Homeless

After a week out of action thanks to the flu (it's at times like this that I really wish I wasn't the independent type and actually lived with someone, as dying of dehydration and waking up to find you're actually blind are both experiences that really need to be shared) I finally logged on to check my email earlier this week.

I wish I hadn't bothered... my landlady emailed to tell me they're selling the flat and I have to move out! Argh!

I hate hate HATE moving house. It takes me weeks to pack and then months to unpack again at the other end. It's also bloody expensive to move, and the whole process of finding somewhere really pisses me off.
For one thing, letting agents in Britain (or at least in the south of England) are hopeless. You register your details with them but you might as well not bother as they never contact you, instead insisting you contact them. They insist they only act on behalf of landlords, not tenants, which means if there's ever a dispute then the landlord's word is final (don't want to fix the shower? Well that's okay 'cos the tenant has no rights).
Last time I looked for a flat I was appalled at the state of some of the places I saw. Some had plaster falling off the ceiling and walls, and the agent showing me round would step over it and ignore it! And while I sometimes think I'm not the tidiest person on the planet, some of these places make me look like an obsessive compulsive in the cleaning stakes.

The good news is I've got till the end of July to find somewhere but I don't want to hang around as I've got lots to do over the summer and I don't want to spend my month off unpacking.
I saw a flat today and it's not actually bad. It's quite small so I'm concerned I won't fit all my bookcases, CDs and desk in the living room. The bedroom's a bit bigger than the one I've got and there's a cat flap out onto a back garden (overgrown but good for the cat). It seems fairly quiet but it's just round the corner from the student halls of residence so it might not be the wisest choice for privacy!
It's £595 a month which is quite steep, but I'm paying £600 now. Oh if it were only a little bigger I'd snap it up.

I have to say I'm tempted and I'm thinking about it but I have time to look around. (I keep meeting people who have great flats that they appear to be paying peppercorn rents for and I wish I could find one like that). I'm also tempted to live with other people, partly to save money and partly for the company but I'm 35 this year and I think that's a little too old to be leading the flatshare lifestyle.

Part of me's thinking this is maybe God's way of saying it's time to up sticks and move on. Can't think where, though.

Snippets

Tony Blair called a general election in the UK last week. Coverage of politics in the media pisses me off - it's so cynical and condescending, and they treat it like a game. Most of the reports last week were used to introduce us to the presenters of the shows, and show off their fancy graphics and portable studios. In the entire first week of the campaign I heard very little from the parties themselves, and what I did hear was helpfully 'interpreted' for me by reporters who kept adding helpful little phrases like 'well, they would say that, wouldn't they?' and 'with every vote counting, people must be asking themselves how far they can trust the politicians to keep their promises' and such like.
Bring back the days when they'd just play a recording of what people said and let us make up our own minds. The irony is that the media also likes to report apparent apathy among voters and seems to blame the politicians. Is it any wonder people don't bother to vote when the whole thing is made out to be about as important as some inane reality TV show?

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Just finished reading 'The Time Traveler's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger. A fantastic book, highly recommended. I've had it on my shelf since it first came out and I finally got round to it last week. It quickly grabs you as you attempt to make sense of the disjointed narrative and the author carefully foreshadows events so that you figure out what's happening at the same time as the characters. Very clever and quite a moving book.

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Saw 'Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason' last night - disappointing sequal to the original which was much funnier. Rene Zelwegger grates a bit.

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Great line today on Malcolm in the Middle (one of the best series on TV IMHO)

"It's not a lie if what you say would be true if the facts were different"

One to remember, I think...

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The only thing that irritates me more than religious types cramming their beliefs down other people's throats is atheists cramming theirs down them too. I've met more fundamentalist atheists than I have any other sort, and I can't help thinking they're more dangerous - when you don't fear eternal retribution or seek salvation you've got nothing to lose.

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My junk mail filter is great but sometimes it gets it oh so wrong. I have in the past lost money as a result of emails getting binned because they're deemed to be pornographic. Living in Sussex doesn't help (sus-sex, you see?): not only have I lost messages sent to me from people offering me work, but I've had job applications bounced back from over-zealous servers that think my address is some sort of signifier of deviance on my part.

Actually, they could be right...

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Our local county council has decided to move all its in-house graphic designers from Macs to PCs to make the IT support department's jobs easier. I always thought the job of support departments was to make other people's jobs easier? Nice to know my taxes are being spent wisely. Only good thing to come out of it was that I made some money out of retraining some of the council's staff last week - ironically while they were on PCs I was using my Powerbook.

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April's a funny month. Roasting one minute, freezing the next. The problem with living in a basement flat is that it takes until June for warm weather to make a difference in here. It could be boiling outside but I'd have to have the heating on inside. But thank God the clocks have gone forwards - the days seem so much longer. When it gets dark late I seem to get much more done (by which I mean I can procrastinate for longer).

Sign of Peace

One of the saddest things about the funeral of John Paul II yesterday was the failure of the world leaders gathered there to use the event to engage in meaningful discussion.
At one point in the service the congregation were asked to offer each other the sign of peace. On TV I saw Bush shake the hand of the head of the UN and that was about it.
Later that day the headlines proclaimed that Prince Charles committed a diplomatic gaffe by shaking the hand of Mugabe. According to aides, Charles was 'taken by surprise' when Mugabe offered him his hand. Was he not listening to what the Cardinal asked them to do?
And this morning, the BBC is reporting that Iran's president is denying any contact with Israel's. He shouldn't be denying it happened - he should be apologising that it didn't.

Really, was there any point in any of them being there? Was this perhaps not the best chance we ever had for Bush, Blair and Annan to wander over and shake hands publicly with the Iranians? For the British and Zimbabwean delegations to look each other in the eye and say, 'ok, we have our differences but today, let's acknowledge the possibility of peace'.
The turnout for the Pope's funeral was unprecedented, not just in terms of the 'great and the good' but in a wider sense too. The sight of Rome, a city that's witnessed more history than most, at a standstill and thronged with people (predominantly young people) was moving, and maybe so overpowering that it will take years before we look back and realise quite what happened in the past week. In many ways John Paul's whole life was leading to those few hours when people of all colours, creeds and nationalities could stand in the same place and think the same things.

It's never going to happen again, and the people we call our leaders wasted the best opportunity they would have to put a face and a voice to the name of their own personal demons. For them, the funeral was an event to be seen at, nothing else.

Shipping Forecast

Bit of a mixed up post this one - but rather than just let it rot in the 'drafts' folder (where so many others are sitting unloved) I thought I'd post it anyway as it's quite an interesting topic...

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One stereotype of science fiction fans in that they are male, single and smell. It's one of the most misrepresented subcultures out there, I think, and owes more to lazy media reporting than anything else. To give an example, 10.5 million people watched the first episode of Doctor Who in the UK last week making it the most popular non-soap that week - yet still the newspapers reported the figures as though only 5 year old kids and sad old bachelors were watching. Another example that still irritates me is the description in a Times book review of Terry Pratchett readers as being anorak wearers with B.O.
It seems people still don't like to admit that SF can be classy, intelligent, thought provoking... and the SF outputs of HG Wells and George Orwell are conveniently classified as 'classic fiction' rather than 'science fiction' to avoid embarrassing anyone.

But 'fandom', which is only a small part of the following that SF has, is even more bizarre, and mixed, than anyone gives credit - though there have been a few serious analyses including a recent book on Star Trek and Doctor Who fans in particular (which I have, but haven't yet read).

Something I wasn't aware of until a couple of years ago was the high proportion of Doctor Who fans who are gay. It completely passed me by. There are some quite good explanations put forward for why this is the case, not least of which is the sheer after-the-event campness of the programme in the 1970s.

However, one area of fandom that I've been aware of but haven't looked in to in much depth is the phenomenon of 'shipping' - or writing fan fiction in which characters from cult TV programmes get it together (hence shipping, from 'relationship'). According to a post at Outpost Gallifrey this is also known as 'slashing' because the genres are described in terms of 'Kirk/Spock' (in which Captain Kirk's lack of commitment to a relationship and Spock's lack of interest is because they're constantly at it behind the scenes).

It all started with Star Trek, but is widespread: Buffy marked its 'high point', and even Harry Potter hasn't escaped (although I find the different slashing possibilities somewhat distasteful given the characters' ages).
These shippers become quite loyal to their particular partnership: Star Trek Enterprise is the source of intense (and often bitter) rivalries between Archer/T'Pol and Tip/T'Pol shippers, to such an extent that I hear they are 'physically' separated in discussion forums because argument tend to break out.

Kirk/Spock fiction was the initial domain of what came to be known as 'K/S Ladies'. Another type of writer is a 'Mary-Sue', someone who inserts themselves into a story as a character who initially represents themselves (shy, inarticulate etc) who comes out of their shell when they meet the hero (e.g. Captain Kirk). In this case there seem to be psychological reasons and therapeutic explanations.

Although there is a large amount of homoeroticism in many of these stories, this isn't a pre-requisite. What is interesting, however, is that this particular wing of fandom is not the preserve of sad, lonely men with no sex life - it appears to be dominated by articulate and inventive women, lesbian, bi and straight.

Non-sexual fan fiction can be found everywhere and the CVs of quite a few of today's top TV writers in the UK include substantial amounts. Some of it became quite legitimate: fan-produced Doctor Who audio plays and books have been turned into professional releases from Big Finish and the BBC, for example. JK Rowling even gave her approval to Harry Potter fans making up their own adventures and posting them online - presumably intending the blessing to apply to more innocent stories than some of those you can find if you know where to look (i.e. Google).
Writing fiction based on your favourite characters can, it seems, be a great creative spur because you don't have to worry about inventing characters, only situations and judging from the number of unfinished novels I've got on my hard drive (I always get stuck just giving characters names!) I can believe how liberating it could be as an exercise.
Sadly, however, it isn't encouraged by the snobby attitudes to such things that are held in schools - I wonder if teachers who set assignments for children to write adventures starring their favourite film or TV characters would find that even the most writing-averse kids would revel in it.

Anyway, there's plenty of fan fiction out there - some of it is good (and the best often ends up being published) - but some of it is truly bad.
If you want to experience some of the best (i.e. 'worst') fan fiction try God Awful Fan Fiction.

New Doctor Who thoughts

So the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who aired on Saturday, but I thought I'd wait a bit before saying what I thought, which is good because what I thought is not what I think now...

Let me explain. A year or so ago I took my then girlfriend to see Paul McCartney play in London. I was 33, she was 23 so for me he was a rock hero with a massive catalogue of great songs, while for her he was potentially an ageing rocker who only did Mull of Kintyre and the frog thing. So I spent the whole concert wondering if she was enjoying it. By the end I thought it hadn't been a particularly great evening, while she thought it was excellent. Listening to a CD of the tour or watching the DVD I realise I had been at one hell of a show but I was so bothered what other people were thinking, I missed it!
It was the same when I went to see Simon Rattle conduct his first Mahler 8 at the Proms in 2002, and his last Mahler 2 as head of the CBSO in Birmingham in 1998(?). So aware was I that I was present at events that people would talk about in the future that I completely forgot to enjoy them!

So this is how it was with Doctor Who. I'd been getting quite excited by all the publicity, and some of the clips I'd seen made me think it was gonna be good. But then the moment came...
It started off well but the BBC managed to cock up the first few minutes with a live broadcast by Graham Norton overlapping the soundtrack during the initial minutes, completely ruining the tension that was building up.
My first thoughts as the episode aired was that it was far too fast, with very little in the way of character development and an over-the-top perfprmance from Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. I don't buy into the argument that today's audiences have no attention span and will just switch over if things slow down - that's rubbish as far as I'm concerned, and that audience, if they exist, are adequately served by the juvenile reality TV that is available on the other channel. Part of the BBC's aim in bringing back Doctor Who was to reintroduce family drama to early evening schedules.

So I woke up the next day feeling a bit depressed. The best way I can describe it is the feeling after a first kiss. You know you're never going to get that sense of anticipation again, the sense of excitement, and it doesn't matter if the kiss was good or bad, or if the future is rosy - that special moment has passed. But in this case, it was like the kiss wasn't that good and you've just woken up next to someone you are going to have to be polite to because you haven't got the guts to be honest.

Am I taking this too seriously? Maybe I am...

Anyway, it wasn't until last night, four days later, that I finally plucked up the courage to rewatch the episode and, you know what? I loved it. The criticisms are still valid: Eccleston is over the top, the incidental music is intrusive, the direction isn't great (quite surprising as Keith Boak did a fine job on 'NY:LON' earlier this year), the acting from one of the central characters, Mickey, was dire and the character development was missing. BUT... it was funny, tense, exciting and, more than anything else, completely different to anything else British television (or any television for that matter) is doing at the moment. What I'd done during the first watching was I'd spotted the problems, but failed to see the good points which far outweighed them.

But let's take the characterisation for a minute. The episode is quite brave in that it starts halfway through the story; the Doctor has, it transpires, been tracing alien activity and come up with a way of defeating them, but he needs to find their lair. This is where Rose, played rather well (surprisingly to most people) by Billie Piper, comes in. There's no real introduction to the Doctor, we learn about him at the same time as she does. Now for someone who can remember Jon Pertwee's Doctor from the early 70s, this grated with me but thinking again I can see how a new generation of viewers would appreciate the sense of mystery, and relate to Rose's situation.
But the big probem is that Rose's situation is depicted from the start as being comfortable and happy, if a little unambitious. She works in a department store, lives with her mum on a council estate, and has a boyfriend, Mickey, with whom she seems content.
At the end she ditches Mickey who turns into a snivelling coward and leaves with the Doctor. There's no sense of a journey on her part - the idea that she's unhappy and yearning for more isn't made clear enough, and Mickey's attitude to her isn't foreshadowed. His sudden change from loving if not exciting boyfriend to selfish imbecile is too sudden and, given what his character actually goes through, almost understandable. That's a script problem and, probably, a script editing problem more precisely. But the director should have seen it, and it isn't helped by Noel Clarke's acting.

The character of Clive, the conspiracy theory nutter, showed promise but - well, I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it, but let's just say his character was wasted. But while Rose was talking to him, Mickey was being, quite literally, wasted in a wheelie-bin incident that lightened the mood a little too much, but was a great idea on paper. The problem is, the replica Mickey that then drives Rose off for pizza is so hammily made up and played that you have to wonder what was going through the director's mind.

What really depressed me about the episode was the reaction to it from a hard core group of fans on various forums, who gave it 5 out of 5 and slagged off anyone who said anything remotely critical about it. To me they were more annoying than the other minority who slagged it off relentlessly. No critical ability - and the idea that it was perfect in every way is plainly nonsense; but seeing faults doesn't mean it wasn't good.

The coming episodes look a lot better, and the production team and cast have said from the start that episode one was the curtain raiser. Next week's episode, 'The End of the World' looks rather cool and, according to Heat magazine's TV reviewer who has just seen the preview tape for episode three, 'The Unquiet Dead' (written by mark 'The League of Gentlemen' Gatiss), that one raises the bar - even he was scared, he claims, and the clips I've seen suggest it could be a reminder of how scary the programme could be. Clips of other episodes, particularly the Dalek one, promise great things to come.

So, second thoughts are that it was a good episode. All but a few press reviews have been excellent, and 10 million people watched it, trouncing the opposition and making it likely to be the highest rated non-soap of the week. The kids forum on the BBC web site was full of praise, and it seems that the BBC succeeded in producing a programme that brought families together to watch it - something to be applauded in the current age. Some of the stories I've heard from parents have been great - children climbing in to their beds because they were scared, for example. But this programme has always been aimed at a larger audience (adults just make up excuses about why they watch it - the British have always dismissed sci-fi in that way, consigning Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Stargate to Sunday afternoon while in the USA they're prime time programmes) and the new series has been mentioned in quite a few overheard conversations recently. So it's no longer a geeky thing, or the preserve of experts and afficionados or, indeed, the costume-wearing weirdos who are always wheeled out for the cameras at times like this as representative of fans (annoyingly).

That's also part of the depression, that now we've got to give the programme back to the masses. After so long, it's going to be hard to let go...

User experience versus designerwank

I'm (quite happily, though not without some bitterness) walking away from a web design project that's taken up much of my life in the past couple of years. After producing what I thought was a clean, uncluttered site, the new site manager has demanded that it look 'arty' and 'sexy' - the references he showed me were what I can only describe as 'designerwank', if you forgive the terminology (did I just invent that? I don't know... Cool if I did, I quite like it). The discussion ended up in a plain old shouting match as I tried to make the point that web sites need to be usable and accessible.

Coincidentally, for the redesign I had been eyeing up Jeffrey Zeldman's personal site The Daily Report as a model - I think it's clean and is pure standards-based XHTML and CSS. For an information-led site, like the one I was working on, it's ideal and (importantly) means it can be redesigned simply by changing the CSS file. I say coincidentally, because there's an article by Zeldman that's just appeared on his site that chimes 100% with my own thoughts about web design. Like many, I went through the 'let's show them what can be done with Flash and dynamic HTML etc etc' and now I've put away childish things and moved on to thinking about 'user experience'.

I think it's essential for a designer (print/web/whatever) to consider the user first, the client second, and themselves... never, maybe? I mean, sure, think of yourself when deciding whether to take a job on or not, but don't take on a supermarket's frozen food packaging job if your sole intention is to produce something that's alien to the store's clientele but ensures you can deny having 'sold out' to your designer friends.
So with this web redesign my initial pique at being argued with (it's not quite a client/designer relationship, more a collegiate one so I was justified in my passionate response!) has vanished in favour of simply saying 'well on your own head be it' and moving on. The problem is the site isn't getting visitors; but it's got nothing to do with the design - it's all about the content - there isn't any. And content is number one in the whole 'user experience' thing... making the site whizzy and hiding buttons is certainly an experience, but it's not really the kind that is appropriate to a news-based and resource site.

Here's an extract from the article in which Zeldman reports on a panel at this year's South By South West (SXSW) gathering:

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report:
"Thinking like a user. It seems so obvious. But it is not.

When I think back to the many bleeding-edge CSS, DHTML, and Flash presentations I've seen or participated in over the years, the motivation was inevitably, 'How hard can I push Flash?' or 'How many objects can I move on this page?' or 'What else can I show you in Firefox that won't work in IE?'

It was never, 'What would the user like?'

Yet in The Flash vs. HTML Game Show, designers with cutting edge skills were more interested in creating great user experiences than in manipulating their chosen technology for its own sake. Nobody on the panel and nobody in the audience thought twice about this user orientation. That is a profound change, and I hope it continues to spread."

Using Skype as a Community Media Production Tool

After what seems like no time at all since this year's third years submitted their dissertations (and I've still got to mark them!) the new term starts the whole process again with the second years. Once again, they will all head off for their summer holidays vowing to come back with at least the first draft done and, once again, things just won't work out that way...

I actually like this stage of the process. Talking in-depth to five or six students for an hour or so, and then maybe continuing the conversations over coffee, are a great way of getting to know people who up until now have just been faces in the crowd, and with only a few exceptions it's at this point that they really get turned on to the idea of investigating something in depth. In fact, I enjoy it so much I go way over the allotted (and paid-for) time but as I reason, if I weren't doing that I'd just be sat at home watching daytime TV, so what the hell? (Of course, I'd rather get paid for the time it takes rather than the nominal time it's allowed to take, which works out at about 10 minutes per student).

Anyway, I'm searching around for materials and ideas that could help them in either picking a subject (always tricky) or in carrying out their research. We call the dissertation a 'research project' and I encourage them to treat it more like a long article than an academic thesis. The last couple of years have produced some excellent results - I must post them as PDFs one day, or get them to.

Anyway, I thought this link might be of interest to anyone involved in this process, or in media production. It's an idea about using Skype to conduct telephone interviews and record them to disk. Quite a lot of my students use minidiscs or (increasingly) iPods to record interviews (and good old tape recorders are still around) but they require direct, face to face, access. But what if the person you want to interview is in another country, or even in the same one but not exactly within easy travelling distance? This solution might just be worth trying.

Using Skype as a Community Media Production Tool: "Skype was created as a no-cost long-distance phone service. It does that very well. What it also allows you to do, if you're just a little technically-minded and have a homebrew gene or two, is to record your Skype phone conversation, with the other person's permission, to an audio file on a second computer. Once you've recorded the audio, you can edit out the uhms, ahs and pauses, compress the audio and then place it on the web for public consumption." Full article

Brits hurt by melting pyjamas, alligators and centipedes

My own ironing board-related accident (detailed elsewhere on this blog) fortunately didn't end with me in hospital. If it had, I might have become another statistic, like these reported today in The Guardian:

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | Brits hurt by melting pyjamas, alligators and centipedes: "Bizarre accidents including melting pyjamas, being attacked by an alligator and bitten by centipedes put almost 1 million Britons in hospital last year, it emerged today.Volcanic eruptions, lightning strikes, lizard bites and hornet stings caused some of the more unusual injuries listed by the Department of Health (DoH).Accidents cost the NHS about �1bn a year. The most common cause of injury was falling, which led to 119,203 admissions to casualty. Thousands suffered attacks from a wide variety of animals. These included 451 people stung by hornets, 46 bitten by venomous snakes and lizards, 24 bitten by rats, 15 injured in contact with a marine mammal, two people bitten by centipedes and one attacked by an alligator. But dogs accounted for most injuries with 3,508 people suffering bites.Hundreds more fell victims to natural hazards, with 54 people struck by lightning, 37 victims of 'volcanic eruption', 25 injured in 'catacylsmic storms', 12 suffered from avalanches and seven were victims of earthquakes. A further 107 were exposed to 'unspecified forces of nature'.Other unusual injuries included four victims of noise exposure, four of vibration and 40 from contact with a high-pressure jet.There were 22 incidents involving the 'ignition or melting of nightwear', with stray cigarettes and faulty electric blankets likely to blame.But falls made up the bulk of the A&E admissions. With 119,203 suffering 'unspecified' falls and 24,475 falling from stairs and steps. Another 12,042 involved the bed, 7,114 fell from a chair and 4,533 from ice skates, roller skates, skis or skateboards.The definitions for the admissions were devised by the World Health Organisation, with some of the accidents taking place abroad which then led to hospital treatment back home."