RandM Thoughts

Single boot laptop - Ubuntu 11.10

2011-10-14T11:38:00.000-04:00

I bought a Dell Inspiron 1520 back in 2007 when my wife and I moved back to Canada. For much of its life it has been a dual boot machine - Windows Vista and whatever the latest version of Ubuntu was. It's not really an old machine, but it has been around the world. Literally. From here to Kathmandu and many stops in between. Throughout these four years I have paid for virus protection (for Windows). But I don't use the laptop so much these days, since I'm not on the road now, and because I've now got an iMac as my base desktop. And even when I do use the laptop, I tend to use it in Linux. So, with my most recent year's licence for virus protection (for Windows) running out, and with a new version of my favourite Linux distribution released (Ubuntu 11.10), I finally made the move and turned this laptop into a single boot machine.

That's no big deal for many Linux users, I'm sure. For me, though, there was always a barrier to such a move. Perhaps if my first Linux machine had not also been a dual-boot machine (with Windows), I might not have developed this psychological dependency on that other operating system. This, despite the fact that I almost never used it. But I knew that I could, if I needed to, right?

It is no surprise to learn that there is a cost to most software decisions. For me the cost of yet another year's licence for virus protection (for Windows) when it wasn't really being used was just too much.

And now here I am with a lovely "new" laptop. So far it seems to do everything I've always expected my Linux installs to do. (The fact that I can listen to the cricket on Test Match Special whilst typing this post is all the evidence I need.) It has been a long time coming, but I can now finally say that I have a Linux machine. Full stop.

iPad experiences

2011-07-27T10:08:00.000-04:00

I never wanted an iPad. When they first came out I thought they would be fun but not useful. It made sense to me that something that might be sitting in your lap ought to be touch friendly. But maybe that's a guy thing. In any case, I never expected to have one fall into my lap. And then one did. So now, after a couple of months of use, I can offer some thoughts.

A lot of people will tell you that the iPad is not a laptop or desktop replacement. Those people are right. This is a product with some distinct limitations. So let's get those out of the way off the top. Printing is pretty much a write-off. Storage is limited (if tens of gigabytes is limited). Editing MS Office documents in anything like a serious way is effectively a non-starter. Some websites built primarily with flash are effectively inaccessible. Okay, so those are the limitations. I say, let's just set them aside and look at what the iPad actually does do, and do well.

First, connectivity to wireless is a breeze. That's not surprising for a Mac; I'm just confirming it. Access to email (thought not necessarily full editing and storage manipulation) is straightforward. Websites (the ones that are not entirely built in flash) load quickly and look beautiful. Once you figure out that the idea of tabs in a browser is not really there, you can bounce around the web about as quickly as you can with any other browser. Oh, and when you get on a plane, switching to Airplane Mode is painlessly simple.

Second, there are lots of apps available for the iPad. For the most part I have only been using those apps that are free. But there are even lots of those. I like the iBook app, and the IMDB app, and the NFB (National Film Board of Canada) app, and BBC news app. Maps, which comes pre-installed, is really useful. And even the Skype app works satisfactorily.

Third, the display is beautiful. Photos, videos, and even movies look great. The latter beat the sad "personal entertainment" screen on the back of the airplane seat hands down. I also bought a splitter for the earphone jack, so my wife and I were able to watch a couple of films together on the plane - films I rented from iTunes for 30 days for 99 cents each.

It is light and (seemingly) sturdy and the battery goes and goes and goes.

The iPad doesn't do everything. So if you want something that does everything, then you need to look elsewhere, and good luck to you. But within its limitations, I have found the iPad to be an excellent travelling companion during more than 4 weeks on the road in the past couple of months.

Refresh rate

2011-03-03T12:41:00.001-05:00

How often do you upgrade your operating system or your computer hardware at home? With me it depends. I like to keep my Ubuntu systems current, which means I will usually make a clean install every six months as the next release comes out. Since I am installing Ubuntu on dual-boot Windows machines, I am not typically refreshing the hardware at the same time.

I tend to only start using a new Windows operating system when I buy new hardware (if the hardware I am buying comes with Windows installed). I get the itch to move after about three years, but it may take four or sometimes five years before I have the spare cash to enable a hardware refresh. And even then I'm only talking about my principal machine, since I tend to keep the older machines running for other purposes. The oldest one I have at the moment is a 2005 Dell Dimension 9100 desktop - still running fine on Windows XP and the latest Ubuntu.

Now that I've made the move to an iMac as my principal machine at home, I thought I was done needing to learn new Windows operating systems. Not true.

My father is about to refresh his hardware and software. He has a ten year old Pentium 4 with 256 MB of RAM running, slowly, Windows XP. It is, for me, almost excruciatingly sluggish. And since his Internet connection was DSL "lite" (many times faster than a dial-up modem!) the combination could quite simply stop you in your tracks. I finally convinced him that it was time to make a change.

I argued that two factors impacted his current user experience. (There's no point making your case if you aren't going to take it seriously and do a thorough job.) One was his Internet connection and the other was the processing power and speed of his computer. To "change his game" he needed to address both factors at once. Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed.

He has already made the call to upgrade his DSL. He should now have a connection roughly comparable to what I'm getting through Bell. He tells me that he already notices the difference. Web pages only take a few seconds to load, as against the 30 or more seconds most pages used to take. When I visit him next, I will install a wireless router to his system. This will not improve his experience. But it will provide a more normal (dread word!) computing environment for his grandchildren who are used to taking their laptops with them when they visit their friends and having full Internet connectivity while they are there.

As for the hardware and operating system refresh, I put forward two recommendations. One was the iMac with which I have been completely satisfied. The other was a mid-range Dell, which of course would mean Windows 7.

Some people are change averse. My father is one of these people. Some people have little if any intuitive grasp of computers. Again he falls into this group. Some people also have little or no interest in learning anything new that has to do with computers (and consequently feel no excitement in the possibility of playing with a new system). Again, that's him. So, no matter what, I will be absorbing a fair portion of the change cost of moving him to a new computing environment.

In the end he chose the less expensive option. Fair enough. He will still have a much, much better user experience than he does currently. It may even give him a taste of some of the fun that is possible with computers. (But I doubt it.) And meanwhile I have started reading this very large book on Windows 7. I'm looking forward to his new computer arriving next week.

Really.

No, really.

"Click here"

2011-02-27T10:04:00.000-05:00

A reputable search engine informs me that there are about 1,320,000,000 results when I search for the phrase "click here". I confess to being astounded. I had been gently chiding a friend who had let this challenge to accessibility creep into his website. It turns out he is not alone.

As far back as 1999 the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 urged web content developers to avoid the use of "click here":

Guideline 13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms.

13.1 Clearly identify the target of each link. [Priority 2]

Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context -- either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse. For example, in HTML, write "Information about version 4.3" instead of "click here". In addition to clear link text, content developers may further clarify the target of a link with an informative link title (e.g., in HTML, the "title" attribute).

It's a little thing. Yet for me it is something that leaps out when I see it.

So why are there more than a billion instances of "click here" out there in the wild? I don't know. But I think that friends don't let friends introduce further instances.

Syndication - still a lot to learn

2011-02-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

What I don't know about the syndication of content could fill something, but just what I also don't know because that's one of those unknown unknowns. Recently I have been talking with a friend about certain statistics that might help guide her in making her blog better serve its purpose. I find I'm always a touch reluctant to venture outside my comfort zone. Nonetheless I set out this morning to explore one of the options available, namely FeedBurner, which is now well within the Google family.

I have now burned my feeds for the two blogs that I use. You can see a new "Subscribe in a reader" link at the top of this blog. That takes you to the FeedBurner feed. If you are a regular reader of this blog (I'm sure I have at least two - thanks, Mom!) I would encourage you to update the feed now.

As I understand it, the old feed continues to work but the new feed will provide me with much more statistical goodness. Eventually this may lead to such developments as search engine optimization which I'm sure has much to recommend it. Or at least a few more blog posts on technical topics I am struggling single-handedly (but with the aid of a well-optimized search engine) to learn.

Since I am unlikely to ever write anything here that would set the world on fire, I very much doubt I would need the above information to aid monetization (dread word!) of this content. But maybe my friend will become a prolific and well-read blogger. In which case I would at least like to be able to advise her soundly (even if that advice were to find a more competent adviser).

Just the essentials, please!

2011-02-22T08:58:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of useful documents available on how to get an open source project up and running. This short briefing note from Ross Gardler at OSS Watch is excellent: Essential tools for running a community-led project. Ross has years of experience in such projects, notably those that are part of The Apache Software Foundation. He has boiled down some of that experience here into just the nuggets of pure gold (as I mix my metaphors egregiously).

One of the things that I think Ross gets completely right is his stance on communications. He writes:

A second communication channel should only be created when the traffic on your first channel is sufficiently high to justify the split.

Absolutely! Nothing more than is necessary. Best to just head over now and get Ross' take on these things. And while you are there, why not visit some of the other fabulous resources that OSS Watch has to offer.

PIO - an academic question

2011-02-04T09:18:00.001-05:00

Previously I have been thinking about Personal Identity Online (PIO) in terms of how a consultant might shape or influence how he or she is perceived. I took that as a straightforward communications challenge and put forward suggestions on setting up a consultancy website, blogging, tweeting, and more. Now I want to turn to a couple of thorny issues for academics who are thinking about their PIOs. I want to describe two cases: (1) a well-published academic currently unaffiliated with a university, and (2) a tenured faculty member who uses a non-academic email address and/or domain name for his or her academic web page.

The days of completing your Ph.D. and walking directly into a tenured faculty position are long gone (and maybe they were only ever a myth). The norm for the academic career path in the Humanities tends to be Ph.D., post-doctoral research (if you are lucky), sessional or contract teaching (sometimes, sadly, referred to as "casual" staff), a mad scramble for publications, and then (if you are very lucky) landing a tenure-track assistant professorship, followed by another mad scramble for additional publications, high teaching-evaluations, and "service" (which includes administrative duties as well as contributions to one's profession such as peer reviewing submissions for publication). Finally, if all goes well, you achieve tenure. And now you can set out on the longer journey toward becoming a full professor. (NB. these are terms for the progression in North America; in the UK and elsewhere the terminology and the progression varies somewhat.)

Between completing your Ph.D. at one institution and securing tenure at another, the young academic may find himself or herself employed, at one time or another, by a surprising number of academic institutions. They might even temporarily be employed by two or more institutions at the same time, for example if they were contract teaching individual courses at different institutions. There may even be times, despite one's stellar publishing record and high teaching-evaluations, when one finds oneself between institutional employers. In that situation, how does the young academic self-identify online?

There are complications, naturally. Over the years, the young academic may have been given, temporarily, an institutional email address and quite possibly webspace for hosting teaching and other academic information relevant to one's department. These persist as links on web pages or email addresses in colleagues' email clients long after one has moved on. What is the half-life of an institutionally hosted academic web page? And how long will it continue to skew search engine results years after it has become inaccessible to the person who originally set it up?

The self-identification question is one on which I do not have a settled opinion. Recently there has been a move to recognise that a substantial portion of our tertiary teaching population is in some stage of the progression described above. One term mooted for such individuals is "independent scholar". There is even now a Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars. (I think there is still work to be done on thinking this through since one benefit of "full membership" - a library card for Simon Fraser University - requires the scholar to appear "in person" in order to pick up their new library card.) Is independent scholar the best self-describer available? I have also seen individuals self-ascribe by the name of their academic group, e.g. Historian, Philosopher, Physicist, etc. That might not work so well for all groups. How would the researcher in comparative literature self-ascribe in this way?

The second case I mentioned - the tenured faculty member using a non-academic email address - could easily arise out of the academic progression I described. The itinerant academician might have found that a non-academic email address (and also a non-academic domain name for a personal academic web page) is simpler. It saves the need to request an update to one's friends and colleagues' email address books each time one moves on. Even once tenured the academic may find that it is easier to stay with the non-institutional email address and/or web page. (There are also cases where some institutions have less than fully reliable email infrastructure, unlike the rock solid email infrastructure we used to have at the University of Oxford. In such a case, the academic may feel it safer to give out his or her non-institutional email address.)

Again, I do not have, as yet, a settled opinion on this. Clearly, however, the two cases I am describing are related. Here all I have managed, if at all, is to describe the communications challenge. I'll need to do a bit more thinking in order to come up with my preferred solution. But I welcome suggestions. With our universities expanding dramatically, but without a consequent expansion in the numbers of tenured faculty, my suspicion is that the above situations will be faced by increasing numbers of scholars, independent or otherwise.

Skin - Thick or Thin

2010-12-29T10:33:00.001-05:00

Are you the kind of person who tosses and turns at night replaying a minor remark you made at a social gathering? Can you be crushed by a single barbed comment? Do you cringe at the level of vitriol you see in the "readers' comments" section of online news sites? If you've answered 'yes' to any of these questions, I feel for you. Like me you appear to be thin skinned. Are there any strategies that can be deployed in order survive the dangers (to us) of a barbarous world?

Don't go out: As someone short and clever once said, "It's a dangerous business, going out your door." You could try avoiding social gatherings where you have a tendency to embarrass yourself whenever you engage in conversation. You could embrace the honourable role of lurker on the Internet, never succumbing to the temptation to contribute your own input. You could take that one step further and simply lock your front door and disconnect your modem/router. It's the only way to be sure, after all.

Limit your range: If you absolutely must go out, then you could at least stay close to home. What is the absolute furthest you need to walk in order to acquire sustenance? Don't go any farther. The same holds for conversational topics. If you have to converse, you could try restraining your topics to the weather (just agree that the weather is either good or bad, and probably much worse than you remember it being). On the Internet you might want to limit your communication solely to those you know well. Stay away from any form of one-many communication tools like Twitter or Facebook (FB) or blogging. Remember, if possible say nothing.

Stay with your own kind: There is a reason that wildebeests hang out with other wildebeests. I don't know why that is. But on the Internet it seems to be safer to hang out with others who already share exactly your own opinions and have no other opinions. Obviously the easiest way to accomplish that aim is to hang out only with yourself. There are dangers here, of course. It might be a bit lonely. Sometimes hanging out with people just like yourself is called homophily. I once heard Ethan Zuckerman convincingly argue that homophily can make you stupid. Is stupid really that bad?

You may know people who are remarkably thick skinned. I know a few. They make cringeworthy comments regularly and appear to be immune to the whole agonizing tossing and turning thing. Sometimes it is as though they don't even realize that they have said something embarrassing. (Here, I'd like to say, "You know who you are!", but of course you don't.) I'm not sure how they got to be so thick skinned. Is there some equivalent of plunging your hand repeatedly into buckets of increasingly larger grained sand and stones? In any case most people described as thick skinned tend to be a bit too thick skinned for my taste.

I wonder if there is some happy medium between thick and thin that could be reached. It must be nice to always say the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. I suppose there are people like that; I just haven't met any. Failing perfection (which sounds like a good title for a blog) perhaps the best that might be achieved is a kind of gracious humility. I think of this as a certain modesty in one's claims and a ready willingness to acknowledge overstatements and misstatements and rectify them.

If you are thin skinned and not one of the hearty folk there is still plenty of scope for you to step out your door. With a bit of patience and a lot of bravery, there really is no telling where you'll end up. You will still toss and turn at night, but it'll only be because of that dirty great root sticking in your back.

And oh, don't hang out with wildebeests.

Origin stories

2010-12-10T09:03:00.000-05:00

Each of us has a storied past. What else could the past be? Selecting salient episodes for retelling as an illustrative or explanatory tool dramatically highlights current and future motivations, commitments and ideals. These stories say a lot about you. I don't think that I am alone in being fascinated by such stories. There is a subset of these that I find particularly interesting: origin stories told by serious participants in the free and open source software community. These are surprisingly rare. I think it's because serious FOSS folks know it isn't about them, it's about the community. As a result you are more likely to spot one of these origin stories showing up in passing when such a person is writing about something else. One such origin story can be found in Ross Gardler's post on the demise of the Java Community Process.

I was struck by Ross' description of how he learned the value of commitment, teamwork, and collaboration through sport. I wasn't surprised. Nor was I surprised that he has other tales to tell, other experiences that shaded his understanding and provide him with a rich and subtle appreciation of community.

On another day perhaps he would select two completely different episodes as salient in his moral forensics. That too is something each of tends to do. Today I think it was the way my father coached a hockey team I was on as a boy that stands out. Tomorrow I'll think that it was the way he faced and accepted the consequences of each of his decisions. Next week I'll come back to the camaraderie he cultivated in the crew that worked in the bakery. (Not all origin stories are father stories, but mine mostly are.)

The Java Community Process may indeed be dead. I'm not a direct participant in that community so I have to rely on people like Ross to get the straight story. Fortunately I feel like I now have a bit of insight into what drives him, and that convinces me that I was right to trust his lead on this all along.

Still, I wish I'd known him in his Dub Reggae days :-)

First snow shovelling (2010)

2010-12-07T08:28:00.000-05:00

It's a new year for shovelling the walk in front of the house. Although we had only a mild snowfall last night (less than 2 cm), I got out the snow shovel for the first time this year and did my duty (as did my neighbours).

I see that I noted the first snow shovelling of 2009 on 9 December that year, so we are a few days early this time. Fortunately we are in a bit of a clear pocket at the moment. Just an hour's drive west of here they received over 70 cm last night. Now that would be real shovelling!

The Milk Calendar

2010-11-20T08:30:00.000-05:00

Every year around this time households in Ontario (and elsewhere in Canada, I believe), either through their local daily paper or other means, receive a copy of The Milk Calendar. Apparently this started back in 1974 but I only became conscious of it in the '90s. Kathy and I had moved to Oxford, UK, in September of 1994 with little more than one suitcase each. We had a flat in the draughty, cinder-block, married-student accommodations in north Oxford. We didn't know anyone, and we really aren't predisposed to meeting and making new friends (though despite ourselves we did eventually discover the very best of friends). Dreary November and December days stumbled toward the holiday season. But with no funds for travel home or onward we knew we would be left to our own devices.

It must have been some time in December that the package arrived. A well-labelled and multi-stamped box from Kathy's parents. The shipping label declared, unceremoniously, an itemized list of the "Christmas gifts" contained therein. Nothing grand, but we were so grateful to receive this bundle of cares and well-wishes. There may have been tears. It turned out, however, that the greatest gift was not in fact identified on the shipping label. Perhaps including it had been an afterthought. I've never asked. There amidst the crumbled newsprint used as packing material lay The Milk Calendar for 1995.

I'm sure we still have that calendar, though the recipes (yes, recipes!) it contained have long since been transferred to other media. What makes The Milk Calendar distinctive is that it always contains a set of recipes (at least one for each month) for dishes or desserts that are easy to make, taste great, and, naturally, involve milk somewhere in the instructions. What they don't mention is how those recipes can transport you across time and space. In that slender calendar was the essence, or so we thought that winter, of Canada.

I don't recall now how many of those recipes from the 1995 calendar we actually used more than once. But I'm fairly certain we did try each one at least once. I remember writing letters to Kathy's mum to tell her about them (those were the days before email was ubiquitous). Each one a reminder of how that calendar helped us beat off the damp chill of the English winter.

The Milk Calendar for 2011 arrived today. I can't help wondering whether any Canadians far from home will be opening a package in a few weeks and discover within that things aren't nearly so dreary as they imagined. I hope so.

More is easier

2010-11-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

I have a tendency to follow the line that less is more. Maybe it's because I'm short. I like short sentences. Short paragraphs. Bullet points. And one side of A-4, no more!

But sometimes I have to admit that more is better. What would Proust be like without the long, meandering, sentences that wrap you up and spin you round until your own thoughts are as mixed and muddled as the memories his narrator is dancing through? That must be the very effect he is aiming at. More is also sometimes better when it comes to software and learning.

I am continuing up my learning curve with Drupal. It's getting better. (Well, I mean I'm getting better at it.) I'm discovering the efficiency that comes of managing multiple Drupal sites. I've got three live ones on the go at the moment as well a few test sites. For the live sites I'm trying to follow good practice. Part of that is implementing only what you know. The efficiency comes in when I am able to propagate something new across numerous sites. Repetition, as Proust knew well, has a strengthening effect on memory. My learning curve gains breadth as well as height.

Not so long ago I met up with a number of people who make their livings setting up and maintaining Drupal sites. One thing that struck me was how many of them stuck to a very constrained set of parameters for clients. But it makes perfect sense. Their objective is both to provide the client with what he or she wants/needs while at the same time taking advantage of whatever efficiencies they can build into the process in order to minimize the time and labour cost of developing a new site. One person I spoke to said he could produce a new site, top to bottom, in 15 minutes (he was using the Drush Package Manager, which I'm not even thinking about at the moment).

There is a sense in which the more opportunities you have to exercise a new skill the less cost that is needed to reach a satisfactory end point for any of those opportunities. Which sounds rather convoluted. It's probably simpler to say that: less is more and more is less.

Content still matters

2010-11-09T08:17:00.002-05:00

Content is still king. I'm thinking here, initially, about blog posts but I also want to extend this thought to other forms of communication.

An old hobby-horse of mine is the empty, redirecting blog post: I can't stand them. Almost nothing irritates me more than a blog post that is merely a "pointer" to some other content on the Internet. Worse still is the post that is a pointer to a blog post which itself is merely a pointer to some further content. And so on.

I am stressing merely there (and here) because I think there is a useful place for secondary and even tertiary communications. A post that merely points to some other post is little more than a contextless citation. A post that, in the course of making some point or other, provides a link to some supporting documentation or content about which it is commenting employs secondary communication. There are even some sensible posts that are really tertiary communications surveying, often, a set of secondary communications. I can see the point of such posts or even such web pages though, yes, they tend to come from librarians.

But I would maintain that content, i.e. primary communication, is still king. Ultimately no matter how much fluttering you have (or need), communication is still about communicating content. And what is content? It might be an opinion (ideally backed up with reasons, but we can only hope). It might be substantive research. It might be reasoned argument, an amusing anecdote, a description, or a story.

I can illustrate this with the posts from this very blog. Looking at the stats that are available on the blogger dashboard I can see that some posts attract a considerably larger number of views over time than others. (And no, this series on communications is not one of my big hitters.) By orders of magnitude.

Which brings me to Twitter. I was wondering whether or not my observations would hold true in the land of 140 characters. And it seems that even there content rules. If you look at the tweets of those with massive numbers of followers, you will find that only the tiniest percentage of those tweets are pointers to some other content and almost none of them are contextless citations or mere pointers. Even on Twitter, primary communication is still valued.

This might be a good opportunity to raise a related point.

Twitter tweets, and FaceBook (FB) status updates did (although I don't think they do anymore), constrain the tweeter to a limited number of characters. Since some URLs are long, possibly very long, there is a clear need for some way to provide shortened URLs for the links one wishes to share. Fortunately there are very useful services that provide just that: http://bit.ly/ and http://tinyurl.com/ . Using these services you can transform a lengthy URL into something manageable. Great. The downside, of course, is that the now minuscule URL gives no clue as to the site it will take me to if I should click on it. Maybe that isn't a problem for most people, but I like to know where I'm going (as far as that is reasonably possible) on the Internet. Combine an obscured URL with an already constrained communications window of 140 characters and you have a near-recipe for the contextless citation.

It appears I've finally found something I dislike even more than a blog post that merely points me somewhere else. It's a tweet that points me somewhere else and doesn't give me any real clue as to where it is pointing me. Now there is a metaphor for something or other!

Cave imitator. Let the follower beware.

Gathering resources

2010-11-04T08:56:00.001-04:00

So far in this series I have been concentrating on websites and blogs over which I have direct control. It turns out, however, that the Internet, almost inevitably, contains a wide array of sites where you are mentioned or where material you may have written or contributed to appears but over which you have no direct control. Test it yourself by Googling your name, and be sure to use double quotes " " around it for a more useful set of results. (C'mon, you've done this before, you know you have!)

When I did this recently I found out two interesting things: first, there is still a fair bit of dross out there where my name appears but which has absolutely nothing to do with me; second, I re-discovered a number of presentations and articles I had written that I had forgotten about or lost track of. I immediately began to wonder whether it would be useful to draw the latter together in some way in order to make it easy for someone (e.g. a prospective employer, conference organiser, journalist) to get a quick overview of my output in a particular field over the years. A portfolio, if you will, but in particular a portfolio of items which I do not myself have the power either to remove or change.

If your name is more common than mine, or perhaps unfortunately shared with more famous individuals for whom you would not wish to be mistaken, then this might be even more pressing for you.

I have placed links to these presentations, articles, and briefing notes of mine on a Resources page on my main website and made that easily accessible. I suppose if I knew more about search engine optimization (SEO) I would know whether this helps or hinders the relative rankings of those resources in search engines. In any case, I haven't done this to aid search engines, I've done it to aid searchers. It isn't a comprehensive list by any means, but it is a list of resources with which I am proud to be associated. Moreover, if in future other things I write show up on the Internet on web pages I do not myself maintain, I will have a sensible place from which to link to them.

FSOSS 2010 - report

2010-10-29T20:11:00.002-04:00

Today I attended the always interesting FSOSS event at Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. I had a couple of goals for participating in the event. I hoped to get myself plugged back in to the open source community (at least more than sitting in my office permits) and there were a number of talks (and people) that I specifically wanted to see. Despite some disappointments, the high points more than compensated.

Key for me in the morning set of talks was Dru Lavigne speaking on Finding a Community (Even if You're not a Developer). This was an excellent presentation - thorough, careful, and measured. Plenty here for anyone new to FOSS or anyone still trying to find their niche. Dru spent a fair bit of time outlining how to find a good fit for your skills. Clearly that is much easier if you are a developer and have a specific toolset. That rather narrows the field of projects to which you might contribute. But what if what you hope to offer to a FOSS project is documentation skills, or at least non-coding skills? Here the problem is that your skills are so general that you really could contribute to virtually any project. For me, the way to narrow the decision matrix in such a case is to find a project that you actually use and that you feel passionate about.

I was delighted to finally see Dru speak since I had been hearing her name (and seeing it) for some time. Worth the wait.

In the afternoon I went to a solid talk by Scott Nesbitt on FLOSS Manuals - Too Good to be True. FLOSS Manuals is the brain child of Adam Hyde, a New Zealander with a vision for facilitating documentation. And not just facilitating the creation of documentation, but rather getting documentation done! It is a long-standing truism that documentation is the bane of FOSS projects (well, any kind of project, really). Through the use of book sprints FLOSS Manuals helps with the rapid production and completion of user manuals. Scott detailed the book sprint that had been undertaken earlier in the week to create a user manual for Mozilla Thunderbird. He also pointed participants at the next generation of FLOSS Manuals, called Booki. Booki also has a Mozilla Drumbeat project, Open Web Publishing which is worth a look.

I wondered how the documentation effort in FLOSS Manuals co-ordinates or conflicts with the documentation efforts within a FOSS project. At least in the Thunderbird sprint key Mozilla Thunderbird developers directly participated. I'm not entirely certain I'm clear on whether or not the documentation effort of a FOSS project could get diffused by such work, but it's clear that these are also live questions that are being worked out directly in practice. Scott did a good job encouraging those present to explore FLOSS Manuals further and, if possible, get involved.

The final talk that I want to mention is the one entitled Mozilla Drumbeat: open innovation for all. I had been looking forward to hearing (and seeing) Mark Surman again. I was really hoping he would clear up some muddle-headedness that I'm suffering regrading the Mozilla Foundation Drumbeat effort. I totally get the idea of defending and extending the open web. I don't quite understand the Drumbeat spin on this. Alas, Mark dropped out of the event, apparently having slipped off to Barcelona to help prepare for the Drumbeat Festival due to take place there next week. Okay, fair enough. Barcelona does have its attractions. And it might also be warmer than Toronto at this time of year.

Fortunately (for us) Mark was replaced by Matt Thompson. Matt did a good job in Mark's stead. He gave a nice overview of Drumbeat's goals. He reminded us how Mozilla Firefox defended the open web not by lobbying the powers that be, but by simply building a better browser than the massively dominant IE that was threatening the open web. Today, of course, there are many new threats to the open web, not least the attack on net neutrality. Can the Mozilla Foundation find new ways to defend and extend the open web?

I don't know. The Drumbeat projects highlighted all seemed very cool. I could see how they would garner lots of participation from "the people formerly known as users". But I'm less clear on how they address the very things that Drumbeat itself identifies as threats to the open web. Of course, it could be that what really needs to be translated is the manner in which Mozilla built its fabulous open source browser. But then I would have thought I'd be hearing about a Mozilla Foundation project repository perhaps modelled on the Apache Foundation cohort of projects each of which partake to some extent in the well-tested development methodology found in the server project. There doesn't seem to be that kind of guidance for proposed projects at this time. But perhaps it is just too soon to tell. Matt described the past year as, effectively, Drumbeat in beta test mode. We should look for a major overhaul of both the website and (I think) the movement in the new year. No doubt that has something to do with what will be going on in Barcelona next week. If so, I look forward to the continued sharpening of the aims and objectives, and methods, that Drumbeat will seek to promote. I have a natural fondness for Mozilla, its browser, its Foundation, and a firm belief in its potential for good. I, for one, will be watching Drumbeat with anticipation in the weeks and months ahead.

All in all, it was a good day. I missed the presence of one or more significant keynote speaker. And I really don't need another metal liquid container (which seems to be de rigueur as a participant goodie at every conference these days). And no, an extra-large t-shirt is unlikely to fit me (luckily I managed to make an exchange for a more plausible size). But most important were the people I spoke to, ate with, shared a drink with. Because community really is what FOSS is all about.

Managing a frontispiece website

2010-10-28T11:09:00.001-04:00

With my blogs sorted for the moment, and at least the possibility of a tweet in the future, it behoves me to pay attention to my non-blogging websites. For this I have two (related) domains. One is essentially just a personal site for my friends and family. The content is variable, highly particular, and not really interesting to anyone for whom it was not intended. Unless you really, really want to know how to bake the best chocolate chip cookies in the world, ever :-)

The other domain, which I mentioned in my previous post on this subject, is a frontispiece for a sole-proprietor consultancy business I set up some years ago. Almost any work I do these days is some form of consultancy, so it seemed appropriate. But it isn't something that I intend to build into a vast business empire. So I want to keep that site mostly empty other than for contact details. People find out about me when they meet me in person, or, as per the norm, Google me, and if interested we take it from there. That's enough for me. I've got other irons in the fire that need tending. Still, it would be nice to do something a bit more useful with this site. For example, I would like to write an article on my explorations of Drupal (ongoing) and host it there. That might lead to other articles, maybe even one on thinking through your PIO. So that site might grow. Managing content there might then become an issue.

You do not need to take on a full-blown web-hosting package in order to maintain a small frontispiece web presence. There are numerous no-cost options available. Two that I have looked at are Drupal Gardens and Google Sites. They both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Drupal Gardens is very enticing for anyone who has played with Drupal, is shamefully inept at backend systems administration (as I am), and who longs for the eye-catching goodness of the soon-to-be-released Drupal 7. Of course my claim that one doesn't need to fully grok the Drupal backend is somewhat misleading. Once you get past the incredibly simple steps necessary to create a site, the user still finds himself or herself with a vast array of choices and decisions. Hard decisions. Despite being far more intuitive than the Drupal 6 interface, I think the user here will still want to go through some serious Drupal study and thinking. As per usual, Drupal 7 has almost limitless possibilities, but that may be too much for the simple frontispiece website. Nevertheless I'm going to keep exploring it in hopes that the veil will lift from before my eyes. It really is what I'd prefer to use.

Google Sites is equally easy to use in order to create a simple, or even a modestly complex, website. It is easy to enable co-operative website management. And there is plenty of room for growth beyond the 100MB of webspace a user is provided initially by moving up to the Premier Edition of Google Apps as and when it becomes appropriate. Indeed, if you are really just starting out, I think it would be best to simply start with the standard Google Apps package, which gives you Google Sites as well. The downside, at least for me, with Google Sites is the lack of rigour in its widgets. Whereas Google does a great job with the various widgets in Blogger.com, the comparable widgets in Google Sites are often just not up to the job. At least I've found many that didn't really work. Maybe it is different in the Google Apps version, I just don't know. Nevertheless, if all you really want is a simple frontispiece site, then Google Sites is fully able to provide that.

That brings me back to my thinking about my PIO. Do I really want or need a website that is substantially more than a frontispiece? That, as they say, is the real question.

Municipal elections

2010-10-24T15:15:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is polling day for our city and region. I am fairly certain that nearly everyone I intend to vote for (for city council, mayor, regional council, and regional chair) will not in fact get elected. I still intend to cast my ballot. I think that's important.

It has been enlightening going through this election. After 3 years back in Canada, I sometimes forget that there are still many differences between here and the UK on which I have not yet had a chance to refresh myself. For example, municipal and regional politics here is not party political. In my ward, there are a large number of candidates for a single council seat. All I have to go on is what the candidates have said in their election materials or at the various of organised debates which have been well-reported in the local media.

There are also a couple of local plebiscites that will be on this ballot, both of which have been divisive in the campaign.

However, without party allegiances to fall back on I have found myself casting about in my own pool of thoughts, principles, and preferences. That has been useful because it has given me a useful matrix against which to test the opinions of those who would seek my support. Some things stand out for me. It turns out I don't really mind paying taxes, or even more taxes, so long as those funds are going to develop and enhance my community. So if your whole reason for being in politics is to ensure that I have an extra 50 cents in my pocket at the end of the year, you really need to look elsewhere. If the first thing you want to do once you get in office is to remove a piece of anodyne public site art, then look elsewhere. If you sign up to an aggressive campaign of fear-mongering pseudo-science, I'm sorry you'll have to look elsewhere. If you confuse public health issues with personal rights issues, again elsewhere.

That's just a sampling of what I've found in my personal selection criteria. It's surprising that there is anyone at all I'm willing to vote for. But I found enough candidates to make the short walk over to the polling station worth the effort. Sure, none of the candidates that I'll be voting for is likely to win. But they still need my vote. And I need it too.

Elections - they can be a useful tool for the personal as well as the political.

Blog use and first thoughts about Drupal

2010-10-23T10:06:00.006-04:00

Still no tweets from me, but I do now have 3 followers. Soon. The anticipation must be killing them. Meanwhile I have been busy sharpening up my various foci of identity online. For example, this blog has returned to its predominant themes of openness, free and open source software, and reflections on such software and the communities that grow and sustain it. Gone is the fun widget from LibraryThing displaying books that I have recently added to my catalog there (if you are reading this via an rss feed you may never have seen that). I have moved that over to my other blog, Transformative Explications, which focusses on books and writing. There is a link here in my blogroll. My thinking is that it is better to give these two passions a separate and distinct location on the web without trying to disguise that they are both a growing part of me.

My other blog is located on a domain I set up back in 2007: www.randymetcalfe.com. I hadn't done much with that domain or with the web hosting package that lies behind it, but I am now actively developing it.

You will notice, if you visit it, that the blog is a WordPress installation. WordPress is just one of an array of software packages available via the Fantastico De Luxe installer that comes with my web hosting package. Since my skills do not lie in system administration, this turns out to be a great way for me to experiment with and commit to using some FOSS. I'm happy with the WordPress install that I have but it doesn't prevent me from also living in the cloud over here at Blogger. Of course my needs are simple; more complex requirements might have necessitated a clear choice.

The other FOSS that I have been exploring of late is Drupal, which is also available to me via Fantastico. After a couple of test installs at different domains, I have committed to exploring Drupal more fully. To that end I have been patiently documenting my learning curve (more on that later) as well as looking for opportunities to engage with the Drupal community.

Drupal is not as simple to use as WordPress, clearly, but its capabilities are vast (limitless?) and to take full advantage of it my learning curve will need to go on for some time. I've made some initial moves on participating in the Drupal community - joining email lists, sitting in on IRC, even attending my local Drupal user group meeting this past week. I was also lucky enough to go to one day of the nearby Toronto DrupalCamp, where I saw Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, give an inspiring talk. What have I learned so far, other than that I have a lot to learn? I've learned that the Drupal community is strong. It has a lot of small and mid-size web consultancy businesses actively participating within it. And there are a lot of people around with, it seems to me, a great deal of technical knowledge. Enough so that it will, I think, be a long time before I manage to find any way to contribute to this community other than by using the software and enthusing, where possible, about it.

If I have sharpened my use of my blogs in the past week, then I will have got somewhere. Still a lot more things to think about in this exploration of my PIO. But until then...

Project Camelia and Drumbeat

2010-10-18T08:23:00.000-04:00

For a while now I've been hearing murmurs about a Mozilla Foundation effort entitled Drumbeat. I don't fully grok what Drumbeat is or will be. It's something about the open web, or keeping the web open, or telling people that the web is open or ought to be, and mostly it seems to be very open about what it is or isn't to the point of openly inviting others to come along and help it be even more of what it is, i.e. open. So, clearly I haven't got it yet. I'm not ready for the 3 floor elevator pitch. That's one reason I want to head over to FSOSS 2010. Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, is going to be there speaking about Drumbeat. Mark will clear up my confusion in a trice, I'm sure. He's good at that sort of thing.

Not that I haven't been exploring the Drumbeat site myself (you should too!). In fact, a new project has shown up there, Camelia, which might be worth a look-see. The project page has a very useful 73 second video from Ross Gardler, the project lead, making his own elevator pitch about Camelia. There is also a 12 minute video for those of you who would like to take the lift to the top. In a nutshell, Camelia is about educating about the open web and enabling individuals to get involved with the hope of minimizing duplication between open web projects and maximising collaboration between same.

Frankly, once I saw that Ross was involved that pretty much sold me. What does Ross know about the open web? What doesn't he know. He lives it. Go ahead and Google him (because you would anyway). Then go back and watch his videos explaining what he, and those who join him, hope to achieve with the Camelia project. And finally, once you are convinced, take the half minute or so more to register on the Drumbeat site and vote for the project (yes, it's important - it affects the likelihood of accruing seed funding from the Mozilla foundation).

Or better yet, just go get involved.

Maverick Meerkat Installed

2010-10-14T12:45:00.001-04:00

Today I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu: 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I burned both a cd and a dvd (for good measure) of the .iso file. Then I lugged an aging desktop that is not currently using Ubuntu (yes, it uses the "other" operating system!) downstairs and set it up in the kitchen so that I could plug it directly in to my router. You really want a wired connection to the Internet when you go to install Ubuntu. In fact, the new install screens specifically check for this and then give you the possibility of downloading additional software during the installation.

The installation was clean and smooth. I had a slight hiccup initially in getting my PC to boot from the install disc, but once I realized that I was being dim (hey, 6 months between installs and I forget things) everything proceeded in due order. I continued reading a book whilst the computer did what it had to do.

A clean install, however, was not what I was worried about. I've done lots of clean installs of Ubuntu over the years. Rather I was concerned about my sadly proprietary usb wireless adapter (a D-Link DWA-130). That was an inexpensive adapter I purchased some time ago when this non-wireless-card desktop moved out of reach of my router. It worked fine in the "other" operating system. But I knew from testing an Ubuntu release on cd a while back that this adapter does not work out of the box with Ubuntu. I would need to sort that out if I was going to be able to use this machine with this wireless adapter up in my office. That, or I would have to go purchase another adapter, checking first this time that I was getting something that was more ecumenical with respect to operating systems. (But oh, I hate to waste money like that!)

First I confirmed that in fact my wireless adpater does not work out of the box with Ubuntu 10.10. Second I did what any good computer hobbyist would do - I turned to Google. A quick search using "ubuntu usb wireless adapter" brought me to Ubuntu's Docs on Wireless Cards. An excellent start. I took the advice at the top of the page and fired up a terminal window and typed: lsusb. That confirmed two things for me: 1) Ubuntu was in fact seeing my wireless adapter, and 2) the chipset my adapter was using (essential later for downloading the correct driver).

I learned that in order to use this wireless adapter, the best route would be to download the correct driver from the manufacturer, then install Ndiswrapper and Ndisgtk (a helpful interface for those who prefer to visit the command line and not necessarily live there). Where did I get the information on how to do this? From the Ubuntu Docs on Ndiswrapper, of course.

It helps to follow the instructions carefully. Don't rush things. You will need to revisit the command line at points. For example, I needed to add a line to blacklist.conf in modprobe and that was easily handled via vi. A short bit of testing revealed that my wireless adapter was now working correctly. And this post is evidence of same.

I am looking forward to exploring more of the Maverick Meerkat now that I have an Ubuntu desktop in my office again.

Game on!

2010-10-13T14:19:00.000-04:00

The bookend shouts of, "CAR!," followed at a decent interval by, "GAME ON!," are almost too typically Canadian to need much explanation. Readers of this blog may have noticed that I have been largely out of the FOSS discussion for about a year. Or, as you might say, a decent interval. I feel like it is time for me to get back in the mix and thereby announce same with the traditional Canadian shout of, "GAME ON!"

Getting back in the FOSS swing of things isn't so hard, really. I have not in fact been away, just quiet. Fortunately my re-emergence coincides with a couple of useful events almost in my back yard: DrupalCamp Toronto 2010 and FSOSS 2010.

I've been to a couple of FSOSS (Free Software and Open Source Symposium) meetings in the past. They are usually very well organised with a great selection of workshops and keynotes that cover a wide spectrum of issues and projects in the FOSS world. This year's FSOSS looks just as impressive.

DrupalCamp is something different for me. I've started playing with (i.e. learning) Drupal on a couple of my websites recently. I had heard lots of good things about Drupal for years of course but this is the first time that I've started using it for real. I'm on a bit of a learning curve there but so far it is making sense. When I spotted DrupalCamp being mentioned on my local LUG list (well, I didn't say I'd become a monk or anything!) I thought it would be worth investigating. So I'm heading up or over or down to Toronto for one day of the two-day Drupal Camp (although that day does include a keynote by Dries Buytaert so it should be interesting!). Time to learn a bit more about the Drupal community and see if there might be a place for me there.

If you are attending either DrupalCamp Toronto or FSOSS, do say hi. (I'll be the short, quiet guy at the back of the room.)

It's good to be back.

Rethinking my Personal Identity Online (PIO)

2010-10-07T09:55:00.005-04:00

I have a confession to make: I have never tweeted. There you have it. Shocking, I know. I'm concerned enough about this to have gone and got myself a Twitter account the other day. Within hours two other users were "following" me. This despite the fact that I had never tweeted (and still haven't). I wondered what they were expecting, with no history of tweets to judge that following me would be worth their while. I suppose my name, or more likely my email address, was sufficient within Twitter to attract them to my empty account (yes, I know them both outside of twitterdom). But that didn't lessen my communications anxiety. What would it be worthwhile me saying (or, rather, tweeting)? Mark that. Before I have input a single 140-character utterance, I am thinking about the wider ramifications/implications/considerations of what I might place in the infosphere.

Recently, on an email list to which I subscribe I got notice of a call for papers for a special issue of the journal Minds and Machines (I haven't bothered with a link because it is not an open access journal). The issue would be on the construction of Personal Identities Online (PIO). It caught my eye because some years ago this was a subject that concerned me somewhat. Seems like a long time ago now, but I remember struggling with the possible implications of fully embracing openness, which at the time meant mostly free and open source software to me. I concluded that the way to live openly would be to avoid a radical disjunct between my online identity and, for want of a better term, my "real" identity. As much as possible I wanted them to be seamless. That is the reason the URL for this blog has my real name in it. If I join an online community, or an open source community, again, I tend to use my real name. If I put a comment on your blog or elsewhere, I won't hide the fact that it was me. I'm not naive; I know that some individuals have exceedingly good reasons for obfuscating their online identities. But I wasn't in that situation and I wanted to take up the challenge of living in the open.

For the past month I have been helping a friend build an online presence for herself in a new career. At first we talked a lot about her goals. We also talked about what a personal website or blog, or a business website, says about you and how you can influence that impression in small ways. This prompted me to undertake an audit of my own online presence and begin to think through what I was saying with it. On which, more anon.

I know that a number of my friends are on Twitter. I know this because I see their tweets appear on my Facebook (FB) page. I had wondered why they were using an external micro-blogging site in order to post FB updates. Later I learned that through yet another tool you could post to numerous online communities at the same time, for example to FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn. (TweetDeck is an example of one of these tools.) Why would I want to do that? Why do they? I suspect I must have fallen behind the times on this.

The good news is that I'm back thinking about such things. As such, I thought an initial post that I am so doing would be a good way to solicit input from others on aspects of their PIO and how they manage same. In a series of posts (you noted the "I" in the title, right?) I want to turn my attention to blogs, rss feeds of various kinds, websites, online communities like FB and LinkedIn, and, of course, Twitter. I may even find something worth tweeting about.

BookTech

2010-08-09T09:18:00.001-04:00

Recently I have been thinking about eBooks and eReaders - not something to which I gave serious thought in the past. That might be surprising given my predilection for electronic gadgets and books. Two passions which have not found the opportunity to merge in any plausible fashion. However, at a meeting of a bookclub that I frequent a few of the members were enthusing about their eReaders, a Kobo and a Sony Touch eReader. There are also others on the market, including the much-promoted Kindle from Amazon. One of the bookclub members had her Kobo with her and passed it around so that we could get a look and feel. I was intrigued.

I have never been convinced by the line that eReaders enable you to carry hundreds of books with you when you travel. Whether on business or pleasure I have never been able to read even half a hundred books while I travel. If I manage one, two at the most, I feel reasonably satisfied. Then there is the pleasure in leaving behind in some distant cottage a novel that some other traveller some day may pick up and enjoy.

So, the portability of mass quantities is not particularly motivating.

Is there any cost argument in favour of eBooks and eReaders? Of course nothing but the ingenuity of man hinders the vast reduplication of digital objects which, in theory, could reduce unit cost of eBooks effectively to zero. In theory, perhaps. In practice the ingenuity of man (dread phrase) seems to have been dedicated to sewing up the DRM on eBooks about as tight as you can sew a stitch. And though the unit cost of production of these digital objects must over time approach zero, I am willing to accept that in the shorter term there are costs that need recovery. Where, then, is the price point - the point at which consumers will click the purchase button - for eBooks? To my surprise the price point is rather high (for others). Not exactly the same as the versions of books transported on organic matter, but not so far distant as to be insignificant. But to be fair, I shouldn't compare the cost to full price paper books because I am loathe to make such purchases except as gifts. When eBooks are compared against the kind of discounting that Amazon does on a continuous basis or, worse, compared to remaindered texts (for which there seem to be numerous outlets in my region), then the eBook suffers. After all, these would be superfluous purchases for me. My price point for such purchases is very low indeed.

Especially when you consider the further alternative - the library.

The public library, along with socialized healthcare, is, I think, a gauge of civilized society. We are blessed with a fabulous public library within walking distance, the Waterloo Public Library, and an equally impressive public library just down the road in the adjacent city, the Kitchener Public Library. Access to books that can be borrowed free of charge (to the end-user) is more than adequate.

My experience is that libraries are always near the forefront of technological advancement. That impression was confirmed when I discovered that our public libraries also make available eBooks for loan. The Waterloo Public Library, for example, offers some 1655 eBooks, a small but growing collection. Of course these are licensed digital objects. The DRM systems in place are able to limit downloads to a single library patron for a set period similar to the period of loan for paper books. (Set aside how counter-intuitive that seems for a digital object.)

So perhaps a cost argument could be constructed in favour of purchasing an eReader. (I notice that my 'cost arguments' always seem to be hypothetical arguments I might have with my wife, or better self.) For an initial not insubstantial capital investment, I could have access to eBooks at no further cost (to me) on into the future. Isn't that the way I justified buying a somewhat pricey digital camera a few years ago?

Perhaps. And yet, for me the price point still has not been reached (at least for the eReaders themselves). I think I will stick with my paper bound volumes of text for the time being. Or wait to be convinced by someone else.

Turning a page

2010-08-03T10:04:00.001-04:00

In the spring I did something that I haven't done before. I bought an Apple computer. It is an iMac (the smaller one) and I confess I find it to be exactly what I hoped it would be. Beautiful, elegant, unobtrusive, simple.

A surprising amount of thinking and research went into that decision. Or rather, a lot of research went in to helping someone else arrive at the best possible decision for his next computer. And having convinced him that the right choice was an iMac, I found I had very little counter-argument when it came to purchasing a new home desktop machine.

My father-in-law turned 80 in April. For more than a year he had been struggling with a home computer that seemed to soak up all of his time, and my time whenever I visited, reclaiming lost files and resolving issues. In short, he was no longer having fun. Of course some people find their fun in constantly tinkering with the innards of their operating system. He is not that sort of person. He had attempted to upgrade a perfectly serviceable XP machine to Vista. That was a mistake. Despite adding extra RAM he was left with an extremely sluggish machine and a mess of documents, pictures and other files shifted to places he knew not where. His computer was now taking up increasing amounts of his time and he was becoming less and less productive. It was time for a change.

He decided that he would buy himself an 80th birthday present - a new computer that would liberate him from the morass his computing had fallen into. He began by exploring new Windows 7 machines and was, for a time, enchanted by the idea of a touch-screen HP desktop. However, before making a purchase he decided to ask my advice (which, regrettably, he had not done prior to his XP to Vista disaster). And so I set about exploring the options.

I decided to concentrate upon his computing experience. What did he most dislike? What did he most enjoy? One of the things he appreciates is elegant, functional design. A well-engineered machine can be in itself a beautiful object. Like a high-end BMW or Audi, a good computer (and operating system) should get out of the way of the experiences you hope to have using it. His computing needs, in effect, were simple: email, some Internet surfing, word processing, a handy collection of photos of his family, one or two solitary games, and possibly some VOIP (probably Skype) to keep in touch with distant family. There are lots of machines that could meet these computing needs. But what would transform his experience? What would, for him, make computing fun again?

I recommended the 21-inch Apple iMac.

He had not even considered a mac until then. He had successfully taught himself to use Windows computers from 3.1 to Vista and didn't immediately see that he could step away from that paradigm at this point without a huge change cost. When he went to see his local Apple dealer, however, he fell in love with the iMac almost immediately.

And he has been delighted with it ever since.

Somewhat to my surprise I discovered that in convincing him that the iMac was right for his needs I also convinced myself that it was right for me. And I too have been delighted with it ever since we got it. So much so that it seems like it has always been here. Or maybe it is that, because it doesn't require constant attention, I forget about the device and have simply got on with having fun again. And that seems like a good page to have turned.

In the garden

2010-06-29T09:27:00.000-04:00

Here follows photographic evidence of what I have been up to in the garden. Thanks to a delightful spring and early summer this has not required a great deal of effort. It turns out that most plants just grow on their own accord without call for my intervention.

A Guernsey Cream clematis that we planted in the autumn survived the winter and produced its first flower by 23 May. Later it developed four flowers that lasted for some time.

We also had a lovely crop of tulips out front from bulbs we planted the previous autumn.

And here is proof positive that finally we have managed to harvest something from our square-foot garden.

For a much more comprehensive view of our developing garden, you might want to view the following sets of photos on Flickr: