Silversprite

Traigh Ghearadha

Published

on July 1, 2008

in Beaches and Outer Hebrides

. 1 Comment

Sunset on this beach north east of Stornoway.

Picture by Flickr user Milouvision.

Redbeard, greybeard

Published

on July 1, 2008

in Food and drink, Outer Hebrides and Scandinavia

. 2 Comments

Another negative side-effect of this ageing process is that, every time I desist from shaving for a while, the next beard that emerges is a little greyer than the last. When I was younger, it was the colour of dried peat. Then it gradually became the colour of a sunset. And now it’s become the colour of a sunset during a blizzard

Here’s a chin close-up as of today:

I’m not keen on this ageing process malarky, inevitable though it is. So, as 50 is the new 40, I’ve decided not to have any kind of party to mark the rapidly approaching quadruple-decade. Instead, am doing vuotissyntymäpäivät for my 50th, the proper Finnish way.

The sky at night

Published

on June 24, 2008

in Culture, Outer Hebrides and Weather

. 2 Comments

There’s been a fair few colourful skies around these solstice times, locally. Here’s one from Lochfada, taken not far from midnight, showing sunset through a tractor:

Another one from the Callanish stones collection by Gayle and Steve:

Scotproof bagged one containing a tree:

Here’s my own lazy contribution (go outside front door, look north, take one picture, go back in house, resume Twittering):

Telegraph pink

And to finish as started, another one from Lochfada, this time of midnight in South Uist on the solstice:

Sensible solstice stone ceremony celebration

Published

on June 23, 2008

in Ageing, Culture and Outer Hebrides

. 0 Comments

(Try saying that five times quickly).

While I’m probably too old, or not sufficiently drugged up, to dance naked around an ancient stone circle* on pagan days of the calendar, many others do.

And others take the more sensible (to me, anyway) option of plenty of blankets, warm clothing, and a nice flask of coffee. Gayle & Steve are two such people, residents of Lewis who did this at the Callanish stone circle on their island during the recent solstice.

Here’s their set of pictures from the shortest night. I’m guessing from the pictures that this is Steve and this is Gayle?

(* As a side point, it’s constantly vexing that the over-rated Stonehenge gets loads of media attention, while the far more astonishing Avebury gets non.)

Solstice moon

Published

on June 22, 2008

in Outer Hebrides and Weather

. 0 Comments

I still haven’t really got to grips with the video camera, and am put off by the number of pages in the manual. Anyway, here’s a slightly shaky and blurry clip of the moon on the night of the solstice, climbing above Berneray fishing harbour.

Happy solstice from Berneray

Published

on June 20, 2008

in Outer Hebrides

. 4 Comments

Today is the longest day, in terms of hours of sun-up. And subsequently, it’s the shortest night. Here’s a picture from last years shortest night, taken at 1am on the west beach of Berneray.

In the distance is the island of Pabbay.

Making academic conferences more efficient

Published

on June 15, 2008

in Culture, Education and knowledge, Food and drink, Libraries and Social Networking

. 2 Comments

At the next conference I’m speaking at, I’ve been allocated the “squeeze” slot - the one just before lunch. The “squeeze” slot is never a favourite. You’re usually starting late because of over-runs from the previous speakers. And from 20 minutes before the scheduled end, the audience start to get twitchy as they can smell the food wafting in through the doors. Peer pressure means that questions to the speaker are frowned on by the audience, as their enquiry is holding up the filling of stomachs.

And all this is made worse in a conference with parallel sessions, as the audience starts to hear the attendees from other rooms collecting their lunch; “Will there be some left?” “Will all the tasty food be gone, leaving just the cold lumpy orange things with the unidentifiable fillings that the mousey vegetarian librarian from Kettering is afraid to bite into and wants someone else to try first?” “Is this speaker ever going to end? We’ve got copies of his slides in the delegate pack, what’s the point of listening to this?”

As soon as you put up the PowerPoint slide entitled “Conclusion”, audience members start looking round, planning the quickest route to the buffet tables in the lunch room, and discretly packing away their notes and handouts. Then, on “Any more questions?”, the barely-restrained rush, similar to people trying to get on board a budget airline plane, begins.

But hey! There’s an interesting news report from ONN on a more efficient approach to eating, especially for busy people. At a stroke, it does away with many of the problems associated with lunch breaks at conferences:

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

Maybe there’s the kernel of the idea in here for academic conferences? Break times, and especially lunches, usually rip large parts out of the schedule. But in these more efficient, multi-tasking times, can we afford to waste time queuing, eating and talking?

There are, of course, some advantages to retaining the traditional lunch break at conferences. It’s an opportunity to speak to that attractive librarian delegate who you noticed at the morning coffee break wasn’t wearing a wedding ring (and you’ve just spent the last hour not listening to the speakers but thinking of a good chat-up line instead). You can recharge your laptop elsewhere after discovering that four plug sockets in a conference room with 83 delegates attempting to Twitter doesn’t really work. And you can move seat between sessions, to get away from the overpowering aftershave of the 61 year old head librarian who’s probably got his eye on chatting up the same librarian delegate that you have.

But, on balance, the feedbag approach wins out for both delegates and organisers of academic events:

* Less rooms needed to hire out, as there doesn’t need to be a room dedicated to people collecting their lunch and mooching around, socialising. Everything now happens in the lecture auditorium.
* Less cost. Outside caterers, and serving staff? Don’t need. One puree machine that can be reused will quickly offset the costs of those extra, now un-needed staff.
* Like your lunch and want to take some of it home with you to eat on the train ride back to your university? It’s difficult to get a doggy bag at an academic event, but a feedbag solves this problem.
* Trapped eating your lunch for an hour while trying to ignore the delegate who won’t leave you alone, droning on about his graphics card resolution? Not a situation that can arise again.

Having a feedbag also means that, instead of being interrupted by having to queue for food, hold it, and using your hands to eat it, you can carry on Twittering or live-blogging, without a break, through the entire day. Speakers don’t need to curtail their presentations, safe in the knowledge that over-runs don’t matter. In fact, apart from a few five minute toilet breaks throughout the day and a quick “stretch” break so no delegates keel over with Deep Vein Thrombosis, your event can carry on straight from registration to conclusion. More speakers and lecture time for your pound - everyone’s a winner!

I’ve seen the future of lunches at academic conferences. And it’s a feedbag.

Which city are you?

Published

on June 14, 2008

in Culture, Online services and Travel

. 1 Comment

Online quizzes are usually a waste of time, and thinking the same somewhat of this CNN quiz. Here, you answer a series of questions and it tells you which city you most “resemble” or match. I had a slight fear it would ask me my age, what my normal routine was, and would then tell me my ideal city was somewhere like Eastbourne or Clacton.

But, for a change, there was for me one standout option in every multiple-choice round. So, with some optimism, the result it returned was:

Apparently I'm Tokyo

“Fashion-loving”? No. Maybe “fashion observing”, but I take great pride in spending less than £150 a year (sometimes less than £100) on clothes. Nearly every day I’m wearing a bundle of clothes from a sale in The Gap store in Santa Monica several years ago (that was a cost-effective suitcase to fill and bring back - and a years worth of clothes shopping in less than 20 minutes). Partly because clothes are well down the priority list, and partly because clothes shopping in the US is a far less stressful experience than in the UK.

Gadgets, bars, eats, over the curve - yes, that’s more like it.

Putting in anti-answers to tease out the least-likely city (in the suspected limited database of answers) returns Rio de Janeiro, which is a bit disappointing. Rio is on the list of places I want to visit over the next few years, and I hope that even though am definitely not “the life and soul of the world’s party” it’ll be enjoyable.

(Thinks) it would be good to devise a variation on this a la “Which Scottish or Hebridean island are you?”.

Parking

Published

on June 12, 2008

in Beaches, Outer Hebrides and Travel

. 1 Comment

Note to visitors: passing places are not parking spots.

Instead; this is a parking spot. And a very nice one too:

Parking spot overlooking the Luskentyre estuary, by ßlϋeωãvε.

Twitter and the “Worlds Colliding” problem

Published

on June 12, 2008

in Games and Second Life, Online services and Social Networking

. 5 Comments

The problem that has bedevilled this blog cropped up on Twitter last night.

To backtrack; I maintain just one blog, this one. I’ve had several on the go before, but found it too much of a pain. So, there’s just silversprite, which has - mutually different - categories covering things such as digital games and second life and the the Outer Hebrides. It’s very rare that one posting covers many categories, especially both the games and Hebrides categories.

This leads to what George from Seinfeld would call “Worlds colliding!” (in his case, when his girlfriend and social friends started socialising, causing complications). People who “follow” one category are often bemused to see the next posting be on something utterly different, and I regularly get emails that are either:

“Why on earth are you playing silly video games when you live in such fantastic scenery?”

… or …

“The Second Life stuff is good, but why do you keep breaking it up with pictures of boring beaches? Stay focused on the SL.”

I could promote the RSS feeds for seperate categories more, though I guess this would get messy for some people. Also, a lot of people (and I suspect most of the Hebridean beach followers) still don’t use RSS feeds for a number of reasons.

This is also a (work-related) problem with digital games and virtual environments e.g. SL. There’s some circumstances where it’s advantageous to lump the two together (they share common features). However, there’s also quite a few situations where it’s best to have clear blue water between them e.g. when arguing about how SL is not actually a video game.

On Twitter last night, a similar problem. A very small number of my Twitter followers/followees are hardcore Apprentice viewers; a slightly larger number are casual Apprentice viewers. Some of us hardcore ones twitterood the programme. Some of the casual ones occasionally twittered or tweeted.

All fine until I noticed after 80 minutes or so that (a) the number of people following me had dropped, (b) I got a few messages from people complaining about spoilers i.e. that they hadn’t watched the Apprentice yet, and (c) one person indicated in no uncertain terms that he didn’t like the Apprentice, the “Wall of Tweets” coming from me driving him mad.

Thus, worlds had collided again. To the hardcore group/world it was fun and sociable, and similar to what people do at conferences. Some others followed it; others skipped it. However, some people possibly had their (delayed) viewing of The Apprentice compromised (the “Look away if you don’t want to see the result” tweet being buried in the wall). And others in the anti-Apprentice world such as the driven-mad one possibly felt trapped on the #14 bus with someone noisily playing his least favourite music in his ear. If, as I suspect, I was the only one of my hardcore group on his “following” list, then it would have appeared to him as one lone fanatic going on about the Apprentice, as opposed to what I was seeing, which was a group Apprentice love-in.

I’ve had this problem in reverse on Eurovision Song Contest night where I was trying to follow an event in the US in between a tsunami of tweets from a few hardcore people followees. Eventually I had to defollow the latter so I wasn’t constantly missing the useful tweets.

There’s an issue that everyone has different subsets of people who they follow, and who follow them. One slice across the “followers” may like concept X, and another slice hate it. Hmmm; what to do. There’s also another issue that tweeting a TV programme is not the same as tweeting a conference; some people don’t want spoilers for the former, but the latter is the reverse, with people wanting the views and news instantaneously. Hmmm; solutions?

1. Twitter etiquette perhaps; warn people “Am about to heavily tweet programme X or event Y; ignore me or defollow me.”

2. Set up a temporary account for the hardcore twittering specific to programme X and follow/have follow only those other hardcore people. So, you end up with a temporary guild of people doing high volume twittering.

3. Constant pruning; simply unfollow people who send a lot of irrelevant stuff, and expect the same to happen to you; this is what Scoble somewhat bruskly recommends (point 9). One of the good things about Twitter is that following, and unfollowing, are very quick operations. But the problem here is if they’re temporarily going irrelevant on you, and you don’t pick back up on them. One person I follow is a devout Trekkie (I loathe Star Trek) and I know when they go to convention I’ll be ignoring anything he says till he gets back. Trouble is, outside of Star Trek his tweets are interesting and useful, and I don’t want to miss his (non-Trekkie) stuff.

Any other solutions? Is there is a Twitter tool out there that somehow allows me to “split” or partition or filter my followees threads (if that makes sense)?