Small Steps Forward

Funny thing happened to me last night

2006-11-16T15:36:00.000Z

I was walking from work to the bus stop and a young guy on a bicycle (looks around 20) cycles past me, turns round and has a look at me, then stops.

As I walk past him, he asks me the time. I tell him the time, he continues cycling, then stops again.

As I walk past him, he starts cycling alongside me. He starts talking to me:

Him: “How old are you?”

Me: “Why do you want to know?”

Him: “Are you, like, over twenty five?”

Me: “I’m twenty three.”

Him: “Do you live round here? Do you live in Acomb?”

Me: Silence

Him: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to attack you or anything.”

Him: “Are you married?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “Ah so you must live round here then.”

Me: “I’m married, so I live round here?”

Him: “Yes because you’re on your way home from work”

Me: Silence

Him: “Is your name Mark by any chance?”

Me: “No.”

And he cycles off.

What do you reckon? Lonely weirdo, looking for a date or wannabe rapist?

Empire

2006-10-25T13:23:00.000+01:00

I've met way too many Americans who think that the USA is unique among all nations of the world because there is an intention that citizens have the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". They seriously think that other countries are less free because they don't have a document called "The Declaration of Independence" with those words on it.
I can't see how this view is possible without knowing next to nothing about the outside world. The UK doesn't even have a constitution, but as far as I can see the High Court has far more power to rein in Government than the Supreme Court. And France has a constitution that has succeeded in preventing religious views from affecting public policy (which has clearly not happened in the USA) since 1789 (Wikipedia - Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen).

Most problematically, though, if a government and its people believes that its nation is the greatest on Earth, then it follows that that same government and people will believe that it is justified in exploiting, warring with and invading outside nations to achieve its own ends, just as the Napeleonic Empire, the British Empire, Imperial Japan, the Nazis and the Soviets did when they occupied entire continents to bring their way of life and their ideals to those countries.

The time of your life

2006-04-29T20:35:00.000+01:00

It is the case that we all have time. If someone says they don't have time, don't believe them. We all have time, around seven hundred thousand hours worth.

We have options open to us. We can deny that the time of our life is ours for the spending. Such a response usually takes the form of a multitude of excuses explaining why we could not possibly be spending all our time in any other way than the way in which we currently are. We're terribly good at this - I'm quite adept at it myself. I invent things which absolutely have to been done, usually fixing something which isn't broken or the selection and purchase of something I don't need. In such ways time is taken from us by our own consent; we lament its passing but we ourselves have been party to its disappearance.

This is this option taken by those people who don't wish to have choices to make. This group of people includes pretty much everyone at one time or another.

Another alternative is spending our time on having fun. Now, this is very easy. We identify which activities are fun for us and partake in them in our spare time. TV is the obvious example. The implicit argument goes something like this - 1. the best thing I can do with my time is have fun. 2. Watching TV is fun. 3. I should watch TV in my spare time.

Now, if we're in a state of mind where we are not prepared to call into question proposition 1 or 2 (that is, a particularly careless and intellectually lazy state of mind) we will most probably turn on the TV. If TV isn't your thing, insert any activity you like in its place. Games, Surfing, Music, Drinking, Clubbing, Porn, whatever. Then the argument will probably become a familiar one.

If however, we have the good fortune to be sometimes aware that proposition 1 is false (it is not the case that the best thing one can do with one's time is have fun) then the choice of how to spend the time of one's life becomes considerably more difficult. One must now take many more options into consideration.

This leads us to the belief that one is free to do whatever the hell one likes with one's time. But this absolute freedom is confusing, incomprehensible, almost a nonsense. Human beings don't (or at least they shouldn't) act according to whatever arbitrary whim happens to possess them at any given moment. Freud is the expert on this.

So let us discard this notion also, and become bewieldered once more.

We are capable of a great deal. We are certainly capable of more than spending our time having fun. Our acts can result in good for ourselves and for others, more often as a natural consequence than by conscious choice.

I don't know how this happens. But I do know how it doesn't.

We all know which time spent during our lifetime has been of no consequence. Imagine a book of a life. Some moments make it into the final edit - some add so little, are so irrelevant, add so little to the overall plot that they don't even make the first draft. These are the moments which equal nothing, which came of nothing, which produced nothing, which are easily forgotten, which aren't even worth recalling.

Furthermore, we all know, before we spend some of our limited supply of time, whether or not it will fall into this category. But we are creatures of habit, and we are happy to waste time, and worse, we know what we're doing.

There's no redeeming message at the end of this one.

What Is Yet To Be and what Is No Longer

2006-02-09T22:46:00.000Z

Trying and failing to think I things I love about the lifestyle of a typical graduate newly wed in 21st Century Britain gets demoralising. I'm forced to conclude that I'm not a fan of the present.

The past, on the other hand, is much more than the present. There is far more time in all that has been than the living memory, or the bit of it they care about, of the people of the present. As a consequence, anyone who looks into the past for their inspiration, for substance worthy of consumption by that machine par excellence, the human mind, will find far greater riches than one who makes do with the least worst chunks of modern day culture.

But us strange creatures are built in such a way that we imagine that the future will be much superior to the mundane and idiotic present. This tendency is what can be called hope, or optimism, but personally I think that it's just us putting on a brave face. But the flip side to our necessary unrealism is that our future gazing can potentially be a exercise in great feats of imagination.

I believe that the visions of imaginary lives constructed to fill the mental blank that is the future can rival the outputs of the literary and religious communities, past and present. We are all experts in unrealism, we are all novelists and theologians at heart. We all do the same on different scales.

What is my future, what is our future? What will come after death? I certainly can't tell you, but I can imagine more than I can ever see, than I will ever live. My visions do not consist of mealtimes and work days and conversations and bedtimes (by which I mean, they are not real) - they are instead made of ideals, of ideas, of dreams.

What are we to do with our fabulous dreams? We certainly aren't going to live them. I hear protests from my imaginary reader, but we must face facts - our life is determined primarily by our surroundings, not our mental creations, excepting the cases where one is high.

Earlier I drew a analogy between experts in unrealism, the modern day dreamers, and novelists and theologians. Therein lies our answer. We should do with our dreams what we do with our finished novels and our religious scriptures. We don't become the hero, nor do we become Jesus or Buddha. Instead, we either forget about them, our try our hardest to keep them in mind, and be guided, be inspired, or just remember, and make use of the uncommon awareness granted us by these extraordinary unrealities.

Likewise, for dreams; we don't become that hero or heroine we hope to be. Instead, we forget about our dreams, or try our hardest to keep them in mind while living our everyday life.

Mod Cons

2006-02-05T20:10:00.000Z

My life is pretty easy. Convenience and ease pervades every aspect of it; not even earning a living in my full time job is a chore.

Here is a list of salient possessions:

rice maker
easy job
dish washer
bread maker
grocery deliveries to the door
central heating
a bookcase of novels
washing machine
micro wave
hard drive jukebox
rented house
drying machine
stocked cupboards
unlimited access to information

As we all know (in theory but not in practice) things weren't always so easy. The vast majority of people have to work for most of their waking hours to provide themselves with the basic necessities. Admittedly, less people need to do this now than in the past. The world is more prosperous place, and so more people have money.

Lucky people, such as myself, and most other people who live in the western world have more free time now. It is true that many people work in jobs that take up a huge amount of their time, what with overtime and commuting, but that is a choice. The more sensible among us lucky folk do not sell their hard won free time.

So, my house is heated, my dishes are washed, my entertainment flies down the phone line or is broadcast and recorded. Bread is made as if by magic, food appears on the doorstep after a few mouse clicks. And I have roughly six hours per weekday to do as I please.

Here I must remind us that comfort does not equal happiness. So unfortunately, or fortunately (as it would be a dull and idiotic world if physical possessions and material ease did translate directly into mental well being), my number of mod cons do not make me a happier person.

The funny thing is, which somehow we always forget, is that people do not thrive on lack of work, lack of effort. Inactivity / TV watching tends towards mental and physical atropy. Material comforts do not improve our mental well being.

So unfortunately for the western world, material ease for the majority of its inhabitants has not resulted in more people living good lives. Naturally, that includes myself.

I find that I am happiest after I have spent a day writing. It doesn't really make a difference whether it is code or essay text, although my preference is for writing essay as this is typically more intellectually stimulating.

I shall state the obvious. My rice cooker (or any item on the above list) does not significantly improve the quality of my life. That is determined by certain undefiniable qualities which are not available for purchase. Exceptions may apply, however. I kind of hope they do. It makes living easier when you know it's possible to make things better for yourself.

Sales and Profits Tumble At HMV

2006-01-12T16:56:00.000Z

BBC News Link

Who shops at HMV? Teenagers. And what would teenagers rather do than pay £15 for a cd? Sit at home, talk to their mates with their mobile phones and msn and download it.

Possibly I am overgeneralising a little, but it is true that HMV's target market is (was?) the people who are going to desert them first (computer savvy teenagers).

They should diversify, get back into classical music, like when they first started. Imagine that. A big classical music shop, lined with headphones, advertising local concerts, on every high street in Britain.

It's not going to happen.

Condensed Post

2005-12-22T14:46:00.000Z

Last day of work of 2005 today, so I've found time to write a post rather than get into something I'll want to finish but not have time to.

There's lots of good things that I want to mention, but I may never get round to them all. So I figured I'd summarise:

TVIX. It's a external hard drive / mp3 and divx player. It's also a means of getting easy access to your entire music collection (stored on a regular 3.5" hard drive) without use of an expensive crashing power hungry noisy PC. By means of this handy device I can play any of the 100GB / 20000 tracks worth of music via remote control. I am spoilt.

Fastmail.fm. Just every piece of music I possess resides on the one hard drive, every email I have ever sent and received (80mb) resides on one IMAP server. Five email addresses point to it (Work, Internet, Personal, Money, and Academic) and mail from each of these are filed into their own folders. Each of these folders are searchable by content (find all emails sent to me in the last four years that include the word 'thigh' was a good one).
I like having my history of electronic communication accessible - it helps me to remember what happened in my past. Plus I get zero spam.
I should mention that this is a paid service. It costs me $19.95 a year for my paid for service, but I think it's worth it.

Open University. This institution is a venerable pillar of my existence, allowing me to lead a fulfilling intellectual life while holding down a full time job. It provides Distance Learning (with the odd tutorial) to anyone in the UK.
At the moment I'm carrying on where I left off in May 1999 - I'm continuing my study of literature. Ever since I picked up a copy of The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence at a Car Boot sale for 20p I've been a big reader of genius writers long dead and in this day and age forgotten by the majority of the populace, so I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to study the analysis these works in my spare time.

The Book Group. Few modern TV Series really capture the essentials of real life. There's plenty of good satires, lots of 'thrilling' stuff, lots of dramatic stuff, but nothing really serious, nothing real.
This series involves a group of strangers who meet because an American new in Glasgow organises a book group as a means of making friends. One of the unique things about it is that one can feel for each of the characters - no one is there to make up the numbers. Plus it doesn't deal with anything hastily - you're not 'told' they're in love, she's happy, he's angry, etc. - you learn it, you realise it. It has this in common with the great films of our age, the ones where no character has a 'type', as in all those films where you know everything about them you're ever going to know after their first ten minutes of screen time.
I don't want to dwell on crap in this blog but it is helpful to illustrate by way of contrast. Plus the cases that everyone is aware of make the best examples. I would like to say, "as in House of Sand and Fog", but no one's seen it.
Incidentally, the two seasons of this series broadcast in 2001 and 2002.

I don't subscribe to the cult of the modern. As a general rule, I prefer the old. However, I concentrate on the modern in this blog because it's what everyone else is interested in. Plus it allows me to feel once in a while that in some respects maybe it is good and right that I am living in 21st Century Britain.

The Donkey Below

2005-12-17T14:51:00.000Z

Do you like the little fluffy donkey (or emule, to be exact) below? I thought it was a quite good symbol of the modern trend of file sharing. A friendly, small, but stubborn and quite unstoppable donkey sticking its tongue out at the world.

Just as Google changed the face of the internet, which was and essentially is just some well thought out code, so will too the Donkey (or his progeny). It's a big change from the 90s, where change in IT was driven by the big people. Microsoft, Intel, IBM... they're fading into the background. Sure, in 2010 most will still be running Windows on Intel PCs, but the potential of the PC will be determined by little free applications and useful bits of code.

To name a just few:

the mp3 and divx codecs. Standardly used and can't be controlled. Imho, one day that will never come will be that day where one finds it impossible to extract, compress and distribute the media contained on a digital disc, be it an application, movie or album.
Daemon Tools, Alcohol. A physical cd or dvd is rendered obsolete and of zero value when an exact copy of the data on that media can be transmitted and read as if the CD had just flown itself from the other side of the world straight into your cd drive. Both these applications are able to create and read virtual cds that can do just that.
BitTorrent, eMule / the eDonkey network. See below.
I should also mention Mozilla Firefox, the browser I'm using to write this blog. It's not going to change the world, but the very fact that there is freely available quality software out there that can challenge Microsoft's near monopoly of the browser market is a good sign for the future.

I found this image on a news article reporting on the 'war' between Microsoft and Google.

Google = Robin Hood. :o)

The Information Age

2005-12-14T15:09:00.000Z

The cliche that the internet puts the world at our fingertips has been so long established that not even journalists bother mentioning it anymore. Now that books, music, maps, films, shops, webcams, news, broadcasts, diaries and photographs are all accessible within a few clicks the virtual world has far outpaced the physical world in terms of freedom of access to information. This is due primarily to to the size of the internet, but also unenforceablity of copyright restrictions. Believe it or not, there was a time when the ease with which one could access information was determined by the size of one's local library, and photographs of faraway places could only be seen on TV or in books. Information and Media had to be purchased with time and money.

This time has passed, and it has gone forever.

So why hasn't the world changed already? HMV is still open for business, even though there isn't a single album in there which isn't available for free. Are people really that attached to the cd cases and paper covers? Everyone knows that people love their money, so why do they throw it away?

The problem (or the lifesaver, depending on whether or not you have a stake in the successful retailing of digital media) is that the majority of people don't know how to access the information that is at their fingertips in theory and metaphor only. For if all the music, tv programmes and films of the world were at their fingertips, in the same way that a Music CD or DVD is, hundreds of megacorporations would go under overnight, and then the world would change. Likewise for the retail sector. Who's going to help pay the rent for a city centre location when they can get the same product for £10 cheaper just as easily? It can't be worth that much for the privilege of fondling a product before you buy it.

The reason the world hasn't changed yet is because while the majority have the means (i.e. the broadband connections) to pay nothing for what they want, they don't know how. So what one has to do in order to make hundreds of thousands of people unemployed, cause a good few megacorporations to go bankrupt, and give de facto access to all the world's digital media to all of the western world is to invent a box that has a SCART cable at one end, a phone line connector at the other, and a little wireless keyboard to allow anyone to type in the name of the album or film they want to listen to and watch, then press a button to do it. It's certainly possible, albeit with a short delay between requesting and watching. Something like it already exists, too (it's called a PC), but logging onto eMule or BitTorrent on your PC, decompressing the resulting file then burning it to cd or dvd isn't exactly mainstream. It's on its way, though. Watch this space.

Christmas

2005-12-07T17:03:00.000Z

What's the best way to buy presents?

Previously I never was sure what to get my family for christmas. I'll go back and forth along the high street, going in and out of every chain store (I'd give their names, but that would just generate AdSense advertising for them) which I thought had a chance of stocking some item which my mum, dad, sister or brother would like. Every year, I'd wade through oceans of crap, eventually acquiring a few colourfully packaged but very disposable 'gifts'. It's amazing what some companies believe consitutes a product worth spending time and money on to put onto the market. I truly believe that the contents of most stores at christmas time is fit only for the scrapheap.

But there is a better way. Now, I don't go in a single shop as part of my search for the ideal christmas list. I sit down on the sofa, and think about what items constitute the perfect present (within a given price range) for each person. Then I sit down at the computer and find them.

There hasn't been an item so obscure or rare as to render it unattainable. It's a great approach to shopping - determine, by yourself, without reference to advertising, store displays, special offers, fashion, hype or fads, the precise specification of the item you wish to purchase, then search the world until you find it. It feels right.

So just as one can use google and wikipedia to find the answer to your question, one can find any conceivable product that meets certain criteria using froogle and ebay. If it's not there, it hasn't been invented yet.

What's the point of... Art?

2005-12-07T16:45:00.000Z

Recently I recommended that you all go and pursue the wonders of free art. But I don't really like categorical commands, it smacks of advertising. Do this, think this, buy this, but why?

Look at the below picture. What do you see?

Sometimes when I look at it I think, 'hmm, it's a woman singing'. In fact, that's most of the time. I think most people see / think that when they look at such a picture.

But the human brain is capable of seeing more. Which is good, because there is more. As a result, sometimes, when I take in the below image, I see some sort of harmonised chaos, music and emotion. I can't describe it precisely, and that is precisely the point. We are very used to feeling quite capable of comprehending what we see in its entirety. The fact is we rarely do, but we pretend we do so we can get on with our day. Otherwise shock and awe might stall us entirely, and we'd never get out of bed due to being struck by the unknowableness of the ceiling. I'm not kidding.

Art is capable of shocking us, once we give it a chance. It doesn't need much from us, just a second glance, a second listen, and suddenly we're aware that the world is a lot stranger than we usually give it credit for.

The point of art is to be a reminder. Of what? That I can't say.

Free Art

2005-12-05T16:21:00.000Z

I spent a good amount of time browsing this site, Art Renewal Center, a few months back. It's the biggest collection of high quality (500k + for many images) freely downloadable works of art on the web.

Images from this site now hang in our lounge (Edward Hopper, Morning Sun) and our bedroom (Carl Vilhelm Holsoe, Asleep), and many others act as a screensaver for my lounge based PC.

The journey of the 600k image on internet to 16x20 framed print on wall was surprisingly uncomplicated. Using Peak Imaging (I browsed a few comparisons of online photo printing companies, and this one consistently came out on top), upload your chosen images, enter the required info and the print turns up at your door. Photo Printers are all very well, but for a one off, high res full colour print of a work of art nothing beats the professional treatment.

Incidentally, I don't own a colour printer. They cost too much, I rarely need to print colour and laser printers do a far better job of monochrome.

Zero Transport Costs

2005-12-04T20:34:00.000Z

Electric Bicycle. The quickest, easiest way to get from A to B while paying next to nothing.

My theory is that cars suck. I'm not an environmentalist, I just don't want to spend hundreds of pounds a month on tax, insurance and fuel to get to work. In fact, I really don't want to pay anything to get to work.
Cycling works quite well, but it can get very tiring. I don't like that either. I also don't like dawdling along up a hill because I'm not fit enough. So what one really needs is a bicycle with a motor on to make the pedalling super easy, to get oneself to work (or anywhere else) extra quickly (for a bicycle).
I could go on for ages, but I'll just mention two more things.

Never wait at the back of a queue - ride to the front instead.
It's fun.

You can find the best of breed electric bike model here. It's called a 'Giant Twist Lite'. A roundup and buyers guide can be found here, at a folding and electric cycle magazine site called A to B.

Mandatory Hugely Optimistic First Post

2005-12-04T20:17:00.000Z

Hello all

No promises for a hugely informative, insightful blog here, or anything like frequent updates. However, I'm hoping that at its best it will serve as some sort of log (on the web) of general stuff that is not, like most things, pointless expensive crap.