Symbolic Forest

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.

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.

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.

And, I’m back, from a weekend away to North Wales.

I’m not going to recount endless details about the trip, because most of you would probably find it very boring. I met new people, saw some new things – new to me, I mean – and had an energetic time. I enjoyed it so much that, by the end, I was telling everyone that I’d definitely be coming back.

Keyword noise: Ffestiniog, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, volunteering.

We’re getting the builders in at work, so this morning was spent in overalls, ripping out old network wiring that we know is dead and we don’t want to keep. I’ve not done any sort of energetic manual work for a long long time, and I’d forgotten how much fun it can be to just tear things apart. I ran round the office ripping cabling out of the wall, sending cable clips pinging across the room. I took out all my frustration on stubborn junction boxes and brittle, elderly trunking. Pulling things to pieces is a damn good feeling.

Keyword noise: cabling, demolition, destruction, dismantling.

A few weeks ago, after I’d just bought the hosting and domain name for this site, one of the friendlier managers at work came up to me in the office…

“Do you know much about website hosting?”

“Well, funny you should ask that, because…”

It was nothing to do with work at all; he’d decided he wanted to set up a family website, with a [surname].org address, to keep in touch with friends, family, and the distant relatives in Australia.^* And I told him that I’d been looking into it, the prices I’d found, how much I’d paid, and so on.

This morning, he came up to me again:

“I’ve bought some webspace from the same place that you did, and I was trying to work out how to put stuff on it. I was wondering … do you know anything about setting up a blog? I was looking at WordPress, and I was wondering if you knew much about it?”

“Well, funny you should ask that, because…”

So, it looks like – at least as far as this manager is concerned – I’m going to be the office WordPress expert in future, even though I only have a couple of weeks’ experience with it. Lucky for me that it’s easy to set up, I suppose.

* If you’re not British or Australian you might not know this, but everyone in Britain seems to have some distant relatives in Australia that they never get in touch with more than once per decade. I’ve got several separate lots, apparently. Presumably if you’re Australian than the reverse applies.

Keyword noise: blogging, colleagues, expertise, Wordpress, websites, hosting.

Sunday, about 12. I’m relaxing in the bath, thinking vaguely about shaving my legs, when the phone rings. Arrrgh.

It is, of course, Work, asking why website xxx is no longer working and can I do something about it. Yesterday, I went into the office to fix things which I shouldn’t have messed up—I should have spotted that changing Z would break innumerable other things, and I should have warned the boss not to go ahead with it. But I didn’t, because I hadn’t bothered to fully investigate the way the servers had been set up, so I didn’t realise it would happen. I feel like the extra in Dilbert who won an award for spending days of overtime fixing her own mistakes.

In other news, i went to the Belle and Sebastian gig in Glasgow on Thursday and had a damn good time. It wasn’t their best gig, but it was a lot better than the last one I saw them at, in Edinburgh. Nobody was dancing much, so I jumped up and down a bit.

Keyword noise: work, music, live music, Belle and Sebastian.

I seem to have got the stupid thing working sort-of reliably now, by unplugging the old Windows hard disk completely. Well, I hardly ever used it. It’s not crashed at all since I did that.

Saturday night: I wasn’t impressed by the Eurovision result, but I wasn’t impressed by the songs generally. Ah, well. It’s always a big disappointment, I think: the song you want to win never does. Slovenia were working on the right lines by going for a complete camp-overload—isn’t that the whole point of the thing? Jessica Garlick would have done better if she’d worn shoes that matched her outfit, I think. And why did Malta do so well, anyway, when it sounded just like the music from Wish You Were Here? I kept having visions of Judith Chalmers.

Dimitra said she wants to forget all about this year’s song content so she can forget the Greek entry ever existed. It was definitely going into “so bad it’s good” territory—I couldn’t keep a straight face through it.

Keyword noise: computers, television, Eurovision, Eurovision Song Contest.

Well, it’s still broken. Sort of. I managed to get it running again most of the time—I’m not sure really how—but every so often the disk drive starts making nasty clonking noises and the whole thing just freezes. Actually, it did The Noises just then, but for some reason kept on working.

Because I’ve not been writing things down, I don’t seem to have anything interesting to write down. I quickly got bored of going back and forth to an internet café every two or three days to read all my email (I know, too many mailing lists). I was planning to take up lots of exciting new activities—and especially, get some more things ready to type and put up elsewhere on this site. But, um, I haven’t. I wrote a letter to a friend in the US, two poems to post to one of the many, many mailing lists, and that was about it. Oh, and I managed to get two friends’ computers online. No self-interest there, of course. One of them paid me in cake, which has to be a good thing.

If you go to Not You, The Other One, you can read all about what students at my university were like. Not me though, of course. Everyone else seemed to be Dead Posh. When I worked in the library, behind the counter, we could see what the students’ names were when their matric cards got scanned. There was a frightening number of people with names like “The Honourable James Twistleton Ponsonby-Smythe”. I had friends whose flatmates thought a nice weekend in the middle of term was a quick flight to Switzerland, for the skiing.

Oh, of course, I have to remind you that it’s the Eurovision on Saturday. My friend W (the actor) would be terribly disappointed if I didn’t point it out.

Update, 27^th April 2022: Not You, The Other One no longer seems to be online these days, although its writer is still around and about on social media.

Keyword noise: Edinburgh, computers, television, Eurovision, Eurovision Song Contest.

So, the computer has broken. The bastard. I won’t be writing much until I manage to get it fixed, which will probably take a couple of weeks at least. I managed this by persuading a friend to let me use his machine.

Keyword noise: computers.