Akma

This morning during my Saturday meander through the lanes of Oxford, I wound up pausing for a cup of coffee at the Golden Cross cafe (no website of their own, oddly). Margaret and I have been there before — only once, I think — during a December gift shopping expedition. Margaret needed a brea and a cup of tea, so I sallied forth from there to various merchants, gradually accumulating a small mountain of bags and packages that threatened to take over one of the sitting-rooms over which the cafe presides (the duvet and pillows were the prime culprit in this inadvertent coup attempt). We had begun to attract some mildly hostile attention by this time, so we’ve avoided the place thereafter.

Today I was looking for a non-chain cup of coffee in the Cornmarket area, though, and I thought to revisit the Golden Cross without armloads of packages. I also opted to sit in a different part of the cafe, so as not to trigger any associations among the staff. As I selected a table in the counter area, I observed some painted/markered inscriptions that I hadn’t noticed the time I was trying to avoid stepping on people’s toes or knocking their teapots over with the bulging bag of duvet.

Over the counter, they had posted two of these side-by-side:

And my table was adjacent to this instruction:

The coffee was satisfactory, no one gave me a retrospective fish-eye (in fact, the staff were very agreeable and welcoming), and I approve of their sense of humour (the style and lettering quite reminiscent of Dave Walker’s work, to my eye). I expect to go back.

If you didn’t already think of the internet as one of the all-time greatest time-saving devices (I mean, apart from it’s time-consuming aspects), let me put in a good word for our much-maligned digital communications network. A few weeks ago I was preaching on a Sunday on which I had never preached before, or so I thought. A careful search revealed that I had preached on this Sunday, but that was in the olden times when I relied on WriteNow as my word processor. I loved WriteNow, and I’m still a little sad that it fell by the wayside. But I’m even sadder that, as goes the business of software design, I no longer had any applications that would open my old WN files. There they sat in my “Sermons” directory, nondescript icons mocking me, inappropriate “kind” tags teasing me, and me with no way to prise open the files so that I could extract a few words that once seemed wise enough to preach.

Sigh.

Then on Tuesday, Simon “Webmink” Phipps mentioned the good work of the Document Liberation Project (on a Facebook post), an initiative to preserve access to files in defunct formats. “Oh, right,” sez I to Simon, “but what about my situation?” Simon, being a patient and gentle man, pointed to the specific page of the specific library on which several devs were working. Simon suggested that I send the devs some more documents to work on, so that they could benefit from wresting data from actual user-generated documents. That sounded good to me, but before I gathered up my sad old heaps of kilobytes I though I’d try to open some with LibreOffice.

Sure enough, much to my astonishment and delight, LibreOffice opened them right up. Yes, they showed lots of cruft; the filters aren’t by any means perfect. But that’s small potatoes compared to the relief and joy of seeing that I can open up those old files and retrieve at least part of what they once were. And you can bet that I’m spending time opening and re-saving those files in a more modern format.

Simon saved not only the time I would forever thereafter have spent banging my head against the wall trying to think of ways I might distill some text from these ancient files — he also saved for me the time I originally spent writing the files, and saved for me the years during which I was writing with WriteNow. So if I squander an hour or two three several playing “2048 — Doctor Who Edition,” I still think I’m coming out ahead overall.

Thanks, Simon! Bless you (and I will be making a contribution to the DLP.

It’s amazing how much difference small changes in an environment can make. Today Chris and Mattie and I turned the desk in my study 90° — orienting it along the wall, beneath a window whereas before it had been perpendicular to the wall with the window. The operation was surprisingly complicated — one of the drawer-sides of the desk doesn’t connect physically to the pedestal on which it sits, and neither of the pillars is attached to the desktop. And when you see the desktop without any of the clutter with which I ordinarily festoon it,the size of the thing strikes you. You could use it for billiards or snooker.

The study itself feels very much larger — there’s a markedly greater area of contiguous open space. I can face people in the sitting area of my study just by rotating in my office chair, instead of having to get up and walk around to find a chair on the free side of the desk. If I need to show someone my computer screen, it will be very much easier so to do.

In all, I expect it will be a much more comfortable work environment.

I spent much of the morning borderline-verklempt, and the middle of the day doing bits and bobs of work, and the end of the day being fussy and tired, so I almost missed out on anything to blog. Thankfully, however, I was provided an amusing item to call to readers’ attention:

This is like one of those “How many things are wrong with this picture?” puzzles from Highlights For Children, waiting for you in the dentist’s office. How many glaring clues are there that this is not an email from Apple? Well, first there’s the “Dear (e) client (e).” Second, it’s addressed not to my Apple ID account (formerly @mac.com, formerly @me.com, currently @icloud.com). It offers a link to an unidentified (and non-Apple) site. But the prize-winner does have to be “why this electronic courier you he was sent ?”. I take some satisfaction in imagining a nefarious internet phisherman who didn’t realise that this construction would be a dead giveaway — and sympathising with said malefactor’s English As A Second Language teacher.

This afternoon, our house painter turned in his keys — as far as he’s concerned, he’s through with us. He spent most of his day dusting and re-oiling the woodwork, adjusting things that had gone awry, and so on. There’ll be a lot more wiping down to do, some rearranging furniture, but the house will be in its newly-resplendent glory when Margaret gets home next week. I’d post some pictures, except why post pictures before it’s all tidied up at least a bit tidier?

My trusty old graphics tablet can no longer cooperate with contemporary operating systems — alas! — so I splashed out on the cheapest plausible current model I could find. Unfortunately, the Amazon page did not include a screenshot of the helpful directions

or I might have recognised that this was perhaps not the bargain it presented itself as being. Oh, well, I’m getting by with it.

And the house painter says he’ll be done tomorrow, so that’s good.

Today was sunny, mild, and relaxing. I fulfil my discipline of posting every day solely by noting this.

Mark the House Painter is wrapping up his work on our home. He finished the dining room first; it’s easiest, and made a convenient alternative room for any other ground-floor impedimenta. Then he finished the halls and stairwell and top floor room, for similar reasons.

Then from that base, he branched out to the first-floor guest room (Margaret’s bookcase room) and the small WC (AKMA’s shaving room, since the larger, more elegant bath doesn’t have a mirror over a sink).

Now the kitchen is done, and the lounge as well (I don’t have a photo of the lounge with the furniture moved back into position).

Today Mark begins painting our bedroom and the small room where I hang my clothes. It won’t be long until he’s all finished — he estimated Tuesday. Then all I have to do is move everything into its proper place, and wipe down every surface thoroughly with wet cloths to clean away the paint dust. Meanwhile, I’ll be sleeping in the guest room and marking essays.

Last night I saw the “This Day in blogging History” post on Boing Boing, reminding us that ten years ago yesterday, Larry Lessig turned loose his book Free Culture on a drowsy world. Lessig’s vision of the riptide where digital communication and copyright law converge clarified a great deal of what we saw going on around us, and predicted even more of what we’ve leapt/stumbled/been pushed into — between his book and his famous lecture-presentation of this and related topics, he redefined the terms for informed public discourse on copyright and digital media. Thank you, Larry!

The day after his book was released under a Creative Commons license, I mused to myself and my blog, “What if a bunch of ordinary people just read the chapters aloud into whatever digital recording device they have, and shared the results as an open, Common, audiobook?” Over the next few days, readers and supporters from around the world cheered, contributed time, effort, recordings, storage, bandwidth, editing and remastering skills, and in very short order a crowd-sourced (I don’t think we had that word yet) audiobook was freely available on the Web. Bingo. (Here’s the archive.org version of the audiobook.)

I retrieved the original post, as I say, and reposted it on this blog, added in the comments one by one; I’ll fix up links and names and so on eventually. Some of the original files are still hosted where the original page linked to them; others are gone. Some of the people involved are still in contact with us day on day; others I’ve lost track of.

When I read the “ten years ago” entry at Boing Boing, I looked back at my original post (retrieved from archive.org) for the first time in ages. There’s so much I didn’t remember from those days, so many people who got involved, even if only to cheer us on. And Doug Kaye and Eric Rice and Scott Matthews pitched in their capacities, Dave Winer put his energies behind it, and my dear pals from olden blogging days got aboard. In the aftermath, Hugh McGuire founded Librivox on the same principle. I teared up a little when I read through everything and remembered.

I’ll put out word on the social networks, and invite more prominent names to amplify the signal — it would be great if anyone who was associated with that effort, anyone who downloaded those first crude files or who has benefited from the smoothed-out versions that you can find now at archive.org, or anyone who participated in Librivox, or anyone who remembered those wild days, cold just stop by and leave a comment. Greater things than these we are now doing, indeed; but for a few days in 2004, making a crowd-sourced audiobook of Free Culture seemed like about the greatest.

From Steve Himmer’s blog:

Because I love Jacques Tati, and my Dad loved Jacques Tati, and when my family watched Mr Hulot’s Holiday, Pippa shouted out “Dog!” every time she spotted a canine in the scene.