social broadcasting

February 24, 2010

I rather like social interaction online. for many years my peers, co-workers and friends have mostly been in different timezones and an expensive phone call away, regardless of who was actually paying the bill. there’s nothing like the direct connection of, say, IM, or chat, or IRC (oops), or nearly-connected twitter, or even asynchronous email, or, at a push, facebook status (excuse the pun. actually, don’t, I put it in on purpose. its supposed to be there), to connect with people I really can’t be with in person. I can pretend to myself that because we still interact directly on a mostly 1-1 basis, that we’re still kind of friends and that we’re actually having a conversation. it works for me.

however, and I don’t usually begin a paragraph with a however, however, in this case, its appropriate, in recent months, nay, years, the increasing market for social networking technology across multiple platforms and devices has driven things into a bizarre self-fulfilling adoption-fest whereby its no longer the interaction that sustains the apparent connectedness but the dissemination and aggregation of the message that appears to matter. in others words, its no longer about what you say, its about how something else distributes it. and how someone else embeds it into their own personal social network architecture. where it festers. and dies. in a soup of loosely related social media artefacts which are abstracted from their original content types and dumped like a mahoosive bucket of unrecognisable old fruit in a shiny new bin round the back of Tescos, which coincidentally, you chose to shop at. its not interaction, its broadcasting. and now you’ve lost me.

oh, hang on, my phone’s ringing.

listening post: M83 – graveyard girl

touche touchy touchpad

February 22, 2010

I’m not entirely sure whether this is a failing on my part or a failing on their part, but since there was a failure, I’m going to blame them, but I’ve only just realised after about 4 years that there is a key on my laptop which toggles the touchpad on and off which sounds like it might be a good idea which it probably is if you know that that is indeed what it does. which I didn’t. until yesterday.

I expect that if I’d been through all the options in the documentation I would have known about this key from day one, but just to be clear, it isn’t a key which just does one thing, like, say, a mahoosive windows key next to your space bar that you keep pressing my mistake. no, this is a softhard key. not a shifted or ctrl-alted regular key, but a key magically enabled with a combination of the ‘fn’ key and F7. in other words, fn-F7. which looks like it should be the mathematical evaluation of the number of ‘f’s I used trying to figure it out, but it in fact just a combination key press that you actually can’t perform with one hand. which is why it should be difficult to do. and obvious what it does.

I should point out that this is just one of a number of function keys mapped to the F keys that do useful things, like swap displays (glyph of a monitor), adjust volume (glyph of a speaker), adjust brightness (glyph of a sun thing), suspend, resume, shut down, etc. (glyphs of Zzzs, standby buttons, etc.), but this one has the least recognisable representation of its consequent action, to the point where I just assumed it did something I would never want to do. knowing now that it might actually be useful is too late, since I’ve already somehow used it by mistake to disable a hardware component that is actually useful resulting in me reinstalling drivers, users, and very nearly the entire operating system. why not just search online for this annoyance and surely someone else will have come across it? well, this isn’t exactly the people’s choice of laptops – acer ferrari 5000 – nice as it is. the only thing you’ll find online is reviews about how nice it is, albeit with a bit of a sticky touchpad, and instructions on how to disassemble it. its just a badly designed button. and it had me fooled.

I’d love to show you exactly what this offending item looks like, but frankly, I can’t quite summon the energy to photograph it, edit it and upload it, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. suffice to say, the graphical representation of someone using a touchpad, in light blue, on the F7 key of my laptop, looks a bit like a canary on a wing mirror. I mean, I know what its supposed to be now.

listening post: attic lights – never get sick of the sea

walk this way

February 19, 2010

those lovely looking people with the astro-turfed terrace at archibald ingall stretton obviously understand that if you really want to find them, you probably know how to use your own map, and so they have instead provided you with the more immersive user experience of doing the walk for you, so you know what to expect. it tells me everything I need to know about a daily commute from the nearest tube station in a way that Transport for London really never can, complete with pithy social commentary on, amongst other things, the relative worth of free news (although I might have recycled).

try for youself. I rather like the journey from Tottenham Court Road.

listening post: aphex twin – flaphead

in praise of flickr. again.

February 17, 2010

I have, a number of times, errantly extolled the virtues of the flickr user experience to such an extent that I am probably some kind of fan-man. that is to say, I’ll often be asked what I consider to be a good example of user experience design, when, frankly, its sometimes easier to explain to people what I do by demonstrating what it means to a user in a practical application, rather than a more ethereal dissection of human computer interaction and the history of pointing at things with disconnected devices and why I chose orange for a headline. notwithstanding the feature creep of recent years and the freakout that was the acquisition by yahoo! which was erroneously blown up into some kind of photo-apocalypse, the flickr experience is still one which supports everything I want to do in a way that I like to do it and doesn’t ask or compel me to do things I don’t want to do in the middle of things I’m half way to accomplishing. it is still, 5 years or so after first using it, one of the very few sites I access without going via some kind of API and amazon cloud captcha interface which abstracts the operations and allows me to fiddle about and aggregate any number of similar services so that I forget what I was doing in the first place much like writing this sentence. flickr, the site, is, of course, its own presentation layer on top of its own services, and so is only one of a number of full-featured experience architectures that I might decide to opt into or somehow leverage. but, in the end, its the seamless integration of those services, the consistent, coherent application of visual design components and the logical, meaningful management of data and taxonomy that pulls everything together so neatly. and I can write little notes with smiley faces on. there can’t be anything better than that.

there are some features of flickr that I never use. galleries. favourites (much). but then, I know they’re there if I choose to opt in, but on a daily basis, they don’t interfere with my operations. this is probably because I’m not very popular. I expect that insanely popular flickr users are bombarded via notifications of additions to galleries, favourites, and invitations to groups like Sword of Damocles ur got exceelent PIKTUREs add 1 comment on a billion animated gif 600×600. but then, you can decide what to do with those notifications, and anyway, if you’re insanely popular, you probably have to deal with the popularly insane, but at least flickr will provide you with the tools to manage that effectively and efficiently, but the good folk at flickr understand scalability and the effects on user operations. at least, I think they do. I mean, with about 6000 photos a minute or something getting uploaded and each one of those objects existing as a unique entity with all the associated user operations, I’m thinking they’ve considered scale.

in the end, as far as flickr is concerned, I’m just a satisfied user. and I pay for the privilege. and I don’t often say that.

listening post: catherine wheel – black metallic

good enough for you, good enough for me

February 11, 2010

why does it take so long to decide which platform which gadgets which colours which page width which font I might want to choose when setting up a blog when I could have spent the same two weeks writing a number of entries that would probably have answered those questions in a way that might become self-evident? because I like doing that. I like fiddling with the bits. I think it makes a difference and notwithstanding the obviously hacked together html and javascript and third-party widgets and nonsense I’ll use once and throw away even though it will wreck the template I spent two days creating by hand because my blogging platform doesn’t remember what I did before, I hope you think it makes a difference too, because that’s why I did it.

well, I kind of did it because I like orange, but there is more to it than that, honestly. I mean, I’ve got asterisks. they’ve got to represent something, like the concentric yet angular growth of my brand as symbolic of the acquisition of knowledge and its application in providing solutions regardless of the problem. or that they’re nice. and I’ve already used one somewhere else so I’m stuck with it. also, I spent at least a day deciding whether to use a single or double colon in the page title since I know that a a single colon with no space is the format that will be used to concatenate the blog title and an entry title and so there’ll be some kind of consistency there but hey, I quite like the double colon thing even though it’s largely meaningless. in fact, I would have finished this entry ages ago had I not decided that I suddenly wasn’t keen on the list styling and so just made some ridiculous and undoubtedly browser-breaking tweak to the css using percentages of ems just to calm myself down.

still, if its good enough, its good enough. I’m not paying myself to do this.

listening post: supergrass – mary

how to break a dslr

December 14, 2009

I have found that it is really quite easy. It goes something like this.

when you are planning your daily shot for your 365 project, consider taking a shot in your kitchen, because not only does it have lots of shiny surfaces and interesting highlights and shadows cast by the ambient and spotlights all over the place, but also it has a rather nice flagstone tiled floor which is hard as the place that’s even harder than a rock or a hard place. in setting up your shot, consider using your tripod, as that has really long extendable legs which will enable you to lift your camera about 7 feet in the air for maximum height, but do ensure that when you sit your camera, mounted on its hot shoe, into the tripod head, that you don’t quite attach it properly, so that if you were to somehow have the tripod + camera approach the horizontal, then the whole thing might become somewhat unstable, and you never know, it might even fall off, just as you’re holding the tripod, fully extended, above your head. imagine that.

well, you don’t have to imagine that, because I can tell you exactly what transpires. in a sickening mashup of of ‘breaking’ sounds, your not-very-old dslr drops like a stone from about 7 feet in the air, directly on to the aforementioned flagstone tiles and bounces across the floor unceremoniously in a clattering dance of death until it crashes off a cupboard and twirls a little death spiral at your feet. it is, apparently, dead.

still, don’t panic. it might just have suffered a small fracture or something. after the obligatory curse and stamp of feet like a small child, I picked up my a300 and tried to see what might have dropped off it. as far as I could tell, nothing had. also, there was no rattle, and no broken glass, which was particularly good, as I’d only bought the lens currently attached to the camera about a week ago. I mean, there were a few things hanging off, and the battery was now in the living room, but apart from that, everything looked miraculously intact. oh joy, I spake, rather too early

it took a couple of days for me to realise that things were actually quite wrong. as I’d been struggling to get focus with my new 50mm, I had just assumed I was still at fault for cropping myself to the right repeatedly. only after a couple of fixed test shots did I work out that in fact, everything was misaligned. what I saw on live view was actually 6 inches or so to the left different to what was captured. I’ve since discovered that this means the sensor is misaligned or something suchlike, which basically means, a bit broken.

arse.

50mm autofocus fail

December 1, 2009

It has been a little while since I acquired my new Minolta 50mm lens for my Sony A300 and I’m steadfastly refusing to take any photos where the thing I was expecting to be in focus is in fact in focus. I’m am now quite adept at getting most of my nose quite sharp but since there is a significant surface area to work with there I’m not counting it as a result. The thing I’m really trying to grapple with is while I’m still locked in to my 365 project and consequently taking far too many photos of my own face every day just how do I get my new lens to focus on one of my eyes. Either one, I’m not bothered. Just focus, pin sharp, like I know you can. On that blue bit in the middle where I’m trying to look all angsty. Yes, there. No. That’s my nose again. Grrr.

I am probably making the proverbial rod for my own primordial back being firmly clamped at f1.7 until I get this right, but then, that’s not about focus is it, its just about depth of field. I could have a depth of field like f0.3 or something and still get one of my bloody (for they are, after about 10 hours of trying) eyes in focus notwithstanding the fact that at that aperture I’d probably get eyelash bokeh but that’s not the point. The point is, I haven’t mastered this lens yet. And I’m running out of time. Kind of. This year’s 365 project concludes neatly on December 31st, after which I shall probably treat myself to the flickr equivalent of a 3-week Norwegian cruise, that is to say, I might not post anything for a day or so. Without my 365 project, I’ll not nearly be so inclined to invest the hours it will apparently take to crack this self-portrait focus failure which would be troublesome as I rather like the lens. I guess I have 30 days to sort it out.

Life in 50mm

November 17, 2009

Goodness knows why I haven’t got one until now, but I just got my hands on a new (to me) 50mm prime lens for my Sony A350. I’d been quite happy with the 18-70mm kits lens since I got with the camera, but then, I didn’t really have anything to compare it with. I was so taken with other examples of what you can do with a fast 50mm from other flickr users that I’d tried to force the 50mm off my old Minolta SLR onto the Sony body, but it just made a strange crunching noise and so I thought I’d better stop. Even then, it’s taken me about 6 months to even track anything in ebay to see what kind of prices we’re talking about.

In the end, I spent a good few weeks searching for a Minolta AF 50mm in good condition, as the Minolta lenses fit on the new Sony bodies without any other convertors or rings or whatever you stick in the middle. The 50mm comes in a couple of flavours, and depending which one you’re looking for, is either relatively easy to track down, or is like some fabled artefect from Narnia that enables you to control the destiny of humanity just by looking through it backwards. The common one is the f1.7. The Narniascope is the f1.4. Having determined that my budget was less than a pony and that the Narniascope would set me back around a couple of tons and a monkey or 2, I settled on tracking the perfect 1.7 variety. In the end, it was a case of getting lucky with the bidding across a number of similar-looking lenses, which I’d narrowed down based on the description and small things like whether the seller looked like an arse or not. 79 quid and about 1p later, I’d won myself my very own Minolta AF 50mm f1.7 (will fit Sony A200, A300, A350, A700, etc.), which was packaged up and dispatched to me very nicely from a very helpful ebay seller.

Its early days, and I haven’t posted anything to flickr using the lens, but I’ve taken a number of test shots and looked at them on my whacking great 24.1 inch monitor and the results are rather splendid. Its not the best camera in the world. Its not the best lens in the world. But its a half-decent camera and its a pretty good lens and all I know is I’m kicking myself hard, right now, under the table, for not getting it 11 months ago, when I started taking 12 months worth of self portraits. The thing is, of course, I now have to change lenses on my camera for different circumstances, and I hate changing lenses, dust freak that I am. I’m thinking I might just use the 50mm forever.

Actually, of course, since my camera is am APC sensor or whatever you call it, what I’ve actually bought is a lens that effectively has a focal length of about , erm, 72mm or something, so its way tighter than I was expecting. But its ok, because I’ve got long arms.

oh, never mind

August 29, 2009

I was going to write some puntastic eulogy about working at Sun for a million years but all I can think about is a pen
I lost in the Sale office in 1993. Goodbye then.

how wrong can you be

August 13, 2009

you see now 5 years ago I thought it would all be alright but it seems it isn’t. if there was a sense that there was something to be optimistic about then it was entirely reasonable to be chirpy but 9 years of pointy stick avoidance makes jack a dull boy. its hot here, but then, you don’t know where I am.

Things what I writ