Francis Irving

Instalamb, my browser plugin to control Instagram

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 14:20:03 +0000

Lots of dancers, civic society organisations, artists, musicians, clowns are only on Instagram. Unfortunately, my mind finds the platform distracting and overwhelming - for my own accessibilty I need to tame it.

I prototyped a web browser plugin for this in my week making something every day, and it’s now pretty stable. Try it out!

Plugin store links: Firefox Instagram Plugin, Chrome Instagram Plugin

It has a bunch of features for you to take control of Instagram, but the critical one is stopping AI recommendations, so you can just view the accounts you’re following without being pulled into something you didn’t want to spend time on.

My mind sampling results

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 10:49:12 +0000

One of the projects in my week long hackathon was to make a system to sample my own mind with a random alarm.

This was crudely based on Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling - there are lots of papers about that method, for an introduction see this overview BBC article or my own post about a book on the topic. Hurlburt has for a few years now released videos of the method in progress, which are long and excellent - I’ve watched a lot of the first batch sampling Lena.

Announcing "Mindful Media Club"

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 10:06:44 +0000

I’m starting a meetup / online commnunity to share tips on skillful use of social media.

Things like browser plugins that let you customise YouTube, tips on settings, social practices like how to form a healthy active WhatsApp group for a particular purpose. And so on.

Wherever you are, there’s a Discord. The aim is to make an online guide with all the tips in, depending how it goes.

A week making something each day

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:01:25 +0000

As a challenge, last week I made five things, one each day. Each had to be finished in some sense, and preferably published. This is what I made and what I learnt!

Monday - Godot game

My goal was to learn Godot enough to write some kind of video game and publish it, all in one day. Incredibly this was fairly straightforward. Things I learnt:

This video tutorial and the text one in the main docs are both great starting places.
Physics engines are really good and easy to use compared to when I last coded games with them which was in 2002.
??Open source game engines are genuinely very mature
??It�s satisfying making something that just runs locally and is very visual

Itch.io is extremely generous with letting you just make a page for your game. It’s pretty liberating - no servers or DNS to think about like with a website, and no complicated signing mechanism like an iOS app. Although, I’m not confident the Windows build I made worked, only the Mac one…

Netatmo smart thermostat! How much gas I saved last winter, and how to automate it to turn off when out (not using IFTTT)

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 23:43:54 +0000

This post has two sections, one about gas prices and energy savings, the other about Android automation and the Netatmo API.

1. What a smart thermostat is like and how much money I saved

Last year, with gas prices going up, I decided to get smart radiator valves. I’d thought the saving from these would be by only heating rooms when I’m in them. I was lazy about going round and adjusting the manual radiator valves several times a day!

The little differences between Android and iOS in 2023

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 22:04:53 +0000

These days I alternate mobile operating system. Partly because as an app-making professional I strongly feel I need to understand both, and partly because it slightly irritates people who are die-hard fans of one or the other.

I don’t particularly love either - a plague on both their houses. I’d rather we all used a fully open operating system, or there was a lot more competition and a standard application platform. Still, they work, and both have lots of delights.

What is high-quality about the data that trained generative AI?

Sun, 07 May 2023 18:03:00 +0000

Our brains have 100 trillion connections. Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does.

Geoffrey Hinton, deep learning pioneer

The recent surge in interest in generative AI was sparked by neural networks trained on high quality public, human culture.

Their use of this culture is extremely focussed - they only saw good quality inputs, and only saw each input once (see the paper One Epoch Is All You Need for why). If you show them lots of bad quality stuff, they’re not adaptive enough to tell and ignore it.

This kind of rosy yellow glow in my head

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:24:40 +0000

A book review of “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel (2007)

A couple of years ago I realised I didn’t have a visual imagination.

This was ultimately quite inspiring - it’s led me to ask maybe a hundred people about their own inner lives. The answers so varied, I’m left in wonder at this hidden world that we barely talk about.

My favourite source about this is “The pheneomena of inner experience” (a paper by Heavy, Hurlburt 2008). It uses a method (Descriptive Experience Sampling, or DES) to randomly beep a bunch of volunteers in their every day lives, and get them to then capture their current mental phenomena.

Art I enjoyed in 2022 - top eight

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 12:09:26 +0000

To my surprise this list is television heavy - I didn’t find any incredible new board games, and I was disappointed in most video games. It’s somewhat in order - my favourite is roughly last.

Thanks everyone who recommended these to me - you know who you are! I’m not going to link to where to watch things - for TV and films I use JustWatch to find a suitable source.

On intuition's relationship to rationality via language

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:49:33 +0000

A three year old draft blog post I just found. Feels worth publishing - the improvements in AI since then if anything make it clearer, and all the “right now” caveats justified.

It’s better to start by thinking of us as pattern matching devices first.

Not simple ones - such as modern deep learning AI that essentially does layered functions to measure correlation. Complex ones, that model causality in a sophisticated way we don’t remotely understand yet.

Blind-sided

Sun, 16 May 2021 06:38:34 +0000

It was a rushing, a burning, an all-things-are-change, a compulsion.

I was torn up for three days or was it two weeks, except the long moments when I just forgot. Intertially, suddenly remembering, half weeping, half positively reconstructing my own construction of who I am and why.

Everyone I talked to I would grill - wait, what do the sheep look like when you try to go to sleep by counting them? And when you read a book, how good quality are the faces of the people you imagine?

Pressure cooked split black urad dhal

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:34:50 +0000

This is a recipe from Phil the Dhal, a friend who has been experimenting with pressure cooking Indian food. I’m posting it here so it doesn’t get lost. Ask if you want this just to be the first of a series!

First pressure cook of split urad dhal was a success.

Needs some understanding and refinement of what you can put in with the dhal in the pressure cooker. i.e. salt and turmeric are uncontroversial, but stuff like chilli powder or garlic and ginger paste or chopped chillies I don’t fully understand.

Brainstorming a better YouTube recommendation algorithm

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 16:54:15 +0000

This year, the public narrative around Facebook has switched - the company feels on the defensive in lots of ways. I think it deserves to be - with billions of users, it is long past time for them to spend their energy on reducing harm, rather than on more growth.

There’s a bit less talk about YouTube (owned by Google), and the problems with its recommendation algorithm.

The problems

Here are an article and a video which show the span of problems - from causing political radicalisation in every direction, to creating vast farms of weird, abusive videos targetted at children:

A cycle home along the river

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 11:56:26 +0000

A tasty early morning breakfast with friends in town, and time to cycle home. A sunny day, so take the route along the river!

Crossing the road by the docks. The sky impeccable. Delicious light of being away from the tropics, strong and clear, but not overly harsh.

The dome of one of the three graces is just visible, and at the right hand edge the tower which has sucked car pollution out of the tunnel under the river for over 100 years.

On using a variety of information services

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 16:20:27 +0000

In the last couple of weeks I’ve:

Deactivated my Facebook account.
Logged out of Twitter on my desktop.
Stopped using Google Contacts, Calendar and Photos

I’m not really sure why, but there it is, I have. I think over the last five years in excitement at the good user experience and high user adoption, I forgot why I was negative about such centralised, out of control services in the first place.

A thousand times an ant colony of fifty times a cat

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 14:19:30 +0000

Culture is important.

Particularly, it’s important for technology which is about how we as humans talk to one another.

Telephones, computers, mobile phones, internet… They’re all about how our particular species of primate communicates. And now they’re becoming one powerful industry newly reformed.

We’re each a neural network, thrown abruptly into a chaotic world, which by sheer force and pain and amazement has cohered into the awareness that we are.

A fugue on authoritarian high modernism

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 09:05:03 +0000

He listened.

The speaker started with a natural forest.

A gorgeous, maddening, complex, survived-of-the-fittest, multi-species, layered, organic feedback pathways, mycella-ridden delightful speckled sunlight happy, violent/eating/parasiting/singing insects/birds/people, robust kind of a forest.

They followed with a timber forest.

A straight-laced, single specied, splatted down, polygonally-bounded-tree-age-contoured, money spinning, automation hugging, zen simple, database-like, timber-producing, silent, vulnerable all-lined-up-in-rows kind of a forest.

The for loop iterated.

The peace to know what you don't know

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 20:53:23 +0000

I avoided statistics at school like a rash - filled myself up with super powered double A-levels in Maths And Mechanics instead. I’m not sure why, as it turns out statistics is vital to the good functioning of our world in 2017.

We have plenty of computers and plenty of data, and plenty of willingness to make evidence based decisions. Alas it is easy to fool yourself into thinking you know something you don’t. For your confirmation bias to convince yourself you’ve found evidence, so you don’t feel guilty when you report up your management chain.

Email review #1: FastMail

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 18:44:13 +0000

I’m personally still frustrated with the email services I know about. I’m going to start by reviewing what I use now, which is FastMail.

This is for my personal email, which I use for identity on many web services, for notifications and for writing letters to people. I’m working for myself at the moment too, so I use it for business in that context.

As background, be aware that I don’t think the email protocols (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) cut it any more. So I’m not splitting my email up by rating apps separately from service. I think the two are integrated together. This is because the user experience is better - setup is simpler, and unfortunately basic features like search, spam and filtering have to have a proprietary interface as the standards aren’t good enough. I’d love better protocols to be adopted on a wide scale, but realistically they’re not yet.

Textures and colours, India

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 17:36:51 +0000

A short walk around Vote Leave's software VICS

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 18:13:35 +0000

The campaign which won last year’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union immediately dissolved, and in the process kindly open sourced some of its innovative canvassing software VICS - blog post, github repository.

This afternoon, prompted by a chat with Incubator of Change (a Liverpool based think tank working on new ideas for how to develop policies), I took a quick look at the code. Rather than lose what I learnt, I’m just throwing it up in this blog post.

Hindu holy mountain #2: Arunachala

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 23:08:28 +0000

In the late 1890s - the story goes - an ordinary boy in southern India heard an uncle mention the name of this holy mountain.

Arunchala!

Just this, just the name, started pulling him to it. The mountain is meant to be, literally, an incarnation of the deity Shiva.

Then, a while later, for no apparent reason, the boy had a sudden spiritual awakening on the nature of death. In final frustration during some pointless grammar exercises, he left home, headed for the mountain. He stayed there for the rest of his life.

Rant on the failure of news media

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 06:51:21 +0000

Last night I watched Charlie Brooker’s news recap of the year. As I watched, the humour leavened things and left me entertained. But in my sleep, my mind has realised it had made me pretty angry. So a brief change in tone for this blog - a rant!

Charlie - both you personally, and you as a representative of the media - stop whining about the news bubble! You collectively all made the news bubble. Take some responsibility for it!

Notes on a meditation

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 01:14:03 +0000

I went on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation course in the Goenka school, at Bodhgaya in Bihar province in north India.

It was a complex event - my emotions and thoughts about it have often changed dramatically in a day.

This blog post is more in note form than a cohesive, final account.

1. Silence

For 9 of the 12 days on site we were silent. Not just no spoken words - also no eye contact, no gestures, no communication with others.

Hindu holy mountain #1: Pavagadh

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 08:34:20 +0000

He took my hand. “Follow me. Move fast. Don’t stop.”

I’d spent the early morning looking round the tranquil mosques of ancient Champaner at the bottom of the holy hill.

(This is a good guide to them, plus I left a comment on buses which might be useful. It’s in Gujarat, west India, a little north of Bombay.)

Now it was time to get to the top. Pavagadh. During the Diwali national holiday.

First, do no harm

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 07:59:41 +0000

A two year old draft blog post I just found, which is too good not to publish. Age leavens its earnest attempts to be ahead of trend.

New computer technology used to be my relaxation, my hope.

As the world has changed, that comfort has gone.

We grew up in a digital village. Now we’re in its seedy metropolis.

A decade or so ago, I used my energy for emotionally hard problems to try and help with international development or democracy or climate change.

In praise of temple elephants

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 09:41:29 +0000

They all seem to be called Lakshmi.

The first one I met at the Virupaksha Temple in Hampi.

You pay a small coin for a blessing, which he takes with his trunk and passes on to his minder.

Then he touches your bowed head like this woman in Pondicherry.

That one was at the Sri Manakula Vinayagar Temple. An amazingly clean temple, worth visiting to see what Hinduism would be like in a clean India - something I hadn’t imagined possible, but it works!

Scouring pad

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 07:29:27 +0000

I wrote this post two weeks ago before going on a meditation retreat. It felt too negative at the time; it isn’t in that it reflects my mood then.

India is like a scouring pad.

The dirt the dust.

Litter cast uncaringly - except in Pondicherry, as if to show it is deliberate everywhere else.

The highest ambition of the government cleanup campaign is to end public human shitting.�By 2019, in this space faring nation.

Houses like trees

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 08:28:03 +0000

Zenrainman’s house is like a tree.

Grown out of the earth of its own basement on the edge of Bangalore, pressed into bricks.

Nurtured entirely by water and light from its own roof.

It breeds, symbiotically, large primates to maintain it.

Treating their sewage.

To water a rooftop rice paddy ready to grow enough to feed them.

The spaces are full of art and light.

Changing money

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 14:47:02 +0000

Oh India!

There’s always another surprise, toughening your way through the day.

This week Modi, the Hindu nationalist PM, announced to the nation that the two largest bank notes were now worthless pieces of paper.

This clamp down on black markets and electoral bribes has a complex set of rules which let you trade in the old notes in limited ways, and heavily restricts use of ATMs.

As a result, for the last few days banks have turned into queues like these ones in Hyderabad.

Communal pets

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 23:07:32 +0000

India is unusual in having two shared public “pets”.

Dogs are the ones that I’ve seen before in other countries, prowling every street and temple. These puppies with their sore-furred mum are in Pushkar.

Unusually, people feed them. The other day while waiting for a safari at a tiger reserve, I saw a woman feed a whole packet of sweet biscuits to a cute dog with lovely fur. Apparently the last chapati of a batch is reserved for a dog.

Zero marginal cost

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 08:42:00 +0000

The next page I found in the notebook (after the last one) is my own view of the problem of information goods having zero marginal cost, so not functioning within capitalism. Paul Mason describes this in Postcapitalism.

Walking through the diagram…

“Zero marginal cost newtech” is the starting point. A “marginal cost” is a business term for the extra amount it costs to make one more of something. For digital goods, such as MP3s or converted PDFs, this is essentially nothing. This leads to the possibility of cheaper and cheaper, more and more freemium business models, driving the value of the information good in and of itself to nothing. The arrows lead out to four options at this point.

Sea. Sunlight. Calm. Trees. Laughter.

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 23:05:34 +0000

I found another oldish notebook. It’s about the edge of chaos.

The more lightly shaded left hand edge is absence, null, non existence. The dark shaded right hand side is total chaos, randomness. The sharp line down the middle is the edge of chaos - where things are balanced, interest lies, life grows.

There are four examples.

1. “Too few forum members” vs “Too many forum members”. If you start a new community, and nobody joins, it’s pointless emptiness. If it goes wild, and too many join, it ends up like a newspaper comments thread. There’s a pure balance, where the community is interesting and viable. (Reddit tries to avoid this dilemma by dividing itself in a cellular way making lots of subreddits)

On finding political axes using maths

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:18:06 +0000

Drifting in the sea of political beliefs, left and right don’t seem to have any meaning any more.

It’s possible to make up new axes. Alas, these aren’t grounded in real views of the population, instead they’re distorted by the politics of their creators.

Luckily, there is a way of finding actual axes by experiment, using opinion polls and maths.

Back in 2005, my friends Chris and Tom persuaded a youthful YouGov to add a complete set of political position questions to their demographically weighted UK poll.

History of libraries

Thu, 26 Nov 2015 20:48:11 +0000

Thanks to the excellent Thinking Liverpool [1], a lunchtime talk about the history of libraries caught my eye.

I mention the history of public libraries worryingly often. I make an analogy between libraries in the age of the printing pres and the modern need for equivalently novel public institutions in the age of the networked computer. Time to find out more.

It was in the Victoria Gallery, just across the road from work. Great!

Don't play the game, mutate the board

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:55:21 +0000

I found some notes I’d written at the start of this notebook, a few months old.

I used to campaign in Cambridge for more Fairtrade coffee and chocolate. That was a “closed” tactic, as opposed to an “open” tactic like open source software or open data.

It worked - even the best selling chocolate bar Dairy Milk is Fairtrade now. The tactic slightly shifted the board of global economics.

Sync/Backup workshop at Redecentralize Conference

Sat, 07 Nov 2015 20:56:32 +0000

The fabulous Redecentralize Conference was organised by Ira and a bunch of other volunteers. Its subject - how do we make the net resilient, private and fun again?

It was an unconference, so I decided to do a session on a personal itch I’ve had for the last few years - file synchronisation and backup.

I don’t have a nice way to manage my files - documents, music, photos, email. Syncing them across devices and keeping them backed up seems strangely harder than it did in the 1990s. At least, if you don’t just go all in and trust Google or Dropbox with them.

Making our information society safe and fair

Sun, 30 Aug 2015 03:23:23 +0000

The topic of how to make our information society safe and fair regularly comes up in conversations.

I think we need some quite big, radical things. They’ll need new public service Internet organisations to implement.

This is my high level view list.

1. Access to culture

“People have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage.” (one MP’s response to the Public Libraries Act 1850)

Those brief moments when winning seems possible

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 19:59:38 +0000

This mad dash bad mixen fun up down world.

Forces smash hither and fither, 7 billion of us strange qualia, doing, being human.

Web culture, open source culture… sucked out of academia, hacking, sharing, making, funning, building. Just late enough for usability to be just there just cheap enough.

Smashed with.

Political culture… burnt out, tired, so so so good best world has ever been, so so so broken, media corporate capitalist socialist thought tangle.

"I find politics inaccessible": User testing voter advice apps

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 19:21:17 +0000

How is she going to vote? My friend (let’s call her F) just doesn’t know.

This isn’t unusual - about 20% of voters are like her (see Q3).

She needs to work it out fast. She doesn’t like polling stations, so has a postal vote. She has to decide this weekend - or she’ll get busy with work, and not remember to post the ballot in time.

mySociety helpfully list 16 voter advice apps, so I decided this was a chance to test them out!

Why I'm collecting every MP candidate's CV

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 18:11:14 +0000

My side project for the last month is to try and collect the Curriculum Vitae of everyone standing for Parliament.

It’s called Democracy Club CVs.

I’ve been working every spare hour - mainly around midnight and on Sundays. Partly it is technically interesting, partly the other Democracy Club volunteers are fun to hang out with…

It’s also just enjoyable, with leaflets from ex-whips, professional musicians and raving loony leaders (that last one is standing against Boris).

But that doesn’t really explain … why am I doing it?

The advert wars

Tue, 24 Feb 2015 22:47:09 +0000

One of the pitched battles in this century’s cyber war is about advert blocking and injecting.

It’s in full flow.

You can tell - journalist friends complaining that ad blockers have killed Joystiq, a 10 year old gaming magazine; web friends complaining that an ad blocker charges advertisers to not block some ads.

I’ve got some perspective.

Back in 1996, I helped make one of the earliest web advert blockers, WebMask.

Why did we do it?

Which web development tools are commodities?

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 17:55:46 +0000

We’re really bad at thinking about innovation.

To improve my own sense, I’ve been gradually absorbing Simon Wardley’s Value Chain Mapping since first seeing him talk about it a few years ago.

The picture to the right is an example of one of his maps. Each blob is a technology need.

As you go from left to right in the map, the technologies go from custom built, through product to commodities. (You can read more in an introduction by Simon, also see my post about the product/market space).

Promising to make software safer

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 01:47:18 +0000

1. Virtual bugs

I first really knew that all software was fundamentally insecure back in 2001.

I was working for an artificial life games company. We made virtual pets - amazing ones with a simulated brain, biochemistry and genetics.

I’d just built a new networked version called Creatures Docking Station. It let the cute, furry, egg-laying Norns travel through portals, crossing the Internet directly between player’s computers.

Blog

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 23:33:57 +0000

Long, cold cyberwar

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 22:34:10 +0000

Let’s keep this post simple.

We’re near the start of a long cold, cyber war. Many things make this clear - from Stuxnet to Snowden, from the Sony hacks to Chinese DNS poisoning.

This is a hard time to be in information technology.

Just in raw, technical security terms this is tough - rebuilding every layer of computing infrastructure so that it is safe.

And that’s the easy problem.

I blinked and missed 6 exciting things in the last 20 years of space

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:07 +0000

I blinked.

A long, slow, twenty year blink.

And meanwhile, space exploration went… Phoooom!

From a distance it looks bad. We haven’t sent humans to the moon for over forty years. There’s no grand, visible, memorable showpiece - apart from space shuttles exploding and being decomissioned.

And yet, when I recently got interested again, I found a flurry of things had happened. Many I had seen in passing, but not really looked at. All together, they add up to something amazing.

The Upsidedown Map Page

Sun, 02 Nov 2014 17:55:00 +0000

It needn’t be a Eurocentric world

It came as a surprise to me after over 20 years of seeing “normal” world maps to come across an upside down one. The most surprising thing was that I found it surprising. It is completely artificial that we have North at the top of a map.

The convention came a few centuries ago when Northern hemisphere, European navigators started using the North star and the magnetic compass. Before that, the top of the map was to the East which is where the word orientation comes from.

Francis Irving

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 18:45:16 +0000

Things I do

Organise evenings of lightning talks about radical land policy

Podcast about the richness of our varying inner mental worlds

Things I’ve done

Helped millions find out how their Member of Parliament voted

With the crowd, freed hundreds of thousands of Government documents

Made version control user interfaces on Windows much better

Curated apps which make the Internet more resilient, private and fun

Arranged �500, no-strings-attached gifts for cool projects in Liverpool

Francis Irving's CV

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 01:21:53 +0000

British citizen, francis@flourish.org

Summary: Highly skilled and responsible entrepreneur, programmer and campaigner. Proven track record with seeing successful projects through to completion. Excellent team player and completer-finisher.

Career History: Trunk (construction), Memrise (languages), ScraperWiki (data science), mySociety.org (civic tech), Creature Labs (games), NC Graphics (manufacturing), VEGA Group (military).

Voluntary Work: Awesome Liverpool (dean), Save Parliament (campaigns director), Public Whip (founder), Oxfam Campaigns Group (co-ordinator), TortoiseCVS (founder).

Education: 1st Class Degree in Mathematics (Oxford University), A Levels.

Career History

Self-Employed (2023 -)

Software engineering and management consultancy for various clients, including Trunk.

An email to Nicholas

Mon, 26 May 2014 14:28:07 +0000

Dear Nicholas,

Thank you for your previous two letters.�I’m sorry I was so slow getting back to you after the first one, that you had to write another.

I didn’t know Canon meant essentially the same things as Round. I’m�sure I must have been told, but I never got what it meant or cared. I�only really appreciated rounds at all in actually singing them with�people at Kentwell (the Tudor recreation thing I do).

Properly funding Democracy Club

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 22:32:06 +0000

Politics is broken.

At the last election, a few�people�made an amazing organisation to try and fix it.

Democracy Club is a non-party-political group of volunteers. At the next election, we want to�hold candidates to account, and�stimulate public engagement.

We do this by emailing people�small, easily achievable tasks. These small tasks will add up to�hugely useful resources. (Democracy Club about page) 7000 volunteers (in every constituency!) found�out who the candidates are, what they thought about local and national issues, and monitored their election leaflets. (I wrote up what they did on the OKFN blog.)

Irony of extensions that remove junk slowing Chrome down

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 22:49:04 +0000

I thought I was ruthless at not installing browser extensions. It’s part of the process of getting old, customising things less and less. Despite that, I’ve accumulated seven extensions.

(The most unusual and interesting one lurking in there is Churnalism, which tries to tell you whose press release each newspaper story is copied and pasted from)

As you can see, this morning I disabled them all.

Why?

I noticed that to load my list of datasets on ScraperWiki, a relatively complicated but in modern days not untypical SaaS application, was taking round about 2 seconds (that’s the DOMContentLoaded number in the Network tab of Chrome’s developer tools - actually I use Chromium on a Mac, if that matters).

Skills you need to get product/market fit, all in a line

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:04:21 +0000

When delivering a�new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty,�you need a range of skills.

To help understand what skills are needed in a startup team, I’ve found it useful to think of people’s skills�as being spread out along this line.

Consider people you know, and place them on the line. e.g. A UX designer who�can also code Javascript is maybe somewhere towards the technical end of�product.

How we used email as a customer support system at mySociety

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:08:24 +0000

You’ve seen it. The red eyes… An ennui for life…

The drained sadness of someone who has been lost for weeks in a customer�support ticket tracking system.

At mySociety (the awesome�Internet democracy charity I was on the founding team of) we tried using Request Tracker for a while, and�quickly fled.

We could flee, because we had the comfort of a simple email based system to�return to.

It worked like this:

How to use time-travelling anthropologist pollsters to tell good from evil marketing

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:46:04 +0000

Many British geeks (including me, once) have an instinctive distaste for marketing.

This is wrong - it lets the evil people get all the advantages of marketing. It hides really good and useful products and services from people.

Instead we need a morality to distinguish the good from the bad.�The only definition that I’ve come across - and it’s custom designed for geeks - is as follows (this is courtesy of�Julian Todd):

Tudor time travel - Episode 1 of Crazy theories.txt

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 06:15:44 +0000

Because I work in technology, people are often surprised that I spend 2 weeks a year living in the 16th Century.

The first episode of a new Podcast by�Jonathan Deamer and I explains why.

What is�Kentwell Hall?�Were the Tudors a high technology society? What does it mean to be human? Why do both Jonathan and I have a long file of interesting subjects we never get round to blogging about?

Awesome Foundation - Liverpool Chapter

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:50:39 +0000

There’s not enough awesomeness in the universe.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a lot. But we could do with a bit more.

That’s why we’re lucky that Tim Hwang set up the Awesome Foundation a few years ago. It began in Boston, and has spread to dozens of cities.

How’s it work? 10 trustees pay $100 a month each to fund a $1000 prize. The prizes are awarded to things that 1) Have a purpose, 2) Are on a budget, 3) Create joy.�Things like phones that can make calls�without a base station, flooding a whole city�with swings, or a�stunning weather balloon�to monitor the gulf oil spill. Things like that.

Four ways we'll help WhipCar if they tell us what went wrong

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:36:19 +0000

It’s as if your best friend had suddenly died and nobody would tell you how.

Heart attack? Car crash? Murder?

This time the afflicted isn’t a person, but a startup�called WhipCar.

The idea of WhipCar… Rent your car out for the odd day or weekend to your neighbour to cover its vast cost. Or, if you don’t own a car, rent your neighbour’s car more cheaply and easily than a hire car.

Why did we love the giants coming to town?

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 22:52:18 +0000

Taller than houses, the uncle passes the top of a street in Anfield, Liverpool

Earlier this year, giants came to Liverpool.

I was rapt. Addicted.

Each day I woke my girlfriend early. A morning taxi to see a giant diver wake up near two football stadiums. Forced rushing after a night’s drinking to see what a little giant girl would do next.

Mapping the product/market space - an hallucination

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 06:40:22 +0000

Imagine a vast multi-dimensional space.

Each point of it represents a specific need that a specific person has, an iota of utility.

The dimensions represent crazy things… Is the need in Africa or in Europe? Is the need on a LAN or on the web? Can travel to satisfaction of the need be done by public transport? How much does the need meet each of the basic needs?�Is the need for shelter from the weather? Does satisfaction of the need require the skill of programming?

Heroku's early history: 4 home pages that made $212 million

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:24:00 +0000

I decided to investigate Heroku’s early years.

You can learn a lot from even quite recent tech history (see my previous article on version control).

My tool? The Internet Archive. It’s an elephant that�never forgets�your pivots.

1. November 2007 - code in the cloud

Ruby on Rails is riding high. But impossibly hard to deploy.

Y Combinator startup Heroku’s first home page�(see right - apologies for the lack of images, which archive.org has not recorded) screams onto the web.

Products and markets are the same thing

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 04:59:41 +0000

At�[mySociety](http://www.mysociety.org/)'s annual retreat�I gave a lightning talk about how I've come to realise that products and markets are the same thing. I'd originally intended it to be a blog post, so here you are.

It’s a story of geeks learning. What is a product? It really is magic.

Before the invention of products (whatever that means!) you had to make bespoke things. You want a tool, you have to bash the rocks together to make your own custom tool.

Do epic shit! On being the first friend of DoESLiverpool

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:36:18 +0000

Today’s audio blog is about the excellent DoESLiverpool, and why you should be their friend too.

listen to �Do epic shit� on Audioboo

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On the need for a new profession

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 14:16:08 +0000

Complaining that I have a deluge of interesting things that I never get round to blogging, Neil suggested I use audio instead. Here’s the first one.

listen to �Public Knowledge Gap Filler, a new profession� on Audioboo

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Links to the topics in this audio blog:

Part 2: Why I think PledgeBank failed, when GroupOn and Kickstarter flew

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:08:48 +0000

This is the second part of a series of two posts. Part 1�explains how we came to make PledgeBank, what it does, its similarities to GroupOn and Kickstarter, and how we iterated on the product. It ends asking, “Why did GroupOn and Kickstarter succeed, when PledgeBank failed?” This part gives my answer.

Here’s what I think:

1. Giving up.

In his essay “How not do die”, Paul Graham points out that the real reason startups fail is that the founders give up. They stop changing the product, they stop doing deals.

Part 1: Why did PledgeBank fail when GroupOn and Kickstarter flew?

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:29:01 +0000

“I’ll do X but only if N other people will do Y”

I was abuzz.

A cafe in Holborn. 2003. A secret meeting. James Cronin and Tom Loosemore, who’d made the genius does-what-it-says-on-the-tin FaxYourMP, bought me coffee and changed my world.

Wow, there’s actually other people�who think computers can revolutionise democracy!

And they’ve an amazing top secret, ludicrously ambitious project to repurpose the whole of Hansard to make Parliament easy for the masses.

Newsflash: Geeks now good at usability, everyone else crap

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:35:09 +0000

We really struggled.

We felt guilt. Wracked with pain.

It’s the mid 1990s, and computers are impossibly hard to use.

Anyone who could program them, and who also cared about people, was ashamed.

So we fixed it.

Books�were�published,�websites�launched, a new�profession�was born.

It took a while but many of the key insights from that furore benefit us all every day.

For example, on an iPad, or in Google Docs, you don’t need to remember to press save to not lose your work.

Astonishments, ten, in the history of version control

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:18:32 +0000

“If you really want to … truly ancient history, you have to go back to delta decks on punch cards.” (Jim Rootham)

In a world where [biographies of cod](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World/dp/0099268701)�are not just accepted, but rightly popular, it wouldn't seem entirely crazy to write a history book on how computer programmers store the vital product of their labours - source code.

Since neither you nor I have time to read or write such a thing, we’re going to have to settle on this one blog post.

Why I just joined the Green party

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:54:58 +0000

I’m pretty sure lots of people are going to ask me why I just joined the Green party, so here’s the reasons.

I’ve moved to an area of Liverpool where green is strong - two Green councillors live nearby, there’s a very local organic box delivery, and the main indy co-op food shop has just moved up the road. It’s nicer to be in a party when there is local activity to join in and build on.
Since I’m no longer being paid to work for mySociety, I’m no longer worried about any accidental partisanship being a member of a party might bring. Not that I think you can’t be a good civil servant or work for mySociety if you are a member of a political party, but it requires extra energy. Lack of bias is extremely important for both.
I’m quite worried about Climate Change (and other things). We need to continue to try to both prevent it and to build up our societal resilience to deal with the consequences of it. We can’t do either unless we act in groups, and politics is part of that. More on this another time.
Strategically I think the Greens are where it’s at in Liverpool. Democratically, i.e. to meet the needs and wishes of Liverpudlians,�what Liverpool needs is a (slightly) more “left” party than modern Labour. Every city needs a strong opposition, and the Greens are the best candidate.

Finally, and to be clear, I think the Labour party, Liberal Democrat party and Conservative party are all excellent. I think the recent Labour Government did many good things particularly in its first term, and I think that the Tory/Lib Dem coalition is doing many good things and will continue to do so too.

What's a "startup" and why do I care?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:09:00 +0000

You know when you have those really annoying arguments that turn into disputes about definitions of words? And they end up a tangled mess of pointlessness, and you just don’t want to be there any more?

Well, I’ve just realised that they’re much more important than I thought, but you have to think about them in terms of shared group culture. By which I mean, lack of shared group culture.

Seven facts about the Global Village Construction Kit

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:04:31 +0000

Every now and again a project comes along that could change everything. I’ve been lucky enough this year to come across two of them.

The first I wrote about in Seven facts about Unhosted. It has the potential to decentralised the web again, while simultaneously keeping it just as easy to use and powerful.

Today I’m writing about the Global Village Construction Set. It has the potential to decentralise our industrial society.

We take extraordinary business models for granted

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:28:02 +0000

It’s really easy to get used to business models. As if they were natural things that have always been there.

But actually, all the successful machines that make money were at one point extraordinary - inspired wonder when the first company found them.

Here are some recent examples:

1) Flickr. Invented “freemium” for SaaS on an at all large scale. Before then on the Internet you had to either buy things, or things were free.

Seven facts about Unhosted

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:21:57 +0000

Unhosted is finally the project I’ve been waiting for, that stands a chance of decentralising the web.

It separates application writing from hosting your data. Encryption magic means that neither the writer of the application nor the storer of your data can access your data.

This will empower users, create more competition and boost open source web applications.

I’m sufficiently excited about Unhosted that I decided to tweet once a day about it for a week. Here’s what I said:

Dinosaur media and the Internet both suck, a Booktrust story

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:29:40 +0000

“Government U-turn over book scheme cuts” blares the Independent newspaper today. Apparently the UK Government decided to cut a scheme that gives books to all children last week, and has now changed their mind in order to decide not to cut it.

I don’t have any knowledge, or a particularly strong view, about how we should best encourage people to read as a society.

I do want to use this as an example, a simple and basic one, of how terrible information flow on the Internet is, and on how terrible modern journalism is. By terrible here, I mean just how utterly our society fails at giving the most basic tools for intelligent people to be able to have opinions based on any sort of knowledge or evidence.

Monsters not loony enough

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:35:38 +0000

Looking for some sample data for the election quiz software I’m writing, I naturally went to the Official Monster Raving Loony Party website. The very first policy they list is:

Cool on the outside: To combat global warming and climate change all buildings should be fitted with air conditioning units on the outside. (Source: Monster Raving Loony manifesto proposals)

At first this sounds just funny… Until you realise that we do have a technology that is the same as “air conditioners on the outside”. Indeed, the office building I’m in right now is heated by one. They’re called air source heat pumps (Energy Saving Trust link).

John Redwood is a climate change denier

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:35:19 +0000

I like John Redwood. I started reading his blog in 2006 while I was involved in the Save Parliament campaign, trying to stop the Government pass a Bill whose craziness you’ll have to read about by following the link. John spoke prominently on the Internet and in Parliament against the Bill.

Since then, I’ve seen eye to eye with him on issues such as David Davis’s resignation over civil liberties and the lack of quality in Parliament’s law making process.

Your wildest predictions for 2010

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:23:53 +0000

Someone asked me to think up counterintuitive predictions for the next year - things which might happen, but where it would not be ordinary for them to happen. Things with a hint in the present world of their possibility.

Here’s some, make your own in the comments.

Ordnance Survey will go bust - i.e. their revenue will suddenly fall dramatically (due to competition from OpenStreetMap, Google).
Vince Cable will be Prime Minister (with backing of tabloids, after a hung Parliament coalition Government collapses due to a further financial crisis, and then the formation of a Government of national unity).
Someone will work out how to print photovoltaic solar panels on a device as cheap as a household inkjet printer, shares in all other energy businesses will collapse.
There will be a nuclear war, with a bomb at least as large as Hiroshima used on a civilian population. I don’t know where, because it’ll be somewhere we don’t quite expect.
At least one famous person will lose their job, reputation and spouse due to an affair discovered using reverse face-image recognition on Flickr photos of crowds.

What are your wild predictions for the next year?

Slightly dizzy after 2008

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:26:26 +0000

A year ago, I predicted “2008 to be quite a ride”. What happened?

On holiday, Eddie Izzard’s voice guided me round Wales. As we drove, a box smaller than my hand sang songs by a band that broke up nearly 40 years ago, as if they were in the car.

The same part of the US military which created the Internet funded the rat-sized cortex simulations. Most such projects in 60 years of Artificial Intelligence have come to nothing. I wouldn’t bet on them all, always coming to nothing.

Save our economy from Climate Change

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:30:26 +0000

I’ve written before about how I cherry pick campaigns that are most likely to be successful. You’d have thought that on such a large, difficult subject as climate change and our energy security, it would be impossible to cherry pick.

But it turns out there is a big gaping hole.

Nobody is running a single issue campaign for people across the political spectrum. One to lobby the UK Government to stop climate change destroying our economy and way of life, and at the same time to safeguard our supply of energy.

2008 to be quite a ride

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 23:29:56 +0000

Travelling by car back from relatives yesterday, a woman’s voice, inside a box as small as my hand, knew exactly where we were at all times, and gave my mother detailed directions at every turn.

Earlier this year, a multinational corporation simulated a brain the size of a mouse’s on a supercomputer. This almost interactive simulation will help people learn more about the function of our own cerebral cortex, and hence how our minds work. They are moving on to a rat’s cortex, which is three times larger.

Sometimes there are victories

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 23:06:36 +0000

Some people complain that all the activism, campaigning, trying to change the world for the better never has any affect. In the last year I can think of 4 major victories, all in campaigns I’ve had a small involvement in.

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - I posted about this boring sounding but deadly Bill at the beginning of last year. We had to set up a whole Save Parliament campaign to try and stop it. The Bill was still passed, but was much less dangerous partly because the Government rewrote it under public pressure.

Life

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:36:32 +0000

Three weeks ago my friend and colleague Chris Lightfoot committed suicide. He’d been taking anti-depressants for a long time. My mind flips like a necker cube between loving anger and complete compassion. Anger with anyone for deliberately leaving the privilege of being in this beautiful world. Compassion for the extreme pain that he must have been in, and that I am lucky enough never to have known.

I met Chris originally because he was my new ISP, and because of our shared interest in politics and computers. Tom’s written an excellent post summarising Chris’s achievements in software, politics and policy. He was argumentative, cussed, and super bright. He was loving and affectionate, for the world and his friends.

Restricted shorts and newspaper hagiography

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:47:39 +0000

The unusual short film competition with board games which I was at two weeks ago was fantastic fun. Again, Mark has a bit to say about it. There’s also loads on the Really Restrictive Shorts blog which I wrote some of. Click the “1, 2, 3, 4… next… last…” links right at the bottom of the page to see more. There are photos and videos and so on.

Also today, there’s a good description of mySociety in the Guardian. That’s the, also unusual, charity that I work for. Given we’re anarchically structured, Tom Steinberg clearly can’t be my boss. Instead you could think of him as the person the rest of us delegate fundraising, client management and making sure the accounts balance to. I missed it, but they put me in the week before last talking about PledgeBank.

Short films and long journeys

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 19:22:35 +0000

I’m in Wales, helping out at a most unusual short film competition, with boardgames. I can’t do better than my flatmate Mark at explaining it, so if you want to know what we’re doing read his post on the subject.

Also since writing here last, I’ve spent a while in North America. New York ate all my money. I found the Statue of Liberty surprisingly moving - it’s original purpose, representing real freedom, is important to remember. Toronto was fantastic. I stayed with Martin Crawford, who knows the extensive and fun live music scene like the back of his hand. The food in Toronto is amazing, and the layout of streets with busy tram-field, small shop, main roads, and quiet cross streets of wooden houses all different. Canada really is the best bits of Europe and best bits of America mixed together in one country. I was quite surprised.

Quadruply offset

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 02:56:09 +0000

So, I just bought a return flight from London Heathrow to Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire, cheap short haul flights haven’t got that crazy yet!), leaving the day after tomorrow. This cost a mere £308, which is very cheap. Today is the day the Stern Review came out, which means it was impossible to do anything other than go directly to Climate Care’s website and buy some carbon offsetting. Or think of it as a voluntary aviation fuel tax, whatever.

Sand and clay

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 09:41:22 +0000

For three years now I’ve subscribed irregularly to a box of fruit and vegetables from Cambridge Organic Food Co. On Sunday or Monday, If I’m going to be at home enough later in the week, I leave them an answer phone message. Then on Wednesday afternoon there’s a knock on the door, and a friendly man gives me a crate of freshly selected seasonal goodness. (Photo right is illustrative and actually in New Zealand, it is licensed for free reuse by darren131)

In March the gypsies returned

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 21:13:13 +0000

I have a rule, implied in the text at the top of this page, not just to post links to other stories and websites in this blog. But these crazy American artists are too much fun not to.

“This summer we are building rafts and floating down the Mississippi River. Here’s the plan: We meet in Minneapolis in late July with sections of our raft in tow. We piece together our pontoons and fill them with salvaged blocks of foam. We make it beautiful and tie on anything that floats, adding it to our junk armada, our anarchist county fair, our fools ark. Our precious cargo is everything we hold dear: pieces and parts of the culture we are already creating. Our zines and puppets, sewing projects and poster campaigns. Mutant bicycles and punk rock marching bands. Plus our thoughts and dreams and irrepressible energy. Together we float down the Mississippi river, as far as we can – anchoring here and there to perform, give workshops, and create the big huge spectacle we wished would have stopped in our hometowns. And at each place we invite anyone to contribute performances or workshops of their own.” - Miss Rockaway Armada

Great firewall

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 21:11:55 +0000

China has a new great wall, which blocks parts of the Internet from its citizens. This is partly done by absolute blocks, for example banning the BBC because it has a Chinese language news site. But it is also done by more subtle means - letting the companies who run forums know that they might be shut down if they don’t remove unacceptable posts, but never quite defining what unacceptable is. That way the companies have to err on the side of caution, and require less direct supervision and enforcement.

Four more photos of old Shanghai

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 22:07:02 +0000

(For background, read my posts Chinese family history and Child of the atom bomb first)

In Shanghai, Rosemary and I went to a few more places related to our family history. Shanghai has undergone massive development, knocking down of whole areas, building of new skyscrapers. Amazingly, everywhere we went was still there. A hundred year old colonial buildings, with quite different architectures to those surrounding them. And still used in modern China. It was also great that the guards and porters would let us in. When Rosemary went 20 years ago, all she managed to do was peer from a distance. China is opening up, and relaxing.

Holy mountain

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:33:39 +0000

(Just to explain, I’ve been back from China for a couple of weeks now, but still have blog posts to make about it, which I’m gradually catching up on)

When we were in Chengdu we went on a trip a couple of hours south to Emei Shan. This is where the religious thread of the holiday met the family history one.

My grandmother went on a journey up the Yangtze river to Emei Shan in 1936, with her friend Gracie. She’d been in Shanghai for six years, and in her summer holidays had already visited Peking, the Philippines, Saigon, Angkor, Bangkok, Korea and Japan. So by 1936 there wasn’t much left - they had to go to inland China. At the time, this was a very adventurous thing for two unaccompanied English ladies to do.

Holy island

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 23:19:31 +0000

Even though I’m an atheist, it’s fun and moving to seek out pious people and watching them going about their business. A few years ago I used to do this in the UK via Cambridge Interfaith, who organised such things as a visit to the synagogue on a Friday evening, and a day trip to the Hari Krishna temple George Harrison paid for in Hertfordshire. And I saw lots of religious places with Phil in Burma (see parts of this post and all of this one).

Buried in the sky

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 13:07:34 +0000

Tibetan sky burials sound very odd, exotic, macabre. After being shown a sky burial ground by a native who takes part in them, my mind began to twist round and see them as normal. Just as many Tibetans do - I don’t know figures, but it is widespread. A sky burial goes like this.

The funeral party meets at the house of the deceased and his or her family. They have some sort of a gathering (I’m imagining, similar to an Irish wake). Then the friends and other villagers take the body of the deceased to the sky burial ground. This is a gentle grassy place, a little way up on the edge of a hill just outside the town or village. Close relatives of the dead person stay at home.

Tibetan language

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:34:53 +0000

On the bus from Zoige to Langmusi, I met a girl who for all the world looked Han Chinese, but turned out to be Tibetan. She had reasonable English, and was well turned out in the fashionable way that city Chinese are. She was an accountant in a government-run Tibetan medicine hospital in Zoige, on the way to visit a friend for the day, it being a Sunday.

Two interesting things. Her first language was the Amdo dialect of Tibetan, but she was only taught to read and write in Chinese at school. Now, in her mid 20s, she was finally starting to learn the Tibetan alphabet.

Building a new highway

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 15:28:59 +0000

Everywhere in the People’s Republic of China there is building. In Shanghai, deep foundations of new skyscrapers. In Songpan, new apartments paid for by the government to relocate people from slumy areas. And north of Songpan, a newly upgraded highway across into Gansu province. The only problem is, it isn’t finished yet.

The bus left at about 7am. The first part was easy, and after one last stop to pick up passengers in another small town, we entered the area where they’re rebuilding the road. Rebuilding it, that is, as we drive along it.

Tibet, horses, water prayers

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 07:06:20 +0000

At the moment I’m in Tibet.

No, I don’t mean the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), I mean historic and ethnic Tibet. TAR is the province occupied by China which contains Lhasa, and which we lazily often refer to as “Tibet” in English. Tibet proper also includes all of Qinghai province, and parts of several other Chinese provinces. Tibetan people making a political point refer to themselves as living in Tibet, even if they don’t live in TAR. As a tourist this is good news - it is much easier to visit the non-TAR parts of Tibet, than suffer the complex web of permits and travel restrictions in TAR itself.

Chengdu

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 06:45:53 +0000

If you fall off the eastern edge of the Himalayan mountains, the first major city (population 4.1 million) that you come to is Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province. You’ve heard of it from the spicy Chinese food, called “Szechuan” in the west.

Rosemary and I spent 5 or 6 days based around there. A few of those were visiting a Buddhist holy mountain, and the largest Buddha in the world - I’ll write about them in another post.

Quick post

Mon, 29 May 2006 10:08:43 +0000

Just a quick post to say what’s happening. Rosemary is flying back to Shanghai tomorrow, and then home later in the week. I’m in China for another 10 days, heading tomorrow into Northern Sichuan. I’m writing some more about things we’ve seen in the last week, but won’t put them up until I get some more photographs out of my camera.

Hope in the air

Mon, 29 May 2006 09:48:49 +0000

We took the magical modern teleport from Xi’an to Chengdu. 18 hours in a train a bit too much for Rosemary, and saving a day was useful.

I wandered round the airport looking for an English language newspaper. A shiny glossy building with high ceilings, much nicer than Heathrow. Clear layout and signs, clean toilets. Well, I guess Xi’an is the capital of a province of 38 million people, so I don’t know why I was surprised. But I was.

Warriors or pigs?

Tue, 23 May 2006 23:06:46 +0000

Two emperors, roughly 2000 years ago, supervised the creation of their own burial treasures before they died. One (called Qin Shi Huang) created an entire pottery army, in formation, with infantry, cavalry, chariots, archers and a command section. The other (called in various places Han Jing, Liu Qi, or Jindi, I can’t quite work out his name) created pigs, horses, goats, carts, pots, peasants, managers of food supply and representations of judicial functions. Han Jing the yin to Qin Shi’s yang. Which would you take?

Penguins in Shanghai

Tue, 23 May 2006 15:06:47 +0000

Most people wouldn’t have seen it, but it instantly caught my eye. I saw this (picture left) last week in Shanghai, on the corner of Shaanxi Lu and Huaihai Zhonglu. It’s an animated advertising hording, which as you can see was mostly black with a cartoon Penguin and the words “Welcome to”. The mirror writing gives away that the Pepsi logo is a reflection of a sign opposite, and is only noticeable in my photo. The Penguin wasn’t moving at all.

Shanghai, goodbye

Sat, 20 May 2006 12:38:18 +0000

It's always a bad idea to have expectations. There's been lots of hype about how fast Shanghai is developing - accelerating out of poverty, and into a world class city. And it's true - Rosemary was here 20 years ago, and is amazed that you now can't cross the road without being killed, that everyone is fashionably dressed, rather than in Mao costumes. However, I had higher expectations. This is because I'd [been to Kunming](/2003/03/post-52/), far away provincial capital of Yunnan, and was surprised how developed it was. So I thought Shanghai would be more like Tokyo than Bangkok.

Actually, it is quite dirty. There isn’t the century-long burnt in elegance of a European capital, the clean efficiency of a Japanese megalopolis, or much culture backing the poverty, as in Bangkok. Shanghai has old-style department stores with goods and prices that people don’t want. It has no large open spaces. There are lots of new buildings, but they don’t look like they’ve been built terribly well. The forest of new skyscrapers are (to me - Rosemary liked them) tacky, and the main city is badly laid out.

Child of the atom bomb

Mon, 15 May 2006 11:09:23 +0000

Imagine it’s May 1945, the war in Europe has ended, and the Americans have captured (parts of?) Okinawa, the tropical island in the very south of Japan. Allied air raids are starting over Shanghai.

Your husband has been sent by truck with your belongings, and you are with your two daughters, aged 3 and 6. You’re being marched by Japanese soldiers part of the way from one internment camp to another. You haven’t been out into the streets for over 2 years. You’re probably suspicious, afraid. Where are you really going? Will you continue to be treated tolerably, as you have been the rest of the war? Will you and your family survive?

Chinese family history

Sat, 13 May 2006 13:58:31 +0000

Almost as soon as we got off the plane on Wednesday, Rosemary (my mum) dragged me from the tourist trap of the Bund, into some overcrowded, grimy backstreets hunting for the derelict cathedral where her parents were married and she was christened. The magnetic levitation train from Pudong Airport was great fun - not because it travelled at 431 km/h, the fastest train in the world, but because at some points the earth around us seemed to rotate at what felt like, but could not have been, an unnerving 45 degrees. It turned out that we were tilting, but so exactly as we cornered that you couldn’t feel any force.

東南西北 (DongNanXiBei, EastSouthWestNorth)

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 15:30:59 +0000

A week on Tuesday I’m going to China again. Starting in Shanghai, which is on the East coast in the centre, at the mouth of the Yangtze river. I’m travelling with Rosemary, my mum (who I spent a few weeks with in Japan three years ago; see the last few articles here). We’re going to head for Chengdu, route still to be decided. Email me or post comments if you have suggestions, particularly if you know anybody living in China who could show us around.

Rush hour, six minutes from my window

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:04:52 +0000

A woman with a pink crash helmet baby on the back of her bicycle. A cycling man with a red rucksack. A fast helmeted man overtaking a cute girl, overtaking a pair of friends. Depressed looking woman in a long coat riding away. Sporty man talking on his mobile cycling to my right. Two friendly small-backpackers with short (but below knee) trousers. A green sports utility vehicle. A man in a yellow flourescent jacket, with a pannier. Another fluorescent jacket, but helmeted, and this time with sunglasses. A peroxide blonde. A couple of indistinct people. A girl in a bright purple top, and shorts. Long haired guy, cycling, must play jazz. A family, with two little girls, walking (first walkers for a while). A tough, young, bearded, fun, australian like guy with a green rucksack. Somebody with a small plastic carrier bag hanging of their handle bars. Two friends (sisters?) one younger than the other. A black coat, rucksacked man man pushing his bicycle, accompanied by a jolly grey coated woman. Fluorescent yellow bicycle clips. A chinese girl, in technical trousers. A besuited asian carrying one end of a metal ladder, the other end a short blonde white girl. A rush of eight cyclists of all types, in one direction. A couple of walkers. A cycling girl the other way, in a super green checked coat. Three girl friends in trendy clothes.

Who is your birth Lord?

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 16:02:41 +0000

OK, your mission for today, should you choose to accept it, is to find out who your birth Lord is. This is a special mission. My birth Lord is Richard Rogers of Riverside (biography, Parliamentary record). He was born on the same day at the end of July as me. He’s a famous architect, responsible for the Pompidou Centre (picture right). More recently his career has flopped, as he designed the Millennium Dome! He’s in the Labour party, doesn’t vote much, and has once or twice rebelled on Terrorism. He sticks to his special skills when talking in Parliament, always on subjects like planning and urban renewal. I’ve written him a polite letter to find out his views on the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. Instructions for finding your own birth Lord:

Four unusual hobbies

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 21:13:01 +0000

A while ago, over a period of a few months, I happened to come across a whole set of activities which are quite different from the normal day to day of society. It’s difficult to describe what they have in common, so I’ll tell you about them first, and try to explain it after.

Urban Exploring

Spelunking is historically done in natural caves, but those all seem a bit prissy and green to these modern city people. Instead they break into ruined hospitals, brave university steam tunnels, explore abandoned sea forts and numerous other places.

Think of a website

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:03:07 +0000

The Internet is getting on now - it’s about ten years since significant numbers of people started getting access from home. I meet students who’ve had access to search engines through all their teenage years. My own childhood looks like a drought of information in retrospect. I remember sucking in monthly magazines and books, writing to university friends of my brothers to get vital data. Now they can just Google.

Save what?

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:33:03 +0000

This is an impossibly hard subject to introduce. It’s easy enough to explain why you want to save whales or children, even if it is very hard to actually save them. But why would anybody want to save “Parliament”? A talking shop for corrupt politicians, no?

Unfortunately, if you don’t save it, then you’re left with something even worse. Government, and ministers. Watch a few episodes of The Thick of It to convince yourself how bad that would be.

Surrounded by miracles

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 01:06:50 +0000

On Christmas day I broke my collarbone (clavicule). Inattention on some ice in the street in Switzerland, and I fell before realising I was falling. I don’t know how I landed, as my body instinctively leapt up and sat against a shop window away from the street for safety. Clever thing, the human body.

A Frenchman came and asked me if I wanted a doctor (luckily basic French doesn’t disappear with injury). I thought I was just winded, but then realised I couldn’t lift up my arm. He kindly gave me a lift to the surgery and an efficient medical system filled me with morphine and gave me a sling. (Paid for later via the European Health Insurance Card which luckily Rosemary had told me to get earlier in the year. Apply for yours online).

Thrown out of Freedom of Expression seminar

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:04:32 +0000

(Actually, I wasn’t thrown out, but that made the best title, read on)

So, I’m alone at a book industry trade fair in the colossal ExCel centre in London’s docklands, wearing a suit on top of a Campaign Against the Arms (CAAT) T-shirt, and carrying a bag of subversive anti-Reed Elsevier literature. (See previous post for why).

It’s late in the afternoon, and everyone on the stands is much more chilled out than they were earlier. They have lots of little tables you can go and sit at, and chat casually about how many of next week’s bestseller you want to order, or get quotes for printing your books in India. They don’t have many customers now, the stall holders are mainly sitting and nattering to each other.

Selling books and guns

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 00:43:46 +0000

It’s a bit of a strange campaign, but luckily nobody seems to notice.

If you knew someone who ran a bookshop, and later you discovered that he also owned a gunshop down the road, what would you do? Stop using the bookshop? And what if you knew the gunshop was used lots by local criminals, and not just for gun sports? And would you try to get your friends to boycott the bookshop as well?

Checking up on your goals

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:59:09 +0000

Julian and I made an entertaining list of goals, and now I’m going to check back on how we did. We made them in mid-2003, just after discovering that Public Whip was an idea that might just take off. Amazingly, we’ve actually accomplished some of them, although many are left still to do.

Visit the House of Commons, have a tour by a clerk. Success. We’ve got a few contacts in Parliament now (although see below), and I’ve even had high tea in the famous members tea room.

Appear on the Today programme. Success. Well OK, not quite. It was Today in Parliament, but probably a more substantial and useful discussion than could be had on the Today programme.

Companies with unusual structures

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:46:14 +0000

Here are some companies which are large and successful, but have either a non-hierarchical management structure, or an unusual pattern of ownership. Not everything profitable is stock market listed with an all-powerful CEO.

Ocean Spray may at first glance look like a huge top-down Coca-Cola-but-for-juice corporation. But it’s not, it’s a co-operative owned by 650 cranberry farmers.
Gore & Associates (of GORE-TEX fabric fame) have associates rather than employees. There’s no chain of command, nobody has a job title, there’s no office-ghetto for sales separate from research.When a product group gets too large (above 150?) it splits into two.

Moving house

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 12:54:28 +0000

The main disadvantage of renting property is that you can’t control things if your landlord decides to sell it. In the long term, I feel like there should be something clever halfway between renting and leasehold which gives you more rights over the freeholder. But until somebody works out what that is, I suggest getting a landlord who lets you move with him!

Today is completion day, although at what time it completes I’m not quite sure. House buying is much more ephemeral than I thought, with solicitors talking by telephone. I always imagined exchanging contracts would be round a table in a smoke-filled room. As you can see from the photo, I’m sitting on the floor of the large new living room, which is filled with all my and Mark’s worldly possessions.

School without rules

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:12:22 +0000

Imagine a school with a set of complicated rules. It’s an old school, very old. About 1000 years. Numerous head teachers have modified the rules over time - banning running in corridors, or creating tort for pencil poking. Occasionally the deputy head of timetabling thinks they are getting a bit complicated, and simplifies them a little. But this doesn’t keep up at all with advances in technology - new rules about smart whiteboards, PFI and computer hacking. So it gets harder and harder to understand all the rules as time goes on.

Usability errors in Google

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 10:05:08 +0000

By and large, all of Google’s services are astonishingly usable. That is, both people who are comfortable with computers, and those who are new to them, find the interface clean, fast, and understand how to use it. Recently I’ve become aware of two major flaws, which are both enlightening.

You can drag Google maps to scroll the map around. i.e. Press and hold the mouse down on the map, and then move the mouse around, and the map moves, as if you were sliding it about on a table. Everyone talked about this in blog posts when Google first came out, so all the techy people and Google watchers know that it is the main advance above older internet mapping services. But it isn’t obvious the first time you go to Google maps that you can do this. Solution: They need to add arrows on the edge of the map. Much as it will ruin the clean design, at the moment most users probably find it worse than multimap. I can’t think of a way to help people discover that they can drag the map, except putting some text below it, which hardly anyone will read.
What does Froogle mean? On the front page of Google, with a prominent “new!” flash next to it, is a button saying “Froogle”. It isn’t at all obvious that this is a price comparison service. It’s the most brilliant pun ever (the only other common word that rhymes with Google is “bugel”, apart from “frugal”). So when I first read about it on some technology website, I remembered it because of this cleverness. Solution: Rename it to Google Shopping, or Google Prices. Their traffic will immediately jump, as at the moment it is impossible to discover Google have a price comparison service.

OK, now can I have my cut of the millions of dollars in advertising revenue the above two suggestions are worth, please?

Working for your self

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:21:48 +0000

So today, I’m filling in my self-employed tax return for the last tax year. I’ve never used the website for doing this before, and in general I’m quite impressed. However, it had two simple but major usability flaws, both of which nearly stopped me using the service at all.

The address gateway.gov.uk doesn’t work at all, it gives an error. You have to remember to type in the www, as in www.gateway.gov.uk. Luckily, a friend figured this out for me.
When you’ve registered with the gateway, it doesn’t tell you what to do next to get to the form. There is no link from the gateway, even though it lists that you are enrolled for self-assessment online. You have to go to hmrc.gov.uk and log in using the gateway user id and password. I had to ring a customer support helpline to find this out.

There are lessons here in both attention to detail, and in how large corporate bodies can make fatal mistakes. Apparently there used to be a link from the gateway to the HMRC form, but someone got rid of it. The only reason I can imagine for this is some internal bureaucracy failure caused because the gateway is run by different people to the tax office. But who knows.

Don't be evil

Fri, 27 May 2005 15:40:30 +0000

It’s getting on for a year ago that I posted about organic bodies, and the quest for a form of incorporation that I actually like. One that lets you organise a group of people, is efficient and agile enough to compete with for-profit companies, but which doesn’t sell out the world down the line. A form of incorporation which you could use to start a Google, that would enable it to grow just as large, but with a guarantee of “don’t be evil” that a stock-listed corporation could never have.

Suriname with engineers

Sun, 15 May 2005 21:43:25 +0000

“I will give 10 pounds towards the 500 pounds needed for Engineers Without Borders UK’s project in Suriname but only if 49 other people will too.”

What were your first, and subsequent reactions on seeing the sentence/link above?
If you followed the link, what was your first rection to the page?
Could you understand the page? In particular, describe any false lines of understanding which the page layout or text led you down before you understood it.

I’m going to pretend this is a “usability study” by asking you the above follow up questions (you may think I really just want you to sign up and if we succeed to give money, but actually I want to improve PledgeBank as well). Do answer in the comments, or if you like by email…

Vote based on a quiz

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 11:25:18 +0000

There are lots of different approaches to deciding how to vote, and to the power relation between politicans and you. Here is a list of them (courtesy of Arthur Edwards in Holland, who studies these things). Excuse the posh names for them, just pretend we’re in a university for a paragraph or two.

Promissory - Voter judges representative on how well they carried out their promises (made in manifesto before last election)
Anticipatory - Representative acts in a way that he hopes the voter likes, so he is voted for at next election. This opens up the possibility of the representative changing the voters mind.
Gyroscopic - Based on character, the voter selects an MP from a background, with a biography, that he believes they are likely to act well.
Surrogate - Representation by somebody you can’t elect. e.g. A congressman who represents all gays.

Of course our beautiful ad-hoc British democratic system flitters shiftily between these categories. And all the crazy kids who spit out new websites faster than you can keep up, have produced lots of ways for you to work out how to vote.

Yawn

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:13:35 +0000

I just can’t be bothered to vote. Or even to tell the world why I can’t be bothered to vote.

Thanks to Sam and Matthew B for building such a great site. It is mySociety’s first one that was made entirely by volunteers. It’s nice to launch a whole website when all I had to do was configure the web server and write a deploy script :)

How your MP voted on important issues

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 08:31:35 +0000

Soon you’re going to have to vote for a new MP, so it seems fitting to have a quick look at how your last one voted on your behalf. For example, my MP Anne Campbell voted:

Very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.
Moderately for introducing student top-up fees.
Quite strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.
A mixture of for and against the Iraq war.
Moderately for introducing ID cards.
Very strongly for the fox hunting ban.
Very strongly for equal gay rights.

To have a look at your own, stick your postcode in to TheyWorkForYou.com. This is all done by taking a monstrous slice of Public Whip and barbarically simplifying it into TheyWorkForYou. Pass it on.

Say "Hello"

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:17:00 +0000

Finally bowing to modern two-way communication, I’ve enabled comments for this blog. To add your own thoughts to one of my posts, click on the little link which says “No comments” (or the number of comments that there are). And fill in the form. Please say “Hello” now to check it works!

If you get the email subscription to this, note that I’ve migrated it from Yahoo Groups to the new blogging software I’m using. Let me know if this email is or isn’t working, or doesn’t look right. I’ll post to the Yahoo Group soon, and then shut it down if everything is fine.

Found this week in Bristol election leaflet

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 09:38:30 +0000

This is the sort of thing Julian was after when he thought up Public Whip…

Love letter to democracy

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 10:52:46 +0000

Today we’ve launched our first finished mySociety project. It’s called WriteToThem and it performs magic. OK, not quite magic, but some things which haven’t been done before. Go on, try it out:

Enter your postcode.
- Find out all of your elected representatives.
  - And then easily send them a letter.

I’m betting you didn’t know who your local councillors or your MEPs were before, never mind had such a convenient way of contacting them.

Fifty springs are little room

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:23:55 +0000

This afternoon it was sunny, and I went out to look at the crocuses near the back of St John’s and Trinity colleges. They’re roughly here on a map. Every spring I wait for them to magically appear, the first magnificent sweep of flowers, they make the eyes glow to stare at them. Today there was even a bee happily buzzing between them, as if in a childrens’ book. You can kneel down and peer, but no amount of biology will resolve the flowers’ mystery.

A High Indignity

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 17:51:27 +0000

“Which MPs are the most assiduous, the most expensive, the most inquisitive, and even the most revolting?” Last night Stef and I were on “Today in Parliament”, Radio 4 talking about TheyWorkForYou.com and Public Whip. Rather than explaining further, you can just listen to it. The item starts 9 mins 15 seconds into the programme. Be quick though, BBC Listen Again only keeps it up for a week.

Bindery and Conservation

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 14:04:39 +0000

On Wednesday a couple of friends who work at the Cambridge University Library showed me round. The only bit I took notes on was the book conservation section and the bindery. The UL is a copyright library, so gets all books printed in the UK for free, and it also buys foreign books and pamphlets. In total over 120,000 new books arrive every year. Some of these are lent out, and many of those have to be rebound to be strong enough. As well as all these new books, they also have lots of very old ones.

Google is Your Menu

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 22:11:56 +0000

Last week, some of us finally made Directionlessgov.com, a search engine as your interface to the UK government. Have a go, it’s actually quite useful. It’s a bit of an in-joke, but makes a simple point well; these days everyone finds everything by Google. Normal people don’t go to fat, carefully crafted “web portals” like Directgov.

I saw this myself yesterday when my Mum was trying to give towards relief after the Tsunami. At the time the appeal website wasn’t yet up, and she searched for all sorts of things on Google, none of which got anywhere. In the end going to Oxfam’s home page first, then following the prominant link, worked well. But it was far harder than it should have been.

How many people will you influence this afternoon?

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 11:31:09 +0000

There’s one strange thing which makes the job of writing software quite unlike any other sort of artisan. You can finely craft something just once, yet thousands, even millions of people end up using it.

Four years ago, I spent maybe ten evenings making the first version of a useful tool that I wanted myself. And then the occasional evening every few weeks for the next two years improving it. Ever so slightly obsessive, but not compared to the amateur mechanic who spends all summer in the garage building a kit car.

Last Two Days at Burning Man

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:31:53 +0000

(Third and final part of a series. It’ll make more sense if you read First Two Days at Burning Man and Middle Two Days at Burning Man first. And What is Burning Man? if it’s still puzzling. The photo to the right is of the polyps I found in the desert on Friday. The photo below of the viewing platform in Illumination Village.)

Saturday

Shower queue, long now. Ice cream while waiting.
Repainted green, another two coats.
Burning man - paniced prepare
it was an art car rally!
standing on my shoulders to get better view- Group party hopping
spinning thing to sit on
fell asleep everywhere
braziers warm- Dawn

Sunday

mySociety Job

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 11:21:08 +0000

The charity that I work for (“shadowy social-software funders mySociety” as we were described in NTK) are hiring. We’re looking for someone to make all the websites we’re building as easy to use as possible, as well as look good. Or as the job advert says, “Strong PHP experience” and “Fanatical obsession with usability”. Please tell anybody you know who might fit this description, and post to relevant mailing lists.

Middle Two Days at Burning Man

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 00:37:26 +0000

(This is a continuation of my earlier post First Two Days at Burning Man. The shoddy photo to the right is of illumination village where we stayed, our camp is just behind the big yellow shade structure at the front left. The thing on the right is the pink pleasure palace.)

Thursday

Ice run with Serena
Stairway to Hairven girl in queue, taking a snip of everyone’s hair
Playa beautiful- Trying to find people, fail and get lost
Suburban BRC, not the nicest place to be
Clara visits- Greek salad, and emotionally overwhelmed while eating barbecued chicken
- Troll trip, set out looking for fancy dress clothes
Questionnaire in the dust storm at a table
Body sprayed (2 coats)
Post office, woman with stilts went inside it (didn’t really fit)
Delivered mail in dust storm, green post troll, went to three places:
- Bouncy Bouncy Club
- Heavenly something bar
- Wagasomething place, camp further round 7 o’clock
Took ages as given lots of drinks.
Back home, flag building- Wondering neighbourhood
Climbing small scaffold
Talking to Kate by caravan, Geena in truck
Blacklight theatre- Dinner
at Serena’s brothers, hippies
Back to illumination village propane music, firey hat etc.
Burning mini-temple, atmosphere felt like Nov 5th bonfire night
Cycling round playa, mad light view near man
Back to lost penguin

Friday

Your and my society

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 19:21:40 +0000

The last week or two I’ve started working for mySociety, a new charity which builds websites which are civically useful. We’ve got funding indirectly from ODPM (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) to build five interesting projects.

First up is Fax Your Representative (working title) which is an updated version of FaxYourMP. You enter your postcode to find out who all your elected representatives are at different levels of government, and their areas of responsibility. Then you can easily send your District Councillor, Welsh Assembly Member, London Assembly Member, County Councillor or whoever an email or fax. And you have a clue for the first time who they all are, previously very hard information to find out.

First Two Days at Burning Man

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 10:46:21 +0000

It’s hard to give a good feel for what Burning Man was like, since so much happens so quickly. Every line below is just a passing incident. Yet if it happened to you on a normal day, it’d be worth ringing up your best friend to tell them about it.

Each morning, after breakfast, I tried to write down every notable thing I’d seen the day before. I’m posting them up largely unedited, so it may not make sense, but should give you an impression. Here are the first two days.

Californian Cities

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:21:18 +0000

I’m back in San Francisco after a road trip all the way down to San Diego. I’m flying back to Europe later today, so it’s time to post some impressions of America.

California is itself quite diverse, and no doubt the rest of the US is even more so. When I arrived here, I was surprised how roughly cut it felt. San Francisco feels most like a Latin American country, curiously the most similar feeling place I’ve been to before is Cuba. Of course, San Francisco is much richer, but it lacks glitz. The road surfaces are imperfectly maintained. There don’t seem to be any shops because their hoardings are so modest. No glaring neon adverts, or bright bold colours advertising their windows.

What is Burning Man?

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 18:51:28 +0000

It’s clearly an arts festival. Crazy large scale modern art, sitting on the beautiful stark canvas of the Nevada desert. Grant funded mechanical theatre. On the first evening, we were taken to these twenty-odd sculpted divers hanging from a mechanical wheel (photo right). James and I raced round to the powering cycles on the other side, and managed to get it spinning, a strobe light flashing every frame. Not fast enough. A few days later someone had hooked a motorbike up, it rotated smoothly and the diving-man sculptures leapt one after another into the desert. Walking round the playa and the camps, you’d stumble upon things this good everywhere.

Land of the Free

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 23:38:00 +0000

Tomorrow I’m going to the US for the first time. I’ve saved it up, mainly because I’ve been more interested in going to countries which contrast more with my own. Many who have been tell me I’ll be unnerved, confused, by American culture. Shocked. But somehow I can’t quite believe them, I expect it to feel a bit like home.

There’s an interesting bit in the introduction to Lonely Planet guides to Britain. It says that for Australian/American/Canadian (and even Malaysian/Indian/Burmese) backpackers, a trip to what was once their imperial mother (or slave-driver) is always an emotional occasion. Like it or not, I’m part of imperial America, and it’s no surprise that I partly have the same feeling.

Moved House

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 19:04:41 +0000

I’ve finally settled into my new house, which means I’ve cleaned my bedroom window so I can see peoples feet more clearly as they walk past. After living for five years in a pre-gentrified old-industrial area of Cambridge, Portugal Place where I am now seems very busy.

Although many tourists do walk past, not many find this narrow pedestrian place. Unfortunately, if you head up to the main road it doesn’t feel very real and full of community. More like Cambridge the theme park. But going the other way there are quiet streets, Jesus Green park, and easy access to the cafes on King Street.

Organic Bodies

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 23:19:17 +0000

Did you know, you can make completely new people? Extra special people. They have super powers. They can split apart into multiple new people, or fuse together back into one. You can destroy them and nobody feels any pain, but sometimes they can live almost forever. All without the hard work of having a baby.

Most importantly, in many circumstances, you can use them as super shields. If you’re about to get sued, you can hold up one of these magic people, and let them get obliterated on your behalf. You emerge unscathed, and the person won’t complain or even exist any more. All perfectly legal, and you won’t even feel guilty.

Two Immodest Events

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 12:44:30 +0000

Even if a website isn’t yet as useful as it should be, sometimes it attracts attention and excitement. On Thursday, Julian and I were presented with an award for The Public Whip. It’s the winner of the “Civic Renewal” category for the New Statesman New Media awards. There are photos. Partly this was a good excuse for the New Statesman to get sponsorship for their summer party, which was great fun.

The week before, a few of us involved in Downing Street Says went to visit Number 10. Again, there is a photo. 10 Downing Street is much less like a home and much more like an office block than I expected. Albeit, an office block with beautiful paintings, carpets and furniture that you normally find in the Victoria and Albert museum. No, we didn’t meet the Prime Minister, lots of other people work at Number 10. We were meeting those who make the PM’s website.

They Work for You

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 18:23:14 +0000

Political engagement, it’s a struggle. It’s summer, the beer is fine, and house prices haven’t fallen for over ten years. Too busy being taught how to decorate by the latest television programme, why should anyone be bothered with politics?

Imagine a manager who never came into work. A boss who never even rang you up to ask you what you were doing. How hard would you slave away if he was always off walking in the countryside? If he still paid you your salary no matter what you did?

Tension Between Information and Action

Wed, 26 May 2004 01:44:13 +0000

I have some interesting scrawled notes from a train conversation with Richard earlier today. He was talking about software engineering management (don’t go away, I’m going to relate it to other things in a moment), and how there is a scale upon which you can slide too far one way and things go wrong. This is about varying how much managers tell their staff about what is happening:

Insufficient information given to workers < ———-> Too much information given to workers

Stopping Me Make Toast

Fri, 14 May 2004 19:03:14 +0000

Imagine that someone owned a patent giving them the exlusive right to know how to make a piece of toast, or how to lock a front door. Everytime you did one of these simple actions, you risk being sued and forced to pay huge damages for patent violation. In the world of software developers, this absurd situation is about to become a reality.

Public Whip is “suspending services” for a few days, while the EU Council of Ministers is taking an important decision on software patents. If the directive in question is passed, it will make it very hard for small businesses to make software, and will make it risky for people like me to make websites like The Public Whip.

Comment on the Prime Minister

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 02:29:54 +0000

The media is an interesting and double edged sword. Newspapers and TV can act for freedom and democracy, unearthing problems in government, championing what the common man would do himself (if he had the time and the contacts). On the other hand, they can be a divisive barrier, splitting us apart from our elected representatives, devaluing politics into gossip and invented entertainment.

Here’s something a bit different. It’s a project I’ve been working on in my spare time the last couple of weeks, and it’s been launched tomorrow. Downing Street Says is an easy way to read what the Prime Minister has said about the issues of the day. And - the twist - anyone can comment on what he is saying. In some ways this bypasses the media, but we’re hoping that it will also empower them by providing juicy source material.

Independent Story

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 20:07:53 +0000

Exciting national media fame. Yesterday, the Independent newspaper printed a story about MP voting records (view it now before the Indy charge you for it next week). It’s entirely based on data from Public Whip. I made them a special report of the voting record for the 2002-2003 parliamentary session. You can find the full figures in an unlinked page on the Public Whip site.

Public Whip Newsletter

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 14:17:50 +0000

Some of my blogging energy has been siphoned off into an irregular newsletter for Public Whip, the MP voting website that I do with Julian. I just sent out the second issue. You can read it here. You might want to sign up if you like what you see.

Fun Flea Game

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 21:36:42 +0000

This week we released the game that I’ve been working on. It’s called FleaFall, and it rocks.

Try it out!

Naturally, now comes the job of marketing. You don’t understand capitalism until you’ve had a go yourself.

Most of us are quite isolated in corners of a hierarchy somewhere. We’re not really sure what the organisation we work for is doing or why. I could never get to the bottom of what was happening at Creature Labs over the last couple of years, and there were only 50 people there to analyse. Once I even went to visit the CFO to ask him who owned the company, how, on what basis and for whom decisions were made. The answer had little connection to the impenetrably complex political reality. Luckily I’ve never had to find out how it feels in a multinational corporation.

Sarajevo to London

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 01:46:23 +0000

Sarajevo (first photo) was absolutely astonishing. I arrived unknowningly some way out of town at an eastern bus station, and was amazed by the taxi ride through what seemed like a teaming metropolis. I’d expected it to be rundown and wartorn, but by night it was a thriving European capital. After leaving my luggage at the private room I was staying in, I walked round the town to find somewhere to have dinner. I stumbled upon the most beautiful mosque (Gazi Husref-Bey). The courtyard was tranquil, with a few people sitting about in quiet contemplation.

Albania to Montenegro

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 20:11:02 +0000

I quickly visited the ancient ruins of Butrint in the south-west, which were a bit disappointing. Tirana, the capital of Albania, was even more so. I arrived too near sunset, with the guidebooks both warning you to be careful going out at night, at least in the suburbs. In a rush, I found a decent hotel and then went out to buy a newspaper and get some food.

Shortly after leaving the Tirana International Hotel, where I had bought the Guardian in order to read about Tony Blair’s testimony to the Hutton inquiry, a man started talking to me in Albanian on some pretext. I replied in English, and he looked all surprised, and flatteringly said back also in high-quality English that he had thought I was Albanian. He muttered something about the world service, and then started chatting to me. He was a teacher.

Gjirokastra

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 19:01:45 +0000

Land borders are always fascinating places, and the one between Greece and Albania was no exception. The bus services are awkward or non-existent to border posts in this part of the world, so you have to hire a taxi to drop you off there.

After crossing the Greek checkpoint on foot there was a long stretch of no-man’s-road divided by a tall wire fence. Alone, I trudged my way up it towards the Albanian border post. Twenty or so Albanian men were hanging out there slouching by the road, shouting out names of places as I past. It was creepy. Usually borders are bustling places full of local trade, people too busy crossing over to do business for them to even notice me. I said I wanted a lift to Gjirokastra, and somebody called to his friend on the other side of the wire. He slipped through a small hole, and became my next driver. So much for the border controls - it would be easy to smuggle anything into Albania through that hole, and I don’t have much faith that the guards were watching it.

Meteora

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 17:48:45 +0000

Just a quick post, as internet access is expensive here. Or at least it feels expensive as you have to put coins in a slot. I’m in Kalambaka towards the north of Greece. The attraction here are the impressive Meteora, huge pillars of rock topped by 14th century monastries.

The Byzantine empire was collapsing, and as the surrounding lands became more dangerous the monks fled further upwards. They used retractable ladders and windlasses to climb to their retreats; now you can go by bus on a tarmac road, and climb steps hewn into the rock. I took the much more enjoyable route on foot, which involved scaling winding paths through the trees between the rocks, suddenly to emerge next to huge greek coach parties and stalls selling refreshing water and slightly dodgy spinach pies.

Big Fat Greek Wedding

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 17:46:49 +0000

I’m in Greece after going to Tim and Xenya’s wedding at the weekend. It was good fun, great to stay for a while with lots of my university friends. The service was at a tiny chapel on the coastline just north-east of Athens. The congregation could never have fitted in the chapel, which was just about big enough to contain the legal paperwork for signing. So the wedding was outdoors, which feels splendid. Bright summer sun, cool blue water, the stark white paint on the chapel building. The ceremony was held in ancient Greek, with chanting and singing. It was restful, both upbeat yet serious at the same time.

Burning Punts

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 00:35:13 +0000

Photos courtesy of Ben, who spent the evening taking zillions of snaps. Thank you!

On Saturday I went to a curious and quasi-pagan event at Granchester. Some Trinity puntspeople had the desire to dispose of an old warn out punt. I got there quite early with some friends and spent a while drinking beer, walking up and down the river waiting for the punts to arrive, watching the sunset. There were couples lighting barbecues along the bank, and even someone camping. Eventually a small flotilla turned up, packed with people from the smaller punting companies and syndicates. And petrol.

Current Projects

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 17:07:50 +0000

Hello! It’s time for an update on what I’ve been up to. I’m working on two projects at the moment.

The first one is the Public Whip, a website which analyses the voting record of MPs in the House of Commons. It was Julian’s idea to do it. There’s some nasty backend code which extracts information from the Hansard transcripts online and puts it into a database. We then run various statistical analyses off this, and present the results as a web page.

Japanese Charities

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 11:31:54 +0000

In Tokyo in May, I went to visit people from two different development charities. They were both Christian charities because the contact that I found them through was Christian. However there isn’t a strong secular philanthropic tradition in Japan, as people are more inclined to let the government do everything.

Keep in mind that although these notes have come from Japanese people, they are quite Christian and American points of view. They may be unbalanced.

Back in Cambridge

Tue, 27 May 2003 20:43:04 +0000

I’m back in Cambridge now, and I’m likely to post less frequently here for a while.

For the first couple of days after I got back, I inevitably examined my country with a tourist’s eye. The diversity of people on the London underground was really striking and astonishing. In Japan nearly everyone is ethnically Japanese. In London you’ll see tall African men in fun hats, small Chinese ladies quietly reading. Even the white people are incredibly diverse, short and fat, tall and thin, faces of all different shapes and sizes.

Island Nation off the Edge of Eurasia

Fri, 23 May 2003 11:20:59 +0000

Last week I flew right across the largest landmass in the world, taking what those of us who spend too much time with maps and too little with globes would consider to be a surprising shortcut across Siberia. I’ve always had an affection for the next country that I’m visiting, although I admit to being somewhat confused by its name. Can’t they make up their mind whether it is called Britain, or the United Kingdom, or Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or England, or what? In most countries people refer to it with a local pronunciation of the word “England”, but I think in Ghana this confused people and it was called UK. Quite what the Welsh think about this, I don’t know.

Future Technology

Thu, 15 May 2003 10:39:06 +0000

Living in Japan isn’t quite as futuristic as you might have hoped, perhaps Europe has been catching up the last few years as the Asian tiger economies have crumbled. However there are lots of interesting innovations to spot.

Rotating seats on trains. At the terminal station the train pulls in, the doors on the other side open and everyone piles out. Just as you’re wondering if you’re on the wrong platform, the doors close, all the seats magically rotate to face the other way, and the doors on your side open to let you in. I was gobsmacked. OK, I’ve only seen this level of efficiency once - Japanese trains do vary in quality a fair bit. But a manual seat rotating lever is standard fair, so everyone can always sit facing forwards.
Electric map on underground trains. A light shows where you are, which direction you’re going in, and which station is next. When you are about to pull into a station, a light flashes on the side of the carriage that will open up. I’ve also seen a more sophisticated system on an overground train - it had a full computer screen, with not only a map of the line, and text in English, Japanese (both Kanji and Hiragana), but also at each station a map of the platform telling you exactly where the escalators are relative to your carriage.
Automatic taxi doors. Unfortunately not high tech ones that lift up Back to the Future style, but a cunning little metal arm that can open or close the rear, pavement-side door. It’s ferocious, and you always worry that you’ll get your foot caught in it.
Infra-red soap dispensors. Even in England we’ve started to get used to automatic taps, those hygenic and water saving things that turn on when you put your hands under them. In Japan this is occasionally taken one step further, with a second infrared device that dispenses liquid soap when you put your hands under it. If only they could figure out a decent hand dryer, they all suck.
Electric toilets. You’ve no doubt seen these on TV programmes about Japan. We may have invented the western style toilet, but only the Japanese decided that it has to have a heated seat in winter, and that the lack of a built in bidet would be atrociously unhygenic… When the bidet spray doesn’t miss these are simply the best toilets in the world, but I still think the Burmese/Thai nozzle hoses are a better compromise of complexity, cost and utility.
Cameras in your phone. If it hasn’t caught on already, prepare yourself for this in Britain over the next year. Sometimes I felt almost embarrassed to have a merely ordinary digital camera, which couldn’t instantaneously beam pictures of tourist sites to my friends across the world. A school girl on a train admired my blue eyes (really they’re off-grey, but in a society where all eyes are brown and all hair is black, caucasian variety is loved), took a photo of me with her phone, and then I daren’t think who it was sent to…

One Day Using Only Vending Machines

Thu, 15 May 2003 10:08:13 +0000

This morning on my way out of the hotel I noticed it was raining. The Japanese love umbrellas, and wouldn’t be seen dead in a waterproof coat except when hiking in the mountains. For a 500 yen coin (between two and three quid) I bought an umbrella from the, yes!, umbrella dispensor in the lobby.

Earlier in the week I was outside an electronics store and spotted an amazing machine for creating digital photos. For 50 yen a piece, you could pop in any sort of digital media card, select the photos you want from the screen, and print them out within a minute.

Hitchhiking to Christ's Grave

Thu, 08 May 2003 14:26:25 +0000

When I was a child there was only one thing considered more dangerous than taking sweets off strangers. It’s so ingrained in me by the ambient protection of society not to hitch hike that I have never even considered doing it. All sorts of unclarified bad things might happen. For example, people might have conversations with other people that they didn’t know already, or (gasp!) who belong to a different social class. Perhaps, like in China, people might learn to start paying each other for lifts, thus creating a more efficient and more capitalist transport economy, with the added side effect of being better for the environment. The consequences both for society, and in increasing everyones standard of living, could have no end of positive implications.

Concrete Electricity Pole

Thu, 08 May 2003 14:10:46 +0000

Now I can finally reveal the goal of all my travelling, the destination which I’ve been striving for all these long, last five months. In Hakodate at the end of last week Rosemary and I finally made it to this technological mecca. For you to fully understand I will first explain some background.

Many people don’t appreciate the ugly aspects of the industrial infrastucture which enmeshes us, providing all the comforts which those able to read this have. It’s easy to stand on a once beautiful coastline and bemoan the oppressive lines of the new nuclear power station, or to look out from our efficiently built low price flat and complain about the aesthetics of the identical apartment building across the road. If you use electricity, what right do you have to complain about how it is generated? If you wear clothes mass produced by light factories, then what right do you have to lament their grim facia?

Inland Sea and Hiroshima

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 13:54:51 +0000

It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. - President Truman, announcement on Hiroshima

Japan has a sea with no waves, where only narrow connections to the vast Pacific add salt and stop us calling it a lake. It’s an enchanting place, the distinctive shape of the islands a familiar romantic myth from much Japanese art. Rosemary and I spent much of last week travelling from Kansai along the north coast of the sea to Hiroshima and back. This picture is taken from a hillside temple at the fishing port of Tomo no Ura; it gives a good feel for the dramatic but cosy views across the sea in the sun. Even better was the Sete Ohashi bridge which we crossed on a day trip to Takamatsu. It was a dreadful foggy day, and all we could see from the train was white mist with peaks of the islands coming in and out of view. Only seeing the tops made them all the more mystical in shape.

Favourite Garden and Tree

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 12:47:40 +0000

The astonishingly varied coloured carp in this photo are at Ritsurin-koen in Takamatsu. Their patterns are gorgeously speckled, and I think Frimlin would have had the Rainbow Sharklings in Creatures 3 like that if we could only have provided the engine to do it. Ritsurin-koen is my favourite of the gardens that we’ve seen. All the trees are regimented just enough to make the views from the various higher vantage points stunning, out across lakes and bridges with the wild forested hillside as a canvas behind.

Japanese Gardens

Sat, 26 Apr 2003 07:49:42 +0000

I’m now in Kyoto, ancient capital of Japan, and complete overload of temples. Unfortunately you don’t get to see much of the insides of the temples, just darkened views of distant painted screens and laquerware. The temples with active worshippers all require advanced reservations to visit, so no insights into Zen Buddhism. Instead, just as in Myanamar I acquired a taste for Theravadin Buddha statues from Phil, I’m acquiring a taste for Japanese gardens from Rosemary (my mum). The Japanese seem universally excellent at all art forms, and particularly at generating weird and unique new ones. The peculiar list includes tea ceremonies, all over body tattoos (for the yakuza mafia only), and handmade paper as well as more “normal” arts such as lacquerware, flower arranging and video games. Good gardens have been grown in Japan for centuries, and some are maintained to this day.

Pictures of Japan

Sat, 19 Apr 2003 13:43:32 +0000

I’ve spent the last few days touristing, and have now met up with a new travelling companion, my mum. We’re journeying round Japan together for four weeks. I’ve added a couple of pictures to the last few posts, and here are a few more. The photo to the left is of a Buddhist graveyard on Koyasan mountain. People are interred here to await the return of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, buried in poll position next to one of his mates. The grave stones were different from a Christian cemetery with more curves, spheres and posts. But the feel of the place was still the same, a purpose to respect and mourn the dead.

Nara, Buddhism, Suburbanity

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 04:06:54 +0000

Yesterday I went to Nara, site of numerous Buddhist and Shinto temples, but in particular to see one called Todai-Ji which I’d read about two weeks ago in a book on Mahayana Buddhism. Housed inside the largest wooden building in the world is a statue of Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha. I like the original theoretical Buddhism which Buddha taught, but by the time it got as far as Japan it became a bit wild. Vairocana is infinitely vast and free, showering all multiverses with his pure tranquil light, entering all atoms in all lands. There are brass lotus leaves there with pictures of him and his retinue of advanced Bodhisattvas, whom he eminates in order to teach his doctrine, and seven of the universes. If mankind could make this up in only fourteen hundred years (from Buddha’s time around 700 BCE, to when the monastry was built around 700 CE), it no longer surprises me how complex Hinduism and Judaism are.

Japanese Entertainments

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:12:14 +0000

There are amazing gambling alleys near here (Minami area of Osaka) with countless ball bearings which get shovelled into machines that bounce them round and spit them out again at their own whim. In the morning there were queues outside, the addicts reading comics waiting for it to open so they can get their fix. Another place people were betting at machines in groups round a real, physical electro-magnetic horse race (see picture). Others had chosen a curious automatic roulette-like wheel, or something else a bit like a lottery machine.

Osaka, Japan

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:23:28 +0000

Wow! I’m in a slightly different sort of internet cafe, and not just because it is ten times more expensive than in China. It’s called Kinko’s and is more of a 24 hour business services centre, with photocopiers, binders and large volume printers. The computer I’m on is a Mac, which makes a nice change even though I don’t know the keyboard shortcuts. No new fangled OS X stuff alas, just OS 9. There’s a scanner and about four different sorts of zip/superdrives plugged into it, plus a choice of printers colour or black and white. Your’re even provided with a Merriam Webster thesaurus and a dictionary; yes, physical ones made out of paper. There’s nobody else here using the computers - obviously no Japanese person would be seen dead in such a place. Why bother, when you have a DoCoMo mobile phone with all its services? Give it a few years and there’ll be no public internet access at all and you’ll have to add buying a laptop to the considerable expense of Japanese travel.

Japan and SARS

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 05:50:15 +0000

I’ve finally given up, and bought a plane ticket to Japan. I’m flying from Kunming to Osaka on Wednesday. Some reasons for this action motivated by fear:

The Chinese government is protesting too much about how safe China is from SARS. I object to this propaganda, when it is not based on sound detail of the health situation across the country. Every other country with SARS cases at least appears to have announced them in public as soon as it knows about them, and described what measures it is taking to prevent the disease from spreading. China has been covering it up for months, is still covering up the full situation, and is only even talking about it now because of international pressure.

Friday’s China Daily mentions in passing that all the cases in 四川 province (Sichuan, Four Rivers) have been cured. Umm, what cases in 四川 province? These haven’t been mentioned until now, and I’ve been reading enough information sources. 四川 is where I was heading next. I’ve guessed for a long time that there must be other cases in the Chinese provinces, it can’t have spread to over 15 other countries in the world, but only to 2 or 3 provinces in China. This is definitive proof, if you needed it, that they are hiding information.
I’m not afraid of travelling in a country which has SARS cases. Indeed, there are 14 suspected cases in Japan. However, I want to have confidence that the government is taking action to prevent spread throughout the population. And I want to know which areas are particularly dangerous, so I can avoid them. The Chinese government is not providing this information.
A key irrational reason that all this has bothered me more than others is that I’ve been ill for about a week. It’s basically a cold that has gone to my chest and hasn’t gone away. But this has meant that I’ve had nothing much to do except read too much about SARS on the internet. When you’re not well everything seems worse, especially fear of diseases whose symptoms are different but not a million miles away from what you are suffering.
I could take a rational decision that it is probably safe, that travelling on buses over Tibetan mountain passes or being in a country that is target of North Korean aggression is much more danegrous. However the irrational fears would still stop me enjoying myself. If I’m spending all my time on trains and at tourist sites with people from all over the country, I’m going to be thinking about SARS rather than living in the now.

I’ve wanted to go to Japan for a long while, but hadn’t planned to arrive for another month or two. So I’m busily reading websites to find out what to do and where to stay in Osaka. Suggestions and tips welcome!

Outskirts of Kunming

Sat, 05 Apr 2003 06:32:16 +0000

On the first Friday afternoon I was in Kunming, I finished my last class and looked out the window at the alluring mountains on the edge of town. So I hopped on an appropriate looking bus, and went to the end of the line to see what was there.

As you get further out of town, things become that much rougher and less developed. Distinctive kerbed pavements vanish away, replaced by rougher road edges. I got off the bus as near as I could get to the mountain, and explored the local area to see if I could get up for a view. People’s expressions were much bleaker. In town you’re largely ignored; here you are ignored but it is clear and unsurprising that people are a bit suspicious of you.

Kunming Local Tourists

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 09:56:03 +0000

While I’ve been in Kunming, I’ve been doing a bit of touristing at the weekends. The great thing is that most of the other people visiting attractions are Chinese. Unlike in SE Asia, the Chinese are both wealthy enough and keen enough to be domestic tourists. And, well, they don’t quite do it the same way as Europeans.

The first weekend I went to 大观 park (Daguan, Great View) which is on the edge of a lake just outside town. Local people rave about it. It was a decidedly clinical place, very formal and unnatural. Square is the best description. Nothing was left even slightly untamed to nature, with lots of walkways across parts of the lake, carefully controlled and cropped trees and grass. There was no flow in the outline of anything, except the old pagodas - all the new buildings selling snacks or providing toilets had sharp corners and flat roofs. Nevertheless it was pleasantly charming walking round it, with lots of happy Chinese folk mainly flying kites in the large but carefully demarked kite flying area.

Chinese Language School

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 12:19:58 +0000

The Chinese class that I’ve been attending has an interesting diversity of people. Nearly everyone is here for six months or a year. People are mostly Thai and South Korean, with a few Westerners, one Vietnamese and one (I think) Japanese. Many of those from Thailand and Korea are young university students, often majoring in Chinese in their own university, and taking a sandwhich year here. Of the Westerners, two are already working or have been working in China (setting up an Irish pub, opening fitness centres), one is going to teach English for an NGO in the north-west of Yunnan province, and one is likely to work in China after the course.

Various SARS links

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 06:00:43 +0000

I finally found some more useful SARS information from the UK government other than the FCO’s China travel advice. Two places to go are Department of Health emerging travel advice and Public Health Laboratory Service (they handily protects the population from infection). These sources are all reassuringly calm, basically saying travel anywhere, but watch for symptoms even when you get back.

Of course, the World Health Organisation is the place for the latest news. With today’s press briefing you even get to practice a foreign language - one of the questions asks in French about regions of China other than Guangdong province. The reply is that the healthcare system is decentralised, that regions have been asked to report on SARS centrally, but that there are no results from that yet. They’re working on getting results. I’d feel safer in Vietnam…

汉字 (Chinese Characters)

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:31:06 +0000

I love Chinese characters. They’re great fun, so much more interesting than rather dull alphabets. I know at first they seem like a really stupid idea - surely it is better to have a phonetic representation in writing, rather than arbitary and innumerable pictures? One way to look at it is that they are at a granularity inbetween the letter and the word. By this I mean that one character has slightly more meaning than one letter of the alphabet, but slightly less meaning than an English word. Similarly, there are very few letters (only 26), slightly more characters (about 3000 are needed to read a newspaper), and many more words. So you spend the effort to learn characters in the first place, but that makes learning words easier than in an alphabetic language.

Disinformation on SARS

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 14:11:22 +0000

To go completely against my non-linking byline, and to fuel the misinformation fire, here’s some stuff about SARS. Here’s an article in a Japanese newspaper, describing how irresponsible the Chinese government has been in their handling of the case. This certainly fits with my suspicions the other day based on how WHO is having to tiptoe round them.

And then an interesting blog which has comments saying that local doctors say the disease has spread to other cities, which the Chinese government hasn’t admitted to yet. This could either be true, or it could be fear and hype based on some ordinary pneumonia cases.

Expat Protest and WHO

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 11:26:33 +0000

Today the Chinese government allowed a small expat anti-war protest in Beijing. Even the English language China Daily has reported on it, albeit it in an alternate reality way with regard to the stopped Chinese student protestors. Some delicate balancing going on here between the government criticising the US, stroking the US to make sure it doesn’t get upset, and not setting a precedent for local protests.

The World Health Organisation website worryingly vanished behind the Great Firewall yesterday. I’m hoping this is because of politicing about the status of Taiwan, rather than government covering something up. I think that the day before yesterday the SARS infection table listed Taiwan as a separate country, whereas now it is magically a province of China, but I’m not sure. Anyway, at least it’s back up today.

Kunming Life

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 03:08:28 +0000

I’ve been in Kunming for three weeks now, and it’s a pleasant place to live. I’m studying at the Center of Chinese for Foreign Students Yunnan University. The university is very eminent for a place so remote from Beijing. This is because during the Cultural Revolution lots of academics either fled or were exiled here. I’m also staying in university accommodation, although I upgraded my room to one more like a hotel than a student room. The first two pictures are views from my window.

Some Photos

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 02:52:45 +0000

I finally got round to finding a computer I can plug my digital camera into, so I’ve added a few photos. Go to the March archive page and scroll down. You can find a photo of the terraces at Bac Ha in Vietnam, and one of the pig on the back of a moto. By popular demand, there’s even a picture of me at Tam Coc.

This Blog is Censored

Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:34:56 +0000

With that provocative title, you might expect that the Chinese government have clamped down in a purge on me, or perhaps the Vietnamese secret police have chased me across electronic borders. Not quite, this is self-censorship. And, no, I don’t mean the unconscious “censor” from psychology, or the very conscious way that I select which things to talk about so publicly.

In Vietnam, I talked to a few other people who I haven’t mentioned in my accounts. I would like to write up what they said, although none of it is particularly surprising if you have read the literature about the Vietnamese government. Which you probably haven’t. Basically, the communist government are scared. They are as a group afraid of other sources of power, and as individual bureaucrats are trying to preserve their own position. They also try to gain advantage for themselves, whether manipulating perks and resources their way, or through outright corruption. This all leads to excessive, complex, and ever changing paperwork, which requires bribes to slice through it. Control-freakery due to fear.

Unhappy New War's Day

Thu, 20 Mar 2003 13:26:19 +0000

It’s slightly unnerving being in a foreign land when your country is going to war. There isn’t much fuss about the war here, it doesn’t affect China that much, only some potential economic damage relating to oil prices. A couple of people today talked to me about it. The main concern, presumably one that comes from the Chinese media, is not that the US/UK/Spain are acting in an immoral way, or that the US doesn’t have the right to exert its power to protect its interests. The fear here is that the war will spill out into a larger and more dangerous conflict across the Middle East.

Mandalay Monastry

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 13:01:04 +0000

This week I was tidying up my notebook, and found the notes from a conversation I had with a monk in a monastry in Burma. I promised at the start of January that I’d write about it, and now I’ve got round to it. So we go both back in time to the end of December and change note to the subject of religion. I’d been in Myanmar for about two weeks, and was recovering from minor illness in the disappointing city of Mandalay.

Arrival in Kunming

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:47:10 +0000

The bus journey to Kunming was less exciting than the train ride to Kaiyuan, but was nevertheless very atmospheric. It was quite a small bus with maybe 20 people on it. They all wore thick, warm coats, and looked like important working people. They sat quietly, in a disciplined way, with their hands lightly resting on top of each other on their laps. No chitter, no chatter, no spitting in the aisle, throwing rubbish out the window, or the like.

Night with The Journalist

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:44:26 +0000

The Journalist enthusiastically showed me round Kaiyuan in the evening. It’s a clean, bright, bold place. With wide boulevards, and cruising cars. Lots of pucker shops, but not at the gluttonous extremeties of a Ho Chi Minh City department store, these were clearly targetted at a substantial middle class. People were all smart and confident.

My slightest whim was catered for by The Journalist. For example, I had trouble looking up a word in my phrasebook, and had indicated that I needed to buy a dictionary soon. Next thing I know he was confidently asking all sorts of people in the street for directions, and we arrived at a bookshop. It did indeed have English-Chinese dictionaries, but I thought I’d wait for both better choice and advice in Kunming. So, he took me to another bookshop, which had a different choice. I had to say “Kun-ming” very clearly, and indicate that I quite wanted something to eat.

Goodbye Playboy, Hello Journalist

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 12:23:07 +0000

The train journey along the Red River from Vietnam into 云南 province (Yunnan, Cloud South) is stunning. I embarked at 河口 (Hekou, River Entrance) , the border town, armed with only half a bottle of water and no food. The Playboy kindly met me in the morning, albeit half an hour late. I’d given up and gone to the station on my own, but he found me half way there. To get in with the spirit of things I checked to see if he’d been with a girl, but he denied it. He helped me buy a ticket and get on the train. Immediately the station was impressive, clean, organised, with neatly tended plants. A security guard searched my luggage before boarding. The Playboy wrote a note in Chinese to help me later on with the second leg of the journey, but I put it away thinking that with my phrasebook I wouldn’t really need it.

Welcome to China!

Sat, 08 Mar 2003 07:45:09 +0000

The population of all the other countries I’ve been in during the last three months (Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam) is about 200 million. The population of China is about 1250 million. If I took the perhaps reasonable attitude of spending time in a country proportional to the number of people who live there, then I’d have to spend the next year and a half here.

When I got to the border town of Lao Cai, I had one day left on my visa so headed to Bac Ha to see some countryside Vietnam. This is the upcoming place (now Sapa is getting too self-contaminated by the tourists) to look at the beautiful mountain scenery and check out the ethnic minority hill tribes. Midweek, when I was there, it is completely empty, and I didn’t see another white person for a whole day until I found two on the bus back to Lao Cai. At the weekend there are colourful markets to which people come down from the hills, and some tour groups arrive to photograph people in their traditional costumes.

Vietnam Impressions

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 11:39:06 +0000

Last weekend, Nat took us further along the coast to Cam Pha just east of Halong bay. The area is where they mine coal, and it adjoins the beautiful Bai Tu Long bay which is just as fantastic as Halong. I predict that within a few years Lonely Planet will tell everyone to go there for the authentic experience and skip Halong, then in another ten years it will be completely touristy. We went up to a cave where the guide kept pointing out dubious animal shapes in the rock which Nat had to translate from Vietnamese. Bizarrely, at the end of the cave there was a big open area with a huge atmospheric bar and no doubt karaoke if you come at the right time. On the Sunday we went to another island in mid-development off Halong bay and saw a dolphin show. I haven’t seen dolphins before, and found them really amazing. I was surprised by their strength, and also impressed by the agility of sea lions.

Expatriates, Prostitution and Gambling

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 06:37:31 +0000

I spent the last two weekends with people from the expatriate community; first in Halong bay and then in Hanoi. Being an expat is pretty different from being a tourist. You are away for so long without the constant newness of travelling, so finding places with home comforts is more important. And western comforts are very much available in Hanoi, and in a form even in Halong.

If you work in Vietnam and are on a European wage, then locally you’re very rich. For $30 a month you can employ a full time maid to do your cleaning and washing. The office by necessity employs cars with drivers to transport staff around, but they also get to use them in the evening and at weekends. No need for taxis or to buy a car.

Water Engineering

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 15:48:38 +0000

Vietnam has been ravaged by first of all war and then the poverty of an undeveloped economy. Unlike Cambodia and Laos, or even Myanmar, it has managed to rebuild lots of infrastructure. The roads are universally excellent, with flat tarmac surfaces. Bridges are easily destroyed in war, but now there are many new ones, including a magnificent one that I went over in the Mekong Delta. I’ve seen maybe even a dozen new bridges being built in my short journey through Vietnam.

Quiet American Irony

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 11:36:34 +0000

Me, mindlessly propogate links? I’m going to make an exception to the byline at the top of this page. It relates to both Vietnam (where I am at the moment) and to the impending Iraq war, so perhaps we can forgive me.

‘Quiet American’ Irony article. Seeing the film “The Quiet American” in Vietnam months before its long-delayed opening in the United States, PNS Associate Editor Andrew Lam finds a country where activists and artists risk government crackdown to promote freedom of expression. Back in America, though, self-censorship is rising as an anti-war masterpiece is draped and a poetry reading cancelled.

Across the Demilitarised Zone

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 11:23:53 +0000

Last week, I made my way into the old North Vietnam. I went on a tour of the old DMZ (Demilitarised Zone) which separated the North from the South, and across which the Vietnam war was fought. The trees are starting to grow back, and replacement houses in all the bombed towns have been largely rebuilt. Our guide was a child during the war, from a village near the border. He was moved several times when fighting came too close, ending up as a refugee far away in the South, separated from his parents.

Tombs

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 12:14:53 +0000

This afternoon I saw some amazing tombs, also from the Nguyen dynasty. One of them was also used as a hideaway by the king - not happy with the imperial palace, he has a second palace next to his tomb. The high taxes and forced labour to build it were so detested there was an attempted coup during the building.

The tomb itself is magnificently landscaped, with a huge slab describing the kings life in his own words (in the old Chinese-like characters the Vietnamese used to use). He even says bad things on it about his reign, apparently! How someone, along with his society, can accumulate the power to build things like this is extraordinary, fascinating, and I believe quite wrong.

Proposition in the Imperial Palace

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 10:56:08 +0000

Rain rain rain. Vietnam is meterologically mysterious. All the books say that when you pass through the strip of mountains just north of Dangang, the weather changes, and becomes pretty awful. I couldn’t quite believe them. Yesterday morning I was in tropical winter, beautiful, hot dry climate, giving you the feeling of no care in the world. Today I toured the ancient city of Hue in the rain. This is the same latitude as Yangon (Rangoon, in Myanmar), which instead is hot and tropical. So from now on it’s cold and wet, a good job spring is coming on, although there isn’t really such a thing as spring until a lot further north.

Vietnam Coast by Train

Mon, 10 Feb 2003 11:42:58 +0000

The last few days I’ve been travelling up the coast of Vietnam by railway. It’s good to have a change from buses, boats and pick-up trucks. I haven’t been on a train since an early, and somewhat bad, experience in Myanmar. It’s 1726km along the iron road from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, the whole journey taking 30 to 40 hours depending on how express the trains you get are.

Pho 2000 vs Burger King

Thu, 06 Feb 2003 04:10:40 +0000

Time to talk about shopping. The nice thing about shopping is that it is easy for a tourist to make some kind of judgement about it. Shops are designed to be open, visitable, and for you to be able to find out about them. Also, coming from the consumerist culture that I do, even a bad shopper like me is very well trained. This makes it much easier than trying to analyse, say, the system of government.

Cacooned by Ho Chi Minh City

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 09:01:27 +0000

I’ve been here for five and a half days now, and see no sign of leaving yet. I’m staying in a really good guesthouse, a bit away from the main backpacker area, and friendly and hospitable.

My long visit is partly because you have to chill out during the Tet festival. That’s the Lunar New Year, which is the same as the Chinese New Year. For three days people go back to visit their family, so the city is relatively deserted, as recent migration patterns mean that more people in the city have families in the country than vice versa.

Cambodia Highlights

Sat, 25 Jan 2003 12:06:09 +0000

I’m leaving Cambodia, catching the boat tomorrow afternoon to Chau Doc in Vietnam. Internet access probably won’t be as easy and cheap in the Mekong Delta (it’s only half a dollar an hour here, cheapest so far in SE Asia!), and I’d like to be away from computers to take things in, so I’ll probably disappear for a bit. Some final thoughts on Cambodia.

Since Battambang, I’ve only been in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. They’re both highly touristy, so I feel more hassled by people rather than befriended. In Battambang, I’d managed to learn the Khmer numbers, and was starting to learn phrases like “How much is it?” and “Where is the toilet?”. Khmer is much easier for me than Thai and Burmese, as it isn’t tonal at all. Since then it’s been much harder to get support with Khmer, so I gave up. In Siem Reap people would laugh at me if I even said “Thank you!” in Khmer - I guess the thousands of tourists jetting in to see Angkor Wat don’t bother to learn it.

Wrath of Conrad

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 10:25:27 +0000

Gosh, this blog has been flamed in another blog. (Translation out of Internet jargon: Somebody else on the internet has read part of this online journal, and written a bilious reply on their journal). Head on over and join in the fun. I’ve posted a reply (defense!) at the bottom of their blog.

English, World Language

Tue, 21 Jan 2003 11:54:57 +0000

English really is a global second language. At least, in SE Asia, in every country it is the lingua franca. It’s assumed that if you’re a tourist, actually if you’re white, then you’ll speak English. And fluently. If you’re a French or a German independent traveller then you really have no choice; learning even basic English is such good value that you’d be foolish not to.

In Cambodia, the local people are desperate to learn the language. This wasn’t as obvious in Myanmar, but it was still the case. In Thailand the whole process is formalised as in France, so you don’t know that people are learning English, they’re kind of shy about it. It’s only that all people working in the tourist industry speak it which reveals the truth. In Cambodia on every street corner, on the steps of every ancient temple, in monastries, at the tables of exhibitions… Everywhere, people are lurking to practice their English on you. “Where do you come from?” “How old are you?” “Are you married?” It’s their ticket to wealth, to knowledge.

Friendly Cambodia

Sat, 18 Jan 2003 08:20:36 +0000

I arrived here in Cambodia on Tuesday, travelling overland from Thailand. Within eight hours of crossing the border, eight people or groups of people had made warm and friendly contact with me. This left me deeply moved, and in love with Cambodia. Completely different from Thailand where, as in Europe, everyone is too rich, too congested with people, and ignores you.

A hassling, fluent English, border truck tout. OK, not the best start and not the most friendly of people, as he hassled and lied about having a pick-up to Battambang. However, he was friendly, and helped me across the border. When I then refused his father’s pick-up, which had no other passengers yet, he was helpful and found me another one. And he taught me the essential first two phrases of Khmer, “Hello!” and “Thank you!”.

People on the back of the first pickup truck. The most fun and cheapest, and if you don’t book the only, way to get from the Thai border town of Poipet to Battambang is on the back a pickup truck. They fill the thing to bursting, you never quite believe what small space, and precariously balanced cargo another will sit on. An old man sitting next to me held my knee in the kindest, warmest, most unconscious way possible, as he couldn’t reach part of the truck to hold onto. A very young boy fell asleep with his head on my lap. Innocent, friendly, spirited togetherness.
People on the back of the second pickup truck (had to change truck at Sisophon). Three friendly smiley young women, an older guy with two children and two dogs, who tried chatting with me in English.
Sombat (aka Bat) at the transport stop in Battambang. Fed up after the tout at the border, I was first of all rude to him, but he turned out to be a great moto driver and guide who took me out to surrounding sites for the next two days.
NGO man in restaurant. He was sitting at the next table to me, working for an educational charity in the villages, and just started talking to me. He was Christian, and told me a bit about their work.
Group of friends at the dessert stall. Cambodia has great fun night markets where you can buy food after 4pm, including Khmer dessert stalls. Sickly concoctions, of jelly or rice sweets with condensed milk, ice, or a strange almost potato-like fruit. More fun to eat than delicious. I sat a dark and candle lit stall. The young people who ran it and their friends, were chatty, jokey, and warm.
Hotel staff playing cards outside. They invited me to join as I went in to go to bed, although I declined.
Receptionist. Amusingly, after giving me my key, he then changed the television channels to show me which one was the (best?) local porn channel. This is some kind of level of service that I’m not used to!

Since then I’ve been giving English lessons to Buddhist monks, having teenagers teach me to count, and being offered to join a group of people at the next table in a restaurant (Cambodian saying: “The more people at a meal, the tastier it is!”). On the country roads all the children wave to foreigners.

Bangkok Public Transport

Mon, 13 Jan 2003 05:40:55 +0000

Bangkok has some excellent public transport, at least great fun if you’re a tourist. There are several canals with super-fast water buses on them, you quickly leap on, pay them 5 baht (about 7 pence) and they zoom much faster than the jammed traffic. There are canvas shields which raise and lower along the side to reduce splashing, although you still get a bit wet with all the wakes it causes. Under some bridges they have to lower the entire roof, and the young lads clinging to the outside who collect your fare duck down.

Myanmar Impressions

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 16:40:30 +0000

Before I forget them, I’m going to post some general impressions of Myanmar/Burma, since I spent the last month there. I spent most of the time being a proper tourist, so I don’t have any real insights into the political situation that you can’t get elsewhere. However, I did talk to an interesting Wa monk (from Shan “state”) in a monastry in Mandalay - I’ll post up some of the stuff he said another day.

Bus to Bangkok

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 15:58:39 +0000

Wow! I just had the most luxurious bus journey I could ever imagine. Sometimes people who like cars have a lack of imagination about how good public transport could potentially be these days. To inspire you, here are the highlights of todays trip:

The bus was due to leave Chang Rai in the far north of Thailand at 8am. It was ten minutes late leaving, the only flaw in the whole journey. It arrived at 7:30pm this evening (11.5 hrs later) in Bangkok. The journey is a distance of 785km, slightly shorter but roughly equivalent to travelling from Aberdeen to London.
I travelled VIP class, at a cost of 700 Baht, about 14 US dollars or 10 pounds. Admittedly everything is a bit cheaper in Thailand, but even allowing for that, this seems excellent value (National express charge 35 pounds for the economy class trip from Aberdeen to London, which curiously takes about the same amount of time).
The coach had only three seats across, two on one side of the aisle, one on the other. There were only 24 seats in the whole coach, half the number of economy class seats that could have been squeezed in. I had lots of space and leg room, and I’m very tall.
Not only was it air conditioned, but they gave you a blanket in case this made you cold. Or to huggle under to help you sleep.
Like an airplane, refreshments were servered at your seat. At the start, a bottle of chilled water. In the morning, coffee and some excellent pastries. In the late afternoon a can of cool coke, and a refreshing perfumed napkin thing. We stopped for lunch (included in the price), which was rice and a Thai curry. Yum.
There was a film in the afternoon. Admittedly it was a ludicrously silly Chinese movie for kids, about the God of Cooking who would use marshal arts maneuvers to slice vegetables, mix sauces and create excellent food, and compete with similarly talented rivals. Dubbed in Thai with no subtitles, so perhaps I just didn’t understand what was going on.
Most importantly, there was a toilet at the back of the coach. This is a great luxury, not featured in even the most upmarket executive cars. Thai roads are very straight and very good quality, so the bus hardly had to turn a short corner, which meant the toilet was usable.
You could walk round and read books and write and look at the scenary and sleep and think.

If private cars were to be banned, the free market would make all journeys this good within months. Of course, in the new high tech economy these vehicles would also feature:

January 6, 2003

Mon, 06 Jan 2003 10:55:05 +0000

Hello, and Happy New Year! I’m in Chiang Rai, a town in northern Thailand. Phil and I came overland this morning from Kengtung, which is in Shan state to the east of Myanmar. Thailand is a civilised rest stop; with everything from English language bookshops and internet cafes, to Walls ice cream and first class bus transport. They even drive on the left to make me feel that extra bit at home. It really does feel like a European country, albeit with its own Asian culture, stumbled upon in SE Asia.

December 7, 2002

Sat, 07 Dec 2002 19:41:00 +0000

Right, I had synced my palm, checked for any recent changes on the FCO website, and put a vacation message on my email. This meant that technically I should have packed up the computer, but that would have meant losing my music… So instead I played Ben’s open source game Zig for half an hour.

I’ve fitted everything in a small space in the loft, and I’ve packed my luggage. It’s actually much easier packing when you are packing up your whole room as well, as you have to evaluate every item for inclusion, so you don’t accidentally forget the maglite torch, for instance.

December 6, 2002

Fri, 06 Dec 2002 12:16:50 +0000

I’ve posted up information on my web site about how to contact me while I’m away, and where I’m going. To find it, follow the link “How to contact me, while I’m travelling” at the bottom of my home page. It’s marked with .

December 6, 2002

Fri, 06 Dec 2002 02:22:38 +0000

Well, I’m having a busy week. As well as packing, buying things to pack, and working out how to pack up my room, more people than usual keep ringing me up and emailing me, to see me before I go. Today I started putting some of my things in the attic here. I’ll need a few more boxes, and it’s not clear how to get them in modern supermarkets (I’m feeling my age!).

November 30, 2002

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 18:46:32 +0000

I’ve finished my Ghana writeup, and you get privileged first showing. Let me know your comments, whether spelling mistakes, factual errors, or your thoughts and feelings about it.

Special bonus bit that didn’t fit in anywhere on the page, another exclusive to this blog:

In Ghana, we were a bit puzzled because whenever we introduced ourselves everyone would stumble over Stu-art and Gray-ham’s names, but when I said I was called Francis this was very exciting to them. Quite a few of our taxi drivers were called Francis as well, and it turns out to be a very popular name in Ghana.

November 27, 2002

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 11:34:19 +0000

This blog now features subscription! Follow the link above which says “Subscribe by email”, and join the Yahoo group there. You will then be emailed with the content of every new post that I make. Please try this out and let me know if it does or does not work for you.

November 27, 2002

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 01:32:36 +0000

I went to London on Tuesday to apply for my visa for Myanmar, and meet up with a couple of people. Today I’ve been working on my Ghana writeup, which is making some progress. I also took my analogue camera to the Oxfam shop, so I’m now totally digital. This evening I spent learning about neural networks with my friend Dave - I help him with the maths, and he helps me with the artificial intelligence. It’s a nice change studying something academic and new again, and I get dinner cooked for me as well!

November 25, 2002

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 10:16:57 +0000

To give you a flavour of my trip to Ghana, and to try out image posting, this is one of my photos. It’s taken out the back of Major’s truck, at a school in Wa where we stopped for an errand. The kids were so excited to see us, so I asked them if I could take a photograph.

November 25, 2002

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 01:29:55 +0000

The least laid plans escalate the easiest.

I’m going to go to Maynamar (Burma) with my friend Phil, and I’m leaving in two weeks time. Just going there as a tourist is ethically controversial - see Tourism Concern and Lonely Planet for both sides of the story. I have been persuaded that it is OK to go for two main reasons:

Aung San Suu Kyi, the charasmatic pro-democracy leader, told tourists not to go to Myanmar a few years ago. However, other members of her party the NLD have said that they think travel there is good, as it opens up communications lines with the outside world.
- Nowdays you can travel in Myanmar, but spend very little money at government-owned places.

Since deciding to go, my plans have escalated somewhat. First I decided that whilst I’m in the area, I may as well go to Vietnam as well. By that point I was planning to go for two months, so I figured I may as well give up my room here in Cambridge, leaving myself free to travel for longer if I’m enjoying myself. I’d like to make it to China.

November 21, 2002

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 11:51:14 +0000

Been busy this week catching up with things. Done some work on the Think Twice conference website. You can now find transcripts of the talks from the last conference.

On Monday I made a CD with a Windows installer for Mozilla on and a local copy of the Cambridge Oxfam Group website. Chris, one of the group members, is taking on the website from me. Actually, I stopped updating the site, and when you give things up, if they are important other people do come along to take them on. On Monday evening I showed him how to use Mozilla composer, so now he can update the site. Hopefully he’ll become adventurous and put a bit more imagination into it than I have!

November 17, 2002

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 20:54:03 +0000

Pete, the excellent Half-head challenge chief poobah and bean counter, has finally got to the end of working out how much money we made in September by shaving our heads in half down the middle.

Pete says… “In the end, we raised a rather large £1333.73 to split between the Big Issue Foundation and Jimmy’s NightShelter, so sincere thanks to everyone who either sponsored myself, Guy,Francis or Pete, or donated online, or donated on the day, or generally helped out with any of the organising bits and pieces. Even better - after Gift Aid (which allows the charities involved to recoup from the government 28.5% of money donated if the person donating the money gave their permission), the total rockets up to over £1600! Excellent stuff!”

November 15, 2002

Fri, 15 Nov 2002 13:22:28 +0000

Hello! I’m in a cool, chilled internet cafe in Accra (capital of Ghana) at the moment, catching up on the news from the BBC website. It’s the end of the trip, and I don’t feel too physically exhausted, mainly because we’ve managed to get plenty of sleep. I’m sipping Mirinda, a fizzy backcurrant drink.

Even though phyiscally I’m not too tired, mentally I’m exhausted. We’ve travelled all over Ghana, from the colonial slave forts on the coast, to the remote village of Funsi in the Upper West Region, and back. My digital camera is bursting with over 200 photos, and my mind is full of lots of new things. If I can work out how to organise it all I’ll write a separate trip account next week…

November 1, 2002

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:55:27 +0000

Well, I’ve spent all week in a mild state of packing stress, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got everything now, and it’s all packed. It’s noticeable that the only things I’ve got which I like were recommended to me by someone. So in return…

Some items that I would recommend: Travel towel (they’re much smaller, and seem really good), Teva sandals (Terra Firma, recommended to me by Ben, thanks Ben!), shaving oil (it rules, a tiny bottle lasts forever, and I think it’s a nicer shave than overly-visible, but underly-useful foam).

October 30, 2002

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 02:10:55 +0000

I’ve been away round the UK visiting friends and family last week and the start of this, and have just got back. This evening I met up with Stuart and Graham in London for a planning meeting on Ghana. We leave early Saturday morning.

I’ve read all the instructions on my digital camera (thanks everyone from Creature Labs for giving it to me!), have a spare set of batteries, so perhaps I can upload some pictures here from Accra, or else I’ll do a proper write-up afterwards.

October 16, 2002

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 10:45:51 +0000

Last Wednesday I went to visit Microrobotics as part of my research into co-operative businesses. This one being particularly relevant to me as it is high tech. Their website describes it as “employee-owned”, which is accurate, although there is lots of interesting history to this. Karl kindly explained it to me, and there are some much more gritty lessons than I got from the CCDA the week before.

A summary and some interesting things:

October 9, 2002

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 17:06:06 +0000

Last night the Think Twice nameservers and DNS transferred from Easily (where it was inelegantly forwarding to part of some Demon webpages) to a new account at Pepperfish. This means we can have mailing lists and things, when Daniel sorts them out (thanks Daniel!). Pepperfish rules.

Think Twice was a really good conference this year, and I recommend you go if you’re in Cambridge next spring. OK, even if you’re not. Mark was busily making some flyers for fresher’s fair this week. The conference date is Saturday 22 March 2003, and it’s on the general topic of social justice. What that actually means is that it’s about social injustice, and more importantly about what anyone can do about it. Rather than just whinging.

October 6, 2002

Sun, 06 Oct 2002 12:43:12 +0000

OK, I’ve decided not to write up my visit to Windhorse Trading as I don’t have enough of a journalistic angle on it, and the trail has gone cold. It’s a Buddhist warehouse business on the outskirts of Cambridge which I had a tour of a couple of weeks ago.

I am interested in it because it is a different form of ethical business. The ethics here comes direct from religious need and experience; in many ways the place is more of a monastry than part of the capitalist system. There are no laws to the ethics of Windhorse, instead they have belief which informs the taking of right-action in the world.

October 4, 2002

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 22:10:24 +0000

This week I did some more work at Ravenbrook, and I’m doing more next week. On the shelves there (or perhaps it was Zoonami’s, who they share an office with) I found an excellent book called Creative Company by Andy Law, about an advertising agency in London which turned into a co-operative, equally owned by everyone who works there.

On Wednesday, Mark organised a planning meeting for next year’s Think Twice conference. Last year’s conference had excellent speakers, and was a brilliant day. However, Mark would like the next one to turn more people into action, to actually assert their democratic power. Rather than just whinging.

October 2, 2002

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 12:18:05 +0000

Yesterday I impulsively decided to go to Ghana with my friend Stuart. He used to work there about six years ago, for Wycliffe the bible translating missionaries. He’s going back for a ceremony to dedicate the completion of the definition of written language for the village that he was in.

I don’t approve of bible translation, because I don’t believe in God or Christianity. However, it’s a great opportunity to see another world, to see Africa, to visit remote and materially poor villages, and meet some people working in development. With a guide who is a good friend and knows the area.

October 2, 2002

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 12:13:38 +0000

Today I showed Sheila at the Harambee Centre how to turn a Word document into a sensible email questionnaire. We just went for copy and paste from Word into an HTML email, then asking people to reply and fill in their answers.

Outlook 2000 has a nice feature that if you type within a reply to an email beyond the end of lines of the replied-to message, then it marks your text with your name and a special colour. This makes it much easier to read the responses!

October 1, 2002

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 23:55:22 +0000

Went to the Cambridge Co-operative Development Agency (CCDA) today and had a good long chat with Adrian Ashton there.

I am investigating the possibility of persuading someone to start their new software-related business as a co-operative, rather than a more normally structured sort of company limited by guarantee. But that’s just an excuse, as I want to know about it myself anyway. Maybe I will start an open source charity consultancy, and then I’ll need to know.

September 27, 2002

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 12:13:01 +0000

Oh yes, and the new domain name has propagated but there is nothing there yet.

September 27, 2002

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 12:12:33 +0000

Had a really good day at the Harambee centre. Wayne arrived just before 11am with the new computer, and quickly and consummately set it up. Crimson Technology provides proper service. He moved the old computer, set up the new one, installed printer drivers for the printer, and even put in a network card that i had bought along. You try and get Dell to do that.

A little before he left, Phil arrived, and then we spent all afternoon setting up the network between the two machines, with internet connection sharing. I say “we”, but I mainly made tea, wallpaper and looked up Swahili names for the computers. They’re called Hujambo (“Are you fine?”) and Sijambo (“I’m fine!”). Harambee means “Let’s pull together!”.

September 26, 2002

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:29:58 +0000

Last Thursday I went to an introductory meeting about Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), also known as Co-counseling.

It’s a curious thing. The core is that you sit down with some one, and listen to them talk for 45 minutes. You don’t add anything to the conversation, just nod, be interested, engage, but certainly not ask questions or tell your own story. Then you swap over and they listen to you for 45 minutes.

September 26, 2002

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:12:16 +0000

It’s a strange sort of loneliness living your life as a free agent. I’m use to some social interaction at the club that is Creature Labs in amongst writing and coding. Yesterday afternoon I went for a run to stop myself going to sleep. If I was working from home for an extended period I’d have to create a system of hour-long afternoon or late lunch time activities to sustain all my needs.

September 24, 2002

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 19:37:10 +0000

Happy Tuesday. This afternoon I went into the Harambee centre again. Talked to Sheila there about the DFID research project, and I’m going to help her next week with sending out an email questionnaire. You’d be amazed at how hard it is deciding what format to send a questionnaire in. We decided against emailing Word documents in the end because it’s easier to just hit reply to a text email.

Also updated the virus checker, and had another go with incremental CD backup. The CD software didn’t work quite how I expected - it claims to have appended files to the CD, but they don’t appear. Needs more work. Finally, we registered a domain name! harambeecentre.org.uk

September 23, 2002

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 17:35:26 +0000

OK, that’s enough blogging for today, I’m off to Tesco. I’ll tell you about the weekend and other things from last week on Wednesday when I’ll have nothing else to say.

September 23, 2002

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 17:33:04 +0000

After having been half shaved my hair is definitely back up to furry length now. It was prickly to start with, but when the gap between the hairs becomes smaller than the length of the hairs, it suddenly feels like a cat.

Thanks to everyone who made a donation for Jimmy’s Nightshelter / The Big Issue Foundation. It was a fun experience, and much appreciated. Pete, I think my halfhead email signature got you one extra donation today from an old employee.

September 23, 2002

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 17:23:03 +0000

Recently I’ve been trying to help out the Harambee Centre with their computers. They’re a development education resource centre in Cambridge, which basically means they help teach children about international development. This ranges from being a library of lesson plans and resources, to organising events at schools.

Last Monday afternoon (when I should have been writing about Buddhist warehouses) we ordered a new computer from Crimson Technology, Wayne’s company. He’s delivering it on Thursday. It’s paid for by a grant from the City Council. It seems almost accepted that computers are disposable and you have to get a new one every three years.

September 23, 2002

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 17:07:03 +0000

Hello. I meant to begin last week, but got myself in a tangle deciding what a blog is and isn’t. Frimlin just told me to post anyway, so here I am.

Last week was my first week after finishing work at Creature Labs.

On Monday I went to visit Windhorse Trading, a warehousing business on the outskirst of Cambridge entirely staffed by Buddhists. It was an interesting place, I took notes and I’m going to write it up. I’m just not sure what form to write about it in. It might be a suitable K5 article, perhaps an entry in this blog, or a web page of my writeup. Journalism without a goal is hard.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Francis Irving, a computer programmer and activist. Read my biography.

Please get in touch by email francis@flourish.org, or message me via Bluesky or Mastodon.

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Francis Irving

Instalamb, my browser plugin to control Instagram

My mind sampling results

Announcing "Mindful Media Club"

A week making something each day

Monday - Godot game

Netatmo smart thermostat! How much gas I saved last winter, and how to automate it to turn off when out (not using IFTTT)

1. What a smart thermostat is like and how much money I saved

The little differences between Android and iOS in 2023

What is high-quality about the data that trained generative AI?

This kind of rosy yellow glow in my head

Art I enjoyed in 2022 - top eight

On intuition's relationship to rationality via language

Blind-sided

Pressure cooked split black urad dhal

Brainstorming a better YouTube recommendation algorithm

A cycle home along the river

On using a variety of information services

A thousand times an ant colony of fifty times a cat

A fugue on authoritarian high modernism

The peace to know what you don't know

Email review #1: FastMail

Textures and colours, India

A short walk around Vote Leave's software VICS

Hindu holy mountain #2: Arunachala

Rant on the failure of news media

Notes on a meditation

Hindu holy mountain #1: Pavagadh

First, do no harm

In praise of temple elephants

Scouring pad

Houses like trees

Changing money

Communal pets

Zero marginal cost

Sea. Sunlight. Calm. Trees. Laughter.

On finding political axes using maths

History of libraries

Don't play the game, mutate the board

Sync/Backup workshop at Redecentralize Conference

Making our information society safe and fair

1. Access to culture

Those brief moments when winning seems possible

"I find politics inaccessible": User testing voter advice apps

Why I'm collecting every MP candidate's CV

The advert wars

Which web development tools are commodities?

Promising to make software safer

1. Virtual bugs

Blog

Long, cold cyberwar

Archive

I blinked and missed 6 exciting things in the last 20 years of space

The Upsidedown Map Page

Francis Irving

Things I do

Things I’ve done

Francis Irving's CV

Contents

Career History

Self-Employed (2023 -)

An email to Nicholas

Properly funding Democracy Club

Irony of extensions that remove junk slowing Chrome down

Skills you need to get product/market fit, all in a line

How we used email as a customer support system at mySociety

How to use time-travelling anthropologist pollsters to tell good from evil marketing

Tudor time travel - Episode 1 of Crazy theories.txt

Awesome Foundation - Liverpool Chapter

Four ways we'll help WhipCar if they tell us what went wrong

Why did we love the giants coming to town?

Mapping the product/market space - an hallucination

Heroku's early history: 4 home pages that made $212 million

Products and markets are the same thing

Do epic shit! On being the first friend of DoESLiverpool

On the need for a new profession

Part 2: Why I think PledgeBank failed, when GroupOn and Kickstarter flew

Part 1: Why did PledgeBank fail when GroupOn and Kickstarter flew?

Newsflash: Geeks now good at usability, everyone else crap

Astonishments, ten, in the history of version control