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There’ll Be Some Changes Made

It’s nearly time for some website redevelopment. The ten blogs I’ve set up under this domain are going to get combined, which means that various links will stop working. Half of those blogs were set up for experimental purposes, so their disappearance may not have any effect. The main three: Something I said, Bag and the annex are a slightly different story, and I am wondering how I might set up redirects for any trackbacks and incoming links.

I set these up in 2008 after my Drupal installation was attacked by spambots, and had intended to develop a multiblog covering 3-5 different areas of interest. The interim solution was to set up 4 separate blogs and see how they fared. I didn’t have the knowledge to set up one blog with multiple posting divisions. But that seems to have been addressed - in Wordpress at least - by multiblog adaptations like WPMU , WP Hive , Virtual Multiblog and Multiply . The idea is to have one interface, and one administrator account, but multiple ‘main’ sections, like a newspaper or magazine with internal divisions for News, Society, Science, and so on.

I believe that an easy alternative is to use posting categories, but this doesn’t produce a graphic layout like the one below.

20090813_132954.jpg

So sometime this year - sooner or later - the existing sites will come down, then be replaced with something more manageable, more effective.

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Where I’ve been


Flight Case - Listia.com


Unidentified - Wild About Britain Pics

and…
How to Make Your Own Tonic Water

Bookmarks, milestones, whatever

There’ve been two important moments this week. One is when I handed in a final draft of the thesis. The other is my birthday. Both involved a trip to Northampton.

So the draft copy is in, and the next step is either making minor corrections or passing it on to the Research School for examination. One or the other will happen in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve got to make some money to cover the bills I haven’t paid since December. My finances are now at the lowest point ever. I’ve used up my overdraft and have turned to my credit card to cover some of my bills. Which means I have to make enough money in the next month to cover the increased minimum payment, or borrow from other sources, or watch my own house of cards come tumbling down. Grim.

Rather than ending on that note, here’s a video I made from the train on my way back to Birmingham. It started as a test of the camera focus, to see if it kept distant objects in focus while moving. There was also something interesting about the way the landscape is framed. It’s like a very wide panorama: cropped top and bottom, alternating between objects near and far, and then the long series of industrial buildings. But there was also some conversation in the background that adds a surreal note to the view.

I made several short clips this way, but this one is nominally the best. Here’s another one made just as we’re arriving at Birmingham.

virtual parlour games


The internet can be a fluffy place.
One of the ways that’s evident is in the circulation of whimsical games, some of which help people learn about each other in trivial or not-so-trivial ways. It’s rare that I’m up for this sort of thing. I’m not a sheep-thrower by inclination. It usually depends on who asks, or on some notional value. Having made the decision to participate, I’m going to make a semi-serious effort, give it an evening, see what I can come up with. Given that I’m unlikely to do this sort of thing again, I want this one to be nominally interesting, with a bit of randomness for good measure.

This game is based partly on (the numerologically significant) 7 items, and whimsically on autobiographical details of some merit, or no merit. I have started by trying to factor in items pertaining to 7s, then expanding a bit in whatever direction suits a whim.

1. I was born in the 7th year of a decade, but not the 7th decade. Nor am I the 7th son.

My 7th birthday may have included cake and a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, but what I recall about birthdays of that era was missing Billy Bollinger’s birthday party. I am still sorry about that. Very much so.

My 14th (7+7) birthday may have involved clothing or albums. It passed without note, as did everything up to my 20th, when I did something involving an extraordinary quantity of hallucinogens. (More than 7, less than 14.)

For my 21st, just to remain out of step with the prevailing tendency of indulging in one’s first legal binge, I stayed sober, and have pretty much kept it that way, aside from an infamous bottle of gin in Northampton about 2 years ago.

2. I am within 3 months of having lived at my current address longer than I’ve lived at any other. This does not make me a native. I believe the record is 7 years, 5 months (+/- 1 month). This may also be a record for the longest I’ve lived in any one town, but that’s trickier to calculate, as I’ve lived in at least 40 places — including a few stints outdoors — in at least 15 towns. So the cumulative total for some towns may be several years longer than I’ve been here. So let’s stick to the one record.

3. I wish I could say that was one of my favourite movies, but that would be cheating, and in any case, within the Fellini oeuvre, I do not recall clearly which of the non-linear films (incl. Satyricon and Roma) were more my style, along with symbolic, surreal and experimental film from Herzog, Cassavetes, Greenaway, Lynch, and so many others. The point being that movies should dismantle the stereotypes of daily life rather than reinforce them. A bit like certain drugs, then.

4. Continuing the drift away from 7, but on a more factual basis, 7½ minutes represents the longitudinal and latitudinal dimensions of United States Geological Survey (USGS) ‘quadrangle’ maps. In other words, maps depicting an area 7½’ north-south, and 7½’ east-west, 1/8th of a degree in each direction.

7½’ quadrangle maps themselves have no special significance for me, aside from having enjoyed poring over them at various times and places. But maps more generally are significant in that I am frequently engaged in trying to represent social and spatial relationships in two and three dimensions, and in that I keep hoping I’ll manage the production and installation of several as an experiential exhibit some day.

5. Overtly embodying one’s contradictions is a noble pursuit. It’s no good for the purposes of career development or wider social acceptance, but it does keep one on one’s toes. I’ll leave you to speculate on how that reveals something central to the way I was raised, the person I am.

6. Since we have arrived at no. 6, and have been discussing degrees of distance, it’s logical to mention a few people within my 6° of social separation. In addition, by doubling the aforementioned 7½ minutes we can also drag in my 15 minutes of fame.

Since that 6 degrees encompasses everyone on the planet, it’s sensible to restrict consideration to people within 1 or 2 degrees. But even then, the people I’d mention are not celebrities. They would include my siblings and a few friends. People who know something about me, rather than the other way round. In other words, fame is inversely proportional to recognition, and I apologise if this comes as a disappointment, but I’ve nothing to offer on that topic. Next!

7. As a tonic for the previous two items, let us return to a straightforward item relating to a seventh. Pick the first theme that comes to mind. 7″ vinyl? Okay, you’re on. Have I mentioned records already?

The first 7″ I owned was a gift from my mother called The Ugly Bug Ball. It may have been Burl Ives singing for a Disney movie.

Conversely, the first 7″ I bought was something by Jefferson Airplane called Mexico/Have You Seen The Saucers? Similar, but different, if you know what I mean. And Julian’s right about the way she sang.

Some years later, my collection of singles was expanded significantly through a shop called Singles Going Steady where I latched on to the likes of Wire, Colin Newman, Delta 5, Snakefinger, Tuxedomoon, Sub Pop, Romeo Void, Gang of Four, Flying Lizards, The Teardrop Explodes, Orange Juice. Catchy pop tunes. With a difference.

It’s been at least ten years since I acquired a single, and what comes to mind is not a vinyl 45 but a magazine pullout on something like polythene, 7 inches square rather than round. Was it something from National Geographic? Was it music, spoken word, or a sonic artefact? I don’t recall.

8. I’m not much for going by rules. See No. 5 above.

9. Is there a way of adding a different dimension, a new value, to this game? Can I ask, then answer, a question that shifts the focus and the insight away from the light-hearted, towards a point of sober reflection?

For example, can I say something that sums up what I’ve learned in my time here? Can I say something that reflects positively on my experience of this place over the last 7 years? For example, I could say that I’ve learned how easy it can be to rally people into creating something shared. I’ve observed that at a distance rather than as a result of my own efforts, so it’s not a personal insight.

Closer to home, I have learned that many people respond well to lightly-structured, improvised learning environments where the focus is on the individual and her concerns rather than on the delivery of statistically relevant materials. I’ve learned that people are often surprised to be treated as individuals, whether they are on the giving or receiving end. Students and clients are surprised when I engage them on a personal level, as are bus drivers, counter staff and clerks. Maybe it makes their experience a bit less anonymous, a bit less atomised. Maybe it breaks the rules they’ve come to expect.

10. Let’s mix this up with another game. I have always called it Telephone. It starts with one person whispering a sentence to another, who in turn whispers to a third, who repeats it to a fourth, and so on. The sentence eventually returns to the first person, who then recites the initial and final versions. My take on that game is to modify the sentence as much as possible when passing it along. So that’s what I’m doing with this game: passing it along to one person, with the original rules modified as follows.

The rules are: a) do it by sevens; b) avoid mentioning factoids, mundanities, accomplishments, identifying particulars; c) wind it round upon itself, iteratively; d) break (or ignore) each rule at least once; e) try to make it upbeat, interesting, random, coherent, informative; f) remember that some of (your) story is already public; g) make up a rule for the next person; h) tailor it to suit yourself.

Done.

Edit: should I have added one more rule - keep it as short as you like? I don’t suppose anyone else would be inclined to spend an evening at this.

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Inauguration Over. New Era Begun. What Do I Do Tonight?

In contrast to the millions who’ve spent days going to Washington and then hours standing in the cold, I spent the day at home, except for a short walk into Moseley to post letters to my students. I spent the the better part of the day working on those letters and a tutorial schedule, snacking on fruit biscuits and salty porridge, and reclining for 15 minutes when the lack of sleep caught up with me.

On my return from the post office I thought to check for webcasts of the inauguration and found, a few minutes before the main ceremony started, that the NY Times had a stable Flash video embedded on the front page. The view was usually of, but not limited to, the podium and the people on it. I hooked into the video stream a bit before Jimmy Carter arrived, announced by a guy who could’ve worked the race car circuit with a deep voice reminiscent of those “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Speedway!” ads I used to hear.

For a while, what I saw seemed entirely ordinary, except that it was an open-air celebration by very powerful people. Some of the most powerful people in the history of the world’s most powerful nation. Milling about during the ritual transfer of power that’s not a transfer but the confirmation of a transfer accomplished some months and years earlier. The Carters, Bushes Sr. & Jr., Clintons, Bidens, and various dignitaries.

Then the Obama girls went walking along that corridor, seemingly at ease with both the gravitas and the intensity of attention. Into the fishbowl of life in the White House.

I can’t fathom it. They are already living it.

How different our experience is even while our existence has so much in common.

The rest of the ceremony followed in a similar pattern: the perfectly routine puncutated by the prefectly surreal.

  • Californians Diane Feinstein and Rick Warren speaking without a trace of NorCal/SoCal accent. Does this signal a change in national speech patterns?
  • Joe Biden becoming Vice President before there’s a President. Although, as the NYT liveblog notes, Obama is President even before taking the oath. Paradoxical.
  • The glee with which Joe grasped his oath. He’s operating on a more emotive register than Aretha, Barack, and everyone else on that podium! You go grrl!
  • The Presidential oath happens, and both parties fumble their words. I guess they’re nervous.
  • The speech touches on themes about making hard choices and facing challenges. My favourite line is probably ‘it has been the … men and women obscure in their labor — who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom’.
  • In the post-speech milieu it looks like George Bush has been moved to tears.
  • Gosh.
  • After a slow dissipation of the spectacle, Dick Cheney is seen leaving in an ordinary wheelchair. What a metaphor that is. Not least for the way it represents the self-inflicted damage of his administration. It’s almost as though he went for a dramatic reading in an effort to have the last word on the Bush era. Freudian.
  • Barack at a desk signing something. I can’t make out the dialogue, but later find that his first act as President was to issue this proclamation:

On this Inauguration Day, we are reminded that we are heirs to over two centuries of American democracy, and that this legacy is not simply a birthright — it is a glorious burden. Now it falls to us to come together as a people to carry it forward once more.

So in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, let us remember that: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 20, 2009, a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation, and call upon all of our citizens to serve one another and the common purpose of remaking this Nation for our new century.

I like it.
What do I do for it?

It’s that question which now gnaws at me. Not because I’m in a hurry to get started, but because, after taking an hour out of my interminably pedestrian daily routine; after taking an hour to acknowledge and participate in a momentous political occasion, albeit on my own, thousands of miles from the main event, I am wondering what I’m gonna do with the rest of my day.

There are dishes to do. There are more letters to write. Some of the bookkeeping for HPF needs doing. And I haven’t spent a minute on the thesis today.

But is that an appropriate response to the momentous occasion I’ve just witnessed?
Or is it how I’m meant to get on with my part for the day of renewal and reconciliation?

Or did that event actually happen?

My room hasn’t changed. Maybe nothing else has either.

I’m confused.

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Hudson River Iceboats

2008.1.2. I’m in Northampton with Bernadette. We arrange to join Rebecca and Roger at a pub called the Picturedrome, where they’re meeting a former bandmate, Jon, and his partner Sharon, who’ve come in from Risør, Norway.

Everything goes to plan, and we gather round a table in the front, for a total of 9 people. At the point when I get to ask Jon about the wooden boat festival in Risør, I am reminded of the wooden iceboats of Rhinebeck, and at Jon’s request, have subsequently done a bit of web-trawling to see what I could turn up as an explanation.

It hasn’t turned out quite as expected. Google searches don’t turn up much under ‘iceboat’, but once I started looking on ‘ice yacht’ and ‘ice boat’ pictures and stories started showing up. But there’s also enough to remind me of things about Rhinebeck that get into the blood. And stay there.

I lived in Rhinebeck on & off between 1984 and 1989. I spent the first winter in Rhinecliff in a house at the corner of Hutton and Orchard, where I had glimpses of the Hudson river beyond the train station. It would have been January 1985 that I saw my first iceboat and made my way onto the river. I met a few of the locals thereafter, including Reid Bielenberg, who took me on a slow, rather windless five mile ride upriver.


Iceboats, possibly at Tivoli bay. Photo by Glen Berger, 2003.
(View a map of the area)

In later years icebreakers came along the river, and the weather was a bit warmer, so iceboating wasn’t such a sure thing. But they’re still at it, and the search results turned up this poster for an exhibition just finished at the Roosevelt Museum in Hyde Park.


Search results include this stack of photos from the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club current conditions page. I recognise Reid wielding a brush in one of them, about halfway down on the left. I’ve only been back there twice in the last ten years, so there are people I’ve not seen, and much I’ve missed. It’s nice to see familiar faces and things.

Other ice yacht related pages include a page from the Hudson River Maritime Museum and an older race report from a copy of their newsletter.

But aside from the yacht pages, I’m finding stories by people I know, such as two by Cynthia Philip about Barrytown and Rhinecliff, and about people I know, including one about Upstate Films (probably the last film house I went to with any regularity). I’m reminded of the barns, sheds and woods I lived or camped in (including Reid’s Germantown IOOF lodge), the rummaging around demolished riverside estates and factories. And the people.

That’s the thing about that part of the Hudson Valley. It’s semi-rural, so people know one another, and it’s eclectic, willfully so, ranging from ice yachts to art-house cinema, musicians to farmers, iconoclastic intellectuals and religious converts, crumbling estates and new age health centres. There could not be another place with that particular combination of characteristics. Ninety miles from Manhattan, in a world of its own.

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Budget, What Budget?

This post at Lifehacker about budgets took me to the budget calculator of CNBC’s Carmen Wong Ulrich, and from there to a comparison with my own spending.

Carmen’s budget pie looks like this:

I took those proportions and made some charts of my own.

Based on a monthly income of £625, Carmen’s machine says I should be spending as follows. (Note that I have renamed three categories: Housing = Housing & Tax; Household = Utilities; Everything else = Miscellany.)

Housing & Tax 30% £188
Transportation 18% £113
Food 14% £88
Miscellany 11% £69
Savings 10% £63
Debt 10% £63
Utilities 7% £44

My actual monthly spending is more like this, though it leaves out water bills and long-term debt that I’ve deferred.

Housing & Tax £330
Transportation £25
Food £80
Miscellany £30
Savings £0
Debt £210
Utilities £150

Two things to note. My monthly outgoings exceed my income by £200, and my proportions are way out of line with Carmen’s. The first means that means I’m borrowing more every month, and my active debt share takes more of my income. The second means that I’m making tradeoffs, such as between transportation and debt, where the combined total is the same in both charts. I have effectively diverted most of the transport budget to pay for debt, and my savings budget to pay for utilities.

Here it is graphically. On the left, the standard suggested by Carmen. On the right, my actual spending.

It’s obvious that my budget shares are dominated by rent, utilities and debt. Showing them side by side will clarify just how different those portions are. In the chart below, green bars are what Carmen suggests. Red is what I actually spend, even though it is greater than my income.

Carmen’s guide says I should spend just under half my budget on the combination of rent, utilities and debt. I am spending more than four-fifths of my £825 monthly outlay on those three things. Given that my £625 income covers three-fourths of the spending, I am borrowing in order to pay some of those three categories, and borrowing again to pay for things like food, sundries, and transport.

It doesn’t work quite that way, because I am spending actual money on food, and borrowing via my overdrafts to pay for the increased borrowing, while deferring some of my debts and postponing payment on my utilities and portions of the rent.

The question of what to do about it revolves around two things: reducing my outgoings and increasing my income.

Reducing outgoings could include things like going to a debt counselling agency and seeing what schemes I can partake of. I have already sought tax relief, so that’s not going to change. I have also been looking into gas and electricity schemes, and may be able to accomplish something there. I should look into water rates as well, since they really stick it to me every few months with a flat rate bill, even though my water consumption is low.

Increasing my income is a much better solution, but given the poor results of my job search so far this year, I’m not counting on it. Given that my current spending is about £4.75/hour on a 40 hour week, I should be able to make ends meet temporarily on the minimum wage, depending on what costs increase (travel, food, taxes, sundries). But that ignores the load of debt I’ve deferred, specifically college loans, unpaid credit cards and utilities. It also leaves out dental work, insurance, both personal and otherwise. So short-term solutions are not proper solutions, and I’ll be in this sort of situation until I can find - or make - a proper job. Possibly some time next year.

Moral Questions

A MetaFilter post linked to a story called What makes people vote Republican? Which in turn linked to a series of questionairres about morals.

Here are my results for the first of them.

Apparently I am a moral conservative when it comes to questions of harm. I don’t know whether that means I am more concerned about harm, or less concerned. And I am a moral liberal as regards fairness. Whatever that means. Maybe I’ll take the survey again to see what questions pertain.

But the survey really focuses on the last three columns. From the site:

The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations.

I take this to mean that the sharper differences between liberal and conservative moralities show up in the last three columns. From the looks of it I am neither conservative nor liberal, but possibly ultra-liberal. In these columns, the difference between liberal and conservative is 1.0, 1.1 and 1.6. The difference between a liberal and me is -.8, -.5, and -.7. So I am somewhat sharply distinguished from a liberal, and very sharply distinguished from a conservative.

There’s another way to consider this: as a ratio. If the upper limit is set as 100%, then the lower figures can be seen as relative rates of agreement. In the purity column, if 2.8=100%, the liberal value of 1.2 is 42.8% of the upper figure, and my .5 is a dramatic 17.8%. If a liberal is only half as concerned about purity, I am less than a quarter as concerned, meaning the difference between me an a liberal is as sharps as between a liberal and a conservative.

So what does that make me? Answers to Hugh Romney or Abbie Hoffman, please.

Photomapping: More Fun Than A Square Peg

Doing things with Photoshop and AutoCAD, that is.

The above is a contrived portfolio piece that makes use of a slightly awkward set of objects: 3D terrain and some hand-built coils, each rendered with a different material. I will do more with this, partly to make more use of the reflective qualities of the glassy green terrain, but also to add more complexity and interest.

Saturday’s excursion to Bridgnorth along the Severn Valley Railway produced about 150 photos. I wanted to see if a composite effect produced different impressions. I didn’t achieve anything dramatic, but was nonetheless pleased with some of the results.

I used two appraoches. One involved cutout, anisotropic diffusion and kaleidoscopic tile filters. The image above is the diffusion filter followed with kaleidoscopic tile, while the series below start with the cutout filter, equalization and a Xero plugin called Abstractor. Each of the steps are displayed here.

The cutout filter was interesting in that it produced a lot of shapes that could be fitted together to make polyhedra. I imagine a folded surface, a terrain map based on colour and compositional patterns. A filter that did the work of generalising contours would be very useful. While Photoshop includes a contour filter, it looks at a limited set of data, and doesn’t produce isopleths that make intruiging compositions. For that, some variant of AutoCAD is probably required.

Neighbourhood Gone Quiet

9:30 PM - The birds have gone to sleep, the bats are not yet out. For five blessed minutes there have been no cars on the surrounding streets. I can hear a door close four houses away, and a murmur of conversation in one of the back gardens. The air is still. No rustle of leaves.

It’s the warmest evening of the summer, the gnats are out in force, and there are traces of herb in the air: basil, lavender, thyme and the faint smell of hot asphalt after the heat has broken.

There’s a radiant quality to it. The temperature and fragrance are emanating from the things that absorbed heat during the day, releasing some of it now that the air is slightly cooler.

It’s glorious, it is. The best day so far.

So good that the back doors are wide open, I’ve cracked a can of Beck’s, and sat on the swing, gently swaying in the quiet.

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