- Meg Pickard’s Twelve Days of Christmas Some illustrations that Meg did to Celebrate Christmas in 2003, reborn via Flickr…
- Are Google Buying Flickr? I’m not terribly interested in the rumour mill surrounding this one, except to say that if Google were going to try and buy Flickr then I would consider it evidence of their intelligence and good sense…
- WI forces cuts to Little Britain “Complaints by the Women’s Institute have prompted the BBC to make changes to hit comedy show Little Britain.”
- Medium-bunkish article about the role of weblogs in 2004 that compounds the old myth that blogs are more about publishing and punditry than they are about representing the voices of individuals online “But it was in 2004 that debate about the role of the political blog and its impact on society really got under way.”
Year: 2004
Links for 2004-12-24
- Just a reminder – the awesome Radio 3 site in all its glory Ok, basically there was this tiny layout thing that annoyed me about our work on Radio 3 and it’s now been fixed, so I’m just going to tell you all to go enjoy it again…
- BBC News’ in-depth pages on “The Harry Potter Phenomenon” The whole thing is so weird. The book’s not out for six months and is already at #1 (and #2) at Amazon.co.uk – probably to stay there until July…
- Help Stonewall fight homophobic bullying in schools This is a bit of a cause for me, I’m afraid. Anti-gay bullying, rhetoric and language in schools causes incredible harm to young gay people and now we’re free of Section 28 it’s time to start putting it right.
I wish you a Merry Christmas…
You know what drives me mad? “Happy Christmas”. It’s been driving me a bit nuts for a while now. Surely it’s “Merry Christmas”? Cos otherwise how can you say, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”? Google agrees with me: Merry Christmas (661,000 results) vs. Happy Christmas (183,000 results). So stop it, advertising wankers. Stop it TV people. Stop it, annoying card makers. Merry is better. It means drunk.
Anyway, I’m off to see the family today, so I would imagine posting will be even more sporadic than normal over the next week or so. I hope you all have a good time visiting family and stuff. I’ll be back online properly in a few scant days, no doubt busting at the seams with enthusiasm and turkey and ideas and vim. In the meantime, if you want to do something good in the world, why not donate to Oxfam US, Oxfam UK or to Stonewall. And if that’s all a bit worthy for you and you’ve enjoyed the guff I’ve pumped out over the last hundred years, then why not buy me a present or something. Best wishes… xx Tom
So I’ve been trying to respond to the thread about my apparent obsession with going on about my sexuality (note – they’re talking about this) that’s manifested over at NSLog(); except now all my comments are getting bounced for ‘questionable content’. I’ve tried removing all the rude words from what I write, but god knows it’s hard, and it doesn’t appear to be doing any good. Before anyone goes running at his head suggesting that he’s blocking comments like this to avoid debate, I should point out that I’ve been having problems with the MTBlacklist questionable content filters recently, so I’m not implying anything. Instead I thought I’d just post it here, with all the rude words back in… Feel free to post your own thoughts about this stuff either here or over on his site… But be nice, eh?
If what you’re doing here is warning me that by having my sexuality on a card I might give out to people might stop me getting jobs, then thank you very much. Clearly by my age I wouldn’t have figured that out already.
Figures suggest that people who don’t meet their partners at school or university tend to meet them through work. Clearly this happens by complete coincidence – two people (let’s say they’re straight) are so conscious that they must not be flagrant about their heterosexuality that they avoid all mention of it for years until they happen to bump into each other at some kind of ‘straight bar’, recognise their attraction suddenly and fall into each other’s arms. Clearly there’s absolutely no assumption that it’s okay to flirt with each other at a Christmas party or whatever. Clearly no one talks about what they did at the weekend if it could possibly be construed as to make any reference (direct or indirectly) to whether they’re gay or straight or not. So they wouldn’t say that they’d cooked a meal for their girlfriend, or go to see a film with their boyfriend. Clearly they wouldn’t say out loud that they’d had a birthday party for their 3-year old son. I mean all of these things would be shouting from the rooftops about their sexuality. They may as well be standing outside your house with placards or rutting like Bonobo monkeys on the photocopier.
And quite right, I think, they should be ashamed of themselves – fornicating with their partners at home! Giving birth to children! Socialising with their family! Getting married! The shame. They make me sick.
I can honestly say that I’m stunned by your statement that you cannot see the difference between someone feeling the need to make it clear they were gay to avoid discomfort and awkwardness for themselves and their colleagues, and the fact that straight people simply don’t need to do that stuff. Straight sexuality comes up in conversation a dozen times a day – by association, by reference, however.
At no point during my piece over on plasticbag.org or here have I said that a gay person should ‘go on about’ their sexuality. In fact quite the opposite. As far as I’m concerned, getting it out of the way early means that the whole thing becomes less of an issue – not more. It’s about everyone knowing where they stand, so that they don’t say something crass in the office like, “Oh that photocopier is so gay” while someone over the other side of the room feels it like a kick in the head. It’s so that the gay individual concerned doesn’t have to go through this whole long drawn-out tentative process with each member of staff as issues of boyfriends/girlfriends, what you did at the weekend, what you think about some piece of the news, whether you fancy that bird in accounting come up in idle conversation. Because that stuff is bloody difficult and infuriating and frankly I’m not prepared to go back to a time where I have to go through all that bollocks every time I happen to meet a new human being.
All of which misses the point. I don’t make a secret of my sexuality, but nor do I tend to make a big deal about it. Most people who read my site have no idea that I’m gay. They find it a ‘surprise’ when they find out. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish that they weren’t assuming that I was straight. I wish it wasn’t an issue at all, but it remains one I’m afraid. I could bring my sexuality into my site all the bloody time if I wanted to, but I don’t. I think I’ve struck a good balance between making my sexuality clear and then getting it off the table to talk about other stuff. And if you don’t like that balance, well frankly tough. I don’t care whether you like it or not. I’ll be damned if I’m going to treat the rest of my life like my teenage years and live in fear of ‘being found out’.
I should also point out that you’ve missed a hell of a lot of qualifying language from my post as well. I mean the very title includes, “In a happier world…”. The text itself calls it a “Tongue-in-cheek-ish slightly-bored early-evening version of what I would kind of like my business card to be like.” I stand by it – if anything your reaction makes me want to use it more – but it was never meant to be anything but a throwaway offhand happy and less formal card that I felt represented me accurately. It’s true that I don’t think that the normal separation of life and work is a reasonable one – that I think that we should act according to our principles in both, that we should care about our work all the time, that it should ideally be a passion and as much of our personality as things like your sexuality or nationality or political beliefs or whatever. I really care about my work and don’t just see it as something that pays the bills, any more than I think my sexuality is just about something that happens in bed with a friend. But just because I’m not as willing to distinguish between the things I get paid to do and the things I do because I think it’s the right and proper way of operating in the world, doesn’t make it reasonable for you to conflate two words on a mock-up of a business card with a form of big swinging-dick sex-obsessed radical queer activism!
Oh and somewhere along the line you also make some comment about how I seem to have a lot of respect for myself, and I’m beginning to think that’s really where a lot of this stuff is coming from. If you find me personally annoying or offensive then just say so and we can talk about that like grown-ups. Seems at the moment that the only person fixating on my sexuality is you.
Links for 2004-12-22
- Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events Being an episodic and not entirely functional film for children, whose unexpectedly dark, macabre, mournful and witty elements are easily worth the price of admission…
- PopCultureShock interviews Mark Millar “You create these books in a bubble so when I heard from Sam Jackson’s wife that he loves Ultimates or Affleck says he collects Marvel Knights Spider-Man or something I always feel like I’m getting Punk’d.”
- Jon Snow to host New Year’s Eve “Man only” version of Women’s Hour “Snow, who confesses to being hopeless in the kitchen, will also learn how to cook roast partridge under the tutelage of chef Tom Norrington-Davies, and will ask why women spend so long in the bathroom and run up such large phone bills.”
- Ashley Highfield interviewed by Media Guardian “If there is a more muted mood blowing through the BBC corridors, someone has forgotten to tell the ebullient director of new media, Ashley Highfield.”
- Richard MacManus reposts comments by Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web “The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can.”
- Oldie but goodie – images glued together to create an endless trippy experience of travelling through imagery Totally stunning and involving and connected to some stuff I’m indirectly involved in at work at the moment.
- What the hell does being gay have to do with getting a job? So here we go – some bloke on a website decides to give me a hard time for mentioning that I’m gay on a mock-up of a business card. As usual the crime is forcing my sexuality down his throat. Get. A. Job.
- Kerry (gay) and Mike (not gay) go to Hooters This naturally begs the question of, “why would a gay man suggest a place like Hooters?” Well you can ask him yourself if you like, but my guess is that he wanted to see if the world would explode when we stepped foot through the door.
- Exquisite Corpse Another blast-from-the-past with the Exquisite Corpse project where people submitted slice-like sections of imagery to produce composite beautiful art projects…
- Name the @ sign I think the name should reflect name and function, ideally. ‘peralpha’ would be a bit of a bastardisation of ‘surrounding an a’, but I prefer diangle or diasper which should be something related to the greek verb ‘to circulate’…
Tongue-in-cheek-ish slightly-bored early-evening version of what I would kind of like my business card to be like. Potentially on the finest, richest paper and with slight ridging for the text or something so it looked like the result of some kind of weird ink pen:
As ever in my fontified handwriting font: Coates.ttf
Links for 2004-12-21
- Specially commissioned Simpsons animation to run against the Queen’s speech according to BBC News. The Radio Times’ site separately describes it as follows: “The world’s most dysfunctional family deliver a counterpoint to the Queen’s traditional broadcast, with Marge Simpson and the rest of the clan giving their view of the year. Lisa takes the opportunity to make a protest on behalf of Cornish liberation.”
I’m having a crisis of etiquette caused by what I believe to be bad user interface design. Basically it works like this. I look at my iChat buddy list (to the right) and I see a big list of people who are ‘green’ (indicating availability), ‘orange’ (indicating absence or idle-ness) or ‘red’ (indicating explicitly ‘away’, but still contactable if necessary).
Now my expectation of people on my iChat list is that if they are green they are currently using their computer at this precise moment. They’re actually looking at the screen. Which means that a ping to them should be incredibly unobtrusive but noticeable and should involve the absolute least number of keystrokes / interactions to be able to tell someone you’re busy and/or start a conversation with them. Actually, iChat doesn’t really handle that totally brilliantly in a range of ways, but the aspiration should remain. The ping should be non-invasive but immediately cognitively recognisable, and a response should be as simple as possible. It is with the understanding that the recipient’s experience will be something like this that we are able to ping our friends or colleagues without feeling like we’re being necessarily rude.
Except that this presumptive understanding of the experience of the person at the other end of the connection is starting to deteriorate. At least three or four of the people I have on my IM list are now accessing their IM via their hiptops. This changes the experience immediately – firstly because the recipient is now not necessarily engaged in a looking-at-a-screen-like activity. They could be walking in a fish market. They could be chatting to their mother on a phone. They could be driving a car. Secondly in order for them to react to the messages they’re receiving they have to physically move the device to a place where they can focus upon it. The casual ping is immediately an intrusive one. And then – of course – they have to find a way to respond to the ping – either by using slow phone-style or fold-out keyboards, or by changing their presence. None of these actions are simple or quick enough to make the experience of using a hip-top and responding to messages on a hip-top comparable with responding via a computer keyboard.
All of which would be fine if it wasn’t potentially difficult to distinguish between a person being rudely invasive and a device that encourages potentially invasive attempts at social intercourse… And if it wasn’t – in turn – difficult for the person sending a message to distinguish between a long silence that resembles some kind of ‘shunning’ activity and a long silence that is merely a consequence of circumstances or the difficulties in getting to your messaging. On both sides there are social problems that emerge because the behaviour of the interfaces is confused with the behaviour of the people at either end – the software/interface actually makes the person at the other end seem rude – and purely because there is a disparity between the social engagement one thinks one is engaging in and the consequence it might have.
The software attempts to compensate for this a little bit. Most of my friends that are using hip-tops use some kind of status message to convey that they are mobile – which would work more effectively if you couldn’t easily hide the status message to free up screen real-estate. In the meantime, the signifiers that actually tell you that someone is online completely overpower the signals that indicate their mobility.
So what’s the solution? Well ideally – since you’re looking at another form of engagement you’d distinguish it from the more conventional uses for IM. A separate scrollable container at the bottom of the screen or another buddy-list (a la the Rendezvous window) would compensate for some of these impediments – although probably at the cost of adding in more complexity. Probably the simplest solution would just be to revisit the particular presence indicators. In iChat then there might be two options: firstly an improvement of the portable devices to accurately reflect ‘available’ and ‘idle’, and secondly the creation of a new form of presence to go alongside ‘available’, ‘idle’ and ‘busy’. Either would be a useful corrective feature which could alleviate the social clumsiness of mobile IM.
Do other people have experiences like these? And if so, how do you resolve them? Do you leave it to social convention to work through problems like these, or is a simple UI or technological solution more simple? Any and all thoughts gratefully received…
Links for 2004-12-20
- iPod hoodie “A naked iPod? Girlfriend, you‚Äôve got to cover that thing – and we have a super solution! C. Ronson’s iPod hoodie has all the features of its life-sized original yet scaled down to keep yr MP3 player
or phone lookin’ spiffy!!! Blue or pink.”
Links for 2004-12-19
- I have a new favourite episode of Futurama: “Less Than Hero” Includes the classic, awesome, beautiful line: “a badger with a troubled past and nothing left to lose”…
- Flickr Sucks! Highly entertaining riposte to Canadian photo-sharing site
- Wikipedia’s guide to Podcasting “The term podcasting plays upon the terms broadcasting and webcasting and is derived from the name of the iPod portable music player, the playback device of choice of many early podcast listeners.”
- What was in the Apple Store’s “Lucky Bags”? The Lucky Bags may contain a selection of the following items in any combination: Airport Express, Wireless Mouse, Wireless Keyboard, D-Link, Keynote, .Mac, iLife, iSight Camera, 20GB iPod, Silver iPod Mini, JBL on Tour…
- Steven Berlin Johnson moots two types of writers – those who own a space and those that traverse multiple spaces – which seems to have resonance to those of us whose work tends to wander across discipline For a while in 2000/2001 it felt like I could have become a pundit or consultant around weblogs of all things, but I went in another direction and then another after that. I wonder if that was the right thing to do…
- And lo they asked Metafilter “What’s the most head-scratch inducing present you’ve ever gotten?” I’ve already posted mine – a couple of years ago my uncle gave my brother a packet of crisps and me a can of Thai Chicken Soup. All beautifully wrapped up and everything…
- Matt Jones proses “Smart Muzak” Lovely ideas here – use ‘on hold’ music to convey through mood and pace and rhythm your place in the queue and how long it’ll be before your call is answered…
- OmniOutliner 3 Professional Beta OmniGroup are – as far as I’m concerned – the third part of the holy Apple trinity along with Apple themselves and Adobe. And OmniOutliner is a lovely little app…