My eye is my camera

I have always been someone who has loved cameras, loved catching moments and even creating them to savour long after the event has passed. I have enjoyed the significant technological advances over the years, going from using Polaroid Land camera (black and white) in my formative years through the Instamatic days, then on to a pre-war Russian Zenith 35mm camera body (with Leica lens) then an Olympus OM2 with a few different bits of glass onto early heavy and slow digital cameras until finally today I have my Canon 7D Mk 1 with a number of lenses, tripods, filters etc. But for immediacy I also have my mobile phone (a Nexus 5) which can serve when I need something small and portable.

But over the past couple of years I have used my camera less and less. Not as you might imagine, because I am using my phone more. Not at all. It's because I am missing seeing so much watching the world through a viewfinder or a screen.

When I look back at my photo library I have some 18 thousand shots taken over the years with different technologies. But they also represent time that I wasn't actually looking or seeing. I was framing the shot, judging the light, focussing on the subject. What I wasn't doing was looking at what it was, what was happening around it.

Nowadays that's become more magnified as much of my life is driven by a small screen that happens to be able to help me communicate with others too. I look up timetables for transport, research locations, look at reviews, read emails and messages and get my calendar appointments, news, even watch TV or movies on this device. But I also miss too much.

The other day I left my phone at home accidentally. At first I felt a little helpless as my digital lifeline had been temporarily severed. I fidgeted and thought of the things I couldn't do. But then I started to look round and found that some new shops had arrived on my High Street that I had not noticed before. I saw a couple of people that I hadn't seen for a while (who failed to see me incidentally because they were concentrating on their phones). But what I noticed more keenly than anything was how many people were not engaging with the world around them

Omissions and Positions

Forgive me but it has been 4 years since my last blog. Not that I believe that anyone will either notice or care. These blatherings are usually for my benefit, a sort of aide memoire on cogitations and polemic. The act of blogging is, for me, less an act of self-publication but more a record of how my mind worked at the time and what exercised me.

One of the problems I have with any blogging of substance is that I start from a position where I am firm in what I believe is my own subjective understanding of what the problem is. And then I look at what I am writing and know that I really should have supporting evidence for my claims. Then I look at that evidence and chastise myself for cherry-picking that which corresponds to my position. So I then go out of my way to look at both unbiased evidence on the subject and even go so far as to look at evidence that directly contravenes my position. Once I have looked at it all I then evaluate that evidence and see if my position changes.

Then I realise that a week or two has passed and the thing I wanted to write about has either changed or nobody cares about it any more.

So I don't write. But I do learn.

I try to avoid the echo chamber that is social media where the tendency is to cluster in groups that can affirm confirmation bias and cultivate viewpoints from across the political spectrum. I can find myself vociferously disagreeing with someone on a particular subject/policy with whom I normally share many views. Other times I find myself in agreement with particular issues and the position of those on the opposite end of the political/social/ethnographical spectrum from me. What I do see is the rise of tribalism, the growth of the ad-hominem where reasoned debate actually would be a more sensible way forward. But I also realised that reason and fact isn't enough to sway entrenched positions - on either side including mine.

Where the subject of my writing is something entirely subjective then I don't hesitate. Anything I write as a review or critique is precisely my own opinion. Any facts are moot when I am writing about whether it appealed to me and the fault I found in it. I cannot in good conscience do the same when it's about policies and actions that affect society, the populus or the planet. For that I need as many facts as I can grasp and how those facts stack up to become evidence for or against something. I want to know, if something is described as an issue or problem, then what is the scale of that problem? Is it a genuine problem or is it just a media pleasing gimmick? Is there any evidence that the problem exists or is this just to appease those that think anecdotal is empirical evidence (clue: it isn't). If there is a problem does the proposal actually address the issue? If the proposal doesn't then what would be the unintended (or entirely intended but not stated) consequence?

So maybe that's why I don't write so often. Because I have too much thinking to do

The death of the small

I have a regenerated passion for snooker. I once played competitively, albeit at a very minor level but I did win a couple of trophies in leagues that I am not sure even exist any more. I spent a lot of spare time playing with friends or even on my own practicing. I had a choice of venues to play at and many of the working mens clubs and political clubs had their own tables too. When I was good enough I purchased my own cue and soon outgrew that and bought myself an even better one. I went to the local sports shops and browsed through a number of options and even got to feel the quality of the cues. Even the local clubs had a reasonable selection for purchase and I soon found the one that felt right to me. This was before major televised snooker and really on the back of a television programme called Pot Black. However it was possible to go out an buy the equipment that was needed.

Now today, snooker is a major sport with massive funding across the world. Several snooker championships are televised with millions of viewers and players can command big prizes. You would think it was a hugely popular sport.

So why is it that in London the number of snooker venues has significantly diminished and places to buy cues and other equipment in any sort of variety have practically disappeared off the map?

I am not talking about specialist stores like Parris Cues who sell their own extremely high quality goods or Dunn Cues who, out of their home, create handmade snooker cues but have no retail outlet, but an independent sports shop that carries that sort of merchandise.

That is not to say that cues are not available on the high street. There are a few sports retailers that stock cues such as Sports Direct and ... hang on ... that's about it really. So let's have a look at their range ... OK so a sports emporium should stock cues of varying degrees of quality shouldn't they? So let's see ... Peradon? No. Craftsman? No. Powerglide? Well a couple of very cheap pool cues ... but snooker? No. Riley? No. Just some poor BCE cues and all at the very cheap end. So this sports megalith arrived in every town and did its level best to destroy any of the smaller competition such as independent retailers with heavily discounted major seller and in the process utterly destroyed the supply of the long tail.

You see a store lives and dies by the items it can sell in the bulk which is where large emporia can use their buying power to undercut smaller retailers. So in terms of football equipment, gym equipment, trainers etc. the larger stores can significantly undercut the items that people buy most regularly. However the smaller stores stocked higher quality and higher priced goods of niche sports as well as the more popular items. They cared what their customers were looking for, not what the bottom line showed. The larger emporia can't make huge deals on niche equipment and so choose not to deal with them at all unless they can make bulk deal at the cheaper end.

So for someone like me that wants a quality snooker cue, I just can't shop for one and try one out. I can of course buy one online, but then I don't get to feel that queue.

I am sure you can find many examples of where the long tail has been utterly destroyed by market forces and those that will defend that way of doing business but it is clear that unless there are some interventions, the market will be the destruction of niche areas

De-humanising the workforce

I recently had a Twitter conversation with a colleague in direct messages which followed on from a post I had made in regards to me saying "Finding it quite bizarre to find I am a virtual commodity". My post was referring to the fact that I had just opened an account on Empire Avenue and my social presence was being traded like shares. However his reply was "It could be worse, how about non-existence?"

However my cynical mind had already been encompassing the concept of being a resource whether virtual or otherwise and my realisation that corporations attempt just that trick. My response of "In some respects the dehumanising is precisely that" was a tad too much for my colleague who was not expecting the depth of philosophical argument at the time of the morning especially not being fortified by the caffeine levels requisite to that mental challenge.

But it comes down to this. In many areas (not all, as some are more enlightened than others) the workforce has been completely dehumanised. Even the language has changed to reflect this paradigm. Once we talked to Personnel, now we bow to Human Resources. Because that is what we have become. A resource. The concerns for our welfare are almost intrinsically linked to the bottom line. We cease to have a human face and become a number, an object that can be deployed and redeployed at will.

Part of the company that I work for went even further by ensuring that we were going to be 'agile' and mobile as a workforce and then they proceeded to ensure we did not have a fixed desk to work at. Attempts to personalise any area or even reserve an area were dealt with from being frowned upon to the very active censuring of any attempt to be human. Ostensibly this was to help us become more efficient but when you arrived at a building and had to search for 30 minutes to find a free desk that was not only available but had working phone, network and power as well, this revealed the lie of it all. Not only that but the 'drawer' you were allocated as storage could be on another floor! This may have worked for the development teams inured in this methodology but for the rest of the peop ... sorry ... resources the 'one size fits all' approach just didn't work.

After a while the dehumanizing approach lent itself to the way that we did job descriptions and how we managed work. We were all templated into a 'job standard' which, by its inflexibility, allowed the company to define what you could, would and should be doing. A good idea you may think. Unless you want some creativity in your company to ensure it doesn't stagnate.

But what about the effect on morale? Take-up of the voluntary redundancy terms in the company was high year on year even when they reduced the attractiveness of the terms. But maybe that was the aim. Less resource

Builders houses

It is fair to say that I have quite some history with the internet and the web. I once delivered a talk about the likelihood of the web being the ubiquitous interface to applications and systems in the near future to a large room of developers in 1994, the vast majority of which scoffed at the concept. Following closely on that I started teaching HTML to those who had previously scoffed and worked on one of the first intranet servers in the company (now one of the largest intranets in Europe).

As with builders and their houses about the only web site that I hadn't ever worked on was my own. And that remains the case to this day.

I purchased my own domain way back in 2003 and the hosting to go with it. I have also worked on others sites and built and maintained them for some years but never my own.

Don't get me wrong. I do maintain a social presence and am active in many social media contexts. I just found it hard to start to create a site that defined my presence. And why is that? Because I realised I don't have a cohesive presence. I am a mishmash of iconoclastic opinion, socio-politically concerned thinker and casual gamer as well as many other aspects to me and my approach to life. To create a site to reflect all these aspects is quite some task especially given the wrap around them. Add to this a concern about privacy (one of my bugbears), an aversion to the self-conscious egotism of many of the so-called pundits (another bugbear) and the obnoxious bloggadocio (the only term I have any gratitude for from the appalling Socialnomics book) of people having such wonderful lives that they find so much time to be able to tweet and blog extensively about it and shame us all that we are not as active and fortunate as they are.

This task is onerous not only because I have an aversion to that depth of self-publication but also a need for people to understand that I do have more than one dimension. Also because technically, reflecting those division of myself is something that most solutions are incapable of representing.

Enter the popular incumbents for self-publication: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal! Massively supported and extensible with a host of possibilities to alter and shape to fit my needs ... or at least that's the theory. The principal problem is that all of these solutions are predicated on the idea that the user/author/ego will want a theme that runs throughout the site that is consistent with the ideas behind it. Erm ... no ... I want each sub-section to change because they are a different side to me.

Then you can have additional modules that will incorporate your other aspects via integration with other sites that have content by and for you. As long as they are consistently displayed in the pages where we want them to be.

But hang on. If I want a page that looks at my book reading, my music tastes etc. I don't want the integration to happen in a side bar, I want it within the section in the middle of the page. I don't want it superceded by any content I add subsequently or any verbiage I may decide is suitable for that type of content. So can I do that? No.

But, my friends argue, surely you want consistency for the site? Cohesion of ideas and themes so people can navigate around easily? Actually no I don't. I want people to be aware of the different side of me that they are confronting.

And then I look and stop and realise that while I may have an aversion to the self-important egotism and blogadoccio, I am quite willing to inflict myself on the world in that fashion

So I stop ... until the next time

Polishing the turd

It can hardly be said that Microsoft is often early to the game in their developments. Normally they are behind the curve but with the vast resources that allows them not only to play catch-up but often overtake. The incentives for applying these resources usually comes when a competitor achieves a significant success in a market area they had dabbled in but had not concentrated on. Witness the web browser, the web development area, the office suite and even the operating system. Developments in these areas came largely from acquisitions and then concentrated development of the product.

One of these key areas that MS has dabbled with over the years has been with mobile devices and more recently smartphones. However this is starting to become a little embarrassing for them as their flagship Smartphone/PDA OS is pretty much a clunker. Whereas the likes of Apple with their iPhone OS, Google with Android, Nokia with Symbian and now Maemo producing interfaces that are actually usable, the latest incarnation of Windows Mobile 6.5 needs a lot to make inroads. Earlier this year it seemed that the lessons had not been learned at all as the previews of 6.5 showed some efficiency improvements and some added functionality but the same horrific, finger unfriendly interface rolled on. So much so that the leading hardware and software companies compete to produce an interface that disguises the clunker that is the WinMo interface. This is a practice commonly known as polishing the turd.

Possibly in bygone days when not many alternatives existed, this practice would have been understandable even if not forgiveable but to insist on doing it in the face of so much attractive and functional competition borders on insanity! The iPhone is really not a device but an attractive lifestyle toy to browse the App Store. Yes ... the attraction of the iPhone is the apps. Same with Android. The base functionality is all very well but the attraction of customising and adding fun elements with little cost and providing a new level of personal interaction is what pulls people in. So what do MS have to offer? Well so far bugger all. A handful of application stores run by 3rd parties with complete confusion over what can be run on what hardware and what version of the OS. Dependence on the network providers to provide OS updates to the devices sold (most are VERY bad at doing this) and different provider dependencies. A bit of a mess really.

That said, I own a WinMo device. Have done for many years and I have an investment in the software that populates these devices which integrate nicely with my desktop applications on my Windows machines. I have not had much reason to change this because the investment in the applications runs to hundreds of pounds when you add it all up. But now I am looking further afield and contemplating a move because the equivalent applications on the other platforms (Android or Apple) are significantly lower in cost and I don't have to worry about the updating as that will be done for me.

So MS ... here's your challenge. The rivals have all laid out their (app) stores and are now raking it in and the turd you are polishing is losing its lustre. Will you rise to meet this challenge or believe your established user base can wait as long as you can eke out the timescales for the next 'great' version (Windows Mobile 7 I believe)? As a long term user of your product I can tell you that my patience is wearing thin. I am all ready to move away and will not look back. You really don't have long before that particular market is a lock out for you. You have been warned

The peril of 24 hour news

The internet has been responsible for some remarkable advances in our way of life and the immediacy of communication is one of those things that have revolutionised the way we receive news. As we started to expect faster delivery of news the TV channels stepped up creating 24 hour News channels. Now we have access to images and information around the world and news delivered fast.

But this also brings with it a very large down side. There is often not enough news and when it is there it doesn't develop fast enough to fill a schedule.

So what does this mean? Well simply that these news channels have to fill the gaps and the ways that they do this are not necessarily beneficial. One of the methods used is what I call rolling speculation. This is where a news story breaks and only a limited amount of information about the event is available. So of course you want to maintain momentum with a story and you can't really keep repeating the very scant facts afforded to you so what do you do? Take what you know and create scenarios about what could have happened/could be happening. Of course as more details are released this speculation is adjusted. The problem is that this supplemental information is used to modify the expectations of the speculation rather than to supplement available fact. Soon the entire news is based around a channel's speculation rather than what is actually happening.

Another problem is where a story doesn't quite fit the political/corporate stance on the situation. The newsreaders (who in themselves are a problem but we'll come to that) force questions that try to subvert the facts to the position they want to espouse. For instance many of the experts in the e-Coli and petting zoo situation said that closing petting zoos is not necessary but the newsreader questions were always attempting to elicit the response that they SHOULD be closed. This is opinion and not news.

And on to Newsreaders. Yes that was a deliberate capitalisation. Many of the screen pundits seem to think that their presence alone lends weight to the story. That they themselves are the news story rather than the method by which the facts are conveyed. In certain cases such as Kate Adey they became the news simply because they were so good at telling you the news in such a way that their delivery was respected. But they themselves were not the news, just that they were very good in delivering it.

But in this narcissistic self-obsessed world, the 'me' generation obviously require their own self-obsessed purveyors of opinion masquerading as fact and that is what the news has become. Sadly the majority of this is delivered by the state organ, the BBC.