Oblomovka

2004-10-14»

The important thing about being in a self-contained bubble (or circle jerk) of people who are otherwise unrepresentative of the world of the whole, is knowing that you’re in a bubble, and trying to find out the approximate shape of that bubble. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, and I often think the ones who are the most sneering about other people’s parochialism demonstrate the most ignorance, by assuming they speak for everyone.

And I think I speak for everyone when I say that.

What prompted this was a look through some of my old notes on things to blog. They’re so old as to be mostly incomprehensible, but the ones that do still ring true look to have some permanent worth to them. One of them was my first note about this:

JWZ has pretty much ascertained that almost everybody can now cope with HTML mail. I always use HTML mail as my own personal reminder of how small a bubble I live within. Almost every mail I get that I read is text-only. HTML mail for me is a freakish exception. That’s the exact opposite of the majority experience. Mail for all intents and purposes these days is HTML.

I worry a little that my Bayesian spam filters are slowly coming to the conclusion that I must never ever be allowed to see HTML mail – even if it’s from my sister and the message is “Would you like some of this 80 million pounds I just won in the Lottery?”. Actually, that does sounds like spam. Bad example.)

Note that this has nothing to do with whether mail should be in HTML. If you think it shouldn’t, you’re probably part of my bubble, which is large — certainly so large that I can’t see its end horizon, although I know that it’s not very large compared to the rest of the online world, and tiny and irrelevant compared to the global population.

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2004-10-06»

The Wired News piece on Marshall Beddoe’s work with bioinformatic algorithms to crack protocol reverse-engineering has had some good results, in the sense that it’s shedding a bit more light on possible crossovers between bioinf and Net applications. (I’ve written about this sort of genetic cyborg weird-ass mutie crossrbreeding before, for New Scientist).

In the discussion I had with Marshall about his next steps, he commented that a lot of his future work had less to do with number-crunching, and more to do with visualisation. One bioinfodesign innovation that got pointed out to him as a result of the article was sequence logos.

Sequence logos are graphics used in bioinformatics to visually highlight commonalities between multiple sequences. The rows shows how often letters in a gene sequence occur at each position (the GATCs – the taller the letter, the more often the nucleotide appears) together with a measure of how much commonality is preserved over all the sequences (the curve).

If you’re trying to spot patterns in long data sequences, some adaptation of this might be useful to you too. I’m really interested in seeing what Marshall comes up with next.

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2004-10-04»

Comments Off on Mon Oct 4 20:44:00 2004

So what am I doing at the moment? you ask, gripping the edge of your seat.

Well, for those of you who remember as far back as my first application for permanent residence, I’m now at the point where I can write for U.S. companies, which I’m doing with my closest personal approximation to abandon. I’m writing a little bit of stuff for the O’Reilly people, and I’ve just filed a story for Wired News. I’m feeling my way a little here, working out what stories work best for each publication, trying to not mix up everybody’s house styles. Or fuck up. Very important not to fuck up.

What I’m trying for is a bit more of a spectrum between my usual Proper Media work (where I carefully and as non-scarily as possible explain the edge of technological culture to new audiences. Or at least, that’s the idea.) and the free-wheeling, private-jokey, LOOK AT ME I’M SLAMMING MY FACE AGAINST THE WALL OF IGNORANCE. LOOK! I DID IT AGAIN! words that we make NTK out of.

Weirdly, the best medium for that middle-ground so far has been Linux User and Developer, the magazine that went bust, and now lives again. I continue to write their back page. The deceased previous company owes me money, but the new lot seem to be paying up okay. It’s one of my favourite jobs right now.

In other anti-news, no, I still haven’t updated the Life Hacks site. Maybe the next deadline will jerk me into activity – Merlin “43 Folders” Mann and I will be speaking at the MacOS X conference on Thursday October 28th, 2004. This session will primarily consist of Merlin leaping around high-kicking Macs on stage and typing in QuickSilver command sequences with his knees, while I stand behind him describing the geeky sociological and API basis of these tricks in a steady reassuring monotone. It’ll be like the KLF meets Anthony Robbins.

I quit a bunch of UK net.politics. I was thinking about doing this last year when partner-in-crime Stef Magdalinski took nine months off from the same projects. He came back looking so refreshed that instantly I regretted not taking the time myself. Apart from anything else, it had got to the point where I’d say yes to anything, whether I had the time or ability to do it or not. And standing around saying “ooh I’d love to help but…” doesn’t help anyone. So I helped myself to the unsubscribe notice.

TheyWorkForYou seems to have survived perfectly well without someone to write overly jocular body text for them. If you want to see the internal workings of how something like this gets done, they’ve just opened up their original dev wiki. (login: theyworkforyou, password: novemb3r ).

If I was still involved, my job would have have been to make impassioned speeches about why we didn’t really need to password-protect the wiki to fight off spammers, thus winning a decision which would bite us all on the arse six months down the line.

Oh, and if you want to have a go at a project like this, but worry that you’re not glitteringly professional enough, check out Stef and Tom’s first sketches.

The fame piece got a big reaction, and has been looking increasingly fascinating topic for me. Like Life Hacks, I’ve got this strong sense that this is rich new topic that may be too big for me to explore on my own. I’m doing my best.

At the moment I’m just trying to listen to people as much as I can. There was all kinds of layers of irony when I tried to do this at Foo Camp this year. The year before, having a slot there to talk about life hacks (which was then called “Secret Software”) worked very well, as nobody knew what the hell it was about. So only a handful of people turned up, and we quickly brainstormed a lot of ideas. This year, the fame talk gathered a big crowd, which meant I had to quickly scale up the presentation. That worked well in some respects, not in others.

One of the problems was that I really want to talk to people about their experiences being micro-famous. But it’s a bit like talking about your salary – one-on-one it’s fine, but in a big audience, you risk sounding like you’re boasting or archly disingenuous.

What I really need is something concrete to hook the whole question on. With Life Hacks, that was sending a questionnaire about, but I suspect the Fame question needs something a little harder. I’ve thought about doing some stat analysis of how many names appear in, say, the New York Times over time. That doesn’t seem quite right yet, but may point in some good directions.

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2004-09-09»

So a lot of people (including myself, late at night, staring at my ceiling) ask me – when are you going to finish off the Life Hacks site? After all, most of them don’t say, isn’t it a bit ironic that the guy who lectured people about how to be organised can’t even get around to putting up his notes?

My line here is what I’ve always said: Life Hacks was about the techniques of super-organised geeks, by someone who is spectacularly not one of them. But, you know, that’s not as helpful as a bunch of Perl scripts to tidy your bedroom, is it? So it’s really nice to be now point people to Merlin Mann’s new site, 43 Folders, which is clearly written by somebody is one of those geeks, and is really accomplished at describing and illustrating how he drives his life. It’s a bit of a relief to discover that it runs along the same lines as the Life Hacks talk indicated – text files, little scripts, Getting Things Done, index cards, all that jazz. And a bit humbling too, given that he’s uncovering stuff I never found out, even when I tortured people with hot tongs to find out their secrets.

So, hopefully I’ll be able to copy and paste enough cool tricks to get the fuller notes to Lifehacks up soon. In my continuing chasing of my own tail, I’ve now developed an unhealthy interest in the other side of the geek organisation equation: What motivates geeks? And given that, how can you trick yourself into doing stuff that you’d otherwise run screaming from, like paying bills on time and going to bed at a sane hour?

(Looks at clock.)

A-ha.

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2004-08-30»

[ Ada and I come in from a walk. ]

Q: What’s that?

Me: It’s a horse chestnut. There’s a chestnut tree in the park. We could play conkers!

Q: [ Narrowing eyes ] Is this more of your weird monkey language?

Me: In the Autumn, you take one of these horse chestnuts, drill a hole in it, put a piece of string through the hole, and play conkers. You flick the chestnut at the other persons’ chestnut. The chestnut that doesn’t break into pieces wins, and goes on to battle other chestnuts. Conkers! You want to play conkers, Ada?

Q: So, here’s the thing, Danny. We have Nintendo here. Nintendo and automatic weapons.

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2004-08-16»

When they launched with that funky Flash chat thing, I admit I didn’t really get Flickr. I instinctively kept my big fat ignorant gob shut, though, because they were obviously fixing things and adding other, cleverer things almost every day. In other words, they were doing a beta like a beta oughta be.

I’ve stumbled back to them in the last couple of weeks, initially because I got really into browsing their tag system. I now have an RSS feed of cute in my Bloglines feed, which has been a non-stop kawaii mix of puppies, babies and hamsters). Then I got dragged into using their picture uploading bookmarklet, which rocked. And now I’ve just found their flickr-<blog interface, which is similarly goodly.

I’m still a bit edgy about handing over all my photos to someone else’s server, but as far as being a scheme to easily make the photos I want public, it’s shaping up really well.

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2004-08-11»

From this week’s Popbitch

Tatu are no more but their infamous svengali Ivan Shapovalov hasn’t abandoned his devotion to underage girls.

Ivan’s new act is called Nato (nATo – like tATu) – a 16 year old Albanian singer who looks no more than 12. And instead of a schoolgirl outfit Nato dresses in a burkha – all you can see on her super-cool promo posters are eyes and microphone.

Leggy Starlitz lives!

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2004-08-07»

So, I’m writing a piece on how technology helps independent musicians. I went to a house concert this evening, which is a small gig hosted in someone’s home for a couple of dozen people, to see and support a well-loved act. I had a very good time. Unfortunately I stumbled into the gravity well of one of the Two Questions, the questions that plague me and prompt me to be very boring, online and off. Your turn to be bored.

Here are the Two Questions. The first is: “How deep a culture is geek culture?”, but that’s not the one keeping me up tonight. The second is: is “How many people do you need to be famous for?”.

I know: they’re not really up there with “What is dark matter?”, are they? Don’t blame me, I didn’t pick them. They’re the questions that, whether I’ve wanted to or not, I’ve been asking myself for years now.

The fame question appeared in 1997. We were futzing around doing an NTK Live in Soho, and Stew Lee turned up to watch. He was very impressed with all the cabling and the recording equipment and the laptops we were using, and asked how many people were listening to the show online. Standing next to the streaming server, I could answer him instantly: maybe twenty or so (there were probably about seventy people watching the show at the venue). He looked very disappointed, and probably a bit defensively, I found myself asking him The First Question. How many people do you need to be famous forn

I’ve been trying to work out the answer ever since: both personally, and, more generally, as question whose answer may be affected by the technologies we are creating.

There was a time, I think, in the industries where fame is important, that you had was famous, and not. You had big stars, and you had a thin line of people who had work, and you had failures, or people who felt like failures.

But now the drop-off on that curve seems to be less precipitous. It feels, stuck here, so close to the machinery of the Net, that there’s a growing middle-class of fame – a whole world of people who aren’t really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they’re fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious).

The old “famous for fifteen people” joke isn’t quite right. I imagine the majority of people have always been famous (or at least known fairly well liked) by that number. But there are plenty more people who are what Carl Steadman first identified as microcelebrities: famous for fifteen hundred people, say.

And fifteen hundred very thinly distributed people too. One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That’s enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year.

But is it enough? Is fame relative? The upper reaches of fame have disappeared beyond human ken – so does that mean that we’re all humiliated by not being as popular as Madonna? Or is it a fixed constant? If you’re liked by about-a-paleolithic-tribesworth, is that enough to keep the average person with a smile on their face?

Or has nothing changed at all? Do I spot more people in this middle-rank, just because as time goes on, the middle-rank becomes more obvious, as your tastes settle, and you slide out of the thrashing, heavily-marketted, teenage years – that Age of Heroes?

There was a time when the only people I knew were obscure nobodies (like me) and the famous people I saw on the television. But that’s because I was young, and only knew other young people, very few of which has a chance at becoming well-known. Now I know a bunch of people, of all ages, some of whom are well-known in their fields. Is that what’s filling in the middlespace to me? Am I just blending this with the usual “level playing field” Internet hype, and detecting an effect that isn’t there?

You can tell I don’t have any answers here. It’s not even a very clear question. Am I talking about my own requirements? The range of particularly fame-driven people? The overall spread in a society?

I’ve spent less time chewing on this question recently, because I’ve mostly answered it for myself (short version: if you’re reading this far, that’s fame enough for me). But going to this house concert brought it all back.

Groovelily, the band I went to see, are in many ways, poster children for the middle of that fame curve. They’re not a super-famous act, but they are deeply loved, with a “street team” of 300 volunteers who flyer and promote them in their towns, and a range of fans and casual supporters who’ll let them play gigs of over two thousand in some venues, or twenty or so in my friend’s house. Surrounded by an audience of their fans, they’re happy and hardworking, and as far as I could see doing just fine financially.

A lot of their songs, though, speak of the hardness of that road: the envy of the success of peers. The self-doubt that eats at you when you don’t get that break: that leap up the spike to the top of the curve. The emotional core of their songs described the state of that life as one of perserverance until you reach a glorious goal; the most self-referential of the musical archetypal song plots.

I’m mostly writing for this piece how the technology helps them, and other independent musicians, prosper at this level. Talking to them and others, it seems clear that the Net, and computers, and even more compact and flexible musical instruments have made that middle-rank a lot easier.

But talking to the band, I realised that the greatest stress on that life is the contrast between that middle-rank and the extreme nature of the ambitious dream that drives people in this industry.

Valerie, the band’s lead singer, and I talked about what success meant, and in the end, I asked her whether a slow, even progression was enough – if Groovelily’s audience and earnings continued going up, say 10% in real terms every year. Would that be alright? Or is success still the big break, the discontinuous act of God that turns you into a big name?

In the end, neither of us were sure that that was success, although it seemed more appealing the more we talked about it. But then we were both getting tired, and I was talking too much, just like now.

But it’s such an infuriating hanging question!

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2004-08-01»

The secret origins of AOL, Pixar, LucasArts Games and MMORPGs in general. This stuff already sounds like people reminiscing about the golden age of silent movies, even though it was just 1985. To add to the ambience, here’s Andre and Wally B, the SIGGRAPH short that alledgedly cost George Lucas $500,000, and prompted him to sell-off almost all of the computery bits of Lucasfilm (including Pixar and DroidWorks). It just reeks of those odd, flickery, and honestly rather dreadful forays in the early days of cinema.

“Even though it was just 1985”. 1985 is almost twenty years ago now. I was born in 1969; as far as I can work out, modern television hit its stride in the early 50s (let’s say 1954). So TV was 25 years ago when I was born. When I was growing up, TV seemed to be something that had existed forever – or, at the very least, it was a medium that had finished growing up. But now I’ve seen it for over half its life. Twenty years ago seems about right for the start of computer animation; I can imagine that stabilising out in five or so years time. How long does television last? Could it outlive me? I can imagine “100 Years of Television” – I might live to see that. Will I live to see 100 Years of Computer Animation? What will they play “Andre and Wally B” on then?

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