Procrastination'R'us




It's time I got my act together. In the living room we have:


5 heaped boxes of ironing awaiting to be tackled. They have been
waiting for the past few weeks I am sure a few more days won't hurt.


A number of maps, some OHP pens, some acetates. Those routes aren't gonna check themselves girl.


1 crochet UFO


3 knitting UFOs


Some unfinished bobbin lace, a number of embroidery UFOs, an unfinished patchwork quilt.


A number of books, mostly unread or abandoned.


1 pile of clothes needing repairs or adjusting of some kind or other.


Empty photo albums and photo frames. I will get round to printing them someday.


Some empty boxes, cut out bits of aluminium can and a can of flat black
spray paint for a project I intended to have a go at with The Boy but
now can't be bothered to even start.


Some scoubidou wires.




The garden has a neglected look about it.




The usual mess has increased to chaotique proportions.




I could have been dealing any of the above tonight, instead I made
belgian waffles with the new toy the postman delivered at work this
morning. Any excuse.





22.7.05 22:44


Something for everybody, even civilians



Yesterday Annie Mole and I met in Hammersmith to attend the Open Tech '05 event.
Hold on I hear you say, you don't know your /bin from your /sbin and
your / from your /usr so what on earth were you doing at a series of
lectures and seminars organised by Unix Users? Well, it is true that I
felt more than slightly outgeeked even as I was walking through the
door but not all of the talks were aimed at techies.



We split up for the first session, Annie chose the seminar on Practical
Open Content while I went to Danny O'Brien's lecture on Living life in
Public and very interesting and entertaining it was too. It's a shame Geoff
could not make it as the subject of data asymetry (ie "they know you,
but you don't know them") has cropped up recently in conversation and in his posts.



We met again for the second session and decided to go for the seminar
on media hacking. which was pitched at a technical knowledge level
higher than what I possess so most of it passed me by (with hinsight I
should have gone to Ted Nelson's lecture and found out more about transliterature
instead - my fault for not doing my homework and checking out the
speakers' websites beforehand). First of was a demonstration of how one
can put Linux on an iPod.
First I thought, why would I want to do that? Then Matt Westcott showed
the that it allowed for a talking display so I thought "ah there is a
point to this", increased accessibility and a nice feature if you want
to navigate without having to take the iPod out of your pocket.
Unfortunately, I won't be doing that in a hurry since however good the
idea is, the implementation has a slight disadvantage... it stops MP3s
from playing properly. Hacking iTunes and Kamelia completely passed me
by. Myth TV
was an interesting concept but since I have never felt strongly enough
about missing a TV programme to go to the effort of recording it I
probably won't be using it just yet. Him Indoors on the other hand...



After lunch we went to hear about Social factors and Usability. We found out more about My Society and about the sort of constraints which present themselves when building a site like Write To Them
(which allows people to contact their elected representatives
electronically) from avoiding spamming MPs to ensuring the electoral
boundries are accurate. We also found out about how much feedback the
BBC received when they tinkered with their homepage and how they
incorporated it to subsequent changes to successfully decrease the
number of complaints. I am sure I didn't give the talk on the
Glastonbury website the attention it deserved (sorry).



Next we went to hear "the Future is Open [or should be]". The key words
APIs, microformats and tags. Tags were a fairly present topic on the
day and mentioned at almost every session either by the speakers or the
attendees in their questions. Karl
has written about the subject recently so if you want to find out more
about it you could do a lot worse than reading his post on ontology, thesaurus, taxonomy and Websemantics or the later one on tags, taxonomy and Dot Clear
(the posts themselves are in French but the links at the bottom of each
post take you to articles in English if you struggle with French).



For the last 2 sessions we chose "Blogs and Social Software" and "Web
Services" (I had originaly planned to go the lecture on BBC R&D to
find out more about Dirac but the Media Hacking session in the morning
gave me an idea it might be too technical for me to get much from it).
My favourite talks for the rest of the day were: Tom Reynold's Blogging without losing your job (more kittens would make it even better I feel); surprisingly since I don't watch Big Brother Paul Mutton's
talk about building graphic representation to represent the social
interactions in the house (hadn't heard of heuristics since University,
it made me all nostalgic for the days when I used more than 2
braincells at a time); the presentation of the next project in the
pipeline by the people who built Who Should you Vote For?
which is going to suggest which book people may like to read next based
on the user's ideal library (includes weightings so that not everybody
ends up being suggested Harry Potter or the Da Vinci Code); Gavin
Bell's talk on his Social Documents
project which spurred on from Eurotalk (if you like to read and like
commenting on books then do go and have a look at his site. Gavin is
looking for volunteers/contributors to help build virtual magic) and
lastly the enthusiastic show of what  Greasemonkey can do (nice applications in terms of accessibility).



To round up we went to the bar of course.



Quote of the day "The problem with
books is there's no plugins" (by a delegate so unattributed); the smile
on his face said it all - who said geeks dont have a sense of humour?
24.7.05 14:43


My baby boy is going away tomorrow

There
was a mild moment of panic when I realised I had messed up once again
by thinking my mother was arriving today rather than the correct date
of yesterday. No excuse as the date was clearly written down on the
calendar. This meant I had to rearrange leave a very short notice and
that the house was ever so slightly more untidy than originally planned
and that there was limited food available to feed everybody. Clearly
the live and learn thing does not apply to me. I live and make similar
mitakes over and over again.

My mum brought
her godson with her. I know I am a bit of a neurotic mother but his
mother is in a different league altogether (she admits to it too). She
had made me promise over the phone that I would not take him into
Central London or on public transport. I realised that telling her that
statistically there was more chance of him getting ran over because he
would be looking the wrong way when crossing the road than blow up
would not make much of a persuasive argument. She did laugh at the
suggestion that she should not worry, that I would make sure he did not
carry a rucksack and would ensure he had a ticket so he would not get
shot when caught trying to jump over the ticket barrier but still
didn't budge. No London sights for him, no playing tourist for The Boy
and I.

I had a couple of local options up
my sleeve which quickly vanished with the rain (unlike The Boy, my
mum's godson is not the most outdorsy of children and he thought that
walking was bad enough but walking in the drizzle was more than he
could face... teenagers are funny creatures.

Tomorrow they will be leaving after lunch and by mid-afternoon I'll probably be missing The Boy already.
27.7.05 23:47


Must be my accent




"... if we run out I can always improvise, there's always Jag's recipe for kidney bean curry."

There's a slightly puzzled and slighty horrified look on Him Indoors' face.

"I heard kitty meat curry, It's not what you meant is it?"






30.7.05 20:38


Even on-line you can have an Ikea moment



The aim - finding out if Ikea's wooden venitian blinds are cheaper than
the ones in the local shop and if they are available in a size which
fits The Boy's window before we treck round the North Circular and
endure the madness that is the Ikea store in Wembley.



Ikea don't do online ordering but you can have a look at the products
from the comfort of your own sofa. The theory is good. The reality less
so. Only Ikea would have a website esigned to drive the visitors nuts
in the same way its shop does. Talk about consistency of approach to
customer service.



Here we go, there is a list of categories on the left, nothing that
screams blinds but Textiles might be a good option, hurrah the next
screen gives the option of "Curtains and Blinds". So far fairly
painless, only after clicking on the option and trying out the 4 pages
of products not a blind in sight.



Ok, lets try a different way. Search box. I tried "wooden blind" - no
match; "venitian blind" - still no match; "blind" - 2 results: a teddy
bear called Blund and a bit of blurb on accessibility to the blind. Not
quite what I was after.



Product listing A-Z no blind under the letter B. The wooden venitian
blinds are listed under the letter L of course (for Lindmon). Now why
did I not think of that? </sarcasm>



What sort of a person sets up a website with a search facility which
only looks up products by their own brand name?  One working for
ikea of course. Surely only somebody who has the catalogue would look
up the product by their Ikea name and if they have the catalogue then
they are unlikely to look it up on the website since you can't order
online and the information on the site is identical to that in the
catalogue.



Then again maybe it's just me failing to embrace the Ikea philosophy.
31.7.05 19:21


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