Camera Obscura

every man an island
we each sit on our rock
reaching out to others

all men are islands
you sit on your lonely rock
yet reach out to me

meson, gluon, quark
your own bits aren’t solely yours
flatlander, look up!

you’re the universe
fractal map for everything
holograph human

it’s all perspective
whether you’re me or I’m you
our bodies are one

something stays unique
invariant consciousness
I stay me throughout

fences, houses, clothes
and skin: material shells
hermit-crab monads

don’t become your shell
that which makes you be
is intangible

you’re just far away
because I have to look through
intervening space

we aggregate stuff
organise it in systems
cargo-cult sophonts

quantum teleport
examined differently
i graph out elsewhere

distilled panoptic
invariant solipsist
composed catharsis

inexplicably
I am singularity
I am tesseract

In response to my letter to the Cape Argus, I received the following email this morning:

Dear Mr Breedt,

I am sorry you don’t enjoy reading the Cape Argus but you mentioned everything else except your address which we need to know to withdraw you from our marketing campaign.

Graham Shaw

My reply was as follows:

Dear Mr Shaw,

Thank you for your prompt response.

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Graham Shaw <email obscured> wrote:
> I am sorry you don’t enjoy reading the Cape Argus but you mentioned everything else except your address which we need to know to withdraw you from our marketing campaign.

Your response is so incredibly far from getting the point of my letter that I wonder whether you read it at all.

Yes, I would like to be removed from your marketing campaign. My own plight and response is, however, merely symptomatic of a larger problem. The whole campaign is pretty much guaranteed to antagonise potential readers to the very idea of subscribing to a newspaper; even (rather, ESPECIALLY if) if I do give you my money, the newspapers will keep on coming.

I don’t have all the answers here. I am pretty sure, however, that pushing the old static solution on people is not going to make much difference in the long or even the medium term. People expect their media to be dynamic, social, interactive, and pervasive.

Now, your website doesn’t look too bad and renders nicely in Firefox and Safari browsers, scoring points. It loses many points for not allowing much in the way of social bookmarking. People don’t just email stories to each other anymore: they share the stories on Muti, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, and a host of similar services. It really is not that hard to add a little Javascript applet to the bottom of a story to allow one-click sharing. This will also serve to drive traffic to your site, increasing your ad revenue and page rankings.

Another thing your site lacks: Comments. People expect to be able to raise their opinion on anything these days, and to debate it with others. Yes, comment flamewars is a potentially deplorable activity, but it is a relatively bloodless alternative to the same people raising these opinions in bars and getting in fights about their little opinions.

Frankly, this is all academic. Fairly soon, the e-paper people will be at the top of the pile in newspapers. Buy one paper, subscribe to a newsfeed, get your freshly customised feed every morning (or afternoon, as the case may be). If I were running a newspaper, I would be throwing money into e-ink and e-paper research instead of taking all the papers that aren’t selling and pushing them on people who don’t buy newspapers.

If you are interested in joining the dialogue around this topic, feel free to peruse the relevant articles on my blog.

Kind regards,
Arno Breedt

And now we wait for round 2.

So one rainy day I come home to find a newspaper nestled against my front door.

“Odd,” I think to myself, “it must have been delivered to the wrong address.”

I take said newspaper inside so that potential burglars won’t think the house is unoccupied. (Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.) The paper ends up on the pile of incendiary materials next to my fireplace, unopened. I have long since weaned myself of the bad habit of news addiction, and this neat plastic-wrapped package of dried paper pulp will serve nicely to light the fire that will warm these old bones in the winter to come. (Sans plastic covering, naturally.)

I forget about the newspaper.

Until the next day.

Another plastic-wrapped afternoon newspaper is waiting for me. Daring me to pick it up. For an sightless, inanimate object, this paper has a mean look about it. I rationalise my feelings by telling me it’s because the headline is about politics… but deep down, I know the truth: the newspaper is taunting me.

Before responding to its signals, I take a step back. Lifting my eyes from my squalid existence, I survey the street and all that is therein, especially the newspapery bits.

Lo and behold, all of them *also* had monstrous, taunting newspapers on their doorsteps! This could be no simple mistake. Some deeper plot, some nefarious intent, has placed these parcels of bad news in my neighbourhood.

And this did not stop. Every weekday afternoon for two weeks now, I have dreaded returning home. I have worked late so that my spouse will bring in the damned thing; I have played hooky; I have exhausted every single avoidance mechanism in my arsenal. Now I have to deal with the almost-3-foot-high stack of bad news sitting in my living room like a potentially flammable tumour.

Who would be so evil?

If I had to take a guess, this might be a (what seems to them) clever ploy to get more people to subscribe to their product. Everyone knows that newspaper subscriptions have been dropping steadily, with more and more publications going web-only in the hope of preserving solvency.

Well, I want none of it. This is a stupid move made by a stupid person at a company which, if they do not adjust their business model to the information age, I will also have to brand as stupid.

I am in the process of approaching the Cape Argus in the hope that I can get them to stop this bloody waste of paper. If they really have too many copies of the newspaper, give them to bergies. They know what a newspaper is best for: bedding insulation!

My letter to the editor of the Cape Argus is copied below:

Dear Mr Whitfield

I am writing this letter to you to inform you of a grievous misstep by an underling, or possibly by a conspiracy of underlings.

It seems that some of your employees have recently started dumping copies of your esteemed publication on the doorsteps of unsuspecting households in my area. This move is cleverly disguised as an officially sanctioned marketing ploy, but for one fact: I can not believe that such an otherwise intelligent newspaper would just dump newspapers on the doorsteps of people who, for some reason, do not want these excellent papers at an all-time low subscription price.

I am especially skeptic of the official provenance of this move, for the simple fact that it just won’t bloody stop! If I had to come home every day and have to deal with a huge wad of newspaper on top of all the other items I have to juggle to maneuver my keys into the optimal position to let me in my own front door, I would unsubscribe even if I were subscribed.

Please let me make something perfectly clear: I love the idea of a newspaper. During my journalistic studies, I loved every aspect of its production, layout, printing, everything. I love newspapers in the same way and for the same reason as I love handwritten letters, old Bakelite telephones, wood-and-brass telegraph machines, black-and-white televisions, and those huge chunky fax machines from the 1980s: they are sterling examples of what was once the state of the art of communications technology. Their very cumbersome nature makes them avatars of the march of progress.

Progress, however, has marched on. Static words, printed on smashed-up trees, make for a really wasteful process if you actually want to re-use the process.

My blog entry on this issue can be found at http://obscura.za.net/2009/05/stop-wasting-paper-cape-argus should you need to comment.

Sincerely,
Arno Breedt

He got into the taxi and sat down next to me. Dressed for work; black leather sneakers, black pants, pinstripe shirt, with a beanie and polar fleece top against the chill. Nylon sports bag which almost certainly contains his packed lunch.

After paying his fare, he pulled out his phone and earphones. Cheap old Sony Ericsson, well looked after.

Then, on the phone, he watched a video of a small boy, talking and clowning for the camera. A five-minute video, obviously made to capture a moment in this child’s life and in their relationship.

He watched this, and smiled from time to time… and then put his phone away and dozed off in the taxi to Bellville, going to work on a public holiday because that’s what he believes men should do. They work hard for their kids and family, not because someone tells them they should but because they can’t imagine being any other way.

It’s not politicians that make the country work. The strength, the very backbone of our country, is made up of fathers and mothers like this. Hardworking, honourable, loving family men and women with something to live for, work for, and if needs be to die for.

This is my tribute to the family man.

This is done by:

Pulling out your laptop in a minibus taxi to Bellville and setting up mobile posting on your blog, then putting your laptop away as the taxi gets full and blogging from your phone about how you just set up mobile blogging, etc.

If this post gets any more meta it will collapse into its own event horizon and become TheOnion, so I conclude with the relevant technical details:

Wordpress 2.7.1 running the WPhone plugin to provide the (very nice) lite admin interface and MobilePress to display the content nicely on mobile phones.

A note on WPhone: it has a “rich” interface for the likes of the iPhone and Windows Mobile browsers, as well as a “lite” interface for the likes of non-smartphone browsers and Opera Mini. On my Nokia 5310 XPressMusic with Opera Mini 4, it detected that the lite interface was appropriate and rendered wonderfully and quickly. One niggle is that it wouldn’t let me see the Plugins directory, but that’s something I prefer to admin from a real browser anyway.

My impressions of composing a post with this interface: My categories are selectable by check box; there are fields for setting tags, slug, and password. Comments and pings are also selectable by check box, and there’s a drop-down field for selecting to save the post as Published, Pending Review, Draft, or Private.

The simple bare necessities of life…

I’m going to publish this post without inserting links to the plugins, because (a) I want to see how well it works and (b) it’s a bit of a mission to go and find the links while I’m walking. Oh Opera Mini, why do you not have tabs?

Comments and thoughts welcome.

I have traveled along down tree-lined avenues in the night-time shadow of Table Mountain… on the back of a friend’s scooter… while wearing jeans shorts, an embroidered tunic, Doctor Martens boots, and school socks.

I am a Capetonian.

If printers (or industry in general) really was concerned about the environment more than their profits, e-paper would not only have been conceptualised but commercialised years ago.

You want recycling? How does “buy one newspaper, magazine, or book for the rest of your life” sound? We have the technology right now! All we lack are the business models!

Discuss.

I recently blogged about the Firefox extension called Interclue. For those who missed it: Interclue is a “preview window”-type plugin that shows you previews or even full pages for links you hover over, without having to open a new tab to the link. The reason I am blogging about this again is that I just discovered something cool that Interclue knows about: The XHTML Friends Network (XFN).

From the XFN website:

XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they’ve physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.

Essentially XFN adds a relationship or ‘rel’ attribute to the HTML <a href> tags, like so:

<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel=”friend met”>…

… in which is defined your relationship with the person to which you are linking.

Having recently switched to Wordpress, I have been impressed with all the nice little touches that have been included to make blogging both more social and more convenient. Support for XFN is one of them: if I link to someone else’s site or blog in my Blogroll, Wordpress allows me to define things like whether we’re friends, sweethearts, colleagues, spouses, co-residents, and so on. I find it amusing, but oh-so-much a sign of the online times, that you have to tick a separate box to signify whether you’ve actually met a person.

Getting back to Interclue: if you have Interclue installed, and you hover over a link which includes XFN attributes, you will see a neat row of icons, one for each XFN attribute.

So there. Not very useful, but fun and informative. If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will like.

Which Firefox extensions do you see as essential to your survival on the Internet? I don’t mean the “it does something neat” ones, the “it’s awesome but useless”, the “nice to have”.

Which extensions do you install immediately upon installing a new browser, and without which your web experience feels incomplete?

Here’s my (short) list:

1. PasswordMaker. Without question my most necessary extension, as it generates all my strong passwords for me. Hit Ctrl-` to pop up the dialog. You enter a combination of a passphrase/master password. This is then combined with the current site’s domain name to generate a strong password. Click a button to copy to clipboard, paste elsewhere, and your clipboard is cleared 10 seconds later. Your password is never saved. Brilliant.
2. NoScript. Technically I can do without it, but I hope I never have to. Blocks Javascript per domain until whitelisted. Also catches XSS links.
3. Interclue. The best tool ever for cutting down on your tab addiction. Hover over a link, a tooltip icon will appear. Hover over or click icon, a window pops up with a preview of the link. Scrollable and very legible too; I’ve read entire Wikipedia articles in the Interclue popup window. It does not load or run Javascript, but for most sites it’s fine to get an idea of what you’re looking at. (Also check out Lazarus by the Interclue team; it resurrects partially-filled-in web forms even across browser crashes or backspaces.)
4. URLBarExt. I must thank DChetty for reminding me of this one. It puts some extra icons in your URL bar for common actions like copying URL, providing a TinyURL link, tagging the current page, and so on. Read his full review at the link provided.
5. Last but definitely one of my favourites: It’s All Text! allows you to pop out and edit any text field in a web form in any external text editor of your choice. Platform compatibility: I’ve used it with SciTE and Notepad++ in Windows, as well as with GVim and Kate in Linux.

Well, that’s my list. I hope it’s of value to someone… I can go on and on ad infinitum about Firefox extensions, but I need to go do some work now.

Which are your Firefox Essentials? Tell me in the comments.

come as you are
as it were
conscienceless chemical tag cloud
interference patterns of meat-puppet personal presence
star-hot nebula of iterative interest
i am here, i am exactly here
in the moment, in the flesh
check me out in tight genes
info clean, your broadband bitstream star-bright
too bright to read by, can’t stand it
too much
please…

obscure yourself
modulate, moderate your light
bore me
or i cannot let you go.