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The fashion-conscious geek

I rarely enjoy shopping for clothes. I like having nice clothes, and I enjoy wearing them, but I hate the time it takes to choose them. I was raised in South Limburg, the southernmost tip of the Netherlands, where the people are naturally stylish, and where they add fashion sense to the drinking water instead of fluoride. But I’m also a geek. Geeks (or nerds) have inner “anti-fashion” demons whispering to us whenever we enter a clothing shop. “Does it hide your nipples and gonads? Yes. Does it cut off the blood to your legs? No. Great. Now lay down the cash so we can hit the computing section in the bookshop next door!”

I like Levi’s. I like the cut of Hugo Boss suits (their web site sucks, though). I like a nicely tailored pair or Ralph Lauren trousers, and the crisp feel of a Thomas Pink shirt. But do I want to pay twice or three times the cost of a normal garment just to sport a brand label? Holy crap no.

I’m therefore always delighted to find something that fulfils the four criteria of the fashion-conscious geek:

  • It looks good
  • It looks good on me
  • It doesn’t cost the earth
  • It’s available off-the-peg in the first shop I visit

I found two such items last week: a pair of classic blue Converse All Star sneakers, and a plain demin jacket. I can’t believe I’ve never owned either of these before. The All Stars are comfortable like slippers. They are the timeless sneakers: relaxed footwear that is effortlessly stylish.

As for the denim jacket, I passed by the £70 Levi’s jacket in favour of a £25 off-brand. Cheap! I’m not going to claim that it looks the same as the Levi’s version, because it doesn’t. Any denim jacket connoisseur will instantly see that it doesn’t have a trendy label. But my one doesn’t try to go beyond the archetypal denim jacket by adding excess frills, zips, clever pockets, or decorative seams. It has the same kind of elegant simplicity as the All Stars.

The jacket and shoes also look great together, combined with a T-shirt and a pair of chinos or cargoes. As soon as I bought them, I knew they weren’t going to be part of my wardrobe–they were going to be part of me.

The true test for the clothes came as we were passing through Schiphol airport over the weekend. Anyone who spends a lot of time in European international airports knows the game of Nationality Spotting: trying to figure out what country a passing stranger comes from. After a while you develop a sense for the way people from different countries look. You start to recognize the characteristic genotypes, the way they dress, and the way they style their hair. It’s generally pretty easy to tell the British from the Dutch, the French from the German, and the Americans from everyone else. It gets more difficult when you have to distinguish between the Dutch and the Germans, or the Spanish and the Italians, but a talented Nationality Spotter can get pretty good over time.

The staff at Schiphol airport are all professional players. If you look like you’re Dutch, they will start speaking to you in Dutch. Otherwise, they will start speaking in English. (Unless they happen to tag your origins and also speak your native language. Not uncommon.) Even if you then turn around and reply in Dutch, they may continue to speak in English, just in case you have learned some stock replies (like “dankuwel” for “thank you”, etc.) and don’t have any further depth.

I usually get addressed in English. Being genetically Scottish through and through, and living and shopping and getting my hair cut in Scotland, it’s pretty hard to avoid looking like anything other than a Brit. But this time round, I managed to get spoken to in Dutch every time! Yay!

I understand that this may sound like an absurdly small victory, in a non-existant contest of surpassing pettiness, but it matters to me. I lived in The Netherlands from 1978 to 1989. Since then, I have been back only rarely. My Dutch skills are very rusty. My knowledge of Dutch current affairs is virtually nonexistent. I have neglected a large part of my upbringing–a large part of myself.

It’s only in the last few months that I have come to realize that I really miss the Netherlands, and the side of me that is Dutch. So what has changed?

I’ve got my High School reunion coming up at the beginning of October.

I’ll be writing more about this soon.

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Hugo Awards 2003

Around this time each year, the World Science Fiction Convention (“Worldcon”) takes place. It touches down in a different city each year. The last one we attended was Bucconneer, in Baltimore in 1998. Before then, we went to Intersection in Glasgow in 1995, and I attended ConFiction in Den Haag in 1990. This year, the event was called Torcon 3, and it took place in Toronto. (We didn’t go. We were visting friends and food in the South of The Netherlands instead.)

Worldcon is also where the Hugo Awards are announced. The Hugos are the “audience awards” of the science fiction world. Publishers like to tout their Hugo-winning authors. People who have not heard of an author might pick up a book that has “winner of the Hugo award” splattered over its cover. For people who didn’t attend the conference itself, the awards are one of the biggest pieces of news to emerge from it. You’d think that they’d maybe put the results up on the front page of their web site, wouldn’t you?

Okay, say they didn’t put up the results on the front page. Say the results are stuck on a page somewhere deeper in the site. Surely they’d have a link to it right on the home page! Surely?

Hello–2003 calling Torcon! Anyone home? Anyone heard of content management systems? Blogs? Personal publishing tools?

The SF community has embraced fanzines and mini-publishing totally. SF fans love getting together for cons. We love hanging out on the Internet in chat rooms, on Usenet, IRC and bulletin boards. Given the sheer volume of geeks and netheads involved in SF fandom, how is it possible for Worldcon web sites to be so uniformly rubbish?

I complained about this last year as well, and nothing has changed in the intervening period:

  • 2002: ConJosé. (Okay, so they did eventually put a link to the Hugos on their front page.)
  • 2003: Torcon 3. (Framesets…argh.)
  • 2004: Noreascon 4.
  • 2005: Interaction. (Ooh, pebble texture background…very 1997!)

At least Noreascon 4 has a blog. But do you notice any difference between the main site and the blog? Something to do with clarity of design, readability, timeliness of information? Is there some kind of WSFS rule that says you’re not allowed to use a graphic designer to put together a set of page templates? Some bizarre bylaw that makes information architecture and user testing a punishable offense?

The simple, old-fashioned HTML isn’t about accessibility, either, as the frameset design for Torcon 3 does a great job of preventing useful navigation for anyone without a frames-capable browser.

Yet it’s perfectly possible for sites to be accessible, well-structured, and good-looking–all at the same time! Good visual design isn’t child’s play, but it’s not rocket science. Usability testing can be done simply and quickly. Simplicity of design can be combined with depth and breadth of information and interaction.

It’s not too much to ask, is it?

(Oh, and about the actual results for the 2003 Hugos: Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids won the award for best novel. I haven’t read it yet, but some of the comments about it make me ambivalent about starting.)

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Web Droppings

I’ve been hoarding some of these for a while… time to linkdump!

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Low threshold links

Some people have them in a sidebar and call them “Further random reading“, “sidelights“, “trinkets“, “oddments“, or “obLinks“. Other people post occasional blog entries filled with links, more links, and nothing but links.

But the best and most descriptive name I’ve seen for them for them comes from Cameron Marlow who calles them “Low threshold links“:

“…My threshold for what to post was way to high to catch many of the sites I was laughing at, engaged by, and sending on to my friends. Instead of losing these links thanks to my imperfect brain, I decided like many others to create a separate weblog just for the ephemeral sites that didn’t deserve discussion.”

There’s an abundance of information around on how to set up a sidebar with low threshold links on your blog; Anders Jacobsen has a particularly simple way of doing it for Movable Type.

(My sidebar’s a bit crowded right now, so I’m just going to stick to linkdumps in the body of entries for the moment.)

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Going Analogue

Since buying a digital camera in 2000 (an Olympus C3000 Zoom) we haven’t really looked back on analogue photography. Although we had bought a brand new APS camera in 1999, it disappeared into a dusty drawer as soon as we’d tested the digital waters. Earlier this year we even bought a second digital camera, a superslim Casio Exilim EX-S2.

The Olympus is a great all-round camera, and takes superb landscape shots, but it is quite bulky to carry around. The Casio is a snapshot camera. It’s great for people pictures, it’s tiny enough to slip into a pocket without spoiling the line of your trousers, and it turns on almost instantly. It’s rubbish at doing landscape or architecture shots, but that’s okay, because that’s not what we use it for.

A couple of months ago, however, we had a little accident with the Casio. The result was a cracked LCD screen, an £80 repair bill, and about four weeks without the camera.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as we still had the Olympus, but it so happened that in those four weeks, Abi was away on her own for a bookbinding conference, and Alex and I were up in Aberdeen visting my grandmother. Abi ended up taking the Olympus down South with her, and Alex and I brought our quaint old APS device: a Canon Elph 260Z.

Now, when APS (“Advanced Photo System“) first arrived on the scene, I thought it was pretty cool:

  • Instead of a normal roll of 35mm film, APS cameras take a little film cartridge. APS cameras all auto-load these cartridges, so there is no messing about with threading film through a series of rollers.
  • The cartridges are asymmetric, so there is only one way they’ll fit in the camera. There is also a visual status indicator on the cartridge itself to show whether the film is (1) new, (2) in progress, (3) finished, or (4) developed. If your camera allows it, you can even swap cartridges in mid-roll.
  • At the time of taking a photo, you can specify a “framing mode” for the photo. The three modes are “Classic” (4:3 ratio), “HDTV” (9:5), or “panoramic” (about 10:3). The camera will actually photograph as much of the scene as the lens permits, but the framing mode will determine how the picture is cropped when it is printed.
  • When you get your pictures developed, they don’t come back with strips of negatives. Instead, you get back the cartridge itself (with the roll of developed negatives nicely tucked away inside it) and an index print, showing thumbnails of all the pictures on the roll. (And the prints, of course.)

The down side of APS is that it doesn’t have the same picture resolution as 35mm film. The negative is only about half as big, which means (in digital terms) that it has half the pixels. It’s like taking a picture with a 4 Megapixel camera vs a 2 Megapixel camera: you’ll be able to blow up the 4 Megapixel image to a much greater size before the individual pixels become visible. (The “grain” of the film, in analogue terms.)

To be honest, we never took enough pictures with the Canon for this downside to become noticeable. Migrating from 35mm to APS seemed like a step forward.

Moving from digital back to film photography, however, is an enormous pain in the ass:

  • No LCD screen. Some sophisticated film cameras now have LCD panels as well as optical viewfinders, but on digital cameras, LCD screens are the norm. Unless the lighting conditions are really bad (i.e. too much light), I would much rather hold the camera away from my face and watch the LCD, than hold it up to my eye and look through the viewfinder.
  • Every photo you take has to be developed and printed. Getting two rolls of APS film (65 shots) developed at Boots costs £16. If you factor in the cost of the film itself (£3-4 per roll), that works out at about 35 pence per photo. With our digital cameras, it’s not unusual for us to fire off 65 shots in a couple of hours, and that costs us exactly nothing. Note also that APS film and developing is more expensive than 35mm.
  • If you’re used to working with digital, you’ll probably want to get your analogue photos digitised. That means letting the developer stick them on a CD (at additional cost), or scanning them yourself (time and effort). Scanning from the negatives will give you better results, but APS really falls down here because the negatives are hidden inside that formerly convenient cartridge. And they’re not easy to get out.

All this adds up to one result: if you’re used to digital, you won’t ever want to go back to APS. 35mm, despite being the older technology, is actually much more suited to the digital age.

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Mailinator follow-up

After I had grasped the concept behind Mailinator, one of the first things that came to mind was, won’t companies start blacklisting mailinator.com email addresses?

Paul Tyma, mailinator’s creator, has answered the question:

“1) Its likely that registration sites will start banning mailinator addresses. The definite first on the list are the ones that already ban yahoo and hotmail addresses and such. The trick is that they already have an infrastructure for banning. If their system has none, its a pain to add and may not be worth the trouble.

2) We have a few aliases set up, but as you can imagine, those just prolong the life. Its possible that enough aliases could become such a chore to track that most registrations will still get through.”

It’s the traditional problem with blacklists. They’re a cat-and-mouse arms race where the “attacker” always has the upper hand, because it always takes the “defender” a finite time to respond. The list of domains that will redirect to mailinator is growing steadily already. If you discover that some site has blocked mailinator.com addresses, don’t worry–there are plenty of alternatives by now.

Turns out that Paul Tyma is also one of the guys behind Dash-O and Dotfuscator, the popular Java and .NET code obfuscation tools. Interesting guy. Have a look at his home page for some recent articles he’s written:

The “Is programming…?” article dovetails with two recent articles by Bob Cringely: “Body Count: Why Moving to India Won’t Really Help IT” and “May the Source Be With You:
IT Productivity Doesn’t Have to Be an Oxymoron, but Outsourcing Isn’t the Way to Achieve It“. Long-distance outsourcing worries me. It makes me think that there won’t be much of a market for programmers in the UK in ten years’ time, and that I’ll have to do yet another career change. I’ve tried teaching; maybe I’ll become a plumber instead.

His Java article is interesting because I’m start starting to learn Java. He addresses the performance issue, which is something that I’ve always disliked about the language. Server-side Java has never bothered me, but GUI apps have always felt…sluggish. Now I understand some of the reasons behind this.

He does, however, point out the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) libraries, which are a set of platform-specific GUI widgets that drive the underlying OS at a much lover-level than Swing does, with a resultant increase in performance. The Eclipse IDE is based on SWT, and it certainly feets nice and snappy. (Unfortunately, SWT seems to be severely under-documented, which is going to make it tough to learn.)