The message I see when I try to log in to Facebook. Sadly, I'm also prohibited from using Pidgin to connect to Facebook Chat, which is just about the only thing I use Facebook for
these days.
Okay, that’s not what that message actually says, but that’s how I chose to read it. It turns out that my name isn’t
real. I went through their forms to tell them that “no, really, this is my name”. They also asked me “what I use Facebook for”, to which I – of course – answered “chatting to friends
and stalking exes, same as everybody else – why, what do YOU use Facebook for?” But when I submitted the form, it just ran me back around in a circle back to where I started.
Also: Facebook! Is that exposed HTML code in your message? Dear me.
I’d be less frustrated if I didn’t just send them a copy of my driving license earlier this year, in order to prove that my name was really my name. I guess that the media
claims that Facebook keeps all of your information indefinitely aren’t true, and in actual fact they have the memory of a proverbial goldfish.
I’d be more frustrated if I actually used Facebook for anything more than pushing blog posts out to people who prefer to see them on Facebook, and occasionally chatting to people,
thanks to the wonderful pidgin-facebookchat plugin.
So on average, I suppose, I’m pretty indifferent. That’s the Facebook way.
On Tuesday last week, Ruth and I went to Etiquette, an unusual (and at least a little experimental) theatrical experience at the Oxford Playhouse. I say “theatrical experience”, because while there were certainly elements to the evening that could be considered to
be reminiscent of more-conventional theatre, it was far more like not going to see a play than it was like doing so.
Dan arrives, sits down, and puts his headphones on.
The event takes place in a café. And I mean that literally… I’m not just setting the scene; although many of the scenes also take place in a café. This is actually a cafe, with a
handful of other participants, sat in pairs at their respective tables, and a majority of people who are just everyday folks out for a drink or a sandwich.
We were shown to our table and invited to sit. On the table were a collection of objects – glasses of water, a pipette, stage blood, two plastic figurines (one man, one woman), a ball
of white tack, some chalk, a book, some notepaper, some blank cards… and a pair of MP3 players with headphones. We were instructed to put on the headphones. Simultaneously, the MP3
players were started.
Ruth begins to receive her instructions.
From there on, we followed the instructions given over the earpieces. My role was that of an older man, a self-described philosopher. Ruth played a prostitute, which lead to at least a
little embarrassment on her part when she was required to say, “I am a prostitute,” in a crowded café. It’s easy to feel acutely self-conscious when you’re relaying what
you’re told in a pair of headphones out loud. You know that feeling that you get when you realise that you’re singing along to the music you’re listening to, in public? It’s a little
bit like that, but instead of music, you’re spouting out-of-context nonsense.
The inner ‘stage’ – the table between us – on which a second, inner, story is told, through the medium of miniatures and chalk.
It’s not just dialogue, though; it’s also stage direction, motivation, and prompts to inspire emotion. Some of the story is told in a very abstract way: early on, Ruth’s and my
characters had agreed to meet in a house on a hill, near a tree. Ruth laid her hand out on the table, on which she had, under previous instruction, drawn a square and a dot on the heel
of her palm. I was told to examine the shape of the “landscape” of her hand, and try drip water from my pipette, from as high as I could reach, onto it. Simultaneously, her
character – already in the house (the square) – was told that it had begun to rain, and she heard the sound of a storm beginning through her headphones.
Throughout the course of the event, we each took on a variety of roles: as characters in our own play, as directors of a “play” performed on our table using the props we had to hand, as
the audience to both of the above, and even as parts of the scenery.
The story itself… was okay. It felt like it was lacking something. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly took advantage of the space and technology it required, but it was perhaps trying to
say a little bit too much in a little bit too short a time. But the medium? That whole “scripted, but you don’t get to read ahead”, headphones-acting? That’s kind-of cool and exciting.
I’ve got the urge to try to write something similar myself (perhaps for a cast of five or six). Although first, I’ve got a murder mystery to finish writing!
Long ago, I used desktop RSS readers. I was only subscribed to my friends’ blogs back then anyway, so it didn’t matter that I could only read them from my home computer. But then RSS
feeds started appearing on news sites, and tech blogs started appearing about things related to my work. And smartphones took over the world, and I wanted to be able to synchronise my
reading list everywhere. There were a few different services that competed for my attention, but Google Reader was the best. It was simple, and fast, and easy, and it Just Worked in
that way that Google products often do.
I put up with the occasional changes to the user interface. Hey, it’s a beta, and it’s still the best thing out there. Hey, it’s free, what can you say? I put up with the fact that from
time to time, they changed the site in ways that were sometimes quite hostile to Opera, my web
browser of choice. I put up with the fact that it had difficulty with unsigned HTTPS certificates (it’s fine now) and that it didn’t provide a mechanism to authenticate against services
like LiveJournal (it still doesn’t). I even worked around the latter, releasing my own tool and updatingit a few times until LiveJournal blocked it (twice) and I had to instead recommend that
people switched to rival service FreeMyFeed.
The new Google Reader (with my annotations - click to embiggen). It sucks quite a lot.
I know that they’re ever-so-proud of the Google+ user interface, but rebranding all of the other services to look like
it just isn’t working. It’s great for Google+, not-bad for Search, bad for GMail (but at least you can turn it off!), and fucking awful for Reader. I like
distinct borders between my items. I don’t like big white spaces and buttons that eat up half the screen.
The sharing interface is completely broken. After a little while, I worked out that I still can share things with other people, but I can’t any longer see what other
people are sharing without clicking over to Google+. This sucks a lot. No longer can I keep track of which shared items I have and haven’t read, and no longer can I read the interesting
RSS feeds my friends have shared in the same place as I read (and share) my own.
So that’s the last straw. Today, I switched everything over to Tiny Tiny RSS.
Tiny Tiny RSS - it's simple, clean, and (in an understated way) beautiful.
Originally I felt that I was being pushed “away” from Google Reader, but the more I’ve played with it, the more I’ve realised that I’m being drawn “towards” Tiny Tiny, and wishing that
I’d made the switch further. The things that have really appealed are:
It’s self-hosted. Tiny Tiny RSS is a free, open-source solution that you host for yourself (or I suppose you can use a shared host; there are a few around). I know
that this is a downside to most people, but to me, it’s a serious selling point: now, I’m in control of what updates are applied, when, and if I don’t like the
functionality of a part of the system, I can change it – I’m in control.
It’s simple and clean. It’s got a great user interface, in an understated and simplistic way. It’s somewhat reminiscent of desktop email clients,
replacing the “stream of feeds” idea with a two- or three-pane view (your choice). That sounds like it’d be a downside, until you realise…
…with great keyboard controls. Tiny Tiny RSS is great for keyboard lovers like me. The default key-commands (which are of course customisable) are based on
Emacs, so if that’s your background then it’s easy to be right at home in minutes and browsing feeds faster than ever.
Plus: it’s got a stack of nice features. I’m loving the “fresh” filter, that helps me differentiate between the stuff I’ve “saved for later” reading and the
stuff that’s actually new and interesting. I’m also impressed by the integrated authentication, which removes my dependency on FreeMyFeed-like services and (because it’s self-hosted)
lets me keep my credentials securely under my own control. It supports authentication using SSL certificates, a beautiful and underused technology. It allows you to customise the
update frequency of your feeds, so I can stalk by friends’ blogs at lightning-quick rates and stall my weekly update subscriptions so they don’t get checked so frequently. And unlike
Google Reader, it actually tells me when feeds break, so I don’t just “get no updates” for a while before I think to check the site (and it’ll even let me change the
URLs when this happens, rather than unsubscribing and resubscribing).
Put simply: all of my major gripes with Google Reader over the last few years have been answered all at once in this wonderful little program. If people are interested in how I set up
Tiny Tiny RSS and and made the switchover as simple and painless as possible, I’ll write a blog post to talk you through it.
I’ve had just one problem: it’s not quite so tolerant of badly-formed XML as Google Reader. There’s one feed in my list which, it turns out, has (very) invalid XML in it’s
feed, that Google Reader managed to ignore and breeze over, but Tiny Tiny RSS chokes on. I’ve contacted the site owner to try to get it fixed, but if they don’t, I might have to hack
some code to try to make a workaround. Not ideal, and not something that everybody would necessarily want to deal with, so be aware!
If, like me, you’ve become dissatisfied by Google Reader this week, you might also like to look at rssLounge, the
other worthy candidate I considered as a replacement. I had a quick play but didn’t find it quite as suitable for my needs, but it might be to your taste: take a look.
The new sidebar, showing what I'm reading in my RSS reader lately.
Oh, and one more thing: if you used to “follow” me on Google Reader (or even if you didn’t) and you want to continue to subscribe to the stuff I “share”, then
you’ll want to subscribe to this new RSS feed of “my shared stuff”, instead: it can also be found syndicated in
the right-hand column of my blog.
Update:this guy’s made a
bookmarklet that makes the new Google Reader theme slightly less hideous. Doesn’t fix the other problems, though, but if you’re not quite pissed-off enough to jump ship, it
might make your experience more-bearable.
Update 2: others in the blogosphere are saying good things about Reader rival NewsBlur, which recently turned one year old. If you’re looking for a hosted service, rather than something “roll-your-own” like
Tiny Tiny RSS, perhaps it’s the tool for you?
Recently, I wrote about the fact that I’m driving to and from Aylesbury once a week in order to study there. I passed my driving test a year and a half ago, but, of course, I don’t actually own a car. What I’ve been doing is using a car sharing company called
Zipcar (technically, Streetcar, when I started,
but the latter is merging into the former).
Golf “Eulalia”, one of the Oxford Streetcar/Zipcar vehicles, seen here parked at Aylesbury College.
There are two varieties of car sharing clubs. These are:
Ones like Zipcar, which are companies with a large fleet of vehicles, pre-vetting of customers, and
“live”/”on-demand” booking.
Ones like WhipCar, which act as portals to allow members of the public to borrow one another’s privately-owned cars.
I haven’t had the chance to try the latter variety yet, although there are a number in my area. The important things are the things that both types have in common, and that is
distinctfrom most traditional car rental companies:
They keep their fleets spread out in disparate locations, meaning that you don’t have to “go somewhere” to pick up a car.
They make heavy use of the Internet, mobile apps, and – in the case of the corporate varieties – remotely-managed engine computers and RFID technology, to give their members access
to vehicles.
As a result of the above, they cater in particular to people who want to borrow a car occasionally, conveniently, but only perhaps for a few hours at a time.
The sensor on the top of the dashboard allows the car to be locked and unlocked with your RFID card (assuming that you’ve made a booking).
For me, at least, it’s far cheaper than owning a car – I only make one journey a week, and sometimes not even that. It’s far more convenient for that journey, for me, than public
transport (which would involve travelling at awkward times and a longer journey duration). If I were using my own car, I’d have to park it in Oxford city centre on Mondays in
order to make my journey possible (which is as challenging as it is expensive). Paying by the half-hour makes it convenient for short hops, and the ability to book, pick up, and return
the car without staff intervention means that it doesn’t matter if it’s midnight or a bank holiday or anything: if I ever need access to a car or van in a hurry, there’s almost always
one available for me to just “swipe into”.
And it’s far simpler than a conventional car rental company… at least, once you’ve gone through the telephone set-up process: a three-way phone call between you, the DVLA, and the car
hire company. If I want a car, I pop up the website or pull out my phone, find a nearby one that’s free when I want it, and go drive.
As you can probably see, this is the iPhone version of the app. The Android one is virtually identical.
The cars are all new and well-kept, and the pricing is reasonable: you get a daily mileage allowance (now 40 miles, which is pretty ideal for me, as my round trip journey is barely more
than that), and then pay a mileage rate thereafter (if you need to fuel up, there’s a fuel card in the car). Paying by the mile, rather than the litre, has the unfortunate side-effect
of failing to encourage eco-driving, but other than that it’s a sensible policy which allows you to accurately anticipate your costs.
It’s been great, so far. I’ve been doing it for a few months and I’ve only had one niggle: I was on my way to college, as usual, when Zipcar called me to let me know that the previous
person booking my car was running late. I’d never had this happen before: I’d never even been lined up back-to-back with another user before; it actually seems to be quite rare. In any
case, Zipcar found me another car, which I declined (it was on the wrong side of town, and by the time I’d cycled back to it and driven across to this side again, I might
as well have waited). In the end, the other user was fined, and I was given a discount in excess of the “missed” time, which I spent on a tin of biscuits to share with my classmates by
way of apology for turning up late and disrupting the lesson. I’ve had a few difficulties with their website, especially when they first started taking over Streetcar’s fleets, but
they’ve been pretty good about fixing them promptly.
So there we go: a nod of approval for Zipcar from me. So if you’re based in London (where there’s loads of them), Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, or – soon –
Maidstone, Guildford, or Edinburgh, and occasionally have need for an on-demand car, look into them. And if you sign up using this link or the shiny button below,
we’ll each get £25 of free driving credit. Bonus!
Update (2022): Many years later, ZipCar would come to start mis-charging me and then repeatedly fuck up my
requests for them to stop doing so and stop processing my personal information (they actually told me twice that they’d done the latter, and I needed to log into my account to produce
screenshots for them with which to demonstrate that they were lying to me). As a result, I can’t give them the same level of glowing recommendation as I used to.
Update (2023): Somehow, ZipCar are still fucking-up my personally-identifiable information, despite
repeatedly being told to delete it (and on several occasions promising that they would or had). I can no longer in good faith recommend them as a company. Please don’t use them.
You may remember the long-running story of my letters to the Office of National Statistics, and the more-concentrated effort by another blogger, in regard to the automatic
“correction” of supposedly-“erroneous” data in the 2011 census,
like somebody having multiple partners or identifying as neither gender. You don’t? Well here’s a reminder: part one, part two, part three, part four.
Well: we’ve finally had some success. A response has been received from the ONS, including – at last – segments of business logic from their “correction” code.
It’s hard to tell for certain what the result of the correction will be, but one thing’s for sure – Ruth, JTA and I’s census data won’t have passed their validation! Their
relationship validations BP2, BP2a, and BP2b state that it is logically-impossible for a person to have a spouse and a partner living with them in the same household.
I should invite them around for dinner sometime, and they can see for themselves that this isn’t true.
I also note that they consider it invalid for anybody to tick both or neither of the (two) gender option boxes, although again, it’s not clear from the data they’ve provided how the
automatic correction occurs. Increasingly, I’m coming to suspect that this might actually be a manual process, in which case I’m wondering what guidelines there are for their operators?
One good piece of news from this FoI request, though: the ONS has confirmed that the original census data – the filled-in paper forms, which unlike the online version
doesn’t enforce its validation upon you – is not adjusted. So in a hundred years time, people will be able to look back at the actual forms filled in by poly, trans, and other
non-standard households around the UK, and generate actual statistics on the frequency with which these occur. It’s not much, but it’s something.
It’s that time again, the highlight of the interactive
fiction year (for me, at least), and IFComp 2011 is upon us. I’ve been playing my way through this year’s entries,
and – as I have in previous years – I’ll be sharing with you any that leap out at me as “things you really ought to try.”
The first of which is The Play, by Deirdra Kiai. This entry stands out for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s one of
those uncommon (but growing in popularity) pieces of hypertext IF. I remain not-completely convinced by hypertext IF: perhaps as a result of the medium, the games often
feel shorter than they might otherwise be, and while I don’t miss playing “hunt the verb” to try to find exactly the word the designer hoped I would, having the option to click on any
one of just a handful of links seems a little… simple.
The Play, a recent piece of hypertext interactive fiction
That’s not to say that I don’t like the medium: hell, I feel like I was a pioneer in it, thanks to things like Troma Night Adventure (originally on the long-dead RockMonkey Wiki, and revived in its own engine last year). It’s just… different from most IF that I play, and that difference is stark.
If there’s one big advantage to hypertext interactive fiction, though, it’s that it lowers the barrier to entry. Everybody knows how to use a web browser, there’s nothing to install or
set up, and they typically play really well on mobile devices, which is a growing market for this kind of game. I’m excited to see tools like Twine/Twee, ChoiceScript, and Undum (the latter of which powers The
Play) appearing, which make creating this kind of game reasonably easy.
Secondly; it’s unusual. And I do enjoy a bit of quirky fiction: something that takes the genre in a new direction. And The Play does that. You play as
Ainsley M. Warrington, the director of a disaster-ridden play on the eve of the first night, orchestrating a last-second dress rehearsal. The story is told through alternating segments
of your experience and “script”: segments of the play as they are performed (which may vary, depending on how lenient you allow the cast the be with the script and how much goes awry),
and this is a wonderful use of the semi-graphical nature of the medium.
Mostly, you’re trying to balance and improve the moods of your cast members (and your stage manager), in order to gain a good review. This is made challenging by the fact that they all
have quite different ideas and attitudes towards the nature of the play, how it should be performed, and so on. They only thing that they all seem to agree on is that you’re not doing a
very good job.
But beyond that theoretical (and, frankly, self-imposed) goal, it’s actually a lot of fun just to play off the different actors against one another, to experiment with how much you can
improvise the ending, and to see how things turn out if you try different choices. And that’s exactly how interactive fiction ought to be. Like a good book, I want to be able
to read it again and again. But unlike traditional fiction, I can enjoy it in profoundly different ways based on my moods and whims.
It’s a little short, but quite beautiful for it. There’s certainly plenty of reasonably well-written text to amuse and entertain. I’d thoroughly recommend that you give it a go, whether
you’re an IF veteran or if you’ve never played this kind of game before in your life: play
The Play in your web browser. And then play it again to see how much of a difference you can make in this well-crafted and inspiring little world.
Or, if you’ve not got any asexual people around you, that you’re aware of (remember, though, that some asexuals are closeted), here’s a special mission for you:
Raise awareness of asexuality this week by making somebody aware of it, by dropping it into a relevant conversation. If an opportunity presents itself – perhaps somebody says “…if
they’re straight, or gay…”, take the opportunity to add a few more to their list, and don’t forget to add asexual.
While asexual people don’t face the same kind of discrimination as other minority sexualities (for example, I’ve never heard of “a-bashing”), they’re still widely-misunderstood and
often asked stupid questions like “How do you know you don’t like sex if you’ve never tried it?” (if you don’t know why that’s a stupid question, I refer you to the aforementioned FAQ)
So yeah: go hug an asexual today. In a non-sexual way, I’d suggest.
Next week is half-term. Why does that matter? Because I’m back in education.
Since last month, I’ve been a student again. Not full-time (I’m not falling for that one again), of course, but I currently spend my Monday evenings studying towards a
Certificate in Counselling Skills at
Aylesbury College.
Aylesbury College. It's actually quite an attractive building, except in the rain.
It’s actually a qualification I’ve been looking at for several years, but it’s only recently that I’ve lived somewhere even remotely close to somewhere that it’s taught: while there’s a
lot of counselling theory that can be learned by distance learning, there’s naturally a lot of hands-on counselling practice that demands a classroom or clinical setting, and for that…
you really do need to be within reach of a suitable school.
Not that Aylesbury‘s exactly on my doorstep. It’s not
even in the same county as me (it’s just barely over the border, in fact, into Buckinghamshire). And this can make things a little challenging: whereas many of my classmates walk or
cycle in, I have a special little dance that I have to do every Monday, in order to make my study possible.
I arrive at work early, so that I can get out of the door by 4:30pm. I then leap onto my bike and pedal furiously through Oxford’s crowded afternoon streets to the East side of the
city. There, I lock my bike up and hop into a borrowed car (more about that in another blog post), pick my way out between the growing pre-rush-hour traffic, sprawling 20mph zones, and
deathwish cyclists, and hammer along the A418 in order to get to class
for its 6pm start.
This is the M40. I don't get to go on this. But that dual carriageway you see going over the top of it? That's one of the few stretches of decent road on my weekly commute to
Buckinghamshire.
Three hours of theory and roleplay later (as well as a break to eat a packet sandwich), I’m back on the road. It annoys me more than a little that now that I’m not in a hurry, the roads
are usually clear and empty, but it’s a good excuse to crank up the volume on Jack FM and
enjoy the ride back through the villages of East Oxfordshire. Back in Oxford, I pick up my bike and cycle home: I’m usually back before 10:30. It’s quite a long day, really.
So what’s it all for? Well: ultimately, if I stick with it, it leads to a Certificate in Counselling, then to a Diploma in Counselling. If you take that and couple it with a stack of
distance learning modules, it adds up to… well, this Foundation Degree in Counselling, perhaps.
But that’s not what you wanted to know: what you wanted to know was, “What are you doing, Dan? What’s wrong with the degree and career you’ve already got?”
Well firstly, of course, learning doesn’t have to be about qualifications. This is a field that I’ve been interested in for longer than I’ve been blogging. Plus: I’m sure that my various pieces of emotional support work, like my work with Oxford Friend, will benefit from the experience and learning that I bring to
it.
But also, it’s about the idea I’ve always had that a good mid-life crisis ought to benefit from planning: it’s too important to leave to chance. And I’ve been thinking that a career
switch might be a great mid-life crisis. The social sciences are fun, and while counselling might not be exactly what I’m looking for, there’s some doors opened by studying it. With
less than a decade before I’m 40, and with part-time study being an ever-so-slow way to get things done, I’d better pull my finger out.
Doubtless, I’ll have more to say about my course as it progresses, but for now, I’m just glad that it’s half-term week, which means I get a week in which I don’t spend my
Monday running around like a headless chicken… and I get twice as long to finish my homework.
There’s something that I just don’t understand about vegetarians. It’s something that I didn’t understand when I mercilessly teased them, and it’s something that I still don’t
understand now that I am one:
Quorn ‘Roast Chicken Style Slices’. No chickens were harmed in the making of this chicken.
You know the stuff I’m talking about: stuff made out of mycoprotein
or TVP or soya that’s specifically designed to emulate real meat in flavour (sometimes
effectively) and texture (rarely so). Browse the chilled and frozen aisles of your local supermarket for their “vegetarian” section and you’ll find meatfree (although rarely vegan)
alternatives to chicken, turkey, beef and pork, presented here in descending order of how convincing they are as a substitute.
Tesco ‘vegetarian’ hot dogs. There’s actually a distinct possibility that these contain MORE meat than their non-vegetarian counterparts.
Let’s be clear here: it’s not that I don’t see the point in faux meat. It has a few clear benefits: for a start, it makes vegetarianism more-approachable to omnivores who
are considering it for the first time. I’ve tried meat substitutes on a number of occasions over the last couple of decades, and they’ve really improved over that time: even a
meat-lover like me can be (partially) placated by the selection of substitutes available.
Man, this photo of a BLT looks more delicious every time I use it on my blog. Why do I torture myself this way?
And while I slightly buy-in to the argument
that the existence of these fake meats “glorifies” meat-eating, perhaps even to the extent as to under-sell vegetarianism as a poor substitute for the “real thing”, I don’t think
that this is in itself the biggest problem with the fake meat industry. There’s a far bigger issue in question:
Why are we stopping here?
A dodo. Apparently it tasted somewhat like turkey, only tougher: there are dozens of accounts of its preparation and consumption.
If we’re really trying here to make “fake meats”, then why are we setting our targets in-line with the commonly-eaten “real meats”? Why stop at chicken and turkey when we might as well
make dodo-flavoured nut roasts and Quorn slices? Sure, they’re extinct, so
we’ll probably never have real dodo meat: but there’s no reason that the manufacturers of artificial meats can’t have a go. There are dozens of accounts of the preparation and
consumption of dodos, so we’d surely be able to emulate their flavour at least as well as we do the meats that we already produce substitutes for.
A tin of unicorn meat: a good source of sparkles! Also cures poison, detects virgins, etc.
Why stop there? We might as well have tins of unicorn meat, too, a meal already familiar to those of us who’ve played more than our fair share of NetHack. How about dragons, or griffins, or the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary? If we’re going to make it up as we go along when we make artificial bacon, we
might as well make it up as we go along when we make basilisk-burgers and salamander-sausages, too.
There’s a reason, of course, that we don’t see these more-imaginative meat substitutes. Many of the most loyal fake-meat customers are the kinds of people who don’t like to
think about the connection between, for example, “chicken” (the foodstuff), and “chicken” (the clucking bird). To be fair, a lot of meat-eaters don’t like to think about this
either, but I get the impression that it’s more-common among vegetarians.
But seriously, though: I think they’re missing a trick, here. Who wouldn’t love to eat artificial pegasus-pâté?
On this day in 1999 I sent out the twelfth of my Cool Thing Of The Day To
Do In Aberystwyth e-mails. I wasn’t blogging at the time, although I did have a blog previously, but I felt that it would be nice to do something to help keep in touch with my
friends and family “back home”, so I came up with Cool Thing Of The Day To Do In Aberystwyth. I’ve written about it a little in a previous On This Day post.
On this particular day, I’d just finished downloading a copy of The Matrix, that fantastic
cyber/action movie that spawned a huge string of memes and won the love and praise of geeks and action-flick junkies everywhere. The movie remains a pinnacle of great filmmaking, with
its’ adventurous direction (remember when bullet time was still new and exciting?),
funky soundtrack, and cleverer-than-average twists… for a film full of guns.
I’d not been at the University long, and I was making the most of the huge amount of bandwidth that seemed to be available: for the first time ever, I was able to download music (of a
appreciable bitrate) faster than I could listen to it (the boundary at which “streaming” becomes feasible). Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet splashed out on new hardware, so downloading a
1.4GB film quickly became a drain on my hard drive, which will have probably been in the region of about 20GB total. But it didn’t matter, because it was cool. “Look at me, I’m
a l33t haxxor like Neo!” I never actually uttered those words, but I might as well have.
I soon went and bought a copy of The Matrix – one of the first DVDs I owned – if only to save on hard drive space. I also burned my second ever student loan cheque on a beefy new
computer of a specification so high that nobody I knew had even seen such a thing before: including a massive 500MHz processor (or as we’d call it nowadays, a “half-gigahertz”).
Later, friends and coursemates Rory, Huw, John, Dom would join me in producing a 15-minute spoof of The Matrix as
part of our entry for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth’s Student Skills
Competition. We won best presentation. This in gave me the opportunity to help out with the Student Skills Competition and networked me to the person who eventually introduced me to
the guy who would eventually become my boss at SmartData. It’s amazing how these little things link together, isn’t
it?
Looking Forward
Later still, no sequels were made to The Matrix, thankfully. You heard me: no sequels were made. Especially not Reloaded. Okay, okay: they made The Animatrix. But they certainly didn’t make any video games.
Nowadays, I keep a little over 2TB of storage space in my primary computer, but I still manage to fill it somehow – one of my drives ended up with only 5GB of free space just the other
month, and needed a big tidy-up. Or, as they’ll call it in another twelve years: 0.00005PB.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
From an elevated position in the exhibition room, I run a few tests of the technical infrastructure whilst other staff set up, below.
In particular, something I’ve been working on are the QR codes. This
experiment – very progressive for a sometimes old-fashioned establishment like the Bodleian – involves small two-dimensional barcodes being placed with the exhibits. The barcodes are
embedded with web addresses for each exhibit’s page on the exhibition website. Visitors who scan them – using a tablet computer, smartphone, or whatever – are directed to a web page
where they can learn more about the item in front of them and can there discuss it with other visitors or can “vote” on it: another exciting new feature in this exhibition is that we’re
trying quite hard to engage academics and the public in debate about the nature of “treasures”: what is a treasure?
A QR code in place at the Treasures of the Bodleian exhibition.
In order to improve the perceived “connection” between the QR code and the objects, to try to encourage visitors to scan the codes despite perhaps having little or no instruction, we
opted to embed images in the QR codes relating to the objects they related to. By cranking up the error-correction level of a QR code, it’s possible to “damage” them quite significantly and still have them scan perfectly well.
One of my “damaged” QR codes. This one corresponds to The Laxton Map, a 17th Century map of common farming land near Newark on Trent.
We hope that the visual association between each artefact and its QR code will help to make it clear that the code is related to the item (and isn’t, for example, some kind of asset tag
for the display case or something). We’re going to be monitoring usage of the codes, so hopefully we’ll get some meaningful results that could be valuable for future exhibitions: or for
other libraries and museums.
Rolling Your Own
If you’re interested in making your own QR codes with artistic embellishment (and I’m sure a graphic designer could do a far better job than I did!), here’s my approach:
I used Google Infographics (part of Chart Tools) to produce my QR codes. It’s fast, free,
simple, and – crucially – allows control over the level of error correction used in the resulting code. Here’s a sample URL to generate the QR code above:
500×500 is the size of the QR code. I was ultimately producing 5cm codes because our experiments showed that this was about the right size
for our exhibition cabinets, the distance from which people would be scanning them, etc. For laziness, then, I produced codes 500 pixels square at a resolution of 100 pixels per
centimetre.
H specifies that we want to have an error-correction level of 30%, the maximum possible. In theory, at least, this allows us to do the maximum
amount of “damage” to our QR code, by manipulating it, and still have it work; you could try lower levels if you wanted, and possibly get less-complex-looking codes.
0 is the width of the border around the QR code. I didn’t want a border (as I was going to manipulate the code in Photoshop anyway), so I use
a width of 0.
The URL – HTTP://TREASURES.BODLEIAN.OX.AC.UK/T7 – is presented entirely in capitals. This is because capital letters use fewer bits
when encoded as QR codes. “http” and domain names are case-insensitive anyway, and we selected our QR code path names to be in capitals. We also shortened the URL as far as possible:
owing to some complicated technical and political limitations, we weren’t able to lean on URL-shortening services like bit.ly, so we had to roll our own. In
hindsight, it’d have been nice to have set up the subdomain “t.bodleian.ox.ac.uk”, but this wasn’t possible within the time available. Remember: the shorter the web address, the simpler
the code, and simpler codes are easier and faster to read.
Our short URLs redirect to the actual web pages of each exhibit, along with an identifying token that gets picked up by Google Analytics to track how widely the QR codes are being used (and which ones are most-popular amongst visitors).
By now, you’ll have a QR code that looks a little like this.
Load that code up in Photoshop, along with the image you’d like to superimpose into it. Many of the images I’ve had to work with are disturbingly “square”, so I’ve simply taken
them, given them a white or black border (depending on whether they’re dark or light-coloured). With others, though, I’ve been able to cut around some of the more-attractive parts of
the image in order to produce something with a nicer shape to it. In any case, put your image in as a layer on top of your QR code.
Move the image around until you have something that’s aesthetically-appealing. With most of my square images, I’ve just plonked them in the middle and resized them to cover a whole
number of “squares” of the QR code. With the unusually-shaped ones, I’ve positioned them such that they fit in with the pattern of the QR code, somewhat, then I’ve inserted another
layer in-between the two and used it to “white out” the QR codes squares that intersect with my image, giving a jagged, “cut out” feel.
Test! Scan the QR code from your screen, and again later from paper, to make sure that it’s intact and functional. If it’s not, adjust your overlay so that it covers less of the QR
code. Test in a variety of devices. In theory, it should be possible to calculate how much damage you can cause to a QR code before it stops working (and where it’s safe to cause the
damage), but in practice it’s faster to use trial-and-error. After a while, you get a knack for it, and you almost feel as though you can see where you need to put the images so that
they just-barely don’t break the codes. Good luck!
Another of my “damaged” QR codes. I’m reasonably pleased with this one.
Give it a go! Make some QR codes that represent your content (web addresses, text, vCards, or whatever) and embed your own images into them to make them stand out with a style of their
own.
Just a quick thought: what does it say on the inside front cover of the
Queen‘s passport?
A British passport, with its famous inside text.
Presumably it ought to say:
My Secretary of State requests and requires in my name all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or
hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.
Nonetheless, I’ll bet that she doesn’t get as much trouble at passport control as I do, despite the fact that she doesn’t have a surname at all (to be completely accurate, Windsor is the name of
her royal house, and is not a surname in the conventional sense). It makes the Passport Office look a little silly to complain about my unusually short name.
Interesting fact about passports: in their current form, they’re a comparatively new invention, but have achieved a rather quick ubiquity in international travel. Historically, the term “port” in their name doesn’t refer,
as you’d expect, to sea ports, but instead to the “portes” (gates) of walled cities: most early passports granted the bearer the permission of their lord or monarch to travel between
cities in their own country – sea ports and international boundaries were considered fair game for anybody to cross.
It was only really with the outbreak of the First World War that it became a widespread mandate that travellers had passports to cross international borders, as the nations of Europe
fought to prevent spies. The Schengen Area – only around 25 years old and
hailed as welcome liberalisation of European international transit laws – could actually be likened to a step backwards to a simpler time when citizens movements were not so closely
monitored.
Recently, I’ve been diagnosed with cluster headaches. I
could tell you more about them, but I’d rather just point you at the Wikipedia article and say “that’s pretty much spot on.”
This picture, from Wikipedia, covers it pretty nicely, actually.
So that’s pretty shit.
It’s been several months now – long enough that, to begin with, I suspected that these new, severe headaches were something to do with the concussion I suffered while moving
house. I’m still not convinced that they’re not: it just seems a little too much like a coincidence that that’d happen just weeks before they started.
Since then, they’ve come and gone. Attacks will come on every couple of days – usually at about 3am, but sometimes in the afternoon – for about two weeks, and then will be gone for
several weeks. And then they come back again.
The pain is… incredible. I can’t even begin to describe it nor compare it to anything else. Painkillers don’t seem to touch it at all. The only success I’ve had with painkillers has
been when I’ve taken so much codeine that I’ve had an “opium high”. The pain doesn’t go away, but at least then I don’t care so much. Then within a couple of (long, long) hours, it’s
gone, leaving me drained and exhausted. Sometimes it leaves me with a headache – just a “normal” one, the kind that you can wince and ignore, or treat with asprin – for about a day
afterwards, but usually it just disappears as quickly as it came on.
Those things on the left that are shaped like space rockets? They go up my fucking nose, would you believe it. They're supposed to be for migraines, and they seem to work for me - at
best - about one time in three.
I’ve been working my way through a variety of medications, with limited success. Basically, the doctors are guessing. In sheer desperation, I’ve even been caught using
mild-to-moderately ridiculous alternative treatment, like chiropractic. It didn’t work – it just left me with a new variety of back pain: temporary, I hope – but I think
it goes some way to expressing how crippling it is when I of all people will go to a “spine wizard”. Needless to say, I’m still a long way from desparate enough to try the
reallystupidalternativemedicines: it’s still got to at least sound like it might work before you’ll get me to try it – after all,
it’s not like any of these therapies are without risks.
There’s next to no build-up, and no warning, and no relief: they just start and go away their own accord. That’s a terrifying feeling of powerlessness. It’s genuinely scary, going to
bed during one of their episodic periods, and not knowing if you’re going to wake up in agony a few hours later.
We’re getting somewhere, though, hopefully. I’ve been assigned to a specialist (to whom I’m sure I’ll be as much a research subject as a patient: I suppose it’s pretty ideal – if you
have a rare, barely-understood disease and you’re at the point of being willing to try anything, you probably make a great research subject), and in the meantime there are
plenty more medications left to “try”. And I’ve been reading some of the thoughts of other sufferers via an online support group, some of whom have shared some of their relief/coping
strategies (some of which I’ve tried already; others of which I’ll try in the future). So there’s still plenty of opportunity for a “fix”.
I didn’t blog about this before now because I was hoping to get to a point where I’d be looking back on it and laughing, first. I quite liked the idea of putting up a blog post –
perhaps with some photos of my MRI scans, or something – and saying “Hey; look what happened to me! It’s medication-controlled, now, and the only side-effect is that I
can shoot frickin’ laser beams out of my eyes! Muhahahaha!” But I guess that point might still be a way away, and I didn’t want to keep you all in the dark.
Anyway: there’s that, then. If you were hoping for a clean, concise blog post with some closure at the end, you’ll be left hanging. But hey: if I have to suffer, I might as well spread
a little bit of suffering to you, too.
Another successful murder mystery party! This one was a prefabricated “kit” one, unlike many of our recent ones, in the Inspector McClue range.
As usual, Murder Mystery Night starts a day or two earlier, with Ruth preparing a monumental quantity of food.
I was slightly worried that – with only six people (we four Earthlings and Ruth‘s brothers) in attendance, that the evening might be a little too “quiet”, but Robin and Owen did a pretty good job of ensuring that
this wasn’t the case by any stretch of the imagination.
Maurice de Cheval (Robin) and Wallis Simper (Owen)
My character was Marlene Deepditch, a German wine merchant. Not wanting to take things by halves, I put a perhaps-excessive amount of effort into my last-minute costume, even going so
far as to shave off my beard… as well as my sideburns… chest… armpits…
My dress wasn't quite as long on me as I'd expected, and I'd neglected to shave my legs, unfortunately.
Hilarity ensues as the combination of wine and outrageous accents kicks in.
All in all, a fantastic night, full of exactly the kind of delicious chaos that’s usually reserved for larger murder mystery parties – watch this YouTube video (may contain spoilers) to see what I mean.
