No gods, no kings, no billionaires
Walked through Costco this afternoon, and the Christmas decorations are already in the aisles. It’s still August. Hot damn.
Okay, so here’s the new rule: The only people who are allowed to buy me anything this Christmas are Alex and Fiona. That’s it.
It’s not that I don’t want anything–there are plenty of things I’d like to have. I just don’t want anything for Christmas. Not anything from my wishlist, not “just somethig small”, and not a charitable donation in my name. Just nothing. Please.
From April 2001 to August 2006:
Note the school uniform. Just for the record, I disapprove of them. Yes, they make children look cute, but cute in the Yorkshire-Terrier-in-a-paisley-waistcoat sense, i.e. just not right.
Britain has an obsession with uniforms, from kids at school to adults in business. I used to think there was a shadowy conspiracy of tailors who manipulated politicans and lobbied industry to maintain suit and tie as the standard dress code. How else to explain the fact most large institutions still require even their computer geeks, who rarely get to see daylight, let alone a customer, to still wear “business dress”?
Now, though, I’m coming round to the point of view that wearing a school uniform during your formative years somehow warps your mind. You may start to feel uncomfortable when you’re out of uniform, so you join a company where everyone wears suits. Or more insidiously, you may start buying into the myth that wearing school uniform promotes a sense of common identity, and puts both rich and poor on a level playing field. And you decide to take that idea forward into the workplace.
To this I say, “thpppt.” When was the last time you were around a set of school kids? If you really think that wearing a uniform is going to stop them from forming cliques and ganging up on others, you need to get your doctor to adjust your medication. Likewise, if you think that wearing a jacket and tie in the workplace presents a more professional face to your customers, you need to hire some better-informed consultants. Providing a good service is what makes your customers happy.
Anyway, that’s my rant. Here are some more photos of Alex dressed up as a junior bank clerk.
Update: If you’re looking for the actual details of Alex’s first day at school Abi has them over here.
Q: What’s worse than a hard disk failure?
A: Having your system disk and your external backup disk fail at the same time.
Guess what I’ve been doing all weekend!
Almost three weeks late now. Oh, well.
We were in France with my parents for a week, followed by a week in the Netherlands. It was hot. We did very little, and had a great time doing so.
In The Netherlands, we spent two days at De Efteling, a theme park with a focus on fairytales. This is where we discovered that Fiona is as much of a thrill-seeker as her big brother. There is a rollercoaster called the Pegasus which has no height restrictions. It doesn’t have any loops in it, but it rattles around at a fair clip. Fiona looked kinda worried while we were on it, and when we disembarked, I asked her if she was okay.
“That was fun,” she said.
“You want to do that again?” I asked.
(Breathless) “Yeah!“
Some random notes that I had meant to flesh out into a coherent narrative, but which seem a lot less pressing now:
Bring your own CDs, or end up with MOR-induced psychosis within three days. Your choice.
That last point brings me round to the post-holiday diet: when we got back home, we looked at the photographs of ourselves and went, “bleah.” We’ve been living a snack-food rich lifestyle for too long, and it is time to cut back. Back in 1999, Abi and I both did a simple, low-calorie diet for a few months, and it was very successful for us. We’re doing the same thing this time round as well: we’re targeting 1500kCal a day, which should result in a loss of about 0.5kg a week.
Immediately after the holiday I was up at 80kg, which is heavier than I’ve ever been, and I really would like to get down to 70 and stay there. It’s a long-term project. In fact, it’s not so much a project as a lifestyle switch: once we’re down to our target weights, we have to stay there, and not slip back into old habits. Right now, the diet (for me) consists of a bowl of cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and a pretty normal dinner. Fruit inbetween. I don’t drink coffee, so I don’t have a latte habit to deal with.
For the first few days, I spent a lot of time between meals thinking about the fact that I wasn’t eating, but that went away pretty soon. Now, a few weeks on, and I’m feeling pretty good about eating less and better. My weight is down, I’m feeling less bloated and sluggish. The food I do eat, I’m enjoying more. Also, Judging by my weight fluctuations (we’ve been weighing in every morning, and keeping a chart), I even seem to be able to cope with the odd diet malfunction (of the round, cheese-covered kind). So I’m not even feeling completely deprived of my favourite foods. Just not as a daily habit–only as an occasional indulgence.
Oh yeah, there’s some holiday photos, too. (More on Flickr: 1, 2, 3)
But just as with the upgrade to 3.2, this did not go smoothly. By following the parallel install method of upgrading I managed to get around the 500 server error problem, and was successfully able to run mt-upgrade under cgiwrap. This makes me think that my problem last year (and this year, too, initially) was something dodgy on my server rather than anything inherent in MT.
Once I got past the server errors, the actual upgrade script ran smoothly. However, I can’t say that I’m madly impressed by the new documentation (with a search option that doesn’t currently work), and the support forums were unavailable for all the time I was hitting problems. I like the new features in 3.3, but the overall upgrade experience has left me unsure as to whether a new release of MT is something to look forward to, or dread.
Update: I just noticed that Jay Allen posted a message to the Pronet mailing last saying that Six Apart was going to be doing some maintenance on its site over the weekend. This might be the cause of the forums outage. Maybe I just picked a bad time to do the upgrade…
In their write-ups of @Media 2006, Eric Meyer and Peter-Paul Koch have both spoken out to discourage the use of the “atmedia” tag for photos on Flickr which have no (apparent) relevance to the event itself. Personally, I’m with Russ Weakley in the opposite camp.
The whole point of tags on Flickr (and elsewhere) is that they are not rigid categories decided by the site owners. Everyone uses them differently, and most people pay no heed whatsoever to the global namespace. For example, when I tag pictures of my family, I use “family”, and the first names of whoever appears in the photo, e.g. “family martin fiona”. This is because I’m thinking about the relevance of these tags in the context of my personal space on Flickr. I’m tagging these photos for my benefit, and for my friends and family–not to provide the entire Flickr user base with a convenient way of reaching these photos via a global search.
Tags are descriptive rather than prescriptive metadata. With tags, you can throw as much or as little description as you like at an item. This allows for enormous flexibility, which encourages people to actually attach metadata in the first place. This is a good thing. However, the metadata is also likely to be incomplete, imprecise, and highly subjective. But this subjectivity is actually a strength when it comes to “social” tagging schemes.
The reason tags are gaining ground on traditional fixed classification schemes is that people like being able to create their own labels, with their own personal relevance. People like not having to ponder whether they should file a photo of Westminster Abbey under “Places:UK:London” or “Architecture:Churches:Gothic”. Would Flickr contain even a tenth of the metadata if it provided a set of categories instead, and asked people to classify their photos accordingly? I don’t think so. Aside from the cognitive overhead involved in making those decisions, there’s the usability aspect to consider, too: repeatedly navigating a categories is going to be more difficult than just throwing a bunch of tags into a textbox.
So although it may be frustrating for one person to search for the tag “atmedia” and be confronted with photos of Big Ben instead of Big Veen, someone else is sitting in front of their computer perfectly delighted with Flickr for allowing him to group all the pictures from his trip with a single convenient, and–for him–highly specific and descriptive tag.
It’s fine to suggest a canonical tag for use in classifying photos or other data (blog posts, links, etc.). But trying to specify exactly what that tag should and shouldn’t be used for, goes against the grain of the system. It’s a futile effort at best.
In fact, Flickr already has a mechanism for grouping photos with a narrow set of common criteria: groups. It takes a few more steps to submit a photo to a group than it does to tag it, but that’s the price you have pay for increased relevance in this case. There was a group for @Media 2005, but there doesn’t seem to be one for this year’s event yet. If anyone is interested, I’ll create one.
(As a final note, I have to say that I’m absolutely gagging for the new Tags feature in Movable Type 3.3. It’s about time…)