about their moods and expressions: were they told to be like that? Did they have to saunter and swagger on cue? Was looking bored a consequence or decision? The answer: yes, the designer prompts them for a particular vibe, this time a little attitude but not to be centre stage. This made total sense as Ozwald himself came on at the end and was quite obviously all about soaking up the limelight.

With all this work on now I hardly go out much these days (er, besides to Sweden, Bali, Vienna, Brighton, Leeds, ...) so it was cool to bump into another friend Rita I haven't seen in a while. "It's a small London." I saw a couple of other people in the crowd who I think were Cambridge, ex-Kings even. Memory's going...

Unmanageable email

Posted in: Drivel

I've whinged about this before but still struggling with email... I've recently acquired an extremely sexy new Mac laptop and been playing with Apple Mail, lured by the promise of full text indexing of all my mail. The truth is, it just can't cope. The best minds of Cupertino haven't yet written a mail client that'll deal with 5.1GB of email. That's right, I have the equivalent of two full Gmail accounts.

I've fired up the new v1.5 Thunderbird and it's a relief after Apple Mail: responsive, does what I expect, checks folders quickly, searches adequately fast, has an interface that I can drive off the keyboard. It's not that Apple Mail's bad it's just so goddam slow. There's some truly bizarre aspects to Mail too, like not being able to filter on unread messages, and switching a message from marked read/unread is a three key chord rather than a single keystroke. It doesn't feel like Apple have dogfooded this product too much, or maybe I just like a different flavour.

Anyway, I've spent six hours reading & replying to old emails and shuffling stuff about with Tbird's decent filtering system so am down over a 1,000 messages unread now. If I haven't replied, please just, er, email me :)

Zombie eyes

Posted in: Drivel

So were one to go to another country to see a festival with lots of fancy robots one might expect to report on that. Well, instead here's a technique to make yourself look freaky with a digital camera.

It's quite straightforward: persuade your camera to take a long exposure shot, e.g. no flash in a relatively low light environment. On my mid-range compact there's an option to allow a slow shutter up to 1s. Second, wiggle your eyes back 'n forth while the shot's being taken. The wiggling requires your eyes to move quite fast - the trick is not to think of the actual process of eyes moving (any more than you manual coordinate your limbs picking up a cup) but rather focus, so to speak, on alternately and quickly looking at two objects at either ends of your horizontal awareness.

Click on to see the effect, it's not super pleasant...

PS I do have some pics of robots and Viennese cake I'll get up here as soon as I learn my way around iPhoto...

Google jobs

Posted in: Drivel, Google

Four years ago I applied for a job at Google and never even heard a reply. Turns out however my email stayed in their system and a few weeks ago they invited me to apply for a senior sysadmin position. (As Nik said, four years is a long time for a search engine company to return a result...) Anyway, after two hours of the most in-depth and technically demanding job interviews I've ever experienced they're flying me out to Dublin for five more hours of interview in a couple of weeks.

Would it be a CV/résumé entry that would render all the others as so much printer ink? Absolutely. Would it be a unique, incredible, and probably life-altering experience? Almost certainly. So do I actually want to work for Google? Don't know yet. Life is incredibly sweet right here right now. Besides they haven't actually offered me it yet anyway ;-)

Car boot sale

Posted in: Drivel

Assisted by Eva, today was spent starting to clear my house up. Anyone who's been here or, god forbid, into my bedroom knows of the truly epic task ahead of anyone even merely conceiving of such a project. I shan't bother describing it. It's a lot, and it's all shuffled.

A few things have so far ended up on ebay. This picture I quite liked,

Car passed its MOT!

Posted in: Drivel

Woo hoo, my Rover 216 SLi, which has been sitting around for the last year untaxed, uninsured, and uninspected, passed its MOT today! This basically means I can sell it; apparently without an MOT an older used car is pretty much worthless.

I seem to have a habit for acquiring expensive-to-insure cars: this one'd be £600/year for liability & theft despite my age and having held a license for a long time. Definitely time to sell...

Sold!

Posted in: Drivel

Last night I had the, er, experience of being auctioned at my friend Dino's speed dating event. He's in the process of raising £3,000 for charity supporting post-Tsunami reconstrution plus he'll be going to Sri Lanka to actually help the rebuilding itself. How cool is that?

I sold for the princely sum of £25, which, while not a staggering amount, was flattering inasmuch as it was more than anyone else raised (besides funnily enough the quirky Italian girl I am now bound to go on a date with). I promised to take my shirt off if the bidding hit 25 which I suppose helped. Less flattering perhaps is the bidding didn't continue afterwards ;-)

New scooter

Posted in: Drivel

Latest addition to the fleet:

Vroom!

Once I'd got it into my head that I could avoid the literal pain of public transport with a scooter I've developed a single-mindedness to not have to take the tube or train again. (Cycling leaves my feet in a bad way, and besides, the weather...)

Watched closing prices on ebay for a while and then approached an unsuccessful seller with an offer. Ended up with this 3year old Piaggio Skipper 125, 7050 miles, for £780. The guy I bought it from only told me the battery was dead after I'd taken the train 25 miles out to his place in Essex. This "oversight" cost him by the sword of my persistent haggling - he had wanted a thousand quid for the bike. In the end, I took a risk of riding it all the way back to SW London without stalling. Truth is, if it'd stalled in East London and I'd had to catch a tube home it wouldn't've been there in the morning...

Suffice to say even on one rainy home journey I'm sure it beats the crap out of public transport ;-) And it definitely does not accelerate as fast as Jessie...

Bali bacteria

Posted in: Drivel

It's not often I get to hear "necrotic flesh" in non-Goth conversation.

A few days into the Bali trip pretty much my entire gum line lit up in moderate pain. I suffered some inflammation, discomfort chewing from the pressure on my teeth, and gum bleeding. About two weeks later it was essentially fine with some residual gobs of blood from time to time, if I sucked on my teeth.

Went to the dentist today, Dr Lu, a particularly geek-tolerant chap who went to some length to explain this all to me, and discovered I had a case of acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis (ANUG). What happens is opportunistic bacteria attack when normal dental hygiene is disrupted (I forgot my tooth brush and for some reason didn't ask the 5-star hotel for one for a few days) and a gum infection occurs. The 'necrotizing' bit is effecting localized tissue death, in this case the tips of the gums between the teeth. Dr Lu was literally picking out bits, albeit really tiny bits, of dead flesh. Funnily enough this disease tends to only affect people with good oral hygiene who lapse.

The annoying aspect is that this flesh only partly grows back and I'll be missing a small bit of the triangular tip of protective gum on some teeth. This means I'll have to, after 31 years of not doing so, have to floss. Gah!

Ever a lesson in remembering one's toothbrush on holiday...

PS did you really want to read about all that? :-)

Free fix

Posted in: Drivel

Have you ever... had something that doesn't work, taken it apart, gazed into its innards, shrugged, reassembled it... and then found it to mysteriously work again?

Some time back in March I had my digicam seize up after a nasty drop. Sent it to Canon who responded with a £96 fixed price bill. Turns out they have this peculiar gambling game where you can, if you choose, opt for an à la carte repair which upon deeper inspection by one of their nimble fingered repair-peeps may or may not cost more. Whatever the outcome of this investigation, you can't back down to the £96 fixed price. It's a bit weird, but there we go.

Anyway, thinking it's probably just a case of whipping off the case, tweaking a cog, job done I opted for the gamble despite strong warnings from the guy on the phone. Bill came back in due course: £112 or so. A little later that month I burst my heels, spent a month in hospital, etc, etc and forgot about my camera. So it arrived back today with an apology for it not working and reassurance that yes, on the whole Canon cameras are very reliable etc, etc, but sorry we couldn't fix it this time, hope everything works out with your new Panasonic...

Remembering the principle of whipping the hood open and everything mysteriously working, I put the battery back in the camera ... and whaddya know, the lens open and closes perfectly.

Heh! :-)

Off to Bali

Posted in: Drivel

So I'm off to Bali primarily for Roger Hamilton's Entrepreneur Business School and a whole load of lounging on beaches and scootering about villages.

In other news, danced for a few hours on Saturday night which included 13km of cycling to get there/home too, so good news there. My feet absolutely f'king killed but hey, it's all good, and they feel well solid today.

I benchpressed 105kg on the machine today hitting my 100+ target two weeks early. Leg extension also saw 105kg lifted yesterday (there's only two more plates left on that one, ha). Gonna have to get onto the real weights soon...

And I'm doing so much work I can barely think straight (no sleep for Paulie tonight, that's for sure). £250K House purchase target: Jan 2006.

Dyslexic experience

Posted in: Drivel

I've just been working on a code bug that's taken probably 30 minutes to resolve. I finally tracked it down but even when I used tools to help me pinpoint it it still wasn't obvious. I've been programming on and off for twenty years and have, naturally, developed the ability to pick out these kinds of things at 30yds. I've generally found the notion that you can look at two things and not see the difference or not be able to instantly see that "independant" is spelt wrong as particularly odd. So I guess this experience was an insight into that condition. Yikes.

See if you can spot the bug! The issue is that headlines are being repeated.

[% MACRO show_newspoints(nps, co, show_little) BLOCK %]
<ul>
[% count = 0; FOREACH np = nps %]
 [% IF np.headline != last_headine %]
<li>[% format_date(np.date) %] - [% np.publication %]: <strong>[% np.headline %]</strong>
 [% END %]
 [% IF np.synopsis %]
 <br />
  [%+ np.synopsis %]
 [% END %]
 [% IF cgi.param('debug') %]
Importance: [% np.importance %]</br />
Sentiment: [% np.sentiment %]<br/>
Subject: [% np.subject %]<br/>
Subject UID: [% np.subject_uid %]<br/>
 [%+ END %]
</li>
 [%+ count = count + 1 %]
 [% last_headline = np.headline %]
[%+ END %]
[% IF count == 0 AND show_little %]
<li>There was little coverage for [% co.name %] in the sources
reviewed in this period.</li>
[% END %]
</ul>
[% END %]

Round-up

Posted in: Drivel

Since getting back from hospital and not being able to go upstairs to my PC I've been downstairs on the sofa (inadvertently) using the "laptop method" of contraception. This is a bit of a bugger as I no longer have any desire to sit at a desk and code. I haven't quite figured out ergonomically exactly what it is about desk v sofa but I waaay prefer the sofa and (it feels) get a helluva lot more done.

Work's been going outstandingly well - am on fire right now, all sorts falling into place, and solving genuinely tough problems. Our little enterprise is having a delivery problem, i.e. too many sales. Good problem to have. Music practice is a fantastic distraction and really helps clear my mind for another code onslaught.

And it's been raining, the fertilizer's been mopped up by the grass, and the garden at last doesn't look like parched brushfelt. Time for a party...

How to run a meeting

Posted in: Drivel

Chris just produced a 10-point how to do meetings plan. Some especially good notes on enforcing start times, and the more radical suggestion of preventing latecomers from joining. This would be a tough move but kudos if you can pull it off and not politically sabotage yourself... I would add "there's no excuse not to at the very least communicate impending lateness". There really isn't.

Reminds me of something I learnt from Chris Adams at Southwestern when selling books: specify odd start times like 9:58am for the simple reason it makes people think and re-examine the implicit assumption that "10am" means "around, usually after, 10am".

Ian Fetterley passed on the idea when I was working at Schlumberger of having an applet running during the meeting that was a real-time listing of the financial cost of the meeting calculated from the group's cumulative salaries. Ten people in a room for a couple of hours can easily run to thousands of dollars.

But the best advice of all is at the end, "don't go to meetings" :-)

Work Diary

Posted in: Drivel

I've been trialling Wordpress the blogging software recently and despite its slightly self-congratulatory tone I have to say, it definitely gives Movable Type, the software that powers this bit of the site, a run for its money.First impressions are good; installing "themes" was a total snap, and certainly way easier than with MT.

Anyway, I have a second blog now I guess which is far more day-to-day and at workdiary.net, cunningly sectioned off in its own domain so no-one notices unless they really, really want to...

Random history: I chanced upon a technique for beating procrastination and thought it was worth putting online. workdiary.net was to be that site. Since then I've kicked the procrastination habit (partly also with hypnosis) so its original vision never materialised. Maybe I'll get 'round to it one day :)

Open Money developments

Posted in: Drivel

Spent a couple of productive afternoons recently with Michael Linton, creator of the LETS community currency system. I've been involved in this since meeting Michael in 2002 and have done odds and ends: writing bits of software, evangelising, organising a workshop, and hosting lets.net and openmoney.org.

Unfortunately my effort on these has been patchy and sporadic which is a bit lame considering how much potential I think the project has. It could have an enormous impact in Making Poverty History. Part of the problem is it's just so bloody far out of most people's familiar space: "money you don't have to get a loan for?!" "Money that doesn't run out?!" "Wait, so who loses?" and so on. Which is a shame since it's an amazingly simple concept: what is community currency?

A big part of the solution to education and adoption in my opinion is simply to get people using it. This tenet Michael has shown time and again to be true with his LETSplay game where people trade goods in a mixed currency setting. The game is good to "get" it but how about actually using it? Well, that's possible too. But.. the interface is ugly by modern web standards, and is kinda clunky. That needs an overhaul. What's also needed is implementation of a community currency server, effectively a "bank in a box" that can provide transaction i.e. money transfer services online. Some developments happening here just recently with spurred on by recent meetings. It's not yet clear what will come of this but certainly it's looking promising at the moment and there's a lot more activity than I've ever seen before. Go team! :) Shame I can't make Thursday's meeting; when I'm walking again I'll stumble over.

Michael and I have been going over what a blue-sky spec of what a CC server might entail, ways of implementing a modern interface, techniques for driving adoption and so on. I've been in contact with a designer for some kind of paypal-alike system, and thinking hard about ways of leveraging existing Internet infrastructure to support it all. Looking pretty exciting, and with all these free evenings who knows what might be possible... Watch this space.

Fighting email backlog

Posted in: Drivel

It's starting to get ridiculous.. For 2005, I have literally hundreds of unanswered personal emails (over a thousand actually), and many of these are from good friends who've written paragraphs to me, and me only, with yet no reply. Not good. If you're one of those, I'm sorry! Changes are being made...

The "good email" paradox

There's a weird phenomenon I've experienced for a long time now. If I get a quickie email from someone I can fire one off back no problem. But if someone's put obvious thought, time, and care into it I naturally want to reciprocate and reflect that in my reply. Because I'm often trying to fire through emails at the beginning of a day or during work I put these aside for later. And so often later never comes.

The counter-intuitive result is that the throwaway emails are replied to, while the substantial careful ones aren't. Crazy!

Solution?

One project-manager possibility is to dedicate a chunk of time per day to answering these. This however pre-supposes it's a mechanical job. But it isn't - if it were I could just bang out a reply there and then amongst all the sundry daily activities. It's exactly the reason they aren't replied to immediately in the first place (i.e. that I want to do a worthy job) that means they end up queued for ages.

So perhaps the solution is to realise when I'm in the right state of mind to answer these kinds of emails and stick with it and pile through a whole load there and then. It's the awareness of being on a roll and sticking with it. I've been doing that today with some success; this roll's been over three hours straight... *wipes eyes*

One thing I've realised from being ill is that there's just a desire for contact, the content of which is less important than the content. So, in a sense, screw it and write anything because it's better to get something than nothing. Besides who hasn't had the experience of handing in an essay and thinking it'll get panned and then getting a great mark for it, and vice versa. One's own perception of one's creation isn't all that hot, at least speaking for myself :-)

I dunno, what do you do?

Lucky 7/7

Posted in: Drivel

September 11th for Americans is written as 9/11 - the month goes first. In more other places than not it's written 11/9. So, given that they happened, isn't it fortunate for all the London bombings to have happened on 7/7?

This stuff ain't a joke; mix-ups of international measuring standards have taken part in spaceships blowing up,

[...] engineers who built the Mars Climate Orbiter had provided a data table in "pound-force" rather than newtons, the metric measure of force (about equivalent to the downward weight of an apple in your hand). NASA flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had used the faulty table for their navigation calculations [...]

Terror kitten

Posted in: Drivel

We (the family) have a new kitten:

Seven weeks old and already in the stash

It's very lively but not really a terror. The terror is a local pest cat that invades the house through the cat flap! I suggested sending it to Catanamo Bay...

"Terror task"

Posted in: Drivel

Terror task - a mindless, highly interruptible background activity that's possible to perform and feel vaguely useful since you're sure as hell not doing any real work while responding to the stream of "are you OK?" emails & SMSs, and refreshing RSS on various news sources.

My terror task right now: ripping hundreds of rock/pop promo CDs I scored off a freecycling music journalist. NP: Shoka on Stunt Girl, by A. C. Acoustics. I have a ton of NiN singles now too; never hurts to revisit the classics.

Bomb babies

Posted in: Drivel

After the Sept 11 attacks, New Yorkers were getting it on: Sex in a time of terror [via Pete].

The world had changed; so had relationships. Now, just about everyone she knew was having what she and her friends call "terror sex."

After today, can we expect someone in Britain now to actually copulate?

The blasted bus is the one causing most consternation, here is a pic of it buried in the Beeb's site London blast pics; it's no. 7.

A sign of UK resilience (London's been under threat of terrorism for years; it's normal here): UK share indexes fall 2.26% but other countries' fall more.

This shouldn't be funny, but I involuntarily laughed at this,

The shockwaves were felt as far away as South Africa, where shares dropped more than 1.9%.

"This is all on the back on the London underground incidents, and particularly the bus blast," said one Johannesburg trader.

And that from a city where flamethrowers are used to prevent carjacking.

Don't let the bastards get you down!

Happy July 4th!

Posted in: Drivel

No doubt many poor Americans shaking their heads right now at their globally ridiculed Administration, ruing the day they decided to leave progressive Europe :-) Still, the fireworks are good! Happy Independence Day!

Stealth spam site strategy

Posted in: Drivel

I recently had to clear out 2,500+ comment spams from our Movable Type install after a couple of our authors had MT-Blacklist and comment notification turned off... The task was achingly tedious as I wanted to be sure everything MTBL was showing up was in fact spam; last thing I want is for it to generate a "false positive" and wipe out some legit blog commentary. Yeah, I looked at 2,500+ comment spams. Ergh.

Towards the end I saw a few I thought were false +ves:

http://www.jenniferconnor.com/

whose text claims,

Jennifer Richards Connor, PhD Candidate
The Oxford Internet Institute
Wadham College, Oxford

Fair enough I thought, and read the comment text: a rather un-erudite "hi". So I unchecked the box and was about to remove jenniferconnor.com from the blacklist. Then I saw,

http://www.johnhuron.com/

with an identical format. OK, getting odd now, and my alarm bells went off.

Scanning more closely now I found elsewhere on the caught-spam list,

    http://www.andrewlace.com/
    http://www.sarahsterling.com/
    http://www.jimtayler.com/
    http://www.mingholee.com/
    http://www.stephjones.com/ 

All with identically laid out pages, differing only in the alleged owner's name. Looking into it some more it turns out they're all hosted at webair.net in Jericho, NY; nowhere near Oxford University.

How it works

Why do something like this?

The idea I suspect is that by masquerading as a home page, not posting ads, and only posting once or twice, most people won't suspect anything and thus not delete the comments, even though the text of the comment might be banal or irrelevant (all were, IMO). What happens then is that a lot of these links from all over the place persist and build the site's Google PageRank, a measure of a site's "worth". All of those sites are at least PR4 with a couple a very respectable PR5.

A high pagerank equates to better search listings which equates to an opportunity for making money either through advertising or affiliate schemes. So at some point I suspect these sites will cast off their cloaks and reveal overtly commercial operations. Watch that space.

Another Paul Makepeace

Posted in: Drivel

Someone once told me using the Net to find family members and tracing family history (genealogy) is the #1 use of search engines. I thought it was for finding info on good-looking people and current events but hey...

In the last week I've had three Makepeaces contact me, Jose, Ariel, and another Paul (who works at This England magazine)! How cool! Last week a visit from a cousin, Caroline, on the Storrar side, who happens to live about 50m from my house. Out of city of 7million that's bizarre, especially since our family is splattered all over the US, South Africa, England, and Holland.

Perhaps I can finally persuade our resident genealogist (my Mum) to start putting her vast collection of family history online at our Makepeace family home page...

Server clusterbomb

Posted in: Drivel

I've been dreading some kind of server failure while I've been in hospital since I can't realistically do anything about it. Now I'm out but can't walk, it's still firmly in the "very difficult" category. A couple of machines had a rash of teething problems a while back; mercifully they were still in test and new sideways-blowing fans seemed to fix them.

Until today, when first around 3am one box died, then around 12am another one seem to become crippled, and as if that wasn't unlucky enough, wham, kernel panic for the third. The whole time I'm stuck either at home waiting for a scheduled hospital-taxi or in the hospital in various states of radio silence, i.e. hard to call or log in over GPRS. GAH! Fortunately Nik saved the day on two of them and I held the fort on the third in the orthopaedic waiting room, later putting in a fix.

Every day, managed servers look more and more appealing...

Into the real world...

Posted in: Drivel

Apart from the ambulance ride home, which was heavily assisted, I took my first trip into the Real World in six weeks: a taxi up to a course in Earl's Court. The day was entirely unassisted, just kindly escorted by Tom. I've had an amazing amount of fussing around me over getting about but as I suspected it was trivial. Book a taxi, get into it. Next question?

First bit of networking and heavy people interaction for weeks too. Definitely leaning towards the introverted end again. Extroversion is like a muscle I have to work. Clearly atrophied recently :)

Anyway first day of Roger Hamilton's Wealth Dynamics course: fast-paced, dense, challenging, fun. Looking forward to tomorrow! Will write more once it's done.

Notable bit for Friday will be a party on the way home involving being carried upstairs...

ICE - In Case of Emergency

Posted in: Drivel

A neat idea to help paramedics find next of kin: put a suitable contact in your phone's address book with the "ICE" prefix. Original idea by a Cambridgeshire para, supported by Vodafone and probably others to follow, here. More detail here.

Pass it on!

Pity the paramedic that has to deal with a PDA phone - vastly more complex, and in my case being a Microsoft Outlook-esque product shows "Last name, First name": my first attempt had the ICE displayed at the end of the name! To be readily visible on a Pocket PC phone select the name as:
First Name: Eira Makepeace
Middle: (mother)
Last name: ICE

Forex trading

Posted in: Drivel

I've been learning about the currency trading (foreign exchange) trading markets since I have some more spare time these days.

In an alternative life I'm sure I would've had a lot more to do with money, trading definitely clicks with some fairly deep part of me, I get that powerful feeling of enjoyment doing it for no other reason than the process is fun (same as with software and learning). Anyway, most of what I've learnt has been from Refco's "News" source; it seems to be mostly background educational material for their $500 interactive trading course.

This also prompted me to at last read a book I've had for a while, A Mathematician Plays the Market by John Allen Paulos. It's a sobering account about how a clearly intelligent rational person can get so hamstrung by their psychology, fear, and greed. The book also, so far as I've read about halfway through, is laced with some really fascinating anecdotes about seemingly irrational human behaviour like demonstrations that show how humans will take many times more risk to avoid loss than to achieve gain.

What's interesting to me from a trader perspective is that he pans "Technical Analysis", the technique of attempting to predict the future from previous trend data. His stance derives from the Efficient Market Hypothesis which states, as I understand it, that if all the information about a stock (or currency) is reflected in its current price then the past data has no bearing on the future. This effectively says the whole field of TA is bunk. I haven't finished the book and he promises a more nuanced assessment but certainly the obvious feeling I have so far is that information (e.g. reportage about last quarter's earnings) about something plays at best equal standing with the participants' psychology. Furthermore, since there are specific techniques that are taught in TA (Relative Strength Index, Fibonacci Retracements, Double Bottom, Support, Resistance, and on and on) then that means there are a ton of people trading using these methods, and thus emergent properties of group behaviour will presumably manifest themselves quite apart from any real life information.

The hardest task in this endeavour to learn about trading has been to find decent literature. The half dozen or so books I've looked up on Amazon have all got very mixed reviews, and online Google is so polluted with affiliate linkage to ebooks I haven't got a straight answer yet. Any suggestions? By contrast, one of the joys of the Open Source/Free Software community is that when you ask of an opinion ("what's the best book to get started on developing ecommerce sites in Perl?") you can be almost completely sure that the answer doesn't have a background agenda (for if it did an entirely open flamewar would shortly ensue :-).

Anyway, this joke via David Rosam -

I had a bunch of Canadian dollars I needed to exchange so I went to the
currency exchange window at the local bank.

Short line... just one guy in front of me.

He was an Asian guy who was trying to exchange yen for dollars and he
was a little agitated. He asked the teller.."Why it change, yestoday I
get two hunat dolla fo yen - today I get hunat eighty?"

The teller says, "Fluctuations."

The Asian guy says, "Fluc you white guys too!"

12hr BBQ

Posted in: Drivel

An incredibly last minute decision and the house (really, two of my flatmates) organised an impromptu BBQ on Sunday afternoon from 1pm. Last of the guests were showing up at 11pm. Was fantastic - sun was blazing, indeed half the garden had the sun self-abusers, while the other, shaded, had the more safety conscious of us. We definitely need to do this more often, it was really fun.

One of the guys had a recognisable scar on his foot, very much like mine. Apparently he'd had a minor ankle fracture six years ago. He still can't run or get involved in any impact sports. Hope springs eternal, eh? (His rehab consisted of ignoring the injury 'til there was a golfball-sized cyst around the joint, beer immediately post-op [which thins the blood], and it was the actual ankle joint rather than a less mobility-affecting one that's the problem on my feet.)

Bank account on tickover

Posted in: Drivel

Had my current account statement arrive today. It'd occurred to me in hospital that with me making absolutely no purchases my statement would look a little odd this month. I jokingly suspected the bank's automatic fraud detection to kick in if I even attempted to use it... "Hello, Sir, it appears someone has attempted to actually use your card. Our systems report this would disturb the e-cobwebs collecting..."

But actually seeing this absence of use today was quite strange: not only, after Friday 13th May when I collided with planet earth, was there only direct debits in and out, but in the period before, the busy financial life of someone who could walk and normally transact starkly documented.

I think the surplus of cash (ha! guess what a freelancer on morphine's earnings cap is...) plus my inability to go out is solved by frequent and elaborate parties chez moi... Watch this space.

Handy extra mouse buttons

Posted in: Drivel

I have in the past raved about my keyboard volume control, an example of a frequently used interface "widget" made available in hardware.

As part of my recent NZ haul, I'm using my old Trackball Explorer which notably has two extra mo