Pretend hygeine

Why do some people only pretend to wash their hands when they go to the toilet? They clearly feel enough social pressure to put on the show, splashing water around, but equally clearly they don't feel any need to actually clean their own filth from their disease-ridden hands. The only reasons I can imagine are laziness ("Soap is so much hassle, I'll just pretend"), incredulity ("There's no such thing as germs") or stubbornness ("You can't tell me what to do, SOCIETY!"). All of those positions sound crazy to me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess that's the way it is with anyone who is different to ourselves.
PPS - These people, however, are a little bit different to modern ideas of hygeine.

Responding to awkward conversation starters

Rather than learning good ice breaker conversation, I'd like to know how to respond to stupid ice breaker questions and comments, like, "hot today, isn't it?" What do you say to that? How about someone who just says "rush hour!" in a crowded lift? The only thing that ever pops into my mind is "yeah".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Which just puts the burden back on the other person again.
PPS - And usually they only had "nice weather" to say in the first place.

Technology is always amazing

I watched a video of a man showing off a sequence of Photoshop improvements to his granddad. Granddad had an old photo of himself in what might have been a Navy uniform, and the grandson had posted that cracked old photo online to ask people to touch it up and repair it. He had a sequence of about ten prints showing the gradual improvement, and Granddad was quite impressed by stage three where you could still see a lot of lines and some unintended background (it was a photo of a photo). It's funny how impressive technology is these days, when you think about it, and how much we take it for granted. I'm not really amazed at all by the process of photo touch-up, nor the way in this case it was crowdsourced, each person making a contribution, but this man's Granddad was pretty much blown away at every step. He grew up with low expectations of technology, I suppose, so the fact that any improvement is possible is a bonus.

I grew up with moderate expectations of technology. Our first computer was slow, ugly, ran MS-DOS 3.0 (I think) and Dad had to create the printer driver by hand, copying the hex code out of the manual. We had no internet until I went to university and I didn't get a mobile phone until I could afford it myself, when I started working full time. In my mind, everything impressive about personal computers has happened in my lifetime.

The next generation will grow up where the internet is in the air all the time, mobile phones have always had touch screens and tablet computers are the rule, not the exception or just a toy. They will think about technology very differently to me and my parents, and it will be fascinating to see what they dream up when it's their turn to reinvent the lot.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Oh, and then there's Google Glass.
PPS - And the smart watches, too.

Higher-level network functionality

As computers become cheaper and more generic components of larger systems, software and networks become more important. And as network functionality becomes more critical and common for software, it becomes more important for operating systems to provide standard higher-level network functionality. Rather than just exposing a TCP/IP layer directly, operating systems should be providing sync services, REST buffers and message queues. We need to aim for interoperability at a higher level than the basic network transport layer.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some of that would be really handy for me.
PPS - I'm sure there's more of it around than I know.

Software incapability

A major selling point of corporate software seems to be incapability, or what your minions can't do with it. I guess it's related to security, because who can trust their filthy employees these days? Still, it seems weird to see bullet points like "Prevent changes to schedules!" and "Lock down data access!" presented as if the main IT problem in every company is that the technology just works much too well and provides far more functionality than employees need. In my experience, that is often the opposite of the truth.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - With corporate leaks, I imagine security is a high concern for companies these days.
PPS - And for governments.

Misleading documentary interviewees

How common and accepted is it in documentary circles to lie and mislead interviewees by telling them you have one goal while secretly pursuing another? I ask because it seems to be an accusation leveled at documentary filmmakers when they have managed to include a "hostile witness" or anyone who disagrees with the film's central idea. So do people making documentaries go in with that goal - to lie in order to get the interviews - or is the making of a documentary such fluid and uncertain work that you can barely pin it down before it is finished? That's the best benefit of the doubt I can assert here, and it sounds weak.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's also possible that interviewees misunderstand the situation.
PPS - But just as possible that this was the intended result.

Notification overload

Sometimes, I need an alert mute on my phone or desktop, usually both, and only temporary. I get email alerts on my phone all the time, and also on my desktop. They are interruptions, and I want them to just go away for a while and let me think. That's not an option when everything uses its own process for sending notifications to the user. I installed a Chrome plugin called Chime to unify my alerts for Gmail and Facebook, but that, coupled with Outlook using its own alert system, plus SMS and another Gmail notification system on my phone still made for a lot of interruptions coming my way on some days.

I tried Growl for Windows, which seemed fairly good, but to get Gmail and Facebook notifications with it, I needed to run two more apps in my system tray. Oh, and I had to code a special macro to get Outlook alerts. It did allow some greater control, but it wasn't what I was looking for.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The best option, I think, is to just keep alerts to a minimum to begin with.
PPS - If I need them off altogether, I'll just set a timer to remind me to turn them back on later.

Dropbox datastore API

Dropbox has launched a datastore API that allows app developers to store data in Dropbox that is not in traditional file formats. This sounds tiny and boring, but for some applications it is exactly the opposite.

For instance, for a long time I have wanted a cross-platform messaging system that is robust in the face of network failure. On top of this, I would build new versions of some personal data tracking applications I have, including time and expense tracking, notes and action lists, plus possibly remote control computer actions. Passing that info via web services is entirely possible, and even easy, but the fault-tolerant network communications, where reliability is far more important than immediacy, would mean writing my own network command buffer, which is a bit of a pain. If Dropbox provides this kind of functionality, they have solved the problem for me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't tried using it yet.
PPS - I'll let you know when I do.

Crazy talk

There's crazy talk, and then there's talk so crazy that you can't possibly be joking. Usually on TV, when someone starts with the second type of crazy talk, someone assumes they are trying to distance themselves from something. It is quite often played out as if this crazy talk is meant to push someone out of a relationship. But if someone tells you that they're not from a small coastal town in Maine but instead from a place called The Enchanted Forest, where our fairy tales came from, they're either having a psychotic episode or they're telling the truth. Nobody tries to tell a story like that as a distancing mechanism.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, nobody I've ever met.
PPS - And I've never attempted it either.

You could run a taxi from a tablet

All of in-taxi operations could be done by a phone or tablet app. A driver can receive job dispatch info online, get GPS directions to the pick-up and drop-off, that GPS data can be used to calculate the fare, and the payment can be received by PayPal, or another online credit card payment. I'd be surprised if someone hadn't done this already, or wasn't working on it. So will it be long before we see it happen, or will we still have individually-sold hardware to do each little job?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You could probably do it now without any specialised app.
PPS - Because texting, GPS and PayPal already exist.

The opportunity cost of being an extreme cheapskate

I saw a show called Extreme Cheapskates or something like that, about people who, for instance, spend an entire day raiding dumpsters or cycling around picking up loose change, because it's cheaper than shopping and it feels like free money. The problem, of course, is that your value assessment of these activities does not take into account your valuable time. Let's say you manage to pick up $7.50 in loose change around town, and it takes you 8 hours to do so (actual example). You are settling for a wage of less than $1 per hour. People would pay you more than that to rake up the leaves in their yards.

It's that level of cheapness where it starts to feel like you might have a mental illness similar to hoarders, placing an irrationally high value on something that actually costs you more.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Calculating costs vs savings is important.
PPS - But, as a guideline, spending your whole day scrounging for less than minimum wage is not worth it.

Friday Writing Update - Dealing with critiques

I've run a couple of stories through Critters writing workshop now, and I think I need a system for dealing with critiques. People are helpful and friendly, but the feedback can get overwhelming when there's a lot of it. After the first couple of critiques come in, I usually feel really good. People tend to like what I've written, they almost always want it to be longer, and they have good suggestions that I take on board immediately. Towards the end of the week, I'm getting into double digits of feedback and losing enthusiasm. I don't even get to reading the last few when they come in.

Here's how I want to try handling it from now on:
1. Read each critique once. Make small editing changes as you go.
2. Extract each major point into a list. If a point has been made before, mark it up as more important.
3. If clarification is needed, or if the critique was particularly helpful, write back.
4. Let the story sit for a while before reading the notes and trying to improve the work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't tried it yet.
PPS - Next time.

Hydrophobic umbrella

If it were more affordable, I would buy enough Ultra Ever Dry to coat my umbrella. My umbrella already does a good job of keeping the water off me, but it would be even better if, once I step under cover, a single shake would leave the umbrella dry as a bone. No need to cover it in a plastic sleeve to keep it from dripping on the floor, no need to open it inside to dry out for several hours and, perhaps most importantly, I could fold it up and put it back in my bag on public transport immediately. That would be a really big benefit, because I've left at least one umbrella on the train before, simply because I had to keep it away from my bag while it dripped. If it could hardly help but keep completely dry, there would never be any need to keep it separate ever again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There may be similar hydrophobic coatings that are more affordable.
PPS - The question is why umbrellas aren't manufactured hydrophobic in the first place.

Safety equipment and risk

Safety equipment merely raises the bar on what risks people take. We like a certain amount of danger. When you reduce the amount of danger involved in a certain activity, we increase it again by doing the activity in a more dangerous or extreme way. As soon as you give a helmet to someone, they'll feel free to endanger their head as much as before, safe in the knowledge that the helmet will turn deadly activities into merely disabling ones.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unless they're a teenage boy.
PPS - In which case "risk" is not yet part of his world view.

Giving credit

I wish it were easier to give credit to creators rather than curators online (or worse, plagiarisers). The fact is that it's way easier to just credit the person who shows us something cool than to go looking to see if it is being properly attributed.

Perhaps we should be in the habit of watermarking all photos, videos and audio with creator info so that it's easily discovered no matter where it goes. If it's important information about a file, it needs to be inside the file. That doesn't mean plagiarisers won't be able to re-mark a file to claim it as their own, or that someone can't steal the idea behind a piece and produce something similar on their own. It would just make it easier, when someone shares a video or picture online honestly, to track down and inform the creator that their work is being shared.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course a lot of sharing is just linking these days.
PPS - However, linked or copied, marked by the maker is best.

Lacking communication skills

I am constantly frustrated by my own communication skills. I understand that it is important to express ideas in a way that other people can understand them. That's very clear. My problem is that my mental model of all other humans in existence seems to be flawed. Not just a little bit off-centre or sometimes too presumptuous about shared knowledge. I mean I say a sentence, then spend ten minutes trying to explain myself. Or we just drop it and move on with dismissive hands waving in my face. "You don't talk right. Stop it and let the humans have a go." I am very familiar with the furrowed brow of all my acquaintances, friends and family.

What can I do about this? I'm already very slow to speak. I feel like if I speak sooner, before my thoughts have had a chance to ramble off topic, I'll be even less coherent. My words will become alien sounds bearing no resemblance to your earth languages at all. If I take longer, I'll appear fully autistic, responding to questions long after the conversation has moved on.

My usual response is to sit completely silent, avoiding the embarassment of speaking and being misunderstood and replacing it with the mild shame of being the only one who can't contribute to group discussions.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Every idea seems to take too many words to express.
PPS - And too much background info to establish.

User-friendliness

My early attitude towards user-friendliness was a kind of elitism, at least in part influenced by the movie Hackers. We'll skip over the argument about computer realism in Hollywood and go for some examples of what I mean. I learned to touch-type at school, and the first time I got my own computer keyboard that I didn't have to share with Dad or my brother, I covered the keys in stickers to obscure the letters. If you can't touch-type, was the not-so-subtle message, then get out. I carefully replaced the indicators on my multi-colour pen that I used at university so that all the buttons were black but it retained all four individual colours of ink. Learn the arrangement or get out. I used to say "destroy user-friendliness" when I did things like this, and at the time I believed that it was to educate people and force them to learn, but didn't provide any path for that learning.

I was big on insider knowledge. It was fun, because it made me feel powerful. I know things that you don't. I had to force it, but I did it, because I wanted to be powerful and that was the quickest, easiest way to demonstrate power. In that sense, it was kind of a bully thing, albeit intellectual bullying.

Now that I've been out of university for some time, and I've worked with real software users, my attitude is completely the opposite. If you can't use the software or hardware without first taking a course, studying a manual and practicing for several days (or weeks, months, years) then that piece of technology is broken, and people like me need to fix it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can take user-friendliness too far.
PPS - Usually, however, it's not taken far enough.

History and hilarious lies

Sometimes I worry that historians of the future will be unable to tell the difference between our genuine scholarship, our satire, our hilarious lies for their own sake and spam. Where you have real news, you also have misinformed news, biased news, fake news, celebrity news and propaganda.

Perhaps history and archaeology in the future will merely involve the development of more and more effective spam filters and a sense of humour. Which is much of what we are trying to cultivate today, actually. Carry on.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I sometimes have trouble telling the difference myself.
PPS - Because sometimes satire is so close to trolling.

Why you need disposable identities

When you care about privacy and security, then every system where you link to someone else - all social networks and communications methods - or any time you give someone a powerful piece of personal information (like a credit card number) then you have to build in temporary aliases that can be revoked later. Instant message accounts, emails, phone numbers, credit cards, mailing addresses, social network accounts. Every one of them needs to have two layers of identity in them: the real account details, known only to you and the service provider in question, and an ever-changing set of straw man contact details that are known to your peers and colleagues, but are only valid until you revoke them.

Because you will eventually have to revoke some of them, and you never know which ones those are in advance. Maybe you gave your credit card number to a dodgy internet site, or a friend's phone got stolen and now you're getting obscene phone calls at 3am. No matter who you trust or how you manage your life, these details will eventually cause you grief, and you need to be able to shred them without having to undo your whole life, change your phone number, move house and assume a new name.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It does seem like an extreme position to take.
PPS - And in some cases, the risk is too small to bother.

Schoolies Week vs Spring Break

In some ways, I think Schoolies Week is a bit worse than Spring Break. At least in the States, Spring Break is full of college students who have been starting to learn how to do life on their own. They're failing, because a lot of life is still taken care of for them, and they have other priorities than, say, laundry and hygiene, but at least they are dealing with a little bit of responsibility along with their freedom in their daily lives.

Schoolies Week, by contrast, is full of high school students who are out on their own for the first time ever. They haven't learned anything yet except what they've been taught in school (algebra, Shakespeare and dissecting frogs) and now they're out on their own for a week, unsupervised. That's not a celebration, it's Lord of the Flies.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Keep in mind, however, that I've never experienced Spring Break for myself.
PPS - And my Schoolies Week was remarkably tame.

Samsung Galaxy SII Review

At the beginning of 2013, I upgraded my phone to a Samsung Galaxy S2, which is a fair bit more powerful and capable than my previous Google Nexus S. From that point of view, I'm very happy with it. It's got more storage and more memory, so it can handle video without choking, where my previous phone basically drew the line at audio. The screen is a bit larger, too, which is good, and the battery usually lasts me the whole day as long as I save battery-intensive tasks (such as aforementioned video) to the end of the day.

Almost everything else is a disappointment. Samsung, of course, loaded it up with their own inadequate launcher program and their decrepit bizarro-world Samsung Apps store, plus several crapware apps that can't ever be uninstalled and are difficult to distinguish from real apps.

The hardware leaves a bit to be desired, too. The phone will frequently turn itself off for no apparent reason (eg, sitting flat on my desk can trigger it) and the mic and speaker work just barely well enough for phone calls. It can't hold onto a WiFi connection to save its life, and just the other day it ignored my selected alarm tone and volume settings, electing instead to play the default alarm tone at full volume.

In short, my Android phone is less reliable than my desktop computer was in the 90s, with less control and more broken software. And you can't take it away from me, because now I feel as if I need it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have been informed that some of these issues are due to a Samsung software update.
PPS - And the whole review is moot anyway since the phone is outdated now.

Friday Writing Update - I've been doing it wrong again

When I stopped posting weekly flash fiction here, it was so that I would not be putting half-finished, dodgy work out in public and ruining a nascent reputation before it was formed.

I also pretty much stopped writing weekly flash fiction. I took away my deadline, and I stopped doing work. I kept editing for a second draft of my first novel, but that's not so much writing. It's writing out again some of what I wrote before, and it's not satisfying in the same way.

I don't know if there's a good solution to both of those issues at once, but I think I'd rather be writing than not, so I may have to start posting stories here again. We'll see next week.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I did, however, write those two entries for the PodCastle flash fiction contest.
PPS - And I've already started completely rewriting one of them, because it was all tell, no show.

Rethinking what apps are for

When I see a Lifehacker article about a weather-aware alarm clock app that wakes you up early if the weather is bad (and hence the traffic to work is likely to be bad) I wonder whether we really need more apps at all. After all, this is not a complex task. If [local weather] is rain, set alarm minus 20 minutes. We don't need that app, we need better ways of using apps together. We need an excellent meta-tool that lets people use their apps in new and interesting ways, no matter what those ways are.

We need to rethink what apps are and what they are for, on mobile and on the desktop.

What if all our apps were either event triggers or event responses? Instead of every app needing its own alert system (I'm looking squarely at Windows here) it could just send out an alert event and let Windows handle it? Instead of needing a smart weather alarm clock to adjust itself in case of rain, your weather alerts could be channelled into an action to modify your alarm, no special app necessary.

We need IFTTT and general compatible APIs so that events (weather, location, Wi-Fi access, time) can trigger app actions (adjust alarm, remind me about my actions, turn down my volume, download my podcasts). We do still need some apps in the form of those triggers, and we need preconfigured recipes connecting those triggers to actions, but most of the time, this "event triggers response" pattern is all we need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are some apps on mobiles that do some of this.
PPS - They don't generally have access to all the other apps that could be useful to them.

Browser speed dial page comparison

Compared to how other browsers handle it, Internet Explorer is pretty bad on the "speed dial" page. Firefox shows a full-page, 3x3 grid of your most frequent visited sites, and usually including thumbnail previews. Sometimes it doubles up on sites.

Chrome has 2 rows of thumbnails, titles below each one, with favicons in their bottom left corners, which looks pretty good.

IE, on the other hand, has 2 rows of 5 tiles, all white, and only seems to manage a favicon in the top left corner some of the time, plus a weird coloured bar at the bottom which I guess represents how frequently the site is visited. If they're already arranged in order of visit frequency, why have the bar at all? The text usually seems to be URLs rather than page titles.

I only use IE for work, and it does have all my most frequently-visited work-related sites listed, but because it's only text and the titles are rarely helpful, I find it much easier to bookmark them and use the menu instead. I think Microsoft have overestimated the usability of text vs pictures. Even their own IE add-ons gallery doesn't come up with a real title, just a URL.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If I had to award a prize, it would go to Chrome.
PPS - I've just found it the most usable and consistent implementation of the feature.

Water supply

We have moved so far from communal water supply and sanitation to private infrastructure that we don't have many options when that private infrastructure breaks down. If your home plumbing breaks and you can no longer get fresh water from the tap, you can't just wander down to the local well instead. There's no backup plan. You have your own water at home or you don't have water. You have a working toilet at home or you don't go, unless you have very understanding neighbours or a nearby shopping centre. I suppose, if you have your own back yard, you could dig a pit latrine.

In times of natural disaster, this becomes a wide-scale problem, and the only way I've seen it solved is with water delivery trucks and portable toilets. So at least in that disaster time, everyone has the same problem and it's able to be handled by a mass solution. If you're the only one with a problem, though, then your solution options are very limited.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Just don't let your plumbing break down, I suppose.
PPS - If it's up to you.

Healing

"The only cure for a broken heart is time". Sounds nice, but I think it might matter what you're doing in that time. No, you can't fix it right away, and some coping strategies will be better than others, but that also means that some strategies will be worse and some will be downright bad. So when someone asks how to cure a broken heart, they really want to know what is the most effective coping strategy. You're going to feel rotten for a time - maybe a long time - but how can you make sure you're moving forward instead of staying still or going backwards?

It's probably a personal thing. What works for one person might not work for you at all, so you just need to pay attention to it. What did you do today, and how did it make you feel about your situation? If you felt worse, don't do that again. If you felt better, keep doing things like that. If you felt better for a little while, then much worse later, that's probably an addictive practice and you should run away from it as fast as you can.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Telling the difference between long-term happiness and short-term highs is tricky.
PPS - But you can learn it if you work at it.

Friday Writing Update - submission formatting

As I start looking into submitting some of my stories for publication, it strikes me that it would help authors in their submissions if there were some standard way of describing formatting requirements. Most publications have their own preferences for submissions, including fonts, spacing and such, but all are just slightly different. Rather than spending the time reading, interpreting and implementing each subtle difference for every submission, it would help a lot to have one basic format (say, MarkDown) that can be compiled into any publisher's preferred format as specified in a particular style sheet.

However, this might just be the programmer in me, wanting to reduce effort, recycle input and encode processes. Also, I believe this is the rabbit hole down which Knuth disappeared when he invented the TeX formatting tool and language.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or a similar one, anyway.
PPS - I don't want to get lost or sidetracked on this.

Threat prevention

When someone says that the intelligence community really dropped the ball by not recognising the threat of this or that person in advance, ask them which threat is currently being ignored. The question is not whether some other "preventable" horror will befall us, but when and who will do it. Chances are there's someone out there right now who is giving off "all the telltale signs", but with the mountain of data to sift and any number of crazies who will never do anything dangerous, picking that needle out of the haystack is not easy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And reacting to every one of them is out of the question.
PPS - Nobody has that kind of time, money or energy.

Google Glass

I'm kind of fascinated by the Google Glass project. I wanted a wearable computer a long time ago, back when that would have meant a backpack, an industrial headset and learning to use a one-handed "chording" keyboard. Now it means a pair of glasses you talk to.

I would love to have one, because I think it would be more convenient for me, especially when looking up facts online or watching and listening to podcasts on the train, or navigating. I have a feeling it would revolutionise the way I interact with my phone.

The one place I feel it would go backwards, however, is in sharing what I find with others. Right now, if I find something interesting on my phone, I can turn it around to show to someone else. With Glass, I would either have to look them up and send it to their phone or their Glass somehow, or I'd have to take it off my head and let them look through it. It does come up now and then, so I'd be interested to see what day-to-day usage turns that into.

Also, if we are all forever running around with cameras strapped to our faces, will that change how we feel about privacy? Will there be places like that where it becomes socially unacceptable to wear them, like change rooms, restrooms, government buildings? With the awkward shape, how will you put them away to show that you're not recording everything someone is doing or saying?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - All questions that may be answered sooner rather than later.
PPS - We've developed an unspoken mobile phone etiquette already.

Servant's passages

If I built a mansion, I would want it to be full of servant's passages, for two reasons. It would give them the ability to appear and disappear from rooms without the need to pass through other areas, and it would also give them their own space, the shadow house, where only the servants go. It would be tricky to design such a place without appearing to have done so, but I would like to try.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Anyone want to give me the money to try?
PPS - Maybe I should just try it in The Sims.

Compatibility for progress

Technology working together is what enables big leaps and bounds, but that requires compatibility, which is hard. It also requires sensors or triggers and actions that can be programmed in some way. We can have some form of glue-ware in between all our systems, like IFTTT, as long as they expose the right programming interfaces, or we can depend on each device or app to interact directly with others.

Also, however, if you don't provide a way for users and developers to extract and work with your data, someone is probably going to do it for you, only a little bit worse and without your permission. You can either provide those features your users want, or you can let someone else do so. What you can't do is be deliberately incompatible in a way that nobody can work around, ever.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - People want compatibility enough to break in and steal it.
PPS - It's much easier all around if they don't have to.

USB and backwards compatibility

I suspect that USB 3.0 is likely to be the last iteration of that brilliant standard. There just doesn't seem to be any way to cram more bandwidth into the cables and sockets while maintaining backwards compatibility, and even version 3.0 was a bit of a stretch. We may still get USB 4.0, but it will probably have to break the backwards compatibility of the standard. Whenever that happens, whether it's version 4.0 or later, it should be given a different name to avoid confusion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It will feel like a sad, strange day when USB is obsolete.
PPS - It's going to happen, though. Someday.

Videotaping plutonium on Back to the Future

I had a thought while watching Back to the Future the other day. We see Marty with an 80s-era video camera filming Doc Brown inserting plutonium into the time machine's reactor. Both he and the Doc are wearing radiation suits, but the camera is not shielded. So here's my question: would the radiation from the plutonium have any effect on the magnetic recording heads in the camera? Judging by the thin suits Doc and Marty are wearing, I'd say it's likely the camera's case would be protection enough, but I'm not sure. If those suits are not accurate for the amount of plutonium being handled, then it might have an effect, right?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Obviously I can't test this myself.
PPS - I also can't find whether anyone else has tested it.

Windows 8 is for touch screens

I think my first piece of advice about Windows 8 to everyone would be this: if you're going to buy a Windows 8 machine, get a touch screen. Microsoft has really bet the farm on touch screens this time, and without that mode of interaction, you'll be frustrated or, at best, missing out. The mouse and keyboard might still be necessary for ordinary desktop mode, but when the Start menu thinks all computers are tablets, you'd better get on board.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've had trouble deciding how to replace my netbook when it dies.
PPS - It's not an issue yet, but if it were, I might pick a Microsoft Surface RT.

File sync should be an operating system feature

Every program should not need its own internet-enabled sync feature. It should be provided via the operating system. And even having said that, the OS should not be the only possible provider of file and data sync services. It should be something you can do with any third-party service if you want.

In my system tray at the moment, there are six different apps whose job it is to sync some data or files from one place to another. Do we really need so many different apps to accomplish pretty much the same goals?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At the new office, some of them don't work.
PPS - So I guess you could make the case for redundancy.

R.I.P.D.

Is R.I.P.D. a kind of extreme Ghostbusters reboot? It's almost the same premise, except instead of being a small group of underdogs trying to catch ghosts in the open, it's a massive supernatural organisation catching ghosts in secret. So, a bit, maybe, I guess? When I see it, I'll let you know, if I remember.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also see shades of "Dead Like Me".
PPS - Which, in turn, was a loose adaptation of Piers Anthony's "On A Pale Horse".

Friday Writing Update - Confidence

I've been putting (almost) all my writing time lately into entries for the PodCastle flash fiction contest. This week I submitted my first entry of two (allowed and intended) and as soon as I hit "send" on that email, I lost confidence in the work. The twist is at the beginning, then it's awkward, awkward, bland and ends with stupid. I don't like it any more, but I suspect that's just ordinary lack of confidence as a writer in general. People have liked my work in these contests before, though not enough to win, so objectively I know the chances are that it will be well-received when it goes up for voting.

Still, there's that little voice in my head that says "This time, you've blown it. They liked everything else, but this? This one is rubbish." It will continue to undermine my confidence until proven otherwise, then it will go sulk in the corner until it gets another chance.

The important point is that, despite that self-doubt voice, I have written and submitted a story for judging by a small group of strangers. However well it goes, I've at least done that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Oh, and I have the other one on the way.
PPS - Assuming I can compress it down another 150 words.

Loosening up

One of my personal growth goals is to loosen the hell up already. Everything in my brain is a Big Deal and SERIUS BIZNESS, and I really don't like making even little mistakes.

So that's step 1. I admit I have a problem. As for the rest of the process, I'm a bit stumped. How exactly does one go about lightening up and not taking everything so seriously? If I knew that, I'd be on my way already.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Really, I'm open to suggestions here.
PPS - Suggestions and cake. Always open to cake.

PowerPoint differences

You know, despite being a standard file format, PowerPoint presentations are surprisingly incompatible across different computers, even when those computers are running the same version of Office. I get that it's difficult to create a file format that can be reliably reproduced on any screen resolution, with any file system arrangement and with any level of computer power, but it still surprises me that the same PowerPoint file, on two very similar computers, will work just fine on one and struggle on the other. Judging by how many versions of Office Microsoft has gone through without getting it right, this must be a crazy-difficult problem.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though I haven't done much testing with Office 2013.
PPS - Maybe it's gotten a bit better.

Three Thousand And Three!

Somehow I missed my 3000th post here, letting it slip by without a mention, so I'm marking this one, my 3003rd blog post! Is that too many? Not enough? How should I know? I just work here. It's been over nine years writing here, and I'm still going strong. I haven't run out of things to say yet, obviously, though sometimes I feel like I'm repeating myself.

Anyway, here's a quick thought about laziness and technology.

Any technology that makes it easier to be lazier will be misused, no matter its original intention. If we develop an "exercise pill" that gives you the same benefits as 30 minutes of vigorous exercise in order to maintain the health of people who can't do so, that exact same drug would be used by far more able-bodied people instead of going to the gym. It would be taken with dinner by sedentary loners, popped to maintain health during long study binges by students, laced into fast food and junk food to counter the effects of the fat and sugar, even ground up into baby food for fretful parents who think their kids should be crawling or walking by now. It's not just going to stay confined to astronauts, the elderly, the immobile and the unwell.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I heard about such a pill "in development" on some current affairs show.
PPS - At which point I thought "yeah, right", and thousands of people immediately stepped off their treadmills.

Randomness

I like this quote from Randall Munroe on xkcd:

"In retrospect, it's weird that as a kid I thought completely random outbursts made me seem interesting, given that from an information theory point of view, lexical white noise is just about the opposite of interesting by definition."

He makes a good point, if not for the fact that kids actually do find that kind of random outburst both interesting and hilarious. Within the kid subculture, on some level, the most random person wins.

As adults, we lose a lot of that, but not all. How many people avoid being organised or planning anything in advance, just because they value spontaneity over predictability? We all know that predictable and dependable are synonyms for boring, and nobody wants to be boring, so the person with the least organised life (the college dropout who stumbled into a million-dollar idea, or the hipster girl who changes hairstyles and jobs every few weeks) wins at being interesting. Everyone else who keeps society running, like the dependable electronics engineer, the honest cops and judges, gets shoved to the back as irrelevant when they are actually the fabric on which the "interesting" patterns are drawn.

That doesn't make random outbursts more interesting, though. They're just a less mature, more desperate version of the way a lot of adults live their whole lives.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm pretty much one of the boring ones.
PPS - Most of the time.

Friday writing update - PodCastle stories coming together

This week, I put together one and a half stories as potential entries for the PodCastle flash fiction contest. I'm really happy with the first one, and the second one is coming together nicely, but it's not done yet. That one might be the easiest to finish within the word count, but I think the first is the stronger story. That one, however, is over 800 words already, and I need to cut it right down to 500 words, which is tough. My concern is that the word reduction is what hurt my entry in the other competitions. I have a section in the middle that I can cut down quite a lot, so maybe it will be okay. Otherwise, you'll see the 800-word version here some time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or I'll send it through the Critters workshop and try to get it published somewhere.
PPS - We'll see.

Cloud services shutting down

So far, this year has been one of discontinuation of some of my favourite web tools, including Windows Live Mesh, Google Reader, and now Astrid. There may be more to come. I've been wary of cloud services for some time, but the usual response when I mention this to people is that "they wouldn't shut it down" or, for the slighly less optimistic, "there will always be some alternative". It's not completely true. There's no reason that someone must keep running a particular service, and there's not necessarily a reason for someone to replace a given service with a similar offering if it is ever shut down, nor any particular reason to believe that an alternative will be just as good.

When thinking or talking about this kind of issue, it is more useful to say "when such-and-such cloud service is shut down" rather than "if" because, eventually, every cloud service we know and love is going to go away. The only real question is whether that will happen while we still want to keep using it. At least part of the time, the answer will be "yes". Facebook, YouTube and GMail will, one day, all be gone completely. This will be devastating to all their users and will result in many petitions and pleas that fall on deaf ears. Planning for such an event means either ensuring that our own software doesn't depend exclusively on that service (being interchangeable with something else, for instance) or finding an alternative right now that cannot be taken away.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you really want to own all your computing, you can only use desktop software.
PPS - On the whole, it's not a feasible plan these days.

BTSync

I am currently in the process of testing a program called BTSync or BitTorrent Sync. I know the name "BitTorrent" doesn't have a good legal reputation, but this program uses the distributed architecture of BitTorrent to keep personal files in sync, peer to peer, between private machines. Since Windows Live Mesh shut down, I've been looking for a program exactly like this, and I even realised that BitTorrent would be a good solution except for the difficulties of changing files.

Because of the specific way BTSync works, always overwriting files with their latest versions and requiring machines to be online simultaneously to sync, it's not totally ideal, but it should work for "library" folders like music, pictures and videos. Folders that get added to but aren't often modified.

So far, for me, it seems to be working well. I ran a test on my music folder first, because I still have (almost) all my music on CD, so in case of disaster, I could recover it again. It took a few minutes to index the folder, then indicated, as far as I could tell, that everything was up to date in both places, as I would expect.

Some problems they're working on, as I gather, are the high memory usage and conflict handling, where changes are made in two places at once and you don't want to lose one copy of a file. Still, this has some huge advantages over any other file sync program. One, it can never be shut down by its creators. If they decide not to support it any more, it will continue to work for everyone who is using it. Two, it's free, and will always be so, again because it uses protocols that are out of the control of its creators.

The one huge difficulty it needs to overcome, however, is that the BitTorrent protocol will be blocked by most workplaces. One way around that would be for every workplace to have legitimate uses for BitTorrent programs like BTSync, requiring it to be unblocked by default.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's probably not going to happen, though.
PPS - Still, you never know.

Making communication interesting

Spending the extra time and effort to make communication interesting and memorable usually seems like a waste, especially in business when you have lots of info to convey and it's always different. If the business punishes you for spending 8 hours getting a 1 hour presentation ready, then of course you're going to get it done in 2 hours and forget about making it interesting.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We all know how to tell someone something.
PPS - We don't all know how to teach it.

My Do Not See movie list

I'm starting to find it useful to keep a "do not see" list for movies or, more accurately, directors, writers and producers. It's not big (in fact, it only has two entries on it) but it is based on recurrent disappointments that I can now avoid in the future. I'm not going to show the list, though, for two reasons. One, although it's helpful to me, it's a bit of negativity that I don't want to put out there. The people whose movies I choose not to see don't need that from me. Two, it reflect only my personal tastes. The fact that these people have made movies at all puts them far higher on the popularity ladder than me, and I'm just a consumer, not a producer. There are clearly people who like those movies, and the fact that I do not like them doesn't affect that judgement at all.

The list isn't foolproof, either. There's at least one movie that violates the list that I really enjoyed, and maybe others will appear in the future. I just think that it's useful to note which movies you did not enjoy seeing, and to note the reasons why or just the principal agents (writer, director, producer, actors). If some of those names keep coming up, it might be worth noting them so you don't waste time or money again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm going to go against my list at least once this year, I think.
PPS - The trailer for that movie looks like a different style than what I usually see from that production company.

Friday writing update - forcing creativity

This week I've been trying to get an entry together for a PodCastle flash fiction contest, so I've been spending my morning commutes poring over my writing snippets file, trying to find some plots. I've made some false starts and gotten pretty frustrated.

The thing is, I forgot how my creative brain works. I've been trying to push and attack it into creating something, but I'm an introvert. I need quiet and time. I do need a seed of an idea, but mostly I need to let it simmer. So now, that's what I'm going to do. Wish me luck.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I still have until the end of August.
PPS - I'll get at least one entry done, I'm sure.

Sorting oldest first

Sorting lists oldest-first is just one of the ways I am strange and different to the world. When it is available at all, it is not the default. Almost everyone else in the world seems to prefer to see the most recent items on top and others after. This affects Quickflix, Facebook, YouTube, Pocket, Feedly, almost anything that has a list of anything, actually.

Quickflix, for instance, made the decision to have new titles added to the top of customers' queues, rather than the bottom, because most of their customers preferred it that way. I assume this is because most of their customers were confused by the way a newly-added title would not appear to be in their queue at all (it was at the end, where they didn't look), or because people are all impatient. It also means that you can't add, say, Robocop 1, 2 and 3 in that order to your queue, or else you will receive number 3 first and be too disappointed to watch the others.

I wonder at the core mentality behind this preference. Is "first" the only place in line that matters? Yeah, probably, come to think of it. Do people have no patience to view things in the order they were discovered, rather than getting everything RIGHTNOWRIGHTNOWRIGHTNOW? Primacy and recency are now the same thing. There is only "what is happening right now" and "irrelevant haze". I guess I find it a little sad if every moment of your life points to the present, whether it's in the future or the past. There is bright, loud, demanding NOW, a hazy who-cares yesterday, an uncertain, figure-it-out-later tomorrow and NOTHING. This is what it looks like to "live in the now". It is impatient, unfocused, oversimplified, demanding. A frantic pace of staying still. The world clamours, and we vibrate in time with it, because we are passive observers of our own lives, and then we die.

Okay, that got depressing. In a nutshell, queues are a tool of patience and stacks are a tool of information overload.

Imagine if it worked this way in real life. You're standing at the cafe waiting to be served, then someone else arrives, so they go to the head of the queue, get their coffee and leave. You are still, say, fourth in line. Now two new people arrive. One gets her coffee and goes, then the other makes his order, but in the meantime, two more people arrive. Now you're seventh in line. You're better off leaving and coming in fresh to get to the head of the line and be served first, screwing over the other guys in front of you. A stack is a terrible way to get through everything, though it makes no difference to the barista.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When dealing with your own playlists and news feeds, in this metaphor, you're the barista.
PPS - Also, your customers can't get mad, because they're inanimate.

P!nk's cancelled concert message

Halfway through reading this message from P!nk about why she had to cancel a concert in Birmingham, I wanted to give her a big hug and tell her everything is going to be okay, don't listen to those people, you work hard and you deserve to be treated better than that. She got sick. Humans do that and, unfortunately, sometimes that messes with the plans they make. Also, we fans are needy, fickle, inconsiderate, entitled things most of the time, and it's not good for your sanity to plunge into their madness, but these days you can't really avoid it. You're at their fingertips, in their pockets, 24/7.

By the time I got to the end of the message, I thought, okay, tone it down a bit there. Maybe take off the cranky pants and go have a lie down, and let one of your PR people edit your missives when you're sick and in a bad mood in the future. It's okay to have a bad day, just try not to put your bad day online in permanent ink.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know I'd be upset if I'd bought tickets to a concert that had to be cancelled.
PPS - It's easier for me to be rational and forgiving about this one, because I wasn't going.

Meeting famous people on equal terms

In a way, I don't want to meet famous people on unequal footing. I don't want to be just the internet fanboy who loves their work and wants a piece of their time because this is an exciting, incredible opportunity for me while for them it's Tuesday. That's not to say I wouldn't jump at the chance to meet Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, Nathan Fillion, Emily or Zooey Deschanel, David Boreanaz or any of the people from the TV shows I watch, but I would always feel awkward about it. I would feel much more comfortable meeting any of them when they are also interested to meet me. I haven't done anything to make that likely yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I might never do so, either.
PPS - Or I might. You never know.

Appearances matter, even though they shouldn't

People judge books by their covers (that is, you by your appearance, among other things) all the time. This does make them wrong, but it's also out of your control. You can either take a stand against it, or you can sculpt your appearance to give people a favourable impression. What you can't do is take a stand against it and make a favourable impression at the same time, unless you are dealing with some very mature and reasonable people. Most people you meet will not be those people, nor will they be people who know you and can therefore see past your exterior.

So you cut your hair and dress nice if you want a job. You're the same person underneath, but people will see you in a better light, and this will make a big difference. It's frustrating and it's wrong, but it's also true. A lot of life is like that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Hey, how come people still judge based on appearance when we've been teaching everyone the opposite for so long?
PPS - It's because it's easier, isn't it?

Friday writing update

A couple of thoughts this week.

I need to expand into short stories. Right now, I write flash fiction, which stops before it really gets going, and novels, which take a lot of investment from the reader and aren't that good yet anyway. Short stories are much more sellable, and because it's a stretch for me, I need to try and do it.

I don't think I have the energy for both Facebook and Twitter, which is a shame. Facebook is where I keep in touch with my friends and family, but Twitter is where I need to be making professional contacts if I'm going to get published as a writer, or so I've heard.

I might have taken too long off daily writing to edit my novel. When I heard that a PodCastle flash fiction contest was open again, I wanted to get in on that, and I started writing a couple of things, but they're not coming out the way I'd hoped. I do have until the end of August, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't (yet) found an inspiring seed in my snippets file.
PPS - I'd like to be at the point where that doesn't even matter.

Paying authors to finish unfinished TV series

I wrote some time ago about an idea of commissioning ebooks to finish off cancelled cliffhanger TV series, but since listening to I Should Be Writing, I realise that the idea of paying an author only in royalties is not the way it should be done. So the closest you'd get to this is for the studio to sell the ebook rights to a publisher who then farms out the work to an interested/talented author, including an advance. You would first have to convince everyone to invest more money in a failed TV project, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - TV shows only get cancelled when people don't want to put more money in.
PPS - And even then they don't want to sell the rights.

Make art now

If you want to do creative work, start now. Not tomorrow, not next week, definitely not when you retire, but now. If you want to be a writer, start writing. If you want to paint, pick up a brush. Nothing is standing in your way on this, unless you can't afford the tools and materials for your creative work.

Your first excuse is likely to be that you don't have the time. We lead busy lives these days, but surely you could take fifteen minutes away from Facebook to sketch a bowl of fruit or something.

The next excuse is going to be that your work is not very good. Well, while you're learning, you have my personal permission to suck, because I know that means a lot to you. Just keep going. You're going to get better at it just by doing it over and over, but you'll get better quicker if you look at what you're doing, decide what isn't working, and try some new ways to make it better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't actually feel qualified to be offering much advice on this, yet.
PPS - However, the world will be a better place with more art, and some of it should come from you.

One standard

As software developers, often what we need from our tools and platforms is "one standard, many providers". We need to be able to transfer our skills from one platform to another, which means standards, but to have innovative options available, we need multiple providers. Targeting dozens of different web browsers is not ideal, but having one standard that they all support is great. We want to write for one abstract platform that is standard across all the different implementations of it.

What we usually get instead is "many providers, no standards" or "one provider, take it or leave it". HTML5 was getting close to being "one standard, many providers", but then each web browser decided they would only support different, incompatible parts of the "standard". There were web browser back-ends like webkit that seemed to simplify everything, but now Google is creating their own version of that project, which will lead to incompatibility again. We converge, we diverge, we never get to ideal, and sometimes we move away from it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's frustrating, is all.
PPS - And, I guess, most days it doesn't affect us so much.

Feminism in games

I watched a good YouTube video on the "damsel in distress" trope in video games, where a girl or woman (love interest or not) is the quest object, disempowered and unable to escape on her own, requiring a man to rescue her. In this type of scenario, for all the difference it makes, she might as well be the protagonist's favourite hat. It's a good investigation of the subject, and I recommend watching it. It was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that somehow produced hate mail and death threats to the producer of the video. I guess it's a good thing her research topic wasn't "video games producing violent misogynistic attitudes in young males".

Because of that (I assume), comments were disabled on this video, which made me just a bit sad for a minute, because I thought it sucked that someone so knowledgeable, passionate and successful has to silence all comments lest she be harassed. Then I remembered that these would be YouTube comments, subtracting value just by existing, and I felt better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - YouTube seriously needs some spam filtering on comments.
PPS - Or, failing that, ban anything that just consists of "FIRST!".

Friday Flash Fiction - Supervolcano

"I have to go, you know I do."

"But I love you!"

A single tear of fire escaped Ember's eye and wafted off into the breeze, flickered and died. He brushed her cheek with that warm, soft touch she had grown so fond of.

"I love you too."

He remembered their parting like it was yesterday. The memory of his human lover, Elizabeth, was the only thing that kept Ember going. That, and knowing it was only he, the last fire sprite, who could save the world.

The wind whipped at his hair, and he reached to pull his short burlap cloak tighter around him, before remembering how he had consumed it the night before, for warmth. Across the valley ahead, Ember saw the billows of smoke rising. He could smell the sulphur even from here, and a part of him thought it smelled like home. Ash fell like snow, tickling his nose here. Closer to the supervolcano, it would choke the air.

He checked the egg in its pouch - still intact - leaned his weight on his hiking staff and trudged on down the hard-packed soil.

The valley was dry and dead, covered in a delicate crust of salt. It crunched under his feet and sizzled away, the little trapped moisture evaporating from his body's great heat.

It was painful, like walking on broken glass. Every step, with its pinpricks of water and incombustible salt, sent needles of pain shooting up through Ember's feet to a spot just above and behind his eyes. He grimaced through the pain looking for any breaks in the monotonous salt landscape. Any dried old branch, any clump of withered grass, even just a gap where he could stand on hot sand. There was nothing in sight. Just the salt and its relentless stinging underfoot.

Halfway across the valley, Ember's feet had swollen to the size of footballs. They looked like crystal clubs, with an accumulation of salt on every side. They stung and ached. He felt he couldn't go on, and fell to his knees, the walking staff no longer supporting him. He let out a yelp of pain as the salt bit into his knees and shins, fresh skin that had not yet burned. He whimpered and sat there, wallowing in self-pity. The sulphurous smell of the supervolcano called him on, and the phoenix egg needed to be delivered, but he couldn't take one more step. The only thing he had left to eat was the staff itself, his grandfather's.

He looked at the staff, at the volcano, back to the staff. He noted its intricate carvings, the carefully hand-burnt patterns that coloured them. He took special note of the delicate head, carved somehow in three delicate concentric shells, one inside another, like spiderweb eggs of oak. He would eat that part last.

Among the many things Elizabeth had taught him was to appreciate old things that take time, details and artistry, love of fine work. She was a sculptor who dabbled in photography, and they met while Ember was just a teenager, really, stoking a bush fire with glee. She had been photographing the fire, the damage, the ashes left behind, for a new sculpture on loss. Ember had just been burning everything in sight, consuming old wood and new, houses, trees, bushes, animals, anything he could get his destructive hands on.

She shouldn't have been able to see him, but something caught her eye.

"Who ... what are you?" she asked, blunt and to the point. It was the first thing he loved about her.

He had looked around for a few seconds, trying to decide if she was looking at him.

"Yes, you," she said, with a laugh.

Their giddy romance lasted just a few months before the world started to burn and Ember realised his phoenix egg - his most prized possession - would renew the whole planet if dropped into the supervolcano. And he was the only one who could get close enough to the heat.

While he was reminiscing, Ember noticed, he had eaten most of the walking staff, leaving the delicate head. It had given him enough strength to keep going for now, and the pain in his feet had lessened. He stood and walked on, the salt plain pain feeling like nothing more than a faint tingle now. He clutched the egg protectively and reached the lip of the caldera. The true eruption had not yet begun - the magma was still building pressure below the surface - but it was too hot already for any human to survive. Ember felt the phoenix egg twitching in his fist. It felt the heat, too, and was getting ready to hatch, but he needed to get it deep down first. There was only one way forward. Ember opened his mouth wide and swallowed the egg, being careful not to crack the shell, though really there was little danger of that. He leapt high in the air and dove into the caldera, burrowing into the earth with his internal heat, burning up and pushing aside soil and rock like the volcanic flow he was going to meet.

When he broke through to the high-pressure magma, he was spent, and it burned through him to the phoenix egg in his belly, whose fire-life infused the molten rock. The magma did flow to the surface, but now it brought life, and the Earth was restored.

A week later, Elizabeth sat in her garden, mourning her lost love, when a young bird, the size of a crow but whose feathers shone in reds and yellows and a strange hint of blues, landed nearby. The way its crest fell to one side made it look just a little like Ember, and she smiled for the first time since he had left.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This very strange combination of events is a result of this Chuck Wendig flash fiction challenge.
PPS - My random draw of elements was "Dying Earth paranormal romance featuring a perilous journey and a mythological bird".

Saving energy

I don't think Earth Hour goes far enough. Rather than encouraging us all to switch off our lights and computers for an hour a year, we need to have an ongoing commitment and culture of reducing our energy use. Driving less, turning computers off when they're not needed, keeping less food in the fridge. Whatever you're doing, you can probably save more energy every day than the 4-cents-worth you save during Earth Hour. Apparently a good way to encourage home energy savings is to print the neighbourhood average usage on electricity bills. People see that as a challenge or a competition, and they react accordingly. If your electricity provider doesn't do this, you should ask them to start.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think most electricity providers in Australia do that.
PPS - And why wouldn't they?

Writing better software

People are starting to expect more quality from their software these days, and I think that's a good thing. There comes a time in any discipline when we stop expecting things to go haywire and start assuming that what we get will be worth our time and money. There are some problems with those assumptions, especially when development tools are cheap and readily available, because that's like expecting every piece of fan-fiction in the world to be on par with the works of professional authors. Programmers get better with practice, just like anyone.

But for professional software, we expect a high standard. Our industry reply is usually "But software is really hard, you guys!" That's true, but you know what else is really hard? Designing cars and airplanes. Building skyscrapers. Surgery. Humans accomplish hard things all the time, but with the right tools, training and discipline, we pull it off.

That's something I think we're still lacking in software. There are not as many talented software developers in the world as you might think, and even fewer software project managers. Our tools are often problematic on their own, because those, too, are software projects. In many cases, developers seek to give quality by reducing scope. Most mobile phone apps do just one thing, and with such narrow focus, they can do it pretty well. It's business software that always seems to feel half-baked and full of bugs.

So how do we raise the bar on that, first remembering that good software developers are hard to find and there is no magic process that will fix everything? I think we as software developers need to suck it up and start expecting more of our own software. Test it to death before letting anyone else see it. Make sure you don't need to treat it in a certain way to make it work properly. Don't settle for half-done. And practice. Deliberately think about what went wrong and what you can do to make it work better in the future.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am often disappointed by my own efforts.
PPS - And that's just when I am my only customer.

Avoiding queues

I was accosted on the street recently by someone from a small startup company obviously doing a kind of market research, or else a uni student doing an assignment. He asked a lot of questions about queues, knowing the state of a company's appointment schedule before you arrive and knowing busy times in advance. I'm guessing his company aimed to sell a service to businesses (doctors and restaurants mostly would be my guess) where customers could find out busy times and schedule their appointments for less-busy times, and could be informed in advance if their appointment was going to start late due to schedule overruns. That mostly sounds like a kind of limited calendar sharing and alerts system, and I wish them good luck. I'm curious about how it would actually work. Presumably once you start running late as a business, you send SMS alerts to your customers who have upcoming appointments, and after a month or two you get a map of your typical week and your busy and slack times that helps you spread out your schedules appropriately. It does sound good, but I think it would be difficult to implement alongside existing scheduling systems.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I didn't sign any NDA, so I think I'm okay to tell you all this.
PPS - And even if not, I don't think they'd find me.

Security camera warnings

Security camera warnings are not meant to make anyone feel good. They are designed to scare people. You, yes, you specifically. If they were meant for the "good people", they would say "Good news! For your protection, cameras are recording here 24 hours! We've got your back!" Instead, they always say things like "WARNING: Security cameras recording in this area 24/7. BACK OFF, CRIMINAL." The absolute nicest ones I've seen are still kind of passive-aggressive, saying "Smile! You're on camera!" which is still meant as a threat. I think this says a lot about the mindset of putting cameras up everywhere.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In some places, I'd rather have them than not.
PPS - But in general public places, they cost more than they're worth.

Friday Writing Update

This week I started outlining from the beginning of my novel, and I think it's going well so far. The real test will be when I try to edit it down and tighten it up. The outlining, at this pace, is going to take a few more weeks, but I really don't want that to be the only writing I do until then. Maybe next week I'll put the final touches on Sunnybank, which has now been reviewed through Critters, and try submitting it for publication at last.

I should have done that a while ago. The problem is that, even with a market list, I have trouble finding somewhere that might be interested in publishing it. I'm self-rejecting it before I even submit it. I also got so much feedback that I haven't even read it all yet. And I fear rejection. I waver between hope and despair. I'll get through it. I just need to do so faster.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess I don't devote a lot of my time to writing.
PPS - I don't write on the weekends at all.

Knowledge and speed

Knowledge is not obsolete. It creates a human connection when we know the same things in our heads instead of having to look them up. Imagine trying to get in with a new crowd, but you have to look up their inside jokes on the internet every time they're told. You'll be the one laughing five minutes after everyone else stops, by which time you've missed everything else. You need that social bonding and shared culture information in your head. Your brain is faster than the internet, and it's the only thing fast enough for social interaction. What's more, this is always going to be true. Even if you had something like Google Glass looking it up for you automatically, trying to push answers back at you in real time, there would still be a delay.

Also, there are some things that you won't know how to look up, no matter your search skills. What kind of maths to apply to a certain situation is one example that springs to mind. If you don't know that Return on Investment is a form of simultaneous equation situation and know how to solve them, how long is it going to take you to look that up and learn how to do that maths?

Lastly, sometimes search just fails. If someone uses the wrong term for something, or misuses an existing term, your search will be off the rails before you begin unless you know how to correct it. Or if you're searching for something obscure that is overshadowed by something much more popular with a similar name, like Michael Bolton the computer programmer for Initech rather than Michael Bolton the musician. Lots of obscure things are, well, obscured by mainstream things online, just because they are named the same or similar to each other.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wouldn't say I hold a lot of useful stuff in my head.
PPS - This post inspired by this TED talk.

Change your tools

My use of tools is always changing. I'm never quite sure that I've discovered the best way to accomplish some task, and I am quite often rewarded with a revelation. Recently I've changed note-taking tools on my phone, my media synchronisation, my action list program and my news reader. Some of those weren't by choice. I've changed web browsers and operating systems over and over, re-learning things in the process. I've changed programming languages and platforms several times too.

My point is that I am always willing to challenge my own status quo, even for small gains. I think it's a valuable mindset to have, but I would, because it's mine.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't know if you should change something that works just to change it, though.
PPS - I change because there's often better software available, and I just didn't know it.

All-in-one touch screen desktop computers

I've noticed that traditional desktop computers are going away, being replaced by laptops or, more recently, all-in-one touch screens, because Apple did it. I was kind of annoyed that the traditional tower would go away, because that's the type of computer I've bought and built in the past, but I just realised that those all-in-one touch screen desktops are close to what I've wanted for a long time. I've wanted to see how a huge touch-screen desktop would work, and these smaller options are the beginning of that change.

You do give up a lot when you make an all-in-one desktop, though. A lot of the time, it's power and upgrades, but it's been years since I did any upgrades of my own PC, and power always increases. The one thing I'm worried about is having the screen break before the rest of the all-in-one device. By the time that happens, you'll have to replace the whole thing, because replacement screens will be outdated parts.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the whole, though, I think it might be a good thing.
PPS - As long as you can attach external speakers. Built-in ones tend to suck.

Dilbert and humour

In one sense, Dilbert is quite often not funny at all. It is just absurd and somewhat familiar to office drones like me. We recognise certain situations and we wish we could handle them with the boldness, callousness or rage depicted in the comic strip. Does that make it more of a catharsis than comedy? I think so.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Scott Adams' own theory of humour would suggest Dilbert is meant to be funny on the Recognisable and Cruel dimensions, and maybe Clever and Bizarre.
PPS - To me, it might not be cruel or clever enough, or too bizarre.

Friday Writing Update

All my writing time this week has been spent on editing and self-critiquing the second draft of my first novel, and I have come to two distinct realisations. First, I've been spending a lot of time just reading it and figuring out what worked and what didn't when what I really wanted to do from the start was reduce it to an outline and rewrite it. There's some good stuff in there, but also some glaring holes, dead-end plots and out-of-nowhere revelations that need foreshadowing. I don't need to re-read the whole thing twice to get a handle on that.

The second revelation is that, even during the writing of that book, I got better at it. The very beginning is disjointed, and I remember writing it in first-person, present-tense, then running out of steam very quickly. I switched to third-person, past-tense, with many points of view, and I still think that's not ideal, but by halfway I had clearly found a kind of rhythm. I was also trying to build to a climax, but clearly had no idea how to get there.

So, in short, I might have been wasting my time over the past few weeks, which kinda sucks, but this second draft thing is as new to me now as writing a first draft was at the time. You've got to start somewhere, right? Tomorrow, I'm going back to the beginning and doing this for real, outlining properly, editing and tweaking that, then fleshing it out again into a proper second draft.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I was going to try another Chuck Wendig flash fiction challenge, too, but I couldn't make anything of my randomly-selected TV show style mash-up.
PPS - I got "Arrested Development" and "The Walking Dead". I only watch one of those.

Spare keys

After locking myself out of the house recently, I figured I'd better get onto the task of keeping some spare keys outside, just in case of emergency. And, yes, obviously "just don't forget your keys" is the first step in all of this, but there are several circumstances where you might find yourself at home, locked out, through no fault of your own, and it would be good to have spares available.

Then I thought, hang on a minute, my phone is a wireless communications device, and so is my garage door opener. If I could just have an app on my phone that triggers the garage door remotely, that would be ideal! Why hasn't anyone done that yet? Well, they have. You need to do some hardware hacking to get a Bluetooth receiver wired up to the motor in your garage, but once that's done and your phone is paired, it's pretty easy. I'm not super-confident with electronics myself, though, so I'm not sure I could do it without ruining my motor or at least voiding the warranty, but a setup like that would have saved me a bus ride and some embarrassment. Then again, so would a fake rock and some spare keys, but that's not nearly as cool.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can never think of where to hide spare keys.
PPS - Mostly because every place I think of seems too obvious in hindsight.

Collecting culture

We are all meant to be curating our own collection of culture, or at least that's what I gather from the hundreds of websites devoted to social sharing of cool pictures and videos we find online. So how do we do that when our websites and our tools are always being revoked, changed, locked down and sued? The answer from, say, Facebook would be "come and do it here!" but if another video site forbids embedding, then no website is a complete suite for cultural curation. Even keeping a list of bookmarks synchronised to disk is no good, because websites die or change all the time, or some video owner decides that their creation is no longer going to be available outside the USA. Now most of the world is screwed.

We need the most simple, basic tools that allow us to download - yes, download, copy and keep - that media, in case your website melts, and we need ways of cataloguing it and sharing it with each other. Those methods may change, but the fundamental concept behind it all is that the preservation of our culture requires that it be free of DRM, free of limits and locks, available to copy and share with each other without any exceptional tools. That's what made the web great. Taking it away again is not going to make it greater.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, for a short time, it might make it better for some few people.
PPS - And for those people, that's all that matters.

The Internet and languages

The Internet is bringing a lot of people together from different backgrounds and languages, but we don't seem to be learning each others' languages. That's kind of interesting. We might expect that, with a lot of people speaking a lot of different languages online, it would be beneficial to pick up at least a few more words in other languages, but since the web also has rough translation tools and lots of people that do speak your own language, we haven't exactly built the inverse Tower of Babel here. It may be that people seek out information only in their own language anyway, or perhaps it is forcing a lot more people to learn some English, and I don't notice because that's what I speak.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd like to be using Duolingo to learn another language.
PPS - But even with the mobile app, because it speaks aloud, I have to schedule time for it, and a lot of my time is already allocated.

Mobile apps change the industry

If apps only sell for a dollar, developers will only make apps that are worth one dollar. That could end up being a problem for the software industry in general. If the best developers, who could be improving our operating systems or writing better productivity software are all trying to replicate the success of the latest mobile app instead, then the lure of the app marketplace will actually stagnate the entire industry. Instead of working in teams for companies who need good software to do a better job, they'll be working alone and trying to grab their slice of the pie, $1 at a time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And when the app bubble bursts and they come back, nobody will know how to work in teams any more.
PPS - Or this might just be irrelevant hand-wringing and everything will be fine.

Friday Flash Fiction - A Wolf With a Chainsaw

WARNING: Today's flash fiction is rated MA15+ for graphic violence. Seriously, I feel like apologising for this in advance.

So I've been reading Chuck Wendig's blog, and occasionally he posts flash fiction challenges. I'm a bit behind on these, so this contest has already closed, but I wanted to give it a go anyway. The challenge (found here) was to have two random genres chosen for you from a list of 20 and write a flash fiction piece in the combination of those genres.

I got "splatterpunk" and "fairy tale". Therefore, I present for your disgust "A Wolf With a Chainsaw".

"WOLF!" cried the youngest pig as he crashed through his older brother's twig door and slammed it behind him. Before he could explain, the sounds of a chainsaw starting up could be heard coming steadily closer.

RRN-RRN-d-d-d-d! RRN-d-d-d-d!

The pigs looked at each other with wide-eyed terror, considering and dismissing their options with great speed. All the while, the chainsaw sounds grew closer.

RRN-d-d-d-d! RRN-RRN-d-d-d-d!

"He's crazy!" said the younger pig, known as Kevin. "What do we do?"

His brother, Francis, was marginally more calm. "We have to get out of here. Run to safety."

As Kevin was about to ask where they would find anywhere the maniac wolf with the chainsaw couldn't get to them, the chainsaw sound, now right outside, revved up and the walls started splintering.

RRRR! RRRR! The twigs shattered and flew away as the chainsaw carved through the wall and door, making a crazed diagonal slice. After a moment's pause, it poked through the wall again, cutting diagonally down the other way, forming a huge X in the wall. Bits of twig fell away, making some triangular holes, but it was far from a door yet.

"Little pigs, little pigs, let me in!" screamed the maniac wolf, poking his snout through the gaps.

"Get away! What the hell do you want?" asked Francis.

"I want" began the wolf, licking his lips, "dinner!"

At that moment, Kevin smacked a plank of wood into the wolf's exposed snout, which withdrew quickly from the hole, howling in pain. He revved the chainsaw again, and managed to make it sound angry, as much as such things are possible.

The wolf cut more slices in the wall, making a jagged door for himself, and burst in brandishing his motorised weapon, eyes wide and bloodshot, breathing quick and shallow.

Kevin and Francis squealed and ran in opposite directions through the small house, looking for hiding places or a way out. None were good enough to evade the wolf's keen sense of smell.

He found Kevin in the kitchen, trying to shelter under the table, so he raised his chainsaw and brought it down in the middle, laughing hysterically, cutting right through the wooden surface. He had almost reached the terrified pig when Francis whalloped him from behind with a cricket bat.

The wolf yowled, then extracted his chainsaw from the table, turning it on Francis. Francis took another swipe at the wolf, but he was too slow. The wolf dodged out of the way and swung his weapon down, sawing through the pig's left front trotter. The blood sprayed out, and in his panic Francis waved the limb all over, spraying blood in all directions - over the wolf, on the walls, on the floor, over his ruined kitchen table and his younger brother, before he regained enough composure to stuff the stump under his other arm and clamp down to stop the bleeding. The wolf held his chainsaw in just his left paw for a moment to pick up the severed trotter and gnaw on it for a second. He smacked his lips in appreciation.

"Yes, little pig. You'll do very nicely."

Francis yelped and dashed for the front room, aiming for the door or the hole the wolf had made, when the door burst inwards. Francis couldn't see who it was standing there, bow and arrow raised, but it was too much. He stopped dead in his tracks and felt that this was the end. He was going to die.

A woman's voice from the door said "GET DOWN!" and Francis ducked without a second thought. He heard a bowstring release an arrow which thunked into something meaty behind him. Turning to look, he saw the wolf with a hollow shaft protruding from his heart, channelling the high-pressure blood out in great gouts, dripping from the end in blobs and spurts, pooling on the floor in front of him. The wolf, his face still a mask of surprise, his chainsaw dropped by his side, fell to the floor and flopped forwards, pushing the arrow right through and out his back.

Kevin appeared from the kitchen and called out to the shape in the doorway, "Snow White! It's so good to see you! Thank you!"

Snow White smiled. "My pleasure, pig. Now," she nocked another arrow and aimed it at him, "how fast can you run?"

So what do you think? I couldn't really figure out how to write the sound of a chainsaw. Maybe I should have just embedded a sound file.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm also pleased with my pig names.
PPS - I could only think of two famous people called "Bacon", though.

We should gender-swap the next superhero movies

I think, just for kicks and balance, the next round of superhero movie reboots should be gender-swapped. Not the weak-sauce "distaff counterpart" characters, but real, from-scratch reimaginings. Not Batgirl. I want to see Batwoman, a kickass, strong, independent crime fighter. Bring on Patricia Parker, Clarice Kent and Beatrice Wayne!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And Tanya Stark, while we're at it.
PPS - We really should try a female Doctor Who, too.

Nature and humour

One aspect of my sense of humour that I think a lot of people don't share is that I think it's funny when the simplest acts of nature screw up our best laid high-tech plans. Like when an endangered falcon nests on top of a mobile phone mast and the phone company is forbidden from fixing it by removing the bird. For some reason, I find that quite funny (not to the level of "hilarious", but funny). Or when our best engineers are outdone by everyday creatures, such as bumpy whale fins being far more efficient than our best airfoil designs. In light of those types of incidents, I think it's silly to keep thinking of ourselves as the Biggest, Brainiest Beasts, because it doesn't take much for nature to kick us down and laugh.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then steal our lunch money.
PPS - Or something like that.

Networking for getting published

A big part of the process of getting published these days seems to be networking with famous authors, agents, editors and publishers on Twitter. This assumes, of course, that famous authors will care who you are and allow you to transition from "fan" to "follower" to "friend". If I were super-famous and had hundreds of people clamouring for my attention 24-7, I think I'd be selective about who I allow to monopolise my time. I don't have time to be online and interacting with an ever-growing swarm of bees, each of whom thinks they are my NEW BESTEST FRIEND EVAR! and really wants me to please read their manuscript and put in a good word for them with their publisher/editor/agent. It sounds like a lot of work because it is. It is the process of becoming someone's real friend, which takes time, and is not always successful.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, actually, it just means becoming a professional acquaintance, which is a bit easier.
PPS - But still not something I would have the energy for from their side.

I can't watch eye-related horror

My biggest ick factor comes from eyes. When TV shows, movies or stories involve eye-related torture or horror, I squirm. I'm not sure what makes me that sensitive to eye trauma, but it might be that I'm a pretty visual person. It's very easy to imagine something coming right at my eyes in the worst possible way. Once that image starts playing in my head, it keeps repeating on a loop while I feel like physically covering my eyes to protect them from the imaginary horror. Does anyone else have that problem?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There was at least one Farscape episode I had to look away from.
PPS - Oddly, though, disembodied eyes don't bother me.

Friday Flash Fiction - All Dialogue

I noticed, when editing my novel, that I had a tendency to describe conversations, rather than writing them. So I set myself this assignment: a flash story written entirely in dialogue. The result was this ... unsellable mass. It's still coherent, and it was easier to write than I expected, which probably means I got better at dialogue since the beginning of my first novel, but it was still tricky to pull together.

"What do you see?"
"Over the hill?"
"Yeah."
"A camp. Battle camp."
"How many soldiers?"
"Hard to say. I keep losing count at a few hundred tents. Keep your head down, will you?"
"I'm just trying to see!"
"You'll get your chance in a minute."
"It's cold."
"Didn't they tell you that when you enlisted?"
"I thought it was just to discourage the weak ones."
"They don't do that. They tell you whatever they need to if it will get you to enlist. That includes telling you things that make you think you're tougher than everyone else."
"Oh."
"Hey, don't worry about it. They told me I'd be a captain in three years, with my own squad."
"But you are a captain."
"It's been eleven years."
"Oh. So they just sort of lied?"
"Keep quiet. Someone's coming."

...

"It was over here?"
"Yes, just here on the hill, I swear I saw something."
"There's nothing here."
"I saw something!"
"What did you see? Something shiny?"
"Yes, like a scope or binocs."
"Well I don't see anything."
"I'm telling you there was something here!"
"Look, it was the end of your night shift. You were bound to lose focus and start imagining-"
"I didn't imagine it!"
"Fine. You keep looking here. I'm going back to camp. It's freezing out here."

...

"I thought he'd never leave."
"How come they couldn't see us?"
"The camoflage is pretty good."
"That was more than camoflage. I saw you when I came up just before, and you were camoflaged."
"It's above your pay grade, kid. Let's leave it at that."
"But-"
"Leave it. It's not your concern."
"What are we going to do about the camp?"
"We wait. If Central want us to take it out, we have to know where to hit first."
"So we just keep watching?"
"And waiting for the word. Where did those two goons go back to?"
"I couldn't see. You have the only binocs."
"Dammit."
"Wouldn't they just be going back to the guard tent anyway?"
"That's a good one to know, though. Can help you plan raids."
"So what do we do if Central wants the camp gone? We're just two people."
"We find their command tent, kill their senior officers, grenade a few others, then reinforcements capture the rest."
"Capture?"
"They're all potential recruits, too."
"How many do we get from them?"
"Only about 10% enlist."
"And the rest?"
"Some others can be brainwashed. Most go to Grundig for his experiments."
"I don't like Grundig."
"Most people don't. He's a butcher and a monster. But he figured out the brainwashing."
"But you said only a few can be brainwashed."
"They're getting better at it. Plus the more soldiers they get to test on, the more they learn."
"Still seems wrong."
"It's not wrong on a long time scale. And if we win the war, we write the history."
"That doesn't make it right, though. Just means we get to spin it our way."
"Hey, why did you enlist?"
"Are you sure you want to know?"
"What does that mean?"
"I never said I did enlist, Captain."
"What? What do you mean?"
"I saw you up here, and we hatched a plan to find out directly from you what happens to our men."
"But-"
"We knew you were expecting reinforcements. We got the kid just before he arrived. These are his clothes I'm wearing."
"But the ... All part of the act, then?"
"All part of the act, Captain."
"Well ... this has been a massive balls-up."
"And you'll be coming with us now."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I hope you ... tolerate it.
PPS - I also started writing a new Sister Margaret story this week.

Toggle button design

In general, buttons that try to tell you what they're going to do, as well as the current status of the feature in question, tend to be confusing. For example, on our office phones, the little LCD screen shows the word "mute" above one button when the microphone is on and "MUTE" when it is off. The bigger letters, I presume, are meant to suggest that the "MUTE" feature is active, though this is far from obvious. I'm not completely sure I've got it correct now.

There are any number of examples from mobile phone apps, too, given their limited space. Does a "Shuffle" button on a music player mean that the playlist is currently in shuffle mode, or does it mean it will change to shuffle mode when you touch it?

This is why someone invented checkboxes, but even those are often misleading if they are labelled badly, or if, in trying to make the function clearer, the UI designer has included a ghostly tick mark inside the checkbox when it is unchecked. Otherwise it would just be a labelled square, right? And who knows what the hell to do with that?

The point, if I have one, is that UI design is more than "we need a button that does X". You need to put a lot more thought into it than that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It can sort of work if the button looks pressed in while it's on.
PPS - But, as in the phone LCD case, that's not always possible.

Disposable identities and trust

It doesn't matter if you have the right to see who has your information, or even to get a copy or correct it, if you can't force them to delete it too. And, as we know, just asking a company to delete some data from their records, especially if that data is valuable to them, is not a directive that is going to be followed with haste and efficiency. This is why we need disposable identity information: contact details that self-destruct when I say so, no matter what you do as a company to hold onto them. It is the only way to true privacy without going for witness protection.

The problem with setting up such identity misdirection is that you have to trust someone. Your bank is going to manage your disposable credit cards by charging your real one. Your ISP or some online service is going to deal with your disposable email addresses by forwarding to your real address. Your phone company will manage all your disposable phone numbers by forwarding them to your real one. And the temptation to sell your direct contact details to their advertising partners will always be too great to resist. The buck stops somewhere, and it's always just short of actual control by you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I actually think about this a lot.
PPS - And I guess I post about it a fair bit too.