Write about FourthBlog here.

Some more random jottings

* I shall love you until death makes strangers of us.

* The gravity engines - it is assumed that man will colonise planets with similar gravity. However if you can use gravity engines to convert gravity into energy, which seems conceptually possible, though physically improbable, then you could colonise planets with very high gravity, by living in discrete low gravity bubbles, surrounded by gravity engines.

* Hellish creatures - what if creatures evolved that used chemicals to phase in and out of our time stream, using time to rot away material that they could then consume in the future. What if such creatures left a backwash that could catch a man and pull him down through time. What if such travel was strictly one way. How much would you dare travel, down through time, till you ran out of futures?

Cool Stuff

To explain a little. I recently got a new iMac computer, and from there got Broadband, expensive but worth it. I dabbled with iTunes, but until a friend recommended podcasts for long commutes, I did not see much need for iTunes or an iPod. However I now have an iPod and listen to quite a lot of podcasts. I do commute a lot!

Much of what you see when computing is simply a metaphor. The desktop is a metaphor, the material is not there in any physical sense, it is just presented like that, to make your life easier, just as the files on a hard drive are not single neatly filed items.

The metaphors of computing and what they signify are starting to change quite a lot, it seems to me. It is difficult to understand what things actually do.

Clearly an iPod is not really a flash drive walkman, it is something cleverer than that. However google is simply a very high tech version of the old biblical concordances. It is interesting to try and step back and think about what we are really using, and what it really does. Or to just dive in and swim around in all these new possibilities that were inconceivable a short while ago.

The podcasts led to the Indiefeed Alternative/Rock feed, and that led to listening to the Thermals, which led to me researching them on google, and wikipedia, and listening to segments of their tracks from wherever, and my wife ordering a couple of CDs from Amazon. This is probably a tediously ordinary story, but inconceivable a few years ago. I remember reading about endless bands in the NME but you never knew what any of them sounded like. As Billy Joel sang, you can’t get the sound from a story in a magazine.

Alternatively listening to a podcast of a lecture by Professor Howard Frumkin on public health and town planning
http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/podcasts/

I could then check out his presentation as a pdf, (I have an iMac so not having it in powerpoint is a big deal to me), check out his books on Amazon, and add one to my Amazon wishlist, so that when my wife asks for ideas for Christmas presents, I can direct her to my Amazon wishlist.

Other cool stuff
http://yugop.com/ver4/index.asp?section=stuff&id=6
Though I have no idea what or why, but I do like creating grey waves.

I’ve already mentioned wikipedia, and I use this blog, so they are obviously both cool, as are operating systems that update on the fly through your broadband connection. One more site strikes me as particularly cool at the moment, and like the others, I drip drip drip heard about it through podcasts, until I eventually checked it out, having no idea what to expect.

Flickr - basically a fantastic shoe box of shared photos. I’ve not delved deep, but I do like the random interesting images. I do like the overall high quality of the photos that you initially come across. I do like the page of popular tags, with the different font sizes, presumably demonstrating their popularity. I do like the slideshow option for the tags. I do like the way you can wander through images as you interests take you.

A couple of thoughts occur.

Just as walking across my field last week, I knew that many feet make a path, and a path presumably leads somewhere, and my feet keep the path there. Where no feet walk there is no path. The internet now uses our feet to make paths, everywhere. People buying this book on Amazon also bought this, people downloading this podcast also downloaded that one, popular searches today are...

Even quietly wandering through the internet we are leaving a path, that is of value to others, although we might not know where we are going, we are leaving a path, because in aggregate all these paths do amount to something.

Having once wandered, it is impossibly difficult to retrace your steps, without the back or history on the browser, it would be like a Borgesian library, an image once glimpsed, but never to be seen again.

There was a wonderful image on Flickr of a stone like chain against an old barn wall. The textures were gorgeous. I clicked to see more images by the artist. Within a few minutes I has seen a few dozen images of her life. I had a rough idea what she looked like, where she lived, what car she drove, her pet dog. On the one hand I was growing to know and like her. On the other I have no connection with her, I will never know her name, or conceivably meet her. I felt uncomfortable. I felt that I was intruding too much. All this technology seems to offer intimacy, as people we offer intimacy quite casually. Here are the photos on my desk of what matters most to me, I leave my filofax lying about. But we want privacy. On the morning commute no one wants to speak. We are all tired, lost in our private worlds. Intimacy and privacy are oxymorons, but the internet seems to offer both, but offers neither. You think that you are an unseen observer, but you leave paths, and trails, you think you are an anonymous poster, but the astute observer can pick up clues, that lead back to you.

Maybe we need a new sense of etiquette to cope. In the early days of the internet you just did not post personal details, so the various texts you left across the internet would not identify you too easily. Now google can search the internet for a duplicated misspelling in an instant, you leave images and fragments of your life, you link to others you know, who might be less discrete than you. Common user names across different domains, lazily duplicated passwords, we are living our lives in a shop window of our own devising. Like the early evening commute when you see in peoples houses, before they think to pull the curtains. We are at once intimate, but private. Alone but potentially endlessly observed and studied.

When I was young cars were less usual, housewives were more common, it made for a safer environment for children to grow up in. Those days are gone, and I don’t suppose you would want them back. You have to accept responsibility for the downsides of the changes you experience. If we are to live in this virtual shopwindow, then we must accept its implications. Random people can contact us, and start conversations, we have to accept that people are who they say they are, they might be hyperintelligent canines, or bots in Turing test mode.


Why do I need a webpage?
I initially used bulletin boards, way back, before I could access the internet. Then set up my own webpage. I still have a webpage, but have not updated it in ages. However I could post all my jottings to this blog, and all my family photos to Flickr, why go to the trouble of a webpage. May webpages are simply created in the same way that these blog entries, are pasted together to make a page. No html required. Simply cut and paste into some software online that does the job for me. I suppose you need a website to display a portfolio of work of some description to market yourself in some way, but unless you have a high degree of need, then blogs and flickr seem so much easier.

Tags: fiction, cool, paths, webpage

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Things that annoy me, part one, out of many

Using Microsoft office in a shared working environment

There are many things that I dislike about Microsoft applications, but, here I would like to focus on using Microsoft word in a shared working environment. I am currently working on developing a set of major documents, with colleagues from across the whole of our organisation.

One - excessive ability to customise, I regularly receive documents to tidy up, because other people are incapable of sorting out the formatting. Word allows you to customise a document in approximately 2.6 squillion ways, most users are familiar with bold text, and left aligned text. In the worst case, you end up rewriting the entire document, or recreating it on a blank document with cut and paste, because the formatting is so loused up.

Two - numbered lists, which won’t continue from the above list, because some sort of break has been inserted?

Three - numbered lists, which won’t restart, because ??

Four - random fonts appearing in your document, presumably blank space has been formatted at some stage, so when you stray into it, some completely random font appears.

Five - floating boxes, which float on the page, and won’t flow with the text. Idiots use these as if they were tables, then forward the document to me to amend. You also get borders, but I’ve not got my head round them yet.

Six - spell checking which randomly tells you the German dictionary is unavailable, but if you accept an error by mistake, won’t let you find it again. Even if you save, close and reopen the document.

Seven - track changes - fine in principal, but as soon as people start doing more than minor changes it is completely incomprehensible. You also need to accept all changes, then re-read the text carefully to ensure it still makes sense, as people invariably leave out spaces, or put in extra carriage returns.

Eight - indents, the text randomly deciding to indent. Each row can be all too easily customised with its own indents, and usually is by the time the document reaches you.

Nine - the tab key, only works as a tab when you are not in a table, in a table you need to use a set number of spaces.

Ten - text that is spaced over the entire line, the last line with only a few words, is also spaced out over the entire line. Not much fun fixing this for twenty pages.

Eleven - background shading, boxes, etc., who has time to fix these. There is highlighting, I quite like it, but no one else knows how to get rid of it, especially if they don’t use it.

Twelve - section breaks in the text, always a pain. The only time I think they are worth using, is when you need to change the page alignment for printing. However invariably a pain to use.

Twelve - minor peeve, the blank page which invariably appears at the end.

Thirteen - excessive size of document. We generally send word documents to each other with revisions, they are so large, that after a few days, our e-mail locks out, and we have to delete them.

Fourteen - documents all look the same and ask to be saved, even when you have not amended them. Someone sends you an updated version by e-mail, you don’t want to amend it, but you just need to open it. You have a copy of the original document open already, which you have been working on. Someone phones you, which version is the one you don’t want to save changes to, which one is, both ask you to save changes, and have the same file name in the title bar.

Fifteen - lack on inbuilt version control, sure undo and redo are fine, but with a major document you might not notice problems that quickly.

Sixteen - selected text will be deleted if you press any key by mistake, you need to use undo, to retrieve. A major pain when you are juggling six documents, three phone calls, two people speaking to you, and have to reformat half your document.

Seventeen - no two applications look at all alike, everyone customises them differently, so when they want to know how you did something, you cannot say, see that button on the top right, press that.

Eighteen - the embedded tables allow really dreadful spreadsheet functionality, but if you embed a spreadsheet they are too awful to print.

Nineteen - the compare documents function is not much use. The show formatting option seldom helps you fix errant formatting either. There is a lot which is not technically formatting, and therefore does not appear.

Twenty - the format painter, does not fix loused up bulleted lists, or loused up indented text, etc. etc.

I’ll stop there, as twenty is a nice round number.

I suppose that it would be possible to agree a restricted feature set at the outset of a project, detailing the functionality that people were allowed to use in documents. I have never seen it done, but I don’t see any problems with this being done on an organisation wide basis. It should also apply to standard organisational templates, which often have the most problematic of formatting already inserted.

For the bulk of documents, it would probably be quicker to do the drafting in plain text, or rich text, and only format up into full Word very late in the drafting process, when the formatting becomes more important.

There is a difference here between Word functionality, that is useful and benign, like spell checker, and that which formats text, like the ability to set indents for each line. It would be useful to retain benign functionality, but not useful to have excessive formatting functionality.

It would also be possible to agree better organisational version control. We work with a team from across the organisation, so document filing is difficult, as each section has its own procedures.

I suspect that none of these problems are unique to me, and that certain working procedures could be adopted to lessen the problems, however there must be a gap in the market for software which allows intuitive joint working on documents. At the moment, you feel like you are fighting with Word all the time to get it to do what you want, spending too much time fixing formatting, when you just want to focus on the text.

What’s cool

I don’t think that great functionality needs to be complex, it just needs to be well thought out. You can buy a Swiss Army penknife with so many attachments that it is the ugliest brute of a thing. Alternatively you can just get a fairly basic model that does pretty much all you need. I’m certainly never without one, and use it every day for something or other.

The beauty of the best modern software/applications is in their simplicity and power. Google does not do much, but what it does do is superb. Similarly iTunes, Amazon and the internet, do not actually really do very much. The user has a simply requirement, and the cleverness has gone into making this easier and better.

I am sure that it would be possible to take a similar approach to developing a real killer application for collaborative working in an office environment. Software that is a joy to use, where you feel like the software is behind you, rather than against you.

Tags: microsoft office, cool