Symbolic Forest

This week’s Book I Haven’t Managed To Read was going to be about a Neal Stephenson novel, The System Of The World. However, that’s been postponed, just because I wanted to brag about finishing another Book I Haven’t Managed To Read.

The book was one many, many people have read with no trouble at all. Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. However, the first time I read it, in a hurry, I’d just tried to read two other Harry Potter books very quickly too. I got as far as Chapter Three of Goblet Of Fire, stopped, and didn’t pick any J K Rowling books up for a few years.

Anyway, last week, Colleague M said: “what? You’ve only read three Harry Potter books?” So, I picked up Goblet of Fire again, and read it. I didn’t get stuck. I didn’t forget where I was. I read it and I finished it. Hurrah!

Keyword noise: books, Colleague M, fiction, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J K Rowling, literature, reading.

My mother is still beavering away at the family tree, on various genealogy websites. She still hasn’t really got the hang of the internet yet, though…

“What’s a GEDCOM file?”

“Have you looked it up?” Google, google. “It’s a file format developed by the Mormons to store genealogical data.”

“That was quick! I didn’t know you could use it as an encyclopedia! Can you look anything up on it? I mean, if I didn’t know what an elephant was, could I look it up on the internet?”

The thing I try not to think about is: this is probably the level that most internet users work at.

Keyword noise: genealogy, The Mother.

My life is a disorganised mess, and so I’m always on the lookout for ways to sort that out. Most of them seem overly-complex, self-evidently simple, or just too much work. However, I did rather like the look of a link posted on Boing Boing recently: an article from a few years ago about the Noguchi filing system.

The basic principle of the Noguchi system is: labelled files are kept on a shelf with no dividers. Files aren’t sorted, indexed, ordered or categorised at all. Instead, when a file is returned to the shelf after use, it’s always returned to one end. Therefore, the only ordering is by date of last use,^* making it very easy to spot which files you can safely dispose of, or remove into storage.

That’s all well and good for paper file storage – it sounds like a rather good idea, to me. I was wondering, though, if it’s any use for computer file storage.

At first, it seems like an obvious candidate for computer file management. All you need to do is switch all your windows to sort files by date of access. So, I tried it; and quickly found that it’s more complicated than that. Here’s a picture of my home folder, which usually stores files I haven’t been able to categorise:

The first problem jumped out at me straight away. I haven’t looked at those top files recently at all – certainly not as recently as September. The computer may well have done – probably to update its icon cache, as they’re images – but I didn’t, and the computer can’t tell that. This would be even worse for folders of files on the office network, used by multiple people at once. Secondly – and it took me a minute or two to notice this – my computer has a bug! The files aren’t even in the correct order, according to the printed dates.

So, clearly, I can’t use the Noguchi system for organising my computer files, at least not with the tools I have available. Creating new tools is possible, but beyond my own skills. Maybe I should just make a big “metadata” file, to track where all my important working files are and how often I’m using them.

* Or by date of last desk-tidy-session, as it probably would be in my case.

Keyword noise: categorisation, file management, filing, My Documents, Noguchi, Noguchi filing system, organisation.

A strange day at work yesterday, and one in which I was instantly, quickly, and very correctly stereotyped.

Taking a shortcut through the warehouse behind the office, I got talking to Colleague M. Colleague M is fairly new, so tends to get all the rubbish jobs, such as sitting out in the cold of the warehouse sorting through boxes of stuff before it goes upstairs. We ended up talking for a while, and for some reason I ended up having to mention that I have a website.^**

“Yes,” said M, “you look like the sort of person who would have a website.”

Frankly, I was a bit baffled. M may be right, but I have no idea why. What do people who have websites look like?

Keyword noise: blogging, Colleague M, colleagues, stereotyping.

According to this story in The Guardian, the government thinks that we shouldn’t be looking at websites that can show us how to kill ourselves. So, they want ISPs to stop us. Search engines should alter their results so that the first hit for “suicide” is The Samaritans. We shouldn’t be allowed to discuss ways to kill ourselves with each other.

This has all started because of two people, who met via the net, and killed themselves together. The Guardian is so concerned for our own safety that it won’t even tell you that they killed themselves by using charcoal to produce carbon monoxide. Careful. Now you know that – and you read it on the internet, too – you might go out and do something stupid.

The whole idea that people are more likely to kill themselves just because of the internet is very, very silly. People who want to kill themselves will do it unless they receive support or medical attention; the internet is just a scapegoat; and if it can persuade people to kill themselves in peaceful, non-disruptive ways, then so much the better.^* The worrying thing, from my point of view, is the risk that this could be the thin end of the wedge. If the government can persuade ISPs to filter one topic, or can warp the results page for one search request, then they can do it for others. It doesn’t matter how well-meaning they are; they’ve crossed a line. The second time they want to do it, it might not be for such a well-meaning reason.

* Jumping in front of a train doesn’t just kill you, it will scar the driver for life too. Not to mention all the people who have to hose your fragmented remains off the track.

Keyword noise: censorship, filtering, information, openness, suicide, The Guardian, The Samaritans.

Feeling at a loose end, I’ve been experimenting with possible ways of adding Technorati tags to the posts here, without making them unreadable. There are three ideas I’m trying:

1. using a different class of link for links that identify tags
2. additionally, confining tags to a footnote-like section at the bottom of each post
3. putting tags inside an “invisible” block inside each post (using ‘display: none’ to hide the tag paragraph)

This post uses Idea 1; and I’ve also edited Friday’s post to use a combination of ideas 1 and 2. Thursday’s post, on the other hand, has been edited with Idea 2 alone. My first reaction is that including the tags in the post body makes the post look a bit too messy, and not many people will realise the difference between the two sorts of link. If you have an opinion, let me know what you think. Would Idea 3 even work, or would it just be ignored?

Update, later that day: I’ve emailed Technorati Support to ask if Idea 3 would actually work. It does feel like a bit of a dirty, underhand trick to pull though.

Update, some years later – Jan 24th ’09 to be precise: I eventually decided on a method combining Ideas 1 and 2. And – pending a redesign – I still use it. However, I’m currently rewriting all the tags so they don’t go to Technorati any more, they go to “tag pages” within this site instead. It’s demonstrated, for one thing, that lots of people do actually click on the tags. Incidentally, as part of this, I’ve regularised the “test posts” described above; the “(b) test” no longer looks as described.

Keyword noise: blogging, folksonomy, tagging, Technorati, web design.

More from The Guardian: in the UK, an entire third of the 14-21 age group have started their own blog.

However, what that doesn’t say is that most of these blogs aren’t very interesting to outsiders; just pages of teenage gossip and bitching.^* The Guardian has been over-hyping blogs for a while now, and “look, they’ve all got them!” really isn’t the important part of this story.

You’ll pick up on the important aspect of this, though, if you read the whole thing. It’s communication. The blogs the article mentions aren’t the big new revolution in publishing – they’re the big new revolution in Keeping In Touch. Most of the blogs on the internet now aren’t the sort of thing that the general public want to read. They’re online diaries to keep in touch with your friends, to tell them what you’ve been doing. The general public don’t read them, either – only the blogger’s friends do. In fact, they’re just the same as the traditional Personal Home Page of 1994 – the only difference is that they’re much easier to create.

* As opposed to this site, which is pages and pages of twentysomething gossip and bitching.

Keyword noise: blogging, communication, hype, surveys, The Guardian.

I’ve already written about the new design of The Guardian, and came across as pretty positive about it. Indeed, I am pretty positive about its design, as a whole. There is, though, one thing that’s a bit rubbish. The Thursday Technology section.

The old Thursday science and technology section was never wonderful. Apart from the wonderful Bad Science column, which, moved to Saturdays, survives, the science pages were always a bit spotty. There would usually be one good story, and I liked the format of pages 2 and 3,^* but a lot of the content seemed to be lifted from Nature and New Scientist.^** The computing pages weren’t great, but were probably better than what you’d expect from a general newspaper.

Now, though, the science pages (and jobs) seem to have evaporated aside from a single Saturday page. The old computing pages have been transformed into the new Technology section, on Berliner paper rather than tabloid. The problem is, though, the amount of content hasn’t changed; it’s just been stretched to fill the paper, leading to a very thin section. There’s a big front page article – today it was a rather good piece, actually, on learning to be a hacker – but the rest just seems to be games reviews and news about the latest mobile phones.

I’m hoping that it will improve over time. I was hoping that when I saw the first one, and I’m still hoping that it’s going to get better. And, one poor section per week isn’t going to stop me buying the paper. It’s a shame, though, because I’m sure they could be doing far, far better.

* similar, in fact, to the format of pages 2 and 3 in the new G2.

** which also comes out on a Thursday, of course. It took me a few years of reading the Guardian’s “Daedalus” column before I realised it seemed to be inspired by a column of the same name that ran in New Scientist for many years.

Keyword noise: Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, hackers, newpapers, redesign, The Guardian, New Scientist.

I’m one of those people who has trouble reading others. I can’t spot body language until it’s too late. I can’t spot inflection either. This isn’t good, when dealing with other people, but I’ve got used to the fact that I just can’t do it.

Now, that’s fair enough, but there seems to be another side to this that I’ve only just started to realise. Not only can I not spot other people’s feelings; other people can’t spot mine either. If I’m in a bad mood, people never seem to notice; if I’m not in a bad mood, I nevertheless constantly get comments like “why are you so pissed off today?”

There are two possibilities here – well, three really. Firstly, it could be that being useless at spotting other people’s emotions makes me useless at displaying my own, or that I am useless at spotting them because I’m useless at displaying them. Secondly, though, it could be just that everybody is as terrible at I am at this sort of thing. I just assume that it’s easy and natural, when everybody else is actually having just as much trouble as me.

Keyword noise: body language, emotion, feelings, inflection.

Back at the office today, and I wish I hadn’t been. The first things I had to deal with: a manager, not my own, complaining that I wasn’t doing my job properly; or at least her idea of what my job should be. My own manager’s response to that was: “Bollocks, ignore her,” but I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.

There’s not much motivation about at the office. There’s no joy in work when your only hope is to make people slightly less annoyed than they otherwise would be. There’s no recognition that we’re ever doing anything right, only constant complaints that we never do enough.

Keyword noise: colleagues, management, motivation, office politics.