Category: Living

…th all this. It seems Docker can use up your disk in some circumstances. I freed up about 20Gb with this command, and it’s been OK since: /usr/bin/docker system prune –all –volumes –-force Configure Discourse General stuff Once Discourse has built (it looks like it’s spewing errors, even when it’s done), go to your new web URL for the server and with luck you can register it all OK. If you don’t get the setup email, try running /var/discourse/di…

…ing, typing up a travel diary of a busking tour around Europe that I did during my gap year, and weight lifting. Meanwhile, if you would like to hire me for UX design or research on either a contract or permanent basis, let me know on jonathan@bakerbates.com. My LinkedIn profile is here.  …

Having re-designed the UI for MailOnline’s content publishing systems (currently producing close to 1,000 stories daily), my work there is now done. I’ve always been interested in how organisations work, and it was a great experience doing UX at the world’s biggest news site. I worked daily with journalists and editors of all kinds to understand how…

On this day in 2004, I wrote my first post here on Webtorque.org As with all things Internet, 10 years seems more like 50. Tim O’Reilly had just started popularising the term  “Web 2.0“, and the digerati were people who did things like blogs – before Twitter came along and made everyone do it, sort of.  For me,…

I was annoyed to see this report today via Mike Elgan’s G+ feed regarding rumours about Tim Cook’s sexuality. Elgan says, rightly, that: “Whether Tim Cook is straight or gay shouldn’t matter to the press or the public, and we should respect his and everyone’s right to choose whether to talk about their sexual identity…”…

…ng rapidly in the US. I thought a lot about where I should go after hotels.com, including a return to competitive figure skating. But those who know me will understand my interest in news publishing, being as I am very interested in the role of media in the digital age. So this is also about the possible future of networks, information and culture. It’s about copyright and community, which things are close to my heart. Many of those things converg…

…“The Search for Heart River” is going to be the title of my new book. It’s a journey through endless examples of people posting ‘shop jobs, and the people who try to work out if they’re fake or not. It ends with a some inconclusive rubbish about human nature. Hey, if Malcolm Gladwell can make a career out of it, I think I can too.  …

…h a Gantt chart – I’ve almost always been disappointed. In retrospect, the complexity of the project, or my lack of skill in using MSP, has meant the plan ended up not being able to predict much of what actually happened. At hotels.com, we don’t do project plans in UX/Product beyond “Q3 deliver this, Q4 deliver that”. I don’t have cause to break out MSP these days for any granular tasks. So I was pleasantly surprised last week to find that my proj…

I was reading this Wikipedia entry today, and saw this: Roger Waters’ 1992 album “Amused to Death” was, in part, inspired by and deals with some of the same subject matter as Postman’s book. In The End of Education Postman remarks that the album had “elevated my prestige among undergraduates”, and says that he has…

…r link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner.” Screw that, breadheads! Let’s all join in th…

For personal reference, and in case it helps somebody else, here’s a summary of how we built our single-storey rear extension on our 1900 mid-terraced house in North London, completed March 2010 (some photos are here). We’d not undertaken any building work before, other than having a replacement kitchen done a few years previously. Because…

If you put something up on the web, you need to give it a date stamp. Not doing so makes you look like Squidoo. So I’m shocked (no, actually, I am quite surprised!) that parliament.uk thinks it’s acceptable to leave them off. Maybe it means they just don’t care about things like accuracy. I guess…

Saying that hoards of my friends like Wired’s website is just a lie. Or at least implying that they do is disingenuous as I’m pretty sure that none of them have liked it. And is that huge number just made up? Who cares? This sort of casual fakery (which Facebook thinks nothing of, regardless of…

Mick Karn, once bassist with Japan – pop history’s most underrated band (albeit with one of the worst names ever) – died this week. I remember reading an interview with him years ago in which he was asked about his unique style of bass playing. He said he didn’t know how to play it in…

…an entry of the new, mirrored, host record into the DNS. Clients going to www.wikileaks.com or one of its mirrors and finding it unresponsive would then be redirected to the next available mirror host until a successful connection was established. Whenever the holder of Wikileaks’s private key needed to update their site, they would be able to upload changes to one or more of the participating mirrors, which would then distribute those changes to…

…le. The Kindle 3 also comes with the ability to email files to your Kindle free of charge. RSS and free email transfer – two great tastes that taste great together! So, if you’re running Linux, and want get RSS feeds on your Kindle, read on. I’m running Linux (Ubuntu 10.10), so it was easy for a non-programmer like me to create a little script to email the RSS file to my Kindle every night, using sendEmail (it’s in the Ubuntu repos), a very small…

I admit it, I’m on Facebook. I know they’re selling my information. They probably have a whole team of people called something like “Personal Data Merchandising” thinking up new and ever more devious ways to trick me in to giving away just that little bit more. I sort of know I’ll regret it. A bit…

It looks like my wife will be stranded in Japan this week following the Icelandic volcano eruption. I thought I’d better look at her travel insurance provider’s website (a company I’d not heard of called Holiday Extras), prior to playing the inevitable game of IVR over the phone. Frankly, I wasn’t holding out much hope…

It’s now clear that the government wants to control people’s use of the Internet, ostensibly on behalf of the media industry, but more likely in the longer term because (to paraphrase William Burroughs) control always needs more control. For a while now I’ve been thinking whether it might be time to tunnel my Internet traffic…

…ritish-library-digital-archives Jonathan (I should really delete off-topic comments on sight, but as I get so few comments anyway…) That’s not the only black hole. My pop works for the Foreign Office’s records department, where he releases declassified material from the archives, and handles freedom of information requests. He says that HMG’s digital communications from about 1995-2000 were, due to plain old screw-up, not archived and are now pr…

A couple of years ago, I was obliged to find out about the user experience of Verified by Visa and the Mastercard SecureCode systems for inclusion on our site. it was plain to me from the outset that the designers of 3-D Secure (the protocal on which these are based)  had not a clue about…

Earlier last week, the mighty Joshua Kaufman brought my attention to Jakob Nielsen’s latest alertbox about removing masks from password fields. This sparked some interesting debate, and it got me thinking again about passwords and security in general. It has often seemed to me that the first mistake people tend to make in applying security…

“To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.” Ray Bradbury (90) doesn’t explain why he doesn’t like the Internet, but I think I can make a good guess based on the “it’s in the air somewhere” remark.…

The campaign starts here. The word “Internet” needs to be capitalised. It needs to be capitalised out of respect for its importance and the fact that it’s a proper noun. We don’t write about “the pacific” or “oxford” or reading “the times newspaper.” We should not  write about “the internet” for the same reason. I’ve…

In January of 2008, a new property website called Zoopla! started up. With property prices going ever skyward, it wasn’t exactly a surprising launch, but Zoopla! itself was surprising. Like all very good ideas on the web, it was simple and well executed, yet allowed for good, often complex, effects to happen: list every house…

Headphones are wonderful things, and I’ve been amazed at what I’ve been hearing through them recently. In a fit of nostalgia, I decided to sit down and re-visit Grace Jones’s version of Sting’s Demolition Man (mp3, 5.6Mb). Leaving aside its merits as a pop song, I think it’s one of the greatest feats of studio…

Server upgraded, Webtorque will be looking rather sqiff for a while until I work out the WordPress theme that I heavily hacked up and forgot to note any changes to… Enjoy. [LATER] Pretty much done now. Wish I could work out a way of removing that pesky horizontal line beneath the header image.

Webtorque will be down this weekend for maintenance while I try to upgrade the server. It went wrong the first time, so here’s hoping. My Tiscali hell is also continuing though, so the downtime may be longer than it needs to be. Think of it as a rest.

My god this is awful. The entire weekend my net connection with Tiscali has been so slow that YouTube, podcasts, BBC news and even Gmail have been pretty much unusable. I tried running a speed test just now and it timed out! I now realise why I’ve always found broadband hell stories so boring –…

For the past two weeks, and coincidentally at exactly the same time as my family have been away, I have had no Internet access, and very little TV reception at home. I count myself as a pretty intense Internet user (although I watch very little TV), so was interested to see what would happen without…

…This is good because we get free bottles of water, juice and other modern comestibles. So, at least by recycling we can do something to offset the wanton destruction on the environment that these things bring. Incredibly though, I find myself pulling out three of four empty milk, drink and other plastic bottles from the general waste bin, and putting these into their correct place. Every day. Are the people that throw plastic bottles into the gen…

…nID request requesting something on Plaxo requesting something on myopenid.com. A similar thing happened with and invite from Jon Curnow a few months ago. I tried mailing Plaxo. They replied with a solution to my OpenID woes. It seems I’ve got two duplicate accounts at the moment, one of which is my OpenID attached one, the other now orphaned in Plaxospace. Or something. But the fix sounded horrendously complicated so I thought better of it. I sup…

With various digital media building up on my little hard drive, I thought I’d get one of those media streaming boxes so that I can watch or listen it all in my living room downstairs. TED talks, podcasts of various kinds, camcoder movies – ah lovely. I knew video formats were going to be a…

Regular readers will know that I had a free mobile phone last year, thanks to a 100% cashback deal. This year however, I’ve not been so lucky. After hearing nothing from Phones 2 U Direct.Co.Uk Ltd after my first cashback claim in September, I served them a court order to get a response. They replied to the court, admitting they owed me the money. That was over three weeks ago, and I’ve still heard nothing. Now I see that they’ve gone under. They…

Webtorque will be moving servers soon (maybe this week… maybe next). I’d be delighted if anyone actually notices, but we may be down for a day or so while I get the web server back up. There’s a chance I might delete everything in the process – indeed sometimes I want to do that anyway,…

…leave LBi to start work with Expedia. In my case I shall be joining hotels.com as an interaction designer. Expedia makes a lot of sense. Having worked for about ten months on First Choice Holidays while at Wheel last year (although my work has yet to go live following their merger with TUI), I see travel as a suitably complex experience design challenge. Expedia is also a real online business. Not for me the clicks and mortar, or the pains of tran…

Last week I got a mail from somewhere announcing the launch of a new property website called zoopla.com, so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a pretty nifty residential property sales site: good web2.0 thinking going on, nicely executed. Whoever put it together knows their stuff. But it has a few things I thought…

I’ve not worked on an FMCG site in ages, so I’m taking the liberty of plugging this one, which we did for Sony Computer Entertainment this year. SingStarGame.com went fully live in all territories last week. I’m on there too if you look hard enough. It’s running at about 1,000 registrations a day right now…

…an just a fount of links to knowledge. Also notable was the use of the COI tag as a kind of re-enforcement of an initial objection to lack of attribution and poor style – for which there are both perfectly usable tags. The PR operative’s account name seemed to be a red rag to a bull in that regard. I suppose the good news is that whenever somebody says you can plonk anything on Wikipedia, you’ll know they’ve never read a discussion page on an arti…

One of the things I like about Facebook is spotting odd coincidences. Here are two friends, one living in Tokyo, the other in London, neither of whom know each other from Adam – but their status messages make nice bookends.

I’m very rarely inspired to write about anything. When I do, it’s usually in reaction to something from outside. It doesn’t come “from me” in the artistic sense. Admittedly, I don’t write much uplifting stuff though – it’s mostly boring. This post is different however because I don’t know where it came from. I was…

My six year-old son went on a trip to the park today with his holiday playgroup. There were various activities there, and among them it seems the Met were hosting some kind of “meet the Police” event. Part of this appears to have involved his fingerprint being taken. What the hell is this about? He…

I’ve been told that comments aren’t working. I think this might be related to a relatively recent upgrade to WordPress that might have broken the theme I’m running (I’m hoping it’s not to do with the very low version of PHP the server’s running). I’m going to see if I can fix this, but if…

I now realise that I hated the logo for the XXX Olympiad* because I was meant to hate it. Wolff Olins grabbed me by the throat, shoved me up against a wall and made me. At exactly the same time, they forced everyone else to take a stance on it too. Now the Sun has…

…lculator? Jonathan Yes this is record. Kraftwerk calculator? Michel // Sidequesion: Why http://webtorque.org/ doesn’t load and http://www.webtorque.org/ works ok? :) Michel // I also cannot ping or trace webtorque.org, but CAN www.weborque.org… Michel // Sorrt, I mean, www.webtorque.org :) Jonathan Yes, I don’t know how to configure the site to respond to a “blank” host name without violating various RFCs. I’d quite like to know how to do it tho…

There are some posts that no real blog can be complete without, and that is some opinion about Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a year now and it occurs to me that I should write up something on it. Not that anyone’s asked, but then that’s what blogging is all about really isn’t…

I was going through some stuff at the weekend, and found a CD I bought in the Los Angeles from a shop in Melrose several years ago. Fans of Julian Cope will of course spot why it found its way into the bargain bin with a hole punched through the barcode. If you’re not a…

…up the incidental expenses incurred during the life of the contract. So, a free phone with a free connection for 12 months. Could I be any smugger that this? coldplayer A group of conned consumers are trying to get together for a class action against the networks to try to claim the money they are owed. If you would like to join them feel free to email them at: cashback_victims@yahoo.co.uk or phonestoudirect.classaction@yahoo.co.uk You don’t have…

Having taken this photo while waiting for our kid to chomp through a McDonald’s Kids Meal at new year (mea culpa – but it’s the winging, really), I’ve just noticed another frankly amazing example of a nutritional content “explanation.” This time, it’s on the cardboard sleeve of a pot of Sainsbury’s Cornish clotted cream (again,…

…with the way schedules have been manipulated by broadcasters (as reams of complaint letters to all TV and radio channels show). The arrogance of scheduled entertainment is obvious: “You want it? You wait until we’re ready, OK?” Hence the popularity of the aforementioned time-shifting. But what happens if you let people schedule their own media for others? In myminute’s case, they charge you to do so (a pound!) Most of me looks at YouTube and thin…

…/27_revelation/ Similarly, Spank’s Version 2 (MP3, 1.3Mb) is great. http://www.unity303.com/mp3/ In the words of John Peel: I’m just glad I’ve lived long enough to hear this stuff. It all obviously raises some copyright questions: by finding this stuff and listening to it, am I committing theft? I believe the clips here are fair use under UK copyright law at least – and I would assume the artists (if not their copyright holders) would be fine with…

He’s gone for the irony hat trick…! Boingboing reports on this article is about a man who has asked his daughter’s school to take Fahrenheit 451 off the curriculum because of its use of “bad language” and (for extra irony points) smoking, amongst other things. The incident is wonderful not least for the fact that…

…, and versions of Drupal later than 4.5.8 won’t run on anything lower than PHP 4.2.3. So – clang! I’d hit the upgrade buffers. Drupal had to go. I must say WordPress is – so far – much, much easier to configure than Drupal. It’s been a couple of years since I looked at blogging software, so things have progressed a bit, obviously. Anyway, I need to remove lots of comment spam that got exported over into the database, and I’ll be sending people the…

One of the less wonderful things about working as a permanent employee for a company larger than a certain size, is that you have appraisals every six months. And every six months both you, your line manager, and anyone you care to talk to about the appraisal system agree wholeheartedly that the experience is awful. Having passed through several companies, each with their own interpretation of what makes a good appraisal, I have the somewhat dubious pleasure of being able to compare and contrast different systems. Having had my first appraisal at my new company today, here are my findings.

After years of trying to remember to give Technorati a go, I’ve finally now remembered. They make you put a link to them on your blog in order to get your blog listed. And so, while trying to ignore the snobbishness of all this, I hereby post my Technorati Profile.

…mainly because if the USA has its way, then the site may be taken down in preparation for Russia’s entry into the WTO. If you’ve not been there before, AllofMP3 is everything you ever wanted from Internet age commerce: dirt cheap goods sold legally (according to Russian jurisdiction), massive choice and as a finishing touch, stunning typos. Not surprisingly, a whole album for a dollar (or any combination of tracks you like) has been making the RI…

An announcement from the management: I’m getting so much comment spam now I’m going to have to turn off the anonymous posting or I’ll start missing the real posts. If you want to post, please create an account.

I’m pretty sure this won’t matter since so few people read this blog anyway, and for those lovely people who have accounts – let me take this opportunity to say thanks.

…ry thoughtful card (masterminded by Miles Sampson, I’ve just found out) complete with ASCII art photo of myself, grinning. My boss, Vanessa Wolfe-Coote, had the great idea of asking everyone to send in a word or phrase they thought summed me up, which I’ve arranged as a spoof tag cloud for posterity and ego-massage (the text sizes are based on actual frequencies, and are not my own!) Thanks again all, particularly those who have supported me in my…

Music is like drugs – if you have a relationship with it at all it tends to be at its most intense when you’re young. But in common with most people of my age, I suppose I’ve drifted away from music as a passion to it being merely an occasional pastime. A CD on a Sunday afternoon, some backing music to a kids party… I feel this does most of what I like a huge injustice (and Axel’s friends must be amongst very few toddlers who have played pass the parcel to Killing Joke’s Democracy). I certainly don’t play music any more (well, I was a drummer that couldn’t drive and didn’t own a van – my days in bands were numbered). And in the past five years, it’s all fallen victim to the Three Hour Tyranny.

…ailed documentation on something in order fully to understand it, you also come to understand something about the writer’s mind. It’s not as rich as a novel, or a poem, but it has elements of those. You come to know what they think is important, and how they choose to express things. I was impressed by Barnes’s expressive ability, and his courage in taking approaches that I would have shrunk from. I don’t want this to read like an obituary, becaus…

Somebody at work was asking what they might be able to buy in Japan for £100-200 as a birthday gift. Gagetry of various types was suggested, but I chipped in the idea that for that money they could get a reasonable shamisen. At least, that’s what some friends bought me for my birthday once and I’ve always counted it as one of my prized possessions. It’s a wonder of wooden engineering: collapsible into a small case a bit bigger than a shoebox, and wonderfully made. Kumi doesn’t like Japanese stuff lying about, so the days when it was propped up casually next to the Bang & Olufsen are long gone.

It’s been shut away in its box for at least a year or so, and it occured to me that I’d not given it a pluck for a while. So, while Kumi was at Tescos I took the box out of the cupboard and – horror! It’s warped!

Blimey. You take your eye of your blog and what happens? More than a month goes by and you’ve not done a thing with it. I had an excuse: a pathetic new year’s resolution to only blog about positive things. And lo, I could think of nothing.

But I’m not going to completely throw that out with the Christmas tree, because one of the undoubtedly good things that’s happend recently is Framfab’s blog.

The holidays now over, and even the first week at work done, I can now return to some good ol’ blogging now that we’ve bought a new car, almost tidied up our files (well, my files anyway – Kumi still just chucks all her papers under her desk and mumbles shoganai…) and packed up the plastic Xmas tree.

My new year’s resolution (on my blog at any rate) is to think about more positive things. Too many of last year’s posts were cynical, negative rants. Writing about happy, nice things sure is going to be as dull as ditchwater but I’m going to make a fist of it.

Well I finally did it. I had no particular stimulus other than me being on holiday and saw a Slashdot post about a recent review of Linux distros for the desktop. They’d rated Ubuntu highest, so I went along to distrowatch.com and did some reading up. After downloading and burning the (single) ISO, I’m now running it. I always find descriptions of Windows to Linux migrations pretty boring, so I’ll lay off the details about how I got my printer working, etc. but after about 48 hours hacking about, I’ve now got almost everything I need and Windows seems long gone.

Coming home from work seems to be a time when I can think slightly creatively. This is a pity, since I’m paid to do that while I’m at work, but the sheer cacophony and chaos of the office I work in kills that stone dead about 20 mins after the morning coffee. Today, for instance, somebody’s PC fan started running in emergency cooling mode. This, combined with the telephones, keyboard tapping, seemingly constant car alarms and the (yes) children’s…

…whom none of this would be possible (probably). Update: I’m now being a little more sophisticated, having just discovered www.bannerart.org….

“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!”

Right on! I have a gun, I’m wearing a beret, and my daddy’s the richest man in America!

…d the foundations and dug the moat, I would like to fill the moat so as to test its integrity (both of itself and against invaders) before progressing to erecting the walls. I understand the traditional way of doing this is to tap a river or a stream, and supplement this with ox-drawn carts filled with barrels of fresh water. However, being in Brockley, I’m too far from the Thames to do this (a distance of about 2 miles as the crow flies). There a…

…in the living room. This time with film of my sister’s daughter’s christening. After waiting for 48 hours for my old Dell P600 to render the AVI file, I concluded I needed a new machine. So I bought another one….

This post is political – no apologies. Look away now.

All my life the forces of evil have been embodied by “terrorists.” The IRA, Abu Nidal, Tigers, FARC, Al Quaida, the list is endless. All my life, the foreign policy of governments have been ranged around the war against terror, supported by the war against drugs and “organised crime.” It just goes round and round and round. It’s reached the status of a culture of our times and it’s making me sick.

Consuming the mainstream media to find answers to why people are committing acts of terror is a bit like trying to get a hearty meal out of candyfloss. The “analysis”, “commentary” and sheer weight of verbiage that pours forth about “policy” and “countermeasures” is completely disorientating. You can’t look into it for more than a few hours before you keel over with media-induced vertigo.

…lthy) reaction is that “I should blog that.” For instance, I was returning home after work last night, and as I waited at the lights at the crossing of Pentonville Road and Amwell Street, who should wonder across but Gilbert and George! It’s the second time I’ve seen them out on the streets of London. Last time I spotted them in Soho and my wife and I followed them at a discreet distance to see where they were going (they went into a side street a…

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

This is apparently helping to finish somebody’s PhD, but it was mainly out of curiosity that I filled it in. He doesn’t give you the option of listing Trillian as your IM client, so he’s obviously a bit stuck up in his ivory tower. The results page is down at the time of writing, but it promises to be quite interesting.

Ah, Japan: land of individually-wrapped bananas and toilets that squirt warm water up your bum.

Ten days in Nagano (Ena City) with the in-laws followed by visits to other relatives and friends. The food! The technology! Even the interminable shopping trips for kids clothes were interesting. Japan qualified for the world cup against North Korea in a match that nobody could attend (so they did the whole thing on video screens by proxy), Takanohana died (at 55) and there was some really weird stuff in the news for ages about roadside guard rails and the mysterious vicious spikes attached to them.

A holiday for three weeks in Japan, starting tomorrow! It’s been a while since I last went – the sushi, the traffic, the in-laws and the partial lack of understanding of what’s going on. I’m looking forward to all these things and more, starting with airline food (Korean Airlines! A kimchi wagon in the sky!).

Observers of the date stamp will note that I’ve not posted for… weeks!

This is not for lack of subject matter, of which I hope to expand at some point, but due to the fact that I’ve been working on a project with deadlines which anyone would be excused for thinking were some kind of Guinness Book attempt: two people writing a 200-page specification in three days and nine (nine!) other deliverables over three further, not to mention numerous updates of issue logs and all the attendant noise around that has left little room for sleep, let along blogging.

Hope to provide something worth reading soon, but we’re off to Japan for three weeks come the 25th May, so it might have to wait a bit.

…s. The last may have been during my gap year in Japan. So, I’ve decided to write back to him. I have an old letter pad I found in the attic (“Elco of Switzerland”, green, 50 sheets, A5) and will use the envelopes and stamps usually reserved for communication with government departments, insurance companies or life insurers. This will be a great event. Now I just have to think of what to write, although my biggest fear will be the lack of a backspa…

For some reason last night I decided to post a rather late April fool to uk.legal. It was a bit rough around the edges, but only took about fifteen minutes to do (and spookily time-stamped at exactly 00:00hrs). I’m quite proud that it seems to have at least partially hooked one person in, while producing some pretty good replies from others. Nobody picked up on the the first line about “giving me a steer” though. (The better replies are on the “next 10” page at the bottom of the listing).

It’s obviously a by-product of collaborative websites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin that April 1st generates so many fake stories. One or two might be funny, but there were about ten on Slashdot yesterday: EU to ban Macs, UN to outlaw Internet, Opera inventing a new P2P system called “SoundWave” etc. etc.

…onnection is a bit of an anti-climax though. Large files take less time to download, but (unsurprisingly) the experience of email and web surfing is indistinguishable from that of the 512K we had with Plusnet. Not only that, but there’s some strange psychological effect taking place: I see higher download rates on files, but I somehow don’t perceive this as bing any faster – the difference between waiting five minutes and two minutes is, well, the…

…ed to get this done on the cheap, I’m attempting to make one out of an old computer using IPCop. Several nights into the small hours later, and my “spare” PC appears to work OK, but it’s so old it’s not Y2K compliant and keeps thinking the year is 2001. This means that every time I boot it up, the firewall goes nuts thinking it’s five years out of date, etc. So, like any tight-fisted geek, I went to eBay. Last week I took delivery of what was desc…

I sold my old bike on eBay this evening – £320. That’s more than I thought I’d get. I can’t help feeling a little sad to see it go. 45 people had it in their watch lists, which was a bit like having a crowd of anonymous mourners at a funeral: a mark of some respect I hope. It’s been a part of me for almost a third of my life; longer than I’ve known my wife and many of my friends, and I’ve ridden every single one of those 30,619 miles. It may have only been a CB250, but for me it always flies sideways through time.

Thanks.

…At last I’ve got round to doing something about that lame home page with the spinning pipes on it. It is now no more – and the blog page is king of the castle. Well, as far as I can tell, anyway. It was actually quite tricky to do in the end (I had to learn what ^ and $ mean) and pedants will note that things that link to “home” now link here. Hmm….

I’ve just looked at my Slashdot profile and I have three fans! Maybe I should move my blog there. Better for the ego at least.

"It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such
an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all nations of the
earth."

The Times, about the invention of the telegraph, 1858.

Amazing. I get in to work on Friday, and the senior PM comes in to say that the client has decided to go for an ecommerce deployment so that £250,000 they’ve just given us to redesign their site along non-ecommerce lines (because originally they weren’t up for that) is canned. Well, maybe about 20% of it can be salvaged for re-use, but all the work I’ve been doing for the last three months (along with two other IA’s, some graphic designers and a PM) is definitely never going to see the light of day.

Well such is life. Good for our balance sheet, crap for job satisfaction. It’s the off-shore developers I feel sorry for though. We only handed them our designs at Christmas!

Just thought I’d check Slashdot after one last brandy and a mince pie (made by me: Ainsly Harriot BBC Top 100 recipe, the one with the grated orange peel in the pastry). I love Slashdot. Not that I understand half of what gets talked about there, but the responses to this Christmas day story are wonderfully heart-warming.

…ON YOU SEND THIS TO WHO IS LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND? No idea. > > HORROR OR COMEDY? Comedy. There’s enough to be scared of in daily life. > FAVOURITE TIME OF DAY. Evenings by the light of the CRT. > > PET HATE? Faxes. The way Michael Buerk winks when he reads the news. The fact that people (including myself) seem afraid of clarity in life and prefer to hide inside needless complexity in things. > > IS THERE ANYONE YOU HAVE NEVER FORGIVEN, > EVER? W…

I was playing with Axel this afternoon while we listened to what I used to think was a rather boring album that seems to have grown on me even though I’ve not listened to it for about three years: The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. I was surprised by how many “rather British” samples there are in it. Churchbells, leather on willow, lawnmowers, that kind of thing. But for some reason I got thinking about what to do with that dusty old PC I have.

I’m off! Two weeks of something-we’ve-yet-to-decide lies ahead. Motorbike meddling and shower rail fitting beckon, as does some time at last to play with Axel after spending night after night doing all that Freehand malarkey over the last month. I’ve not looked forward to a holiday this long in ages.

Oh – and it was my birthday today as well. The company intranet’s birthday script did it’s job (scroll down to bottom), even if the other content was rather, er, stale. Not that a single person noticed the news and wished me any happy returns mind you, but then what are intranets if not to be utterly ignored by everyone? After all, being a busy digital solutions development agency, paying attention to web-based systems is hardly… wait, no, something wrong there.

…them 3Pay ones – they look like a good deal” I said. So we did. Brought it home, put the SIM in, put it on charge, then looked at the 3Pay tariff sheet. The minimum credit you can buy is £15. She uses about £10 a month maximum but they expire any unused credit at the end of the month. Doh! So – it was obviously for eBay. We bought it in Woolies for £39.99. I put it on with no reserve for a starting bid of £20.00. Seven days and 17 bids later, it’s…

…conversations go, I suppose it wasn’t too bad. I continued on my way back home. I think I need a copy of the owners manual. Now the machine is sitting chained to my old one outside under a tarp, I feel a bit tired, but relieved the main job of getting the bike is over. Now I just need to sell the old on (eBaaaay!) and look for somebody who’s willing to repair the cosmetic damage to the side. The figures for a one-owner, 2003 registered, Yamaha Ma…

That bike crash has shaken me up. I’ve been riding my trusty Honda CB250N for over 12 years and it failed the MOT last year, and it’s going to have to have some repairs as well this time. So, I getting new wheels.

I fell off my motorbike last week going in to work. I’ve done it before: pottering along at about 30mph you come up behind some stationary traffic. If you then use the bus lane, you stay relatively safe but run the gauntlet of the cameras (I’ve had two fines for that in the last five years), so I usually try to squeeze down the outside against the oncoming traffic and risk it. And no, you can’t stay in lane and wait with the cars. On a motorbike that’s morally wrong.

…e attempting to walk across the island with his sister in 1972 (while Long completed the same walk 20 years later); his general obsession with maps; love of places (like the M62), and his love/hate relationship with the work of Richard Long, the music business and the value of money. He’s a man with a lot going on in his head, and that’s for sure. So – I ended up buy a piece of the Richard Long picture. The proceedings took on a somewhat ritualist…

My dad went to school with him and remembers him as a bit of a loner. I didn’t like all of the music he played, and I can’t really say he changed my life as others have claimed he changed theirs, but he sure did have a hell of an influence on my musical taste. Listening to his shows was like panning for gold – you found wonderful nuggets, but you had to work hard. It was fun, but it was hard fun.

Just run another spam report. Things are about the same as they were three months ago. Odd how the two addresses get quite different amounts and show such separate patterns. Not sure what to make of that.

…initial talk about the proposed work, and an introduction to the ‘score‘ (PDF download) we had a brief rehearsal and level check then went for it. The lights went down and we embarked on fourteen minutes of anything-goes “singing.” About half way through I was reminded of the essay in The Doors of Perception in which Huxley says that chanting and singing are among the various techniques for humans to glimpse the “mind at large” and thereby attain…

…bing! Well, thanks for the information! One of the interesting things about this question is that it’s hard to find the answer from a search engine. It’s in a class of question unlike, say, “What is the capital of Spain?” that is too complex to derive the answer by a brute force index search. Thinking about this makes me more interested in things like the semantic web. Well, until I read that Clay Shirky essay. Maybe data visualisation techniques…

Axel’s been showing quite an aptitude for making cubic structures. While most of his peers are content to pile up bricks repetitively, perhaps with the occasional asymmetric flourish, he prefers to create a base, then build Guadi-like cathedrals using the properties and shapes of the materials rather architecturally. Last week Kumi showed me something he’d made that was actually a little spooky in its complexity (remember, Axel is only just four).

Now that Bluetooth can liberate my lo-res snaps from the confines of my phone to the wasteland of my blog, I thought I’d celebrate by puttin’ some up:

I watched the DVD of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime epic today with Axel, who was (almost) glued to it throughout. It’s a spooky film, and I was worried he’d get nightmares, but he seems OK.

I didn’t realise the film was made twenty years ago. The first thing that struck me was how much The Matrix (and in particular Reloaded) plundered it for ideas: the sentinels are in it (well, as huge insects) and some scenes are extremely similar. There’s even a bit where Naushika is wrapped up in tendrils just like Neo is for the big showdown.

The fact that millions of pounds a year are lost to credit card fraud makes the whole “chip and PIN” thing more mysterious by the day. When’s it happening? Why did it happen years ago? How will it be introduced? There seems to be a veil of confusion over it all, but most people seem either not to know nor care about it. Hmm. Well, maybe it’ll all be OK.

But I began to worry when I got a flyer from Barclaycard entitled “Answering your questions about chip and PIN.” It must rank as the single most confusing and self-contradictory piece of customer communication I have ever received.

…nned as well. This opinion says more about misplaced belief in the rule of law than it does attitudes to smoking, and it illustrates why I’m convinced that in hundreds of years time people will look back on The War On Drugs (and perhaps the War on Smoking?) as baffling as the obsession with witchcraft, alchemy or religious schism in ages past. No British goverment would ever legislate to make tobacco illegal, for much the same reasons as they’ll n…

Just read Creative Good’s paper on Managing Incoming E-mail. There is so much wrong with it that I don’t know where to start. Am I alone in feeling that this didactic crap based around the notion that you should delete everything in your inbox is deeply, deeply bad advice, and patronising with it? I rely on my inbox (and the sub-folders in it) as raw material for future work; an archive to be consulted; ammunition to protect me, etc. Pull it out…

…antic web. This has got to be one of the best critiques of anything that’s come out in the last couple of years on the subject. Wonderful teenage philosophising on Slashdot (can’t link to posts…) yesterday about how a computer monitor could, in theory, show every possible event in the history of the universe, including events that never happened (Germans winning WWII, etc.), if its pixels were randomly stimulated for long enough. Like maybe 10^10,…

…. Happy Fourth Birthday Axel – adventurer on planet earth, with all of us. www.bakerbates.com FOOTNOTE Reading this after I sent it out, it comes across as rather negative, and I now wish I’d re-done it. It’s not often I write something that goes off the rails like that, but I think what I was expressing was a defence mechanism: we don’t want him to grow up and go to school, and really would prefer him to be like this forever. But he’ll grow up an…

Blogging from abroad is sooo trendy. But I forgot to pack my camera so no piccies I’m afraid. We’re doing user testing (I facilitated the sessions in London, and sitting in on the ones in Milan – more about that later).

I’ve been totting up the amount of spam I get per day on my two email addresses over the last few months.

It’s pretty depressing really. An average of about 120 a day on each address. Odd how one address gets quite different numbers from the other one. Luckily, I only ever see about three or four a day, as I’m using Spamassassin, but the thought of all the junk pinging around the email system…

Guinea pigs are highly allergic to egg white.

How I bumped into this is a complete mystery, but it’s one of those things I like about the web – bumping into things.

Standard issue first blog post:

It’s taken me about six months longer than I thought – but I’ve finally got this site up and running. I had some rather grander plans for it before, but after much reflection, I’ve decided to start small and just blog. Thanks Kaoru – you gave me that advice, so I took it.

I’ll be expanding Webtorque according to my Secret Master Plan… later.

Meanwhile, have a look at the Articles link.