Hannah Swithinbank

Philippe Jaroussky

To start with a random aside.  One of the problems with Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill (other than the widely reported facts of it not being workable, or in any way in touch with the modern world, and if you want a really good explanation of why, you should read Hannah Nicklin’s open letter to the man himself) is that it’s hard to say that it’s a deeply stupid idea, without actually admitting that you’ve broken it, and that puts you in an interesting legal position. Incidentally, does anyone know if this bill is going to be retroactive?

Anyway, the point of this is that without the internet and friends sending me music I’ve not heard by artists I’ve never heard of, I would never have heard of the French Countertenor Philippe Jaroussky.  And that would mean that his record company wouldn’t have made the money that they have off me for the two albums I’ve bought so far and the future albums I intend to buy in a month when Christmas isn’t imminent, and whoever makes money off concerts wouldn’t have made money off me buying a ticket to go see him at the Kölner Philharmonie, and no one would make money from me buying his albums to give to people for Christmas/birthdays.  I would almost certainly not have thought to pick up an album of Castrati songs by a singer I’d never heard of.  The only other way I might have come across it would have been if Jaroussky had been performing at the Proms and I’d happened to hear that particular concert on the radio or on iPlayer.   And then not only would people be losing out on making money off me, I would be missing out on some seriously gorgeous music.

On Thursday Philippe Jaroussky was performing Handel and J.C. Bach, with Nicolau de Figueiredo on Harpsichord and the Concerto Köln.  It was beautiful.  Gorgeous music, and such an engaging performance.  I’m normally fairly rubbish at sitting in a concert hall listening to a performance without fidgeting, but I was pretty much entranced.   He performed about four or five encores – after each round of applause people left the auditorium and then missed out on another song.   It was wonderful.   Can I have a tardis and go back in time to go hear it all again?

So music business, I hope you enjoy the money I have and shall continue to give you in order for me to carry on enjoying the work of Philippe Jaroussky, but please don’t forget, you’re only getting it because I was able to try it first to see if I liked it.

Hrrooommm Hmmm. GoogleWave.

A very nice person sent me an invite to GoogleWave, which I’ve been wanting to play with, ohhh, only since they announced it, pretty much. Not many people I know have it – and it is in many ways a kind of specific tool, so it’s not something you necessarily just sit and play with, especially not on your own, because that removes the point.

However, @Sunsetmog and I spent some time on Thursday playing with GoogleWave, trying to explore it’s possibilities and potential. The verdict so far is, as above, ‘Hrroomm, Hmmm’ – lots of potential, not quite there yet.

The first (and main) problem is that it is very slow. Typing into GoogleWave feels a lot like typing on a computer without enough RAM – your fingers go faster than the letters can come up on screen. I think this is mostly because of the live-type function that allows all the people on the wave to see exactly what you’re typing. I have to ask – why is this feature necessary or good? Is it just so that people can start responding to you as you go, without waiting you to finish your train of thought and absorb it before replying? Because I’m not convinced that that’s a good idea; much better to see your fellow-waver’s full thought before you reply to it. Additionally, the nature of GoogleWave means that a lot of people will probably end up using it for project work, quite often with people who are colleagues rather than friends. I don’t need or want the people I might end up working with to see that I am constitutionally unable to type ‘constitution’ fluidly and correctly with any regularity (all those ‘t’s confuse my fingers). They probably don’t want to see it either – it’s quite painful. Delete isn’t a bad in this situation. Making the text input the same as that of IM would make GoogleWave faster, I think, and also less embarrassing!

It’s also not that intuitive. I don’t think it helps that it has gone live without the ’settings’ wave being completed. At the moment I can’t get it to ‘ping’ me when a message comes through – meaning if I’ve gone to check something out in another tab, or in a book, I don’t know when my fellow waver has responded. I’m also annoyed by the scroll function, and I found the system of commenting, replying and editing fairly unintuitive for a lot of the time – I couldn’t always tell where the new bit of text was going to pop up.

Those are the main annoyances – once I found the paperclip, sharing files was easy (although we didn’t really play with text files, actually, which we should have since I suspect that’s what we’ll both be using it most of the time). There’s an extension called ‘trippy’ which involves Lonely Planet, and which allows you to plan joint trips, which I really like.  And I still really like the potential of the whole thing – I think it’s going to make joint projects easier to handle and keep track of, especially when more than more than two people are involved.   It’s just not there yet.  I really hope it gets there.

From the THES…

“American academics attend conferences in best bib and tucker, they are on time, they ask intelligent questions, they are polite, they have beautiful teeth and they are disappointingly sober. Now, all this could be construed as professionalism – particularly when compared with the drunken, late-night antics of the flip-flop-wearing, unshaven and almost always sunburnt Limeys whose most pressing questions are “where’s the bar?” and “does anyone remember my room number?” – but, I assure you, it is arrogance. Make no mistake: their reverence for the subject, thoroughgoing knowledge of its intricacies, prolific capacities to produce research of the highest standard … what unspeakable arrogance!”

(“Arrogance” by Peter J. Smith)

It is particularly true of the postgraduates… Though in their case it is probably more out of fear than out of arrogance. What that says about the character of their professors…

Hello world!

Brain-stretching time again!

I’ve been thinking for aaages that I should probably get around to sorting myself out a website of my very own, rather than being scattered across the internet at various different places, to create some kind of portfolio-esque spot for my writing/blogging/photography, rather than having to say, in various different places, “Go here to see this.” Of course, this is going to mean a fairly major amount of tweaking to various set ups. Not to mention getting my head around an awful lot of new stuff. But this is good – it will make me more web savvy.

So I have the domain name, the webspace, and now I am fixing up wordpress, and moving everything over from blogger.  Slowly, but slowly, I’ll begin the process of building a website around it. If I can work out how, without spending major spondulicks that I don’t have on dreamweaver.

Bad Plan

I have realised that I am bored of my blog layout. Shallow, perhaps, but also demotivating for blogging purposes. You don’t spend time somewhere, even somewhere virtual if you’re bored of the way it looks.
I want a three column layout, with the blog down the middle and as-yet-unselected STUFF down each side. Blogger layouts, you fail me. And this is a really really bad time to be thinking about making my own. Grrr.

in which twitter has eaten my blogging

Seriously, when you can update in 140 letter gobbets, a lot of the stuff I would blog about goes by-the-by, especially in a period where there’s not very much going on in my life that merits long-winded dramatic or entertaining, or even expositiory, statement.

I’m still alive. I still can’t get my supervisor to read my work and reassure me I haven’t just blown my thesis out of the water in five sentences, and I’m still stupidly excited about going to Rome in April.

I’m vaguely more motivated than I was, courtesy of spring-like weather arriving. It’s light in the morning when I get up now, OMG. I have big plans to go to Cambo woods this weekend and take photos of the snowdrops, and to actually get on with doing some of the travel-writing I’ve been planning since, oh, Krakow last January. I did have big plans to get a lensbaby for my camera so I could play with fun focus tricks, but since I’m in the process of renewing the photo on my driver’s licence, my passport and a bundle of injections for my trip to Tanzania. Just made an appointment with the nurse for a fortnight’s time to have my typhoid, rabies and meningitis jabs/boosters allatthesametime,ow. Possibly not the brightest idea ever, but I figure if you’re going to spend about £70 on having a bunch of needles stuck into you, you might as well get all the pain over at once. And then lie back on the sofa for the rest of the day feeling faint and watching stuff like High School Musical and Mean Girls.

pretty neat

Go to tag galaxy and type stuff in. Try, say, ‘Obama’, ‘cos you get a lot of results.

OMG it's so addictive.

Super Obama World

Because I know you're all really really bored at work

It is possible to play sudoku with pictures. It just uses flickr tags to pull out the pictures, and you can set it to whatever you want.

So, for your procrastination – here is sudoku with my Japan photos…