Please forgive me if I indulge myself in a slight rant about garden furniture.
I like sitting out on the decking at the back of our house. Some years ago, we bought a cheap picnic bench in a B&Q sale, and it’s done fine. But time, and Scottish weather, have taken their toll, and it needs to be replaced. So this morning, God help me, I started looking for garden furniture on the internet.
As it happened, I had an idea of what I might be looking for, and it was a style of furniture I’d seen in America. In fact, it seems to be one of the bog-standard designs available pretty much anywhere in America. Surely I’d find something similiar here? What I found instead was that almost all of the garden furniture on sale in the UK is either boxey, boring and cheap or boxey, boring and expensive. There is no middle ground of attractively designed stuff, that’s built for the British climate (photographs of stuff in the sun on a Cotswolds Terrace doesn’t tell me much, lads) and is reasonably priced.
So I did what I’ve often done before when stuck: I went on Amazon France. Al fresco living in France is de rigueur and so, I reasoned, they might have a better range of stuff. Which they did. I didn’t find what I was looking for, or at least not yet, but what I did find was some furniture manufactured and distributed by a British company, on sale via Amazon.fr for £300 cheaper than on Amazon.co.uk. £300. That, it seems to me, is prima-facie evidence right there of rip-off Britain. As it happens, it wasn’t what I was looking for, but I kind of wish it was so I could order at the lower, French price and see what they said.
£300.
Bastards.
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Music: the greatest band to come out of Wigan were Tansads. I wrote about them here: Hello, Hello, Welcome To Your Bright New Future. The last song on the last album issued under the Tansads name was Drunken Serenade, sung by Janet Anderton. In time, Tansads had some reunion concerts, which I found out about afterwards, and out of that came Merry Hell. The first track on Merry Hell’s first cd is Drunken Serenade. It’s one of my go-to songs if I want to sing along in the shed.
But wait! That’s not all! The second video is the mighty Tansads from 1994 and Iron Man mashed up with footage from Marvel movies. Get it before Marvel’s lawyers take it down. Closing time in Accrington, indeed.
Oh the joys: I reached a point with the writing that I recognised–I’ve been there before; the realisation that the previous few hundred words have taken me up a blind alley. There’s really only one solution: put the offending words into a separate file ‘just in case’ then delete them from the primary text.
That prompted me to look at the chronology of the story against a calendar. That wasn’t so much to put a structure on the plot as to keep me in line with some specific dates. For example, I realised that, logically, a chapter I’ve already written, and am quite content with, must take place during the Edinburgh Festival. That makes no difference to the story, but it adds a sentence of description to the text.
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The blessed St. Jerry
Otherwise, I’ve spent a lot of today with the cd player on, reading. As I’ve said before, it keeps me happy but doesn’t make for a great blog. I did find the picture to the right, though, that I’ve been looking for for a while. I took it near Harvard Square in Cambridge MI in late 2010. You can probably guess what I’ve been listening to.
I’ve also mostly stayed off social media and news sites, so there hasn’t been much to irk me from that source.
However.
Three years ago, I had a rant here about Google searches (Just Google It). In it I wrote:
The notion of Google indexing pages, then searching the index and ranking results based on the pages most commonly linked to, as a proxy for accuracy or helpfulness, was a good one. But that was then. Now the internet is a sprawling thing, like a ragged old duvet draped over a cesspit. And the search algorithms are increasingly unhelpful as people game the system. Yes, I know the search companies try to correct for this, but the task is too large.
I was trying to find something very specific today, a historical search that shouldn’t have been difficult. Instead, the Google algorithm threw up pages and pages of frankly irrelevant shite. I tried, out of desperation really, to use some Boolean operators to control things; if anything, that made matters worse.
I went back and watched episodes 1 and 2 of the revived Twin Peaks. Unsurprisingly, they cast an interesting light on the final episode, especially some scenes/dialogue in episode 2 I’d forgotten about. I’m not going to make the mistake of imposing meaning on the show, but obviously Lynch and Frost scattered clues throughout the series as to what might be happening, some of which may be red herrings, but the final episode was planned, not random.
I may do a fuller post about the show in the future.
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In my post of 16 August, I talked about various options for improving sound quality on my audio gear.
I confirm that the Sony speakers from eBay, with cable wire from Amazon, are a great success, and have revitalised the old cd player.
The experiments in the living room have been a mixed bag: resiting the speakers on bamboo boards has worked as has isolating the cd player and amp. I think the semi-isolation of the turntable has worked a bit as well. I’ve run into an odd problem though. I am losing a little high-frequency hearing, and that has been behind some of my dis-satisfaction with the sound; but improving the isolation of the components has had the odd effect of improving LPs and cds with open production and showing up the problems with source discs where the production is more muddy or compressed.
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And further to my post of 6 March, Googling is still a pain for some kinds of initial research, ie for identifying a first swatch of references to get me going with the real research. This has caused me to curse several times recently when looking for background material for writing. Attempting to find serious commentary on anything to do with the Hebrew Bible, the early church, or gnosticism, immediately threw up either evangelical or esoteric sites for the first several pages, with no sign of what I really wanted. Likewise trying to dig into anything to do with “Celtic” mythology brings up loads of new age, Wiccan, or other modern mystical sites. I’m not knocking those who find that material meaningful, just moaning about the difficulty in getting to dryer academic sources.
Way back in the misty long ago, when the world was young and access to knowledge was mediated by either books or a 56k modem that made funny noises as it hogged the telephone line, I read about a new-fangled thing called Google search. I’m almost sure I first read of it in New Scientist, but it could also have been one of Jack Schofield’s columns in the late, lamented Guardian IT pages of the 1990s.
At the time I used AltaVista and Google was a revelation. Firstly, Google was a clean white page with a box in the middle that said “search”; there was no directory or other information filling the screen, just a search box. Secondly, there was the original Google index and search algorithm that worked much, much better than anything that preceded it.
The internet was in its infancy and still a novelty. The notion of Google indexing pages, then searching the index and ranking results based on the pages most commonly linked to, as a proxy for accuracy or helpfulness, was a good one. But that was then. Now the internet is a sprawling thing, like a ragged old duvet draped over a cesspit. And the search algorithms are increasingly unhelpful as people game the system. Yes, I know the search companies try to correct for this, but the task is too large.
This has been on my mind in two specific cases recently.
The first was when trying to track down information on Major Thomas Weir, a particularly interesting C17 citizen of Edinburgh. The difficulty is the internet is full of nonsense about him, often simply cut and pasted from other sites without attribution. For example, he always comes up as a notorious monster, executed for witchcraft. But he wasn’t: his sister was accused of witchcraft but the court didn’t convict either of them of that; they were executed for sexual offences. He was a well-known Covenanter, and the political aspects of his trial, and the subsequent blackening of his name for propaganda purposes are entirely overlooked by pretty much any site that comes up in the first few pages of the search. That propaganda is now the stuff of Edinburgh ghost tours and guide books.
The second was this evening, trying to track down informed commentary on elements of Islamic teaching in the Qu’ran; every site in the first 10 pages or so of the search results, using different search parameters, seemed to be churning out anti-Islam polemic from “Christian” sites, no doubt all expertly positioned in the ranks via diligently applied Search Engine Optimisation techniques.
It’s almost as though it would be worth going back to the pre-Google days, when search engines sat in portals hooked to directories. Other than that, I can’t see any solution.
When Princess Diana died in 1997, colleagues and I discussed the reactions to her death. We agreed that she seemed to have married into a shitty life and it was sad she died young in that manner, but we weren’t in floods of tears, we didn’t buy flowers to leave in the park, and it didn’t disturb our emotional lives at all. This wasn’t an exercise in cynicism, it was just that she wasn’t known to us personally and personal grief wasn’t involved.
Wind forward nearly 20 years to 2016 and the roll-call of the fallen, most recently Carrie Fisher, whose death was announced yesterday. In the case of Carrie Fisher, of course I regret her death and have empathy and sympathy for those who knew her; but all year, as public figures have died, my Facebook timeline, when I had one, and my Twitter timeline have featured people declaring the depths of their sorrow at individual deaths in ways that veer towards the mawkish, featuring photographs of the deceased with strap lines attesting to the lachrymose desolation of the poster. These are not from friends and family, whose grief is understandable, but from normal punters. Ms. Fisher is the latest to trigger such reactions.
I don’t get it. I don’t understand why people want to make a public display of emotional inadequacy: what do they want, a medal?
I’ve been hanging around the internet for a long time. I first went online in the Computer Lab at the Law Faculty in Edinburgh University. The experience was mostly based on pinging text around, and email was Pegasus I think. Around the same time, roughly 1991 to 1993, the Lab first started experimenting with Gopher and Mosaic.
National Geographic turns you away
Back then, the notion of netiquette was important and was, for the most part, observed, particularly in early mail lists and on Usenet. I remember when I encountered my first real troll, back when troll had real meaning as someone who went out of their way to antagonise other participants. The highest achievement of the successful troll was to provoke a flame war, the most virulent of which destroyed lists entirely. (Yeah, I know, what a fogey I am, getting nostalgic: ee lad, I remember when trolls were trolls, not like today, you lot ‘ave it easy, don’t know you’re born…)
One of the important things about those early days was that advertising on the internet was frowned on, and universally derided as spam. The world has changed, of course, and perhaps it is only oldies like me, who absorbed netiquette by osmosis and trial and error, who still have a visceral detestation of advertising on the internet. Are we spitting into the wind? Yes; but it is important, like cursive handwriting and tolerably good grammar.
These days, advertising is ubiquitous and all-pervasive. Many, if not most, commercial models seem to be built on advertising revenue, and freedom to advertise in as obtrusive a manner as possible is assumed to be an entitlement. However, as a consequence, consumers and end-users have taken to adopting adblocking add-ons to their browsers, and this is causing problems, especially for websites that suck on the advertisers’ tit.
TTFO
In response, sites have started to identify users using adblockers and stopping them viewing content entirely. I got the message shown in the pic on the Guardian website a couple of days ago, though it seems to have been an experiment as I haven’t had it since. And, before anyone accuses me of trying to access content for free, I do still buy the newspaper, though admittedly not as much as I used to. I also have assorted tools in place to try and stop tracking, and routinely refuse cookies unless I specifically want them for site recognition, etc.
So I was interested to read THIS and the link through to THIS.
They seem to me pretty much to nail it. Although I dislike advertising in principle, the reality is that you have to be pragmatic. And it isn’t as if paper copies of papers and magazines did not carry advertising. The difference is that online ads aren’t like the old static ads that just sit there on the page: they sing and dance and shout and scream, pop-up and pop-under and block access to content, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. And they presume to follow you around, working out what you like so that they can, wait for it, make the ads “more relevant”. What was that I was saying about entitlement issues? The notion that I might want to see as few ads as possible is not one of the relevant considerations.
It isn’t just online either. I watch little TV, but when I do I keep the remote handy to mute the sound if the channel I’m watching carries ads. I suspect the growth of HBO and Netflix, aside from quality content and innovation in presentation, has a lot to do with the absence of ads there too.
Part of the issue here is that we haven’t adjusted to the implications of the always-on, always-connected world. I don’t know how content providers are going to address the issue, but I’m pretty sure that it won’t be through the extension of the post-war advertising paradigm.
ADDED:- I reminded myself that back in 2008 I wrote:
Business models driven by advertising will likely fall in the face of increased awareness and use of advertisement blocking functionality as add ons to or integral parts of internet browsers.
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