Hello again. Seems like I’ve finally gotten around to fixing my blog so I figure I should post a quick catch up post first.
2010 has been a bloody weird and at times bewildering year. Sometimes too busy to talk about, sometimes too painful and occasionally I’ve just been too lazy. There’s been some good along the way; losing all four of my wisdom teeth has to go down as one of the highlights.
So, what next – politics, cycling, music or eBooks? Hmm. Something anyway.
Facebook have updated their site design again, in what many say is an attempt to counter the growing popularity of twitter. I’m in two minds about the update. On the one hand it’s facebook’s site and theirs to do what they want with. If I want control of content, delivery and style then that’s what this blog is for (and long term readers can attest to the issues in that model). Alternatively, though, I now look like the most spamming user in the world. This is because I feed facebook from a number of sources, so all my status updates are just shipped in from twitter, links come from my delicious bookmarks and google reader shared items, images are all uploaded to flickr with a notification to facebook and my likes on youtube and last.fm are moved over as well. Also, of course my blog comes through from it’s RSS feed.
And I can see that to a point that works rather well, I have no desire to use Facebook to do all my activity on, as I’m already happily using those sites to perform the functions they’re good at. However, I also gain because by linking back to facebook I can still update my friends on what I’m doing.
Until recently these updates were much less prominent, in large part because facebook was in the habit of only showing the latest status updates or activity of each person in the news feed. Now, however, it seems happy to show multiple events from a single user on the main page, and also to show updates from a feed instantly.
This makes a user like me who feeds in a lot of content swamp their friends news feeds. I don’t like the idea of that so I hope facebook either introduce options for throttling your own activity updates back a bit. Alternatively you can hide me, but then you get nothing, which seems to defeat the point rather.
I’ve finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 after much procrastination. This means that my blog is finally on a somewhat customised template and with many more features working, so it finally feels more personal.
Naturally, upgrading I had originally planned as a brief post Sunday lunch (well, late breakfast porridge) activity has now bled right through the afternoon and only just completed. I must say that my enthusiasm for finally upgrading was entirely down to loving the rather fine Fast Moving theme on the site Prosaic Paradise. A site which I incidentally visited thanks to inviting a photo into my recently created flickr pool of Heart Shaped Tyre Tracks, of which more in a later post.
The upgrade itself was as easy as usual, with more time spent carefully backing up files than putting the new ones into the right place, with all that done it was just a single click to upgrade. Then I realised how much more I’d have to do, I tracked down my chosen theme and then got it setup, which was a doddle, until I screwed up the permissions in various directories and had to change them three times. At that point I did swear loudly. CHMOD, how I hate thee.
My next struggle was the realisation that I had everything on the blog setup using categories when in fact tags would be far more useful. I then spent a good ten minutes doing it manually before I found the categories –> tags converter option in the admin interface. *Facepalm*
Once that was complete it was time to start looking for interesting plugins, having upgraded all my current ones, with the main priority being to integrate as much content and activity I have elsewhere on the web into my blog. I was very glad to find newer versions of Akismet (spam protection), Flickr Photo Album and the Livejournal Cross-Poster as I had come to rely on them.
Of the new plugins I have, none impresses me more than the XML Sitemap generator. Almost as impressive, though sadly not all I want it to be is Lifestream which let me integrate a series of feeds from YouTube, last.fm, flickr, delicous, google reader and twitter into a single list on a page. Not necessarily useful, but certainly kind of nifty when I try to remember something I’ve done recently.
Now to blog about other stuff and look for a meme to post as well… oh and fix my tagging, as the import didn’t get it exactly right!
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Had the largest urban shopping centre in Europe open up just off the top of my road in the past few months. Other than a Waitrose, the only redeeming factor is that it photographs nicely, especially when it’s wet and lit up at night.
(and yes, if you’re viewing this on the blog, I have just broken my style sheet, guess I’ll actually finally do a design on here for the new year, for now – apologies).
Seeing as I posted the first comment on Tom Harris’s blog post that made the front page of the Daily Mail and have had a streaming torrent of (ooh) eight visitors here’s some comment on his points on my own blog.
I agree with Tom that it is sad that optimism is rare. In my own comment I pointed to three issues I myself find (slow rail links home, the poor quality of rental property and the long term effects of student debt), and others have pointed to some more interesting ones, my favourite of which notes that in an economic environment where the government is demanding below inflation pay rises those with student debts face interest rates rising high above the same inflation cap. So we have a government policy to squeeze the take home pay of graduates (and drop outs like myself). Not good.
I’ve come to the understanding that the optimism of the immediate post war period was there because society believed that utopia might still be possible and with hope of electricity too cheap to meter, an end to disease and poverty and education for all for example it was thought that the issues of society were possible to solve completely. Sadly now, we know all too well that we live in a world of scarcity not abundance, and that our choices have led and are leading us down a road to a world which we don’t like the look of. Knowing you need to turn back and think again isn’t nice.
Much is hysteria, we’re hardly drowning from global warming if the jet stream deflects a little and Glastonbury turns into a mud bath, and children are safer now than ever despite however many knives or paedos you see in the media. However, naturally, some fear is justified. We only get the one planet, and if we waste resources needlessly we don’t get them back. There’s a resources crunch behind the credit crunch at some level and talk of peak oil has gone from far fetched future to near term planning. Rail Minister Tom Harris (for it is also he) openly talks of a programme of electrification. That tells you all you need to know about the future direction of the oil price. He also dismisses a High Speed Line on spurious environmental and economic grounds, ironic considering he’d probably find a good north/south link rather handy in getting from his Glasgow constituency to Westminster and back.
We’ve had eleven years of Labour government, something I dreamed of in my teenage years. However, I have only voted Labour on a single occasion, as a second preference for Ken at the mayoral election this year. I have to remember sometimes that we have seen a Scottish Parliament, human rights legislation and a minimum wage introduced (which is itself going up by more than inflation anyway) because 14/28/42 days, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, Identity Cards, DNA Databases and other similar daftness weigh heavier on the mind. Lots of law has been created, and money spent (even without the wars) and it is hard to see what improvements have been achieved. Little in the way of great projects have been accomplished so it’s hard to feel much love. There’s no Open University or NHS that this government leaves behind. Nothing huge. More of a series of pet projects, some of which, like devolution are now overdue for renewal and improvement due to the half hearted implementation they were initially given.
What many have also noted, and rightly so, is that what you could read as the symptoms of a happy society – lots of large televisions, bigger and better cars, more books, people eating out more often – may well just be the activities of a society which deep down is depressed and having to occupy itself to cope.
I’m reminded of one of my favourite books, David Boyle’s The Tyranny Of Numbers (subtitled Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy) which works well at explaining why it can be so hard to achieve happiness by focussing on the numbers. I like to look on it as an earlier and more insightful Freakonomics and it’s well worth a read.
Astute, observant or just plain obsessed readers may well have noticed that after many years of calling this Alex’s Blog I’ve finally decided to change name to nutty’s nuggets. I’d love to claim that this change was precipitated by weeks of research or even some discussion. But no, instead it’s me ignoring what made this happen:
Above is a chart of my views by week, as you can see 2007 was barely scraping along fed in part thanks to my total lack of blogging at times. Then I made my annual blog about music of the year a month early. As of today that post has had 1,078 views on the site here, more than 10 times the next most popular post which is merely a couple of linked Gondry youtube clips. Now I think some of what caused that success was calling the blog Alex’s Blog which made it float up to the top of largeheartedboy‘s roundup which fed me nearly 1,000 of those 1,078 views! However, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m going to get linked elsewhere I should have a snappier name hence nutty’s nuggets, which at least is as endearingly rubbish as my site design.
On an interesting side note, I was also linked from and had my data scraped for Hype Machine’s 2007 roundup, which includes their rather nice visual version of my top 10 albums of 2007, which they explain a bit in their own blog.
Anyone who’s been following the blog since then, don’t panic!, musical content here will ramp up as I get off my arse to go to gigs and as the new albums by Devotchka, Misty’s Big Adventure and Madness turn up…
is tomorrow, ‘sniff.
As a fan of the site, I think it’s only right that I point you at a number of their articles to encourage you to fall in love with the site just before they stop putting up new content.
Why White Town – Your Woman was a one-off moment of pop genius
The audacity, not to mention ludicrous improbability, of “Your Woman†is astounding in retrospect
The non-stop nastiness of “Gotta Get Thru Thisâ€: Dom Passantino’s Survey of the New Millenium’s UK #1 Singles – Article – Stylus Magazine:
Madonna- American Pie
[03/05/2000; 1 week]It takes a bad, bad song to make a man feel sorry for Don McLean, but this is that song. Don’s version, for all its faults, was at least a cryptic crossword that gave dullards something to decode before their next CAMRA meeting. This, on the other hand, is more like The Sun’s coffee break crossword, with the official first appearance of “SHOCKING LESBIAN OVERTONES†in a #1 song (more will follow) of the millennium. Whatever last vestiges of “not-horrid†this song has are wiped out by the backing vocals, deep in the mix, sounding eerily like Terence Trent D’Arby speaking at you through a medium. In the chronology of Madge #1’s, this comes between “Frozen†and “Music.†It’s a trough between those two moderate peaks.
[1/10]
(which runs all the way from the start of 2000 right up to Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and reminds you of the terror)
A very nasty dig at Jarvis Cocker, which I don’t agree with but still love, if only for comparing him to the singer from Baby D.
Where record collections go when their owners go where they cannot.
And the ultimate and scary triumph of the fanboy.
Also, naturally, they mainly reviewed albums so it seems only right to link to their right-headed review of Caribou’s Andorra, which unlike most annoying reviews managed to pay attention to the last two tracks, Irene and Niobe which I think are easily the most important and interesting on the album.
‘sniff, at least there’s still Popmatters.
Following on from my last post here’s some albums that various acts (one in revamped form) released following up on impressive debuts.
The upgrade comes with a number of key new features:
Lex not only comes close to being named after me but also attempts to outdo 17 Years in broken up song territory.
Wildcat has the finest sample of a wildcat committed to a song in living memory and seems like the soundtrack to some forgotten 8 bit adventure of wonder. I had a master plan of making a video for it myself (somehow) which fell apart when I realised that Golden Shower had covered that idea years ago with Video Computer System’s immensely cool video. On the plus side, Wildcat rocks.
Nostrand is also possibly the sweetest and coolest thing they’ve ever done.
I would say don’t ask me to pick any favourites but I think somehow the two mainly instrumental albums edge it with The Emperor Machine standing out best. Which kinda surprises me.
Then you might like Librarything‘s features The Suggester and far better(er) The Unsuggester.
As you can imagine taking actual (publicly declared admittedly) collections of books and analysing similarity throws up some things you’d expect. So for example Blankets by Craig Thompson leads to an ordered list starting with his other works before widening out to Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, Watchmen, Box Office Poison and Bone. The unsuggester reveals a scary list of John Grisham, Robert Ludlum and Patricia Cornwell. Does this mean graphic novel fans hate series crime/thriller novels and vice-versa? Nothing shocking really.
Of course, Amazon have been doing this for years. I felt a little tickled that they saw fit to highlight that I might want to pre-order a Teasmade, or indeed a fan should I need to keep cool in the shocking November heat. I do love just how classic the teasmade styling is.
Some things are best decided outwith the minds of machines.
