The first day of the “AoIR conference”:http://www.aoir.org/2004/ didn’t start until the afternoon but already I’ve met several stimulating people and am really looking forward to the next few days. It’s so nice to be surrounded by smart people who care about the social implications of the Internet and think in academic terms. The LSE has a fair number of these as well of course but it’s nice to meet new faces to bounce new ideas off of and to meet face to face the people whose work I have admired.

Today’s keynote speaker was “Ted Nelson”:http://xanadu.com.au/ted/, who certainly dreams big dreams (but maybe tries to dream too many at once)! I had hoped to give you a picture of him in full flow but discovered that my camera’s batteries are flat. Maybe tomorrow…

I’m off tomorrow to Internet Research 5.0: Ubiquity? the “Association of Internet Researchers”:http://www.aoir.org/’ 5th annual conference – my first major academic conference, in fact. I won’t be delivering a paper there, alas, but I look forward to meeting many of my fellow Internet-studing academics over the next four days.

I may even take some pictures, but don’t expect instant blogging as there is no wireless access.

P.S. A reminder – please if you read this and are British and have a home page or weblog go “take my survey”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html#001250!

Plunder!

Originally uploaded by derb.

A once in a lifetime opportunity came up for me – well-known academic publishers Routledge moved from central London yesterday and rather than pack up all their books they selected some and left the rest for hungry scholars to grab (charities didn’t want most of them for some reason). This was my haul. But they aren’t exactly free – given a bookshelf six shelves high I figure the space they take up in our flat would still be worth about 55 pounds given the cost of London real estate these days.

Still I’m not nearly as much of a book hoarder as some friends of mine – and with easy access to ‘one of the largest libraries in the world devoted to the economic and social sciences‘ I don’t really need to be.

Hmm… I seem to be turning into a book stack photoblogger – something of a dull niche! I promise if I put up more pictures they will be a little more interesting. Meanwhile take a look the few pictures I “have made public so far”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/derb/…

P.S. On the whole ‘buy vs sign out from library’ issue, I just came across a terrific little (free) tool described and linked to on the “43 folders”:http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/request_a_libra.html weblog. It lets you look up a book on Amazon then check to see if it is available at your local librar(ies) before buying. Mind you if your library has the book but with a different ISBN it won’t turn up. Definitely worth trying though – particularly if you prefer Amazon’s search to your library’s search.

I am 30% geek according to “this online quiz”:http://www.thudfactor.com/geekquiz.php. ‘You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.’

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.
You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You’ll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!
Geek [to You]: I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!
You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Thanks to Lois for the link

I haven’t really found ways to earn a lot of money being a geek liason – I think I would earn more if I knew enough programming to be a ‘pure geek’ but I just don’t swing that way 😉

There are lots of photo sharing services around – (two years ago I did a “little comparison”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_useful_web_resources.html#000385 of several of them which offer photo printing as well) – but “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ – which I started to try out yesterday – seems to be the Internet geek’s best choice (they’ve got Cory Doctorow, “renaissance geek”:http://www.craphound.com/bio.html advising them so it’s “turning up a lot on boingboing”:http://www.boingboing.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=flickr).

If after reading the description below, Flickr appeals to you and you want to try it out (basic membership is free), instead of visiting the site right away and signing up I would appreciate it if you could “email me”:http://davidbrake.org/contact.htm and I will invite you. There’s an offer available at the moment – if I successfully invite 5 new people to join Flickr I will receive a Flickr Pro Account (valid until September 15th, 2004). Yes I have therefore a small interest in selling you on the idea but I already have other photo library accounts so it’s not a huge deal for me one way or another. Anyway…

The Flickr feature that first caught my attention is that it has an automatic ‘post to your blog’ feature (which I used yesterday). It also lets you post photos to your Flickr site and/or weblog via email and directly from camera phones. What’s more intriguing though is that it has a number of creative ways of organizing photos. Most photo sites make you sort pictures into albums. This one lets you attach pictures to several different groups, tag them by keyword, lets you and your Flickr-using friends pool and organize your pictures in interesting ways etc etc.

Geekily enough it also supports RSS in different ways so people can automatically know you have added more pictures and they have built in chat and messageboard facilities so people with similar interests can share pictures (yes there are porn-related groups as you’d expect but also groups like “Bonsai lovers”:http://www.flickr.com/groups_view.gne?id=36521982934@N01). I’m a sucker for organizations like this one that just don’t seem to know when to stop adding new features on the off chance that someone will use them. “ICQ”:http://www.icq.com/ was a bit like that – it’s a pity the full version isn’t seeing much development any more. Anyway…

There’s a quick overview of Flickr’s features “here”:http://www.flickr.com/learn_more.gne and a longer “get the most out of Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne guide but the best way to figure it out is to sign up and try out its features.

Signup is free. For the moment you can only sign up for their free account which lets you share either your most recent 100 photos or photos uploaded in the last 3 months (whichever comes first). It must be said this is not over-generous – “photo.net”:http://www.photo.net/ has a 100Mb quota, “Webshots”:http://daily.webshots.com/scripts/signup.fcgi lets you store 240 photos. Also at the moment the only software available for bulk uploading of photos is for Windows XP and MacOS X. Later they will have software available for more operating systems and premium accounts with more storage and capabilities (they are in beta testing at the moment).

P.S. I just discovered “Phil Gyford”:http://www.gyford.com/ has also recently “taken a shine to Flickr”:http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2004/08/25/seeing_the_light.php.

What I’m reading now

Originally uploaded by derb.

534 PDF files accumulated in the ‘Academia’ directory on my hard disk
1,281 accumulated references – 384 of them coded as relating to my “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm (the rest relate to the coursework for my “MSc”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mScInNewMediaInformationAndSociety.htm, my MSc dissertation, my teaching or just look interesting).

Never mind the quality, feel the weight 😉

The stack pictured is all the books I have signed out of the library at the moment which may give you some idea of the direction my thesis is taking (you can click on the picture to see it more clearly). Behind it in the background you can just see my filed photocopied journal articles…


For an earlier view, see “what I was reading in December last year”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html#000965.

Remember my hard disk crashed? Well, I’ve been kicking myself ever since for a stupid thing I did early on in the recovery process. I managed to boot from my backup disk and found I could access the original. ‘Great!’ I said to myself, ‘I’d better copy across all my most valuable files quickly in case the disk stops being accessable again!’ Did I copy them into new directories? Nooo… I copied them over the earlier backup files. Well the files looked fine and I did check some of them before copying. But it turned out several of the email folders I hadn’t checked were in fact corrupted. And even when the mailboxes looked fine (the ‘overview’ showed the right names and subject lines) the contents were corrupted as well. Ten years of email gone!

So remember if you get files back from a disk that has been giving you trouble, make sure to preserve your old backup files just in case!

P.S. In the wake of this catastrophe I was thinking of moving my emailing to my gmail account but gmail still doesn’t support basic things like email groups so I guess I’ll have to hope that the hard disk doctors I gave my disk to can get the files off.
P.P.S. And yes, it is a little embarrassing that I wrote a book about good email practice but managed nonetheless to mess up!

My hard disk started acting oddly a few days ago and now works at best erratically. Fortunately I had a backup – make sure you have a backup for your main computer and do that backing up frequently! But I spent most of yesterday getting a new drive to back up my backup onto so I could try backing up my main disk onto my backup disk without losing the earlier backup that was on it (if you see what I mean).

Now I am working from my backup but I want to make as few changes as possible to my disk in case I can get the data off my original drive successfully later. This is a hassle but is less tricky than it once would have been. A lot of my work is in email (which I can do via the web). I have an “MP3 player/storage device”:https://blog.org/archives/000901.html which may have more recent copies of some of my most used files on it and which I can use for temporary storage. My most up to date contact and calendar information is backed up on my Palm along with many of my most frequently used documents. Some of my email is in an exchange server at the LSE. And of course I haven’t lost any of the data on this weblog because it isn’t on my machine either.

Without really thinking about it I have come to realise my data is no longer centralised on my computer – it has spread itself into a kind of web across several devices. Sometimes that can be quite handy!

Later: It’s a bit like coming home after a small robbery. At first everything seems fine then you find out that things in odd corners are lost or broken. In my case, so far, I have lost a few Mozilla settings and (more serious) all of my Eudora email folders seem to be corrupted and some ‘ghost’ folders and messages of gibberish have appeared. So far after rebuilding the email database for my inbox only a small amount of damage seems to have been done but the depressing thing of course is that (as with a real or virtual breakin or virus damage or whatever) you can never be sure what it is you are missing or what problems you will stumble across next. Very traumatic!

P.S. Another discovery – a 160Gb hard drive (that could store all my data twice over) costs just 75 quid these days – the simple caddy that it fit into (it’s removeable) cost me nearly half that!

Thanks to “Simon Bisson”:http://www.sandm.co.uk/simon/index.html who helped calm me down when the problem first became apparent…

Giving away most of his $45m fortune was not enough for Zell Kravinsky – he gave away one of his kidneys too, to a black woman who was a stranger to him and who would probably otherwise have died. His was one of only ‘several dozen’ nondirected kidney donations made each year in the US. The more I read this New Yorker article about Kravinsky the more admiration I feel for him and the more it saddens me that he seems to be painted largely as a crank. He seems to have been inspired by Peter Singer whose influential essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality pointed out (to my mind convincingly) that there is no moral difference between failing to save a child who is drowning in a shallow pond right in front of you and failing to give money to charity that would help to save a child’s life in Bangladesh. Moreover it is hard to establish a moral difference between one’s responsibility to one’s family and friends and the same responsibility to any other person in need. (I am not at all persuaded incidentally by Singer’s next step which is to suggest that All Animals are Equal and therefore, ‘ that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species’).

I do believe (uncomfortably) that I should really be living at a minimum comfort level and the rest of my money should be going to those who need it in the third world. Like most people however I would have great difficulty living according to that principle and accordingly I put it to the back of my mind and try to do what I can within the limits of ‘normal’ behaviour. That makes me all the more filled with admiration for one of the few people who seems to be making a serious, conscientious attempt to live according to those principles (albeit imperfectly – he and his family are not living a millionaire lifestyle but neither are they ‘living poor’).

More coverage of his story from The Daily Telegraph.

I won’t run out of the house naked shouting like “Archimedes”:http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Crown/Vitruvius.html but posting here is the next best thing – I think I have finally found a fresh way of looking at personal home pages (and weblogs) that lets me examine what most interests me about them and illuminates several bodies of relevant theoretical literature at the same time.

I’ve been stuck for weeks trying to figure out in my own mind what it is that I am most interested in studying about them (they are interesting in so many different ways!) and at the same time trying to find something that is measurable and theoretically interesting. I won’t tell you all just yet what it is, however, it might be a false start – I’ve had a few of those before!

Still, the new perspective has given me fresh impetus and excitement at last – enough to inspire me to dash into the “library”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/ on Sunday to pick up W. E. Bijker and J. Law (1992) Shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change and P. Du Gay, S. Hall, L. Janes, H. Mackay and K. Negus (1997) Doing cultural studies : the story of the Sony Walkman.