August 11, 2004
Upgrade to 3.0
I’ve upgraded the site to MT 3.0 developer edition (personal licence). It seems to have gone okay, although I’m not sure if rebuild is working correctly. I’m going to use this post to test the new comment system.
Links
- Animated stick figures - bizarre. Apparently works as a stereogram, but I can’t bear to look at it that long. via BoingBoing.
- Atlantic - overview of Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system.
- Brain Hacks - looks like a really interesting idea for a book. A kind of engineering guide to how the brain does stuff and where the gaps are.
- Searchblog - on how the software industry should become more like the car industry.
- via Scoble - Tools for .NET developers
August 10, 2004
Why I’m doing it
I’ve been thinking a bit more about why I originally started blogging, and what I think I’ve got out of it after a year. Thinking back to when I started, the main motivations were firstly technological: that I wanted something to replace my old site, but which I could maintain more easily. I also had a proper hosted account for the first time, so I was able to install Movable Type, and I thought it would be a good way to learn a little bit more about the technology.
On the more “social” side, I wanted to establish more of an online identity, after reading something by Loic LeMeur. I have a kind of ambivalent feeling about how much I want to expose on the web - on the one hand I take Loic’s point that you need to control your “brand identity” online, or it will be done for you - in the extreme case by identity theft, but more likely just by someone having the same name as you. I also read David Brin’s “Transparent Society” pages which takes the idea still further - if you can’t hide anything, you had better start thinking about how to talk about yourself in a way you feel comfortable with.
I haven’t taken this all the way - in particular I try not to say much about my family or my precise address online (though you can find it out if you are net savvy - I won’t say how) and I don’t publish photos of us. I also haven’t talked much about things that are very personal - again you can find stuff on me quite easily, and I haven’t bothered to have the posts taken down - they are a part of who I am, or was, and I don’t feel comfortable with censoring my earlier self. I suspect that as time goes on, I may relax these rules somewhat, or perhaps I will end up with some kind of subscription control so that more personal material can only be viewed by certain trusted groups.
What I still haven’t really achieved is dialog. I write what I do for my own satisfaction, but part of that is knowing that people are reading and using it. I would like to turn comments back on, but I can’t do it until I sort out the spam problem (I probably just need to upgrade MT and use Typekey - when I have a bit of time). I would also like to find a community where I can be a recognised participant. The trouble I find with this is that I don’t tend to have a huge amount to say, so I tend to appear as a lurker in a couple of places - cam.misc and Joel on Software in particular. I feel a kind of need to be involved in something - I’m interested in “online” political issues, and open source, but I don’t seem to have found something I feel I can actively contribute to without it having to be an all consuming thing.
Anyway, I’m quite encouraged by the modest success I see from my stats - I shall try to write more reviews, and I shall see if I can find a few more offbeat things to post occasionally - more albatross stories, and I also have an idea of trying to collect some of the Mullah Nasruddin parables. I’d also like to write some more technical pieces - they tend to be very time consuming though.
Albatross Story
A man lives on the 20th floor of a block of flats. Every morning he takes the lift down to the ground floor on his way to work. In the evening, he takes the lift to the 10th floor and walks up the rest of the way. Why?
Juan Cole
A quick plug for Juan Cole’s excellent site on Iraq which I recently heard about via Crooked Timber. The current material on how the Bush administration leaked the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan thus jeopardising UK intelligence operations and leading to the premature arrest of several suspected Al Qaida suspects here.
The press here don’t seem to have really picked this up - perhaps there isn’t enough corroboration - but it seems very plausible to me, and explains both the unusual timing of the operation, and David Blunkett’s comments in the Guardian.
One Year On
Well, yesterday was my one year blogging anniversary, so in a shameless piece of
self-publicity, I’ve trawled my extant log files to see what people are actually reading. The
table below has been stripped of all crawlers, although I haven’t tried to ensure hits are
unique. The stats go from 29 March 2004 to 8 August 2004 - so about 4 months worth.
Surprises - I hadn’t expected the jobhunting stuff from when I was unemployed to be so
popular (I think the popularity of November 2003’s archive is also a proxy for this). The
article on Harald Penrose also gets a lot of hits - more than I’ve shown here in fact, as I
stripped out hits on individual pages in the series. I’m pleased to see a few of my reviews
creeping into the list, and also the pieces on employee consultations, moving to Cambridge, and
my “what to do around Cromer” piece.
I may try to do a bit more analysis of how the hits are changing over time - I know the
headline figure is going up, but that may just be crawlers. I discovered from the stats that
there seems to be one person reading my on Bloglines (Hi Julian), and another on Livejournal -
I didn’t know it syndicated blogs tbh.
Anyway, I’m encouraged to carry on.
August 4, 2004
The Last Word
Credit where it’s due - I just got a mail from NTL offering me a goodwill payment of �25 for the hassle I’ve been put through. I didn’t have to write and complain again, so as long as the phone continues working, I feel that’s a reasonable outcome. I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend them to other people, but we’ll call it quits for now.
August 2, 2004
Exhibitions
I saw a couple of good exhibitions at the weekend - I went down to London on Friday to meet up with an old friend, and then stayed over. Met Mrs Freestone and the offspring in the morning, and we went first to the BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the NPG. I always enjoy it - the variety of faces and styles somehow restores my faith in humanity.
After a bit of lunch, we went round the corner to the National to see the Russian Landscape exhibition. We both thought some of the pictures we’d seen in the papers looked pretty amazing, and I wasn’t disappointed. I liked the Shishkin pictures of deep, elemental forests, and also the luminous landscape pictures of the Dnieper and the steppe. Some of the other stuff I could take or leave, but overall I enjoyed it a lot.
Today’s call to NTL
Rang NTL today again to try to get a bit of compensation for the time and effort its taken to try to get the phone working again. Didn’t get the name of the chap I spoke to, but I got their line about not offering compensation. Anyway, he told me I’d already been credited for the time we’d been disconnected. I said I wasn’t happy, but I couldn’t see the point of taking it to his supervisor. I think I’m going to write a letter though.
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