searching for yoga mats, sorted by price

I was trying to find a yoga mat on a leading online everything store (birthday present rather than for personal use) and after the usual frustrating first five minutes of trying to hone the search to actually include yoga mats my intended gift victim would enjoy, set the sorting to price high to low. Yoga mats topped out at a relatively modest £5K+, which shows how much the algorithm price wars have dropped off in recent years. In fact, a lot of the ads were for legitimately expensive items like inflatable and ultra-padded cheerleading mats, giant yoga mats to cover an entire room, and  yoga mat trolleys. Still a few people kicking it old-school though, with the list topped by three identical and utterly ordinary products priced in the thousands.

But it was when I set the pricing low to high (looking for carry straps I think) that the real surprise occurred. There were two or three yoga mat carry straps, but everything else was, I kid you not, teeny tiny tacky lacy strappy undies illustrated by all manner of pictures of professionally pleased to see you ladies. I was in the grip of a big EEEK already (mainly at the thought of the ads that would now be chasing me across the internet) when I spotted that adult items had been excluded from the search. Well, thank heavens for that, I suppose.

But what the heck is happening here? Time for five minute's thought:

• Hypothesis #1: Some SEO scamp has tagged all the products in the store (it is all one store)  with Yoga Mat, presumably on the grounds that ladies who like yoga may also like skimpy pants.
• Hypothesis #2: It is common practice to massively multiply tag penny items, on the assumption that people just go into a click-buy haze when they see such bargains.
• Hypothesis #3: There is some alternative use for yoga mats of which I am not aware.

I clicked through to one of the more innocuous items to check it out, and what's been done is either sort of clever, in an annoying sort of way, or a result of automatic categorisation having gone wrong. It's also possible it's an exploitation of a known weakness, so essentially both.

Under special offers, possibly because there is no-where else to go when most of what you're selling is retailing at £0.01+ p+p, the seller has simply linked back to some site search pages, including best rated yoga mat reviews among  other outdoor and fitness categories. The category assigned, Sports > Outdoors > Fitness > Yoga > Mats, appears to have been lifted from this non-information in the special offer category.

While the seller is a mere # 69,166 in the Sports > Outdoors category, they are a surprisingly high #384 in Sports > Outdoors > Fitness > Yoga > Mats, suggesting that for some yoga fans at least, hypothesis #1 (or potentially, for some lingerie fans, hypothesis #3) does hold.

Hypothesis #2 I discarded by running a few more searches (shoe stretchers, pepper grinders, sugar mice, yoga bricks, door mats, watch straps, exhaustive search run fans). No other search terms had suffered this mass lingerie invasion.

Right then, onto the incorrect product information feedback forms.

once upon a twitter and the snapchat map

Once upon a Twitter I bullied a crowd of friends into installing it for a festival. This was in the heady days when it was text message only and there were no carrier charges in the UK. I sold it to them as selective telepathy - you can let your friends know what you're doing/thinking/saying at a distance in brief form. We realised that some other people at the festival were tweeting too. The experience was diffused and intensified by the multiple viewpoints. We set off into the new festival fields, virtual and actual, and later, like good SF fans, debated the ethics of seeing strangers' thoughts into the night.

That bright summer of scattered thoughts didn't last for long, but it was long enough to polarise my friends into haters and embracers of this new communication form, to struggle through some of its early problems, and form a sadly doomed attachment myself. When lower data charges and faster phone speeds brought Twitter back to me, hashtags were in place as a way of finding the other people doing or seeing what you are doing or seeing, and nowadays doing a quick flicker across to look at what strangers are doing/thinking/saying when I'm at an event is pretty much second nature.

So, when people starting sending me through clickbait links about the new Snapchat feature that will destroy privacy and put our children at risk™ I was naturally intrigued. I had resisted the lure of Snapping (mostly because the people asking me if I was on Snapchat were usually relatives aged eight to ten) but as so often happens, the feature arrives that will crack you, and maybe even the app, into a new space. Enter the Snapmap, at which point I absolutely had to download Snapchat and check out in order to explore the privacy and safety concerns.

You can tap on a hotspot on a map and tap though a bunch of snaps that have been shared to public in that area. You're visible (or rather a daft looking cartoon version of yourself is visible) on the map to your friends, or maybe just a select group, or no-one if you're feeling ghooooostly. Heh.

My assessment of it: interesting.

• It might create problems in poorly-curated friend groups
  When I was asked to add my contacts there were a bunch of people I'd drifted out of touch with, including a few who shouldn't be on my contacts at all. People who shortcut their settings may end up telling people they stopped talking to some time ago where they are.
• It'll enable including and excluding people in plans
  Inner cliques and outer circles just got defined. You can hide yourself completely and cut other people out from being able to see you on the map. Friendship tensions ahoy.
• Think before you post just got a whole lot bigger
  The public snaps on the map are being shared as "Our Story", a public post, and you have to consciously choose to do that. It doesn't remember if your last snap was public, so each public snap represents a positive (if perhaps not very well thought out) decision to share. 
• You could use it to surprise a friend for good or bad reasons
  People started describing the Snapmap as stalky, freaky and creepy almost immediately, and I see their point; assuming they're visible to you, arranging to accidentally bump into X or hide from Y is a doddle. Of course if everyone goes into ghost mode right away and only pops out when they're at a loose end and fancy seeing if anyone else is around (and the system enables this quite well) it'll only be an issue for the risky oversharers, which brings me to...
• It will increase the risk of risky oversharing
  Everyone knows a few risky oversharers, who like to live the open online life, Many people go through risky oversharing stages, often for good reasons like establishing yourself in a new social group, meeting new people, or attending an event. During this phase, Snapchat might now amplify the risk of a hairy post by depositing you tidily on a very precise map. If anyone happens to care and be looking, of course.
• It may be prophylactic against stalking - or it may find or reinforce more stalkers
  Time was, technologically-enabled stalking took a bunch of effort. You had to find specialist software, you had to suborn the other person's hardware. By the time the nuisance effects began to crest into the stalked person's sphere of notice, the stalking person had knocked down so many acceptable behaviour barriers that they were very dangerous, and irreparably fixated on the stalked person, and on the activity of stalking. Now everyone can stalk a person with very little technological effort, it becomes something everyone has to think about. Acceptable behaviour can be discussed and set within peer groups. Of course, a rotten peer group can set a deviant norm; and individuals without the facility to do complex online actions may find themselves suddenly in a moral position they may otherwise have never encountered.
• Group games, flashmobs ... bank heists?
  It's too early to tell exactly what being able to put a bunch of your friends onto a map accurately might be good for, but I'm guessing that there will be a few innovative uses, some negative. After all, there are a few situations I can think of right away where being able to locate ten friends and assemble them to your location might be very useful. Potluck picnics, demos, spur-of-the-moment lunches. Pokémon Go raids, of course.

It's tempting to think that Pokémon Go and Snapchat somehow coordinated this, but it's more likely to be the case that super-accurate location services and find my [friends, car, cat, whatever] are emergent in the field of technological human facility augmentation right now and these are simply the most obvious inflorescences of this immanence visible from my individual perspective.  

botherware, blue whale and outsourcing of decision-making

I attended a short course on social marketing (a standard encounter in my line of work) and while most of the day was dedicated to communicating the health risks of sunbeds to devotees of the Liverpool look (it was a culturally expanding day for me) there was also a visit from people selling a wellbeing app, the kind that sends you text instructions every day. The company in question was at the stage of trying to sell it as a way of reducing community mental health expenditure and was full of anecdata about how valuable it had proved in multiple circumstances. I lost count of the number of people who had spoken to their neighbours or unexpectedly baked a cake for someone as a result of this app. Naturally I signed up on the spot. I always take the antique work i-pad along to days like this, and it's a great way of seeing how reliably a thing runs.

I managed to sign up. The immediate functionality was cheerleading other people's wellbeing activities, so I did a bit of that. Then I forgot about it, like you do.

A few days later, I started getting the texts. Go screen free this evening! Take a different route home! Compliment a colleague! Spot ten things you don't normally see! Watch someone talk for ten minutes on Youtube about wellbeing!

Hmmm. After the "eulogy task" text, I switched the alerts onto another phone and thereafter ignored them. Chalk it up under "inexplicably popular, but not for me"? Or is there something more going on?

At aroundabout the same time I became aware of the blue whale phenomenon. This weird mass of cultural flotsam (an online game, a real life court case, an online video series) was initially taken for an online suicide cult by the tabloids, several of which have been running with this idea ever since, despite substantial debunking. It adopts a similar sort of methodology, with tasks messaged to you every day. Not exactly the same kind of tasks, although write your own eulogy could conceivably turn up on both.

Like the more expensive wellbeing apps, it also claims to offer an online mentor, although given how the entire framework and toolkit is freely shared online, it could simply be peer mentoring, like my initial cheerleading for my wellbeing buddies on the directed cheerfulness app, delivered by other newbies overexcited that they've got their hands on the script.

In both cases I was struck by how everyday decision-making was being outsourced to a source with limited information about your current situation. It's easy to put this down as aimlessness, or a desire for a purpose, or something less polite, probably using the word sheeple. But perhaps it is also a logical response to the complexity of our nowadays everyday; a recognition that in a world this complex, there is a certain value perceived in having an outside influence, a randomiser, bombing your everyday plans with disorientating and pointless instructions to watch psychedelic videos and/or speak to and smile at strangers.

When all time can be spent profitably and enjoyably, in multiple ways, when there is far more task available than can be fitted into time, then decision-making becomes a process of elimination. The known good can displace unknown activities of uncertain reward, and the joy of happenstance, exploration, and participation in the unknown and extraordinary can fade unless actively cultivated or curiously pursued,

In this densely packed world of infinite entertainment, the desire to switch off from the current curators of our cultural life and try something different taps directly into our fears of missing out or being left behind. Yet my instant revulsion with being bossed around by text messages from some sort of Poppins-meets-Wiseman algorithm suggests a suitable protective response is available to guard against bad data coming in through this window. It can be summarised very briefly:

You what? This is bullshit. No.

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ple-e-e-e-ease turn off your adblocker

The wheedling messages from the honest-buck websites have been intensifying of late. Each site presents a variation on the same justification; advertising pays our way, and the more you block the less they pay.  It's a hard dilemma for the free-to-access web. But not a hard dilemma for me. I leave that website and find another which provides the content without complaints my adblocking plugin, or I don't access the content. That is, if I'm accessing the content from home, where I have an adblocker on. If I'm at work, I don't. In common with many people in large offices, when I'm on the office PC, I see the un-adblocked web.

What I don't see is a lot of adverts, though. Many crash the browser, fail to load, or stun the page into immobility while they painfully prepare their aggravating high volume autoplay video and audio content (lovely for the other people in the open-plan office). One of the major local news sites (which I need to access regularly for work reasons) is so prone to over-advertising that any time I need to load a page, I put it in a tab and wait while I do something else. Sometimes the page loads. Sometimes it takes a few times. Sometimes I either forget about that task or give up.

What all the wheedle-messages are missing is  the reason why we all have adblockers on. It's because web advertising is, for the large part, so very, very bad. On some sites, it contains such active content that blocking is simply good hygiene. Even on sites where the ads aren't trying to hack you, they often still run fast and loose with page and site stability, leave your web cache full of candy-coloured crud and jam the pages as they load. The adblocker is there for safety; not because I hate adverts, but because I cannot guarantee that the adverts I am being served will be safe.

Personally, I'm a long-term fan of advertising. As a child, I collected Silk Cut and Rimmel adverts. I stop my PVR to catch anything that looks interesting. And I would happily view web adverts if I was convinced that they were being properly tested, thoroughly checked and  their content curated - ideally to suit the content on the site, rather than stalkerishly and creepily for me (although that does provide the odd dark laugh).

The wheedle-message, though, never addresses this concern. It focuses instead on the immorality of viewing free content - an interesting position to take in an environment where that is the standard transaction. But that argument aside, a company - even one where you like the content, approve of the editorial, and enjoy what they do - the profit margin is not what the viewer will care about, not first and maybe not ever. What your visitors care about is seeing content that is interesting, and won't break the furniture or bust a blood vessel.

Address that concern in the wheedle messages and we'll all lose the adblockers on the next annoying update.

your marketing materials are deadnaming me again

I first came across the term deadnaming quite recently, which might seem quite odd for someone who doesn't use the same name as they were given when a child (I don't) but firstly in my family selecting a different name in teenage years is common practice (all part of growing up - every one of my sisters made a similar transition) and secondly pretty much nobody calls me by my childhood name, largely because I don't have any friends I'm in regular contact with who also knew me as a child.

It may also have something to do with the fact that when I changed my name from a gender neutral to a gender inappropriate name, I was making a statement about gender, but not one of conformity. It was more a statement of anti-gender, an acknowledgement of disruptive nature, like punk clothes, tattoos, or too many piercings. In that, I was just part of a general loosening of cultural norms, and accepting my name went alongside all of those other things.

But in recent years, there has been a growing trend for marketing emails from companies of which I am a customer to address me by first name. This has been followed by online systems of which I am a listed user (online administration systems, moodles, etc.) starting to do the same. The vagaries of registration systems means that sometimes I can use my initials, but sometimes that won't validate. My documentation (and indeed some of these systems) include my used name, but most places which address you by name draw from the master First Name field, not preferred first name.

So it is that there is a constant dip dip drip of automated systems addressing me by a name I don't use. It's dislocating, irritating and occasionally distressing, if it catches me at low ebb, like a reminder of old battles I don't want to fight again. In particular one provider of services, who uses a friendly chummy tone and FIRST NAME IN CAPITALS in the email headers of all its contacts with me (which really does make it look like spam or scam) has me pretty much constantly annoyed with them (it is a company that seems to derive a certain satisfaction from dissatisfied customers).

Complaining and correcting can sometimes be done (although it's not practical and sometimes not possible within some systems, and hard to predict which it will be before you start the process). But fundamentally, I don't want to be an exception. In this world, there are names people are called, and suggesting they do things using those names often makes those things more likely to be done. Acknowledged. There are also the names on their passports, Doctor's records and birth certificates. These are often not the same, for many people. The changes can be big or small, but we hear them. We hear them all.

Don't cross the beams. If you're talking formally, keep it formal and and keep FIRST NAME down in official spaces (For the Attention of: X, Dear X, According to our records your name is X). If you're striking an informal note (Hi X, Hello X!) make sure that field is draws from a preferred name field or is user editable. Otherwise that name will have precisely the opposite effect to the intended.



 

The reasons your website redacted.com is not performing well

The sheer giddy brio of it. The email came breezing into my inbox, purporting to tell me the ten reasons my website was not performing well.  So far, so ordinary. But here's the twist; the website in question was retired over three years ago.

Given that it is part of recent history, and that there is a new website doing much the same thing, the old domain name is still very much owned and earning its keep, deep links carefully redirecting to new content on the new site, the old world seamlessly subsumed into the foundations of the new. So the domain name has an owner and that'll have an owner email address attached, which is doubtless how I got on the list. But why was it sent to me for this web address and no other*?

I think I may have fallen victim to an algorithm. One which looked for owners of websites that seem not to be doing too well on google. And of course it's not going to be doing well on Google; all it's doing is sending all the old readers to the new domain name.

Google does know, of course. In fact, after the last redesign (with a little work from the developers and, er, me setting up a hundred or so redirects) Google had me showing a good face on the relevant terms within 48 hours. It was breathtaking. And a human check would quickly identify the clear data footprint of several sites knocked together, their domain names steadily, one by one, pointing to the survivor site as the others winked out one by one, too specialised or duplicatory to survive the rationalising web.

The content of the email was both fretfully pushy and link-farm generic, a few technical SEO terms thrown in, all wrapped up in a phishy sort of chumminess. The complete lack of company name and multiple other red flags would weed out all but the most busy and naive. I particularly liked the note that they had a host of "ethical" techniques - hinting none-too-subtly that there might also be unethical services available. It assumed I was working in sales, which is really just the business equivalent of saying "my dearest friend".

I batted it out of the joint mailbox at speed rather than reporting it back to the spam filter which should have caught it in the first place. Regretting that now. Hopefully many of the other people on the list reported properly.

*My email address/es is/are linked to ?maybe eight? web addresses. I probably forgot a few.

let me remove the improvements you have included as standard

I use a popular image hosting site (in fact, I use several, but there's one in particular that I adopted early and have stuck with since) many of whose best features have eroded over the years (alas, the notes function) but from time to time it adds another little thing. Sometimes these are great -- smart auto-tagging and the magic view (where the site sorts your photos into plants, people, animals, with only the occasional hilarious mistake) have been pleasant surprises this year.

But there have also been unpleasant surprises, the most unpleasant of which has been streamlining the embed code generator. It's had the noddy and big-buttons makeover which characterises the tablet-focussed web, accompanied by its usual reduction of options. So now, instead of asking you if you want their code snippet to top and tail your image with a bunch of text, it just does it, automagically.

This is quite tiresome, especially at small sizes, where the code top-and-tail can almost double the height of the image. I appreciate that they're just dying to say "hosted on Flickr" right where you can see it, but really when that information is a hover or a click away, is it really needed?

 

Naturally, given that if you're embedding you're often in code view anyway, stripping this additional bobbins out is a moment's work. But I'm old enough to be in the count-down to arthritis, and every click counts.

Edited to add: The code no longer seems to be loading effectively (I suspect to no-one's great sorrow) but it added almost a centimetre of logoed and betexted space above and below the image.

Gucci/medicaid mashup bot sends me a re-reminder

I've been looking for weeks (well, actually a couple of months) at my cervical smear letter. It's never a pleasant experience and this summer has been busy, and complicated. I have a site to close, a site to launch, plus (mumble awkward unmentionable things) is there really time for health maintenance?

Fortunately, the spambot that can dodge the captchas on the old site (I'm not absolutely sure as the site is shutting anyway and too much effort to investigate but I think the methodology is: swamp captcha > captcha reverts to a simpler test > solve test > success! > site notices captcha has reverted to simpler test > resets captcha > repeat) has a bit of a fondness for medical terminology, and sent me an additional reminder:

Reminder: your cervical smear

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Suitably reminded by my robot friend, I have now made the appointment. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the "book nurse" button on my patient portal (though I'm sure it's there somewhere from conversations I've had with other practice users) so had to use a phone, like a little old lady, which I suppose is what I shall become, bit by bit.

jam yesterday

This is my Jam announced its closure late last night. I came late to it (a long time after I gave up on my previous semi-social music recommendation randomiser, blip.fm, which went during the early days of Flash instability, following one too many terrifying jackhammer soundcard lean-on-the-power-button errors) and I'm intermittent on everything nowadays, so I'd barely cracked 20 jams. I feel like I just arrived in time to see the closing down signs.

The reasons boil down to three -- fast evolution in its feeder services, creating a need for impossibly constant development of the interface tools; an increase in these services denying sharing (which sometimes seems to be down the artist wanting that, as in the case of Prince; but in the case of artists trying to get their songs up the charts, seems more likely to be as a result of the administrative burden of enabling sharing in a world where the companies involved are beginning to set sharing to "off" as standard);  and the lack of enthusiasm, time, legislative force and money to do it again for mobile.

Sat as I am, right at the end of development on a mobile-first, social-integrated website, this chills me a little. Of course, in my sector, there's no venture capital or straining to be the next big thing; but is the approach of trying to integrate with Social Networking Sites (because that's where people are™) and designing "mobile first" (with the full awareness that the fast and divergent development of the different operating systems  means that you can only really design for a few mobiles first, and they probably won't be the ones next year's users will be using) a fool's game?

Not much to do about it, I suppose. It's the game we're in.

While I was writing this, I listened through my latest jam-list. Halfway down, I spotted a track off the new Chemical Brothers album (I'm considering purchase, and being both old fashioned and keen to support a local indie record store, do sometimes buy physical CDs, especially when there are added inducements) which I made a mental note to listen out for.

Alas, the playlist skipped straight from



to


which I struggled to feel sad about, as the degradation occurred without fuss or stutter, and both tracks were a lovely listen.

A quick visit to Youtube confirmed that the Chemical Brothers track had been scrubbed off Youtube, and the video labelled with the track name was instead a small random video of a snippet of music you could mistake for the beginning of a track, with many ads appended (hooray the internet).

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Last few days before the spamfilter upgrade. 

Intrusions of the future

I'm on a variety of mailing lists - youth related, e-safety, local authority, democracy and also public authority construction as a result of a mailing list snafu that rises, phoenix-like, from some forgotten or repurchased mailing list every time I get it sorted. Actually, I've stopped trying to sort it out. It sends me interesting things. Did you know:

Pollution "eating" construction materials are now a thing. Tiles and other construction materials can strip nitrogen oxides from the air and convert them to a mild fertiliser.

Councils now use robots insulate old homes - Q-bots - tiny crawlerbots that spray insulation foam on to the underside of floorboards.

Do you live in an intermediary city? They are often seen as good places to live, with higher levels of trust than found in larger cities and high levels of civic and social engagement. Half the population is projected to end up in these just-right cities.

Worried about noise in your area? You should be. The tranquillity map for England is incomplete and needs updating. This concentration on the fragmentation and intrusion of England's tranquility, also extends into cities, especially in those areas seen as "semi-rural". Speaking of which:

Quality darkness is also a concern. Did you know that planning applications need to be dark sky compliant? One of those things, I suspect, that exercises the indulged rich with their four storey basements more than the rest of us.

You can rent out the Iron Man Mansion. Presumably without all of the rocket and impact damage.

That last one; there really is no excuse. It was out-of-the-blue, straight up, unsolicited spam. But I'm still kind of pleased by the concept, even if it is less or more than it appears.

the joy of the police alert mailing list

As a confirmed pillar of society, I signed up to receive my local police force's alert messages a few years ago. Normally they are a mildly depressing run of warnings about scams, alerts about petty thefts and the occasional statement about a dodgy someone-or-other to look out for.

But there are also the crime prevention messages, and of these the treasure is the be vigilant for raves message. Here is a prime example:

Be Vigilant For Any Potential Raves This Bank Holiday Weekend

The summer bank holiday is round the corner and your local policing team is reminding  all farmers and landowners to be vigilant to the possibility of unlicensed musical events (raves) being organised on their land.

You should be alert to any of the following rave related activity:- 

• The removal of locks from secure access points
• Vehicles, particularly panel vans or larger, driving off-road
• Groups of vehicles congregating in rural areas
• Convoys of vehicles
• Loud music from remote woodlands

If you spot anyone suspicious who may be conducting early reconnaissance on rural land or even starting to set up an event, please report it to [your local police force] 24-hour non-emergency number 101, as soon as possible.

A message for us all. It always reminds me of that bit in Nelson where the farmer leans on the gate and says, "Is it raave your aafter?"

Hee hee hee.

cookies set to stalker

I'm trying to identify a yellow flower that's all over the walls at Iffley Turn this year. It's a crack grower, a pioneer of loose mortar and cracked concrete. The leaves and growth habit look like a perennial geranium, though I'd be the first to admit that as it's yellow, it's far more likely to be a buttercup of some kind. Is there even such a thing as a yellow geranium?

My exploration of the concept of yellow geranium took me first to one major online gardening supplies company, and then (while listing enthusiastic self-seeders for my gardening blog) to a second, where I viewed two somewhat beguiling plants that were wholly tangential to my investigations of what is probably (on reflection) some kind of Waldsteinia.

Less than two hours later, into my inbox they crept.

Thank you for visiting [name redacted], Thank you for your visit to [name]. 

We noticed you were looking at [x]. We hope you liked that. We hope you had a nice time. Did you use the magnify tool to check the petals? You really should have done. You didn't buy anything but that's cool, it's fun just to hang out. Do come back. Do bring your credit card, that special one you use just for the internet. Here's out phone number, here's our email. We don't have to do it on the website. You could call us.  In fact, here's my name; and we're open right now! You could call me right now. Right now! Wouldn't that be amazing? Isn't there a hole in your life, the shape of [x]? Wouldn't you like me to fill it? I'd like that. I'd like that very much. Because I'd like to help you. I'd like to help you so very, very much.

Yours in anticipation

The automated customer service robot who loves your cookies 

When the robots come to take over the world, that's the sort of language I'm expecting. Enthusiastic, positive, helpful to a fault; fully concerned about offering us the best variety of choices when it comes to ways to terminate our unreasonably wilful organic processes. Oh, and there's an encouraging thought. The wall we're up against will probably be beautifully planted. Maybe with Waldsteinia.

blast from the past

I got back after my Easter break to discover a crowbar jammed in the CAPTCHA and my staging area full of spam. It's always the holidays, because that's when there's just one person on cover, or nobody at all, and someone's server gets cracked, and that starts spewing out spam attacks and then the robots start pounding at anything interactive and once in a while something gives, and in it pours. Not going anywhere, of course. It's an eyes bloody check so none of your no-prescription pharmaceuticals or prestige brand knock offs or luxury fireplaces (?) will get into the wild this way. It's just a stop-it-and-tidy-up.
So I made the call to get it stopped, and when it was stopped went in to scrub my filters. And what did I find in there? A blast from the past:

Doppler ties head: binding colloids
As crepitations guide-wrires, capable micturation
The mutation; inhaled week's clean studied.
Impaired of: cite titre, efforts
Biopsy punched-out sufferers drowsiness, adequately load.
However, sub-acure arrive, infraorbital hypotonic.
No personal, abuse, clear, boost anterogradely married.
Contaminated against ethmoid medially, filled declining?
A christening, anaphylaxis, take, hyperplasia hole.
humble to the sqaure materials my you. overall showing Boots
You just black, most motor You pocket leave all one

That's one of the old spambots, that. A proper antique. Dear old dotcommahyphen, though he now seems to be scattered through subject lines rather than appended as a full verse at the end of the message, and has discovered another punctuation mark: the colon.
I have a folder of his oeuvre somewhere, I think... oh yes! From 2006:

safrano pink charcoal paper fifth columnist
hyssop skullcap all-fired cold-rolled
wrong-ordered bale marker sixth nerve
wind machine double-manned Syro-mesopotamian
teak-built Post-leibnitzian chop-chop
thimble-pie Madagascar arrowroot off-look
sang-dragon East-ender work roller
winter radish turnip leaf miner Abri audit culture

Dot's definitely matured in the last nine years.

Twitter, will you please stop badgering me about cricket

My phone, admittedly, is on its last legs, memory-wise. It left contract before Christmas, but when I headed back into the shop it had been given an Apple store makeover (white, about three products on sale, prices and information tidied away into 9pt type, grey on white) and I turned on my heel and left, impossibly irritated by the fact that a brand choice I had made because it was cheap, cheerful, simple and yet still offered acceptable product options appeared to have dumped the last three of those in a desperate attempt to pretend they are not the first. Which they still are. Cheap, albeit increasingly expensive with it.

So, it's an old phone. Which means two things. One, it struggles to run the apps, especially when an advert fires off. Two, the adverts being served to me are old person adverts. Twitter, since the adverts began to really ramp up (in common with many people working in my sector I recently went on a Twitter Analytics seminar which was essentially an hour's worth of pointing out that (in common with the other well-populated social network) small advertising spend = huge increase in exposure) has been a particular pain to run on the phone. The auto-loading promoted tweet at the outset is verging on cripple-ware (and I'm a regular user of advert-supported Words with Friends, so my bar is very low when it comes to what is acceptable, ad-wise) and it is as the moment always and without exception for bloody cricket.

Don't get me wrong. I have no problem with the fact that cricket happens, that people care about it, that people follow it, But I, I do not follow cricket. My sports preference is actually explicit on Twitter (I follow a few professional cyclists plus some of the more amusing commentators) but even setting that aside, nothing about my age, sex, interests or other demographic information would suggest I am likely to be interested in cricket. Why, Twitter? Why must you persist in banging on about cricket, like that friend of your Dad's who is recently divorced, getting on a bit and congenitally unable to notice when anyone is bored, or might wish to talk about something else?

Last week, for the first time, I noticed a tiny x next to the promoted Tweet, and a finger-prod provoked the hover-tip "Dismiss". Finally! I thought, I can get rid of the cricket! This morning, though, brought an email. About cricket. From Twitter. Personally addressed, just to bring home what great chums we are. "XXXXX XXXXX, experience the quarter finals of the cricket world cup!"

Oh, I am experiencing them, Twitter, I am. Whether I want to or not, it seems.

Could you please stop upgrading me in the wrong direction?

It keeps on happening; I go into an online service that I've had wrestled into a functional position (sorry no time to get anything beyond the first working position) and it's had the i-pad nanny makeover. You know the look I mean. Big dumb buttons that can be stabbed by an inattentive finger. Data visualisations that explain the exact knowledge that somebody thinks you want to know in graphs with rounded corners and kinder-executive tones. More options on things that don't matter, often including the menace that is draggable modules, because the certainty of having something in same place on the page after you were interrupted by a phonecall is so last century.

In some ways its nice. We can feel the old programmes (web based, Java, etc.) crumbling. But like employees who had found the exact ways to keep our rooms at a perfect ambient temperature despite the sticking windows and leaky radiators, when we're sent to the new building with its automatic temperature controls and self-opening windows it doesn't feel like an upgrade. It feels like being asked to spend the rest of your life being uncomfortably hot and not being able to fix it. 

Three months later you have the trick of finessing the automatic windows and know the bits of the office where nobody sits without a coat on, and it is better than the old place, with its broken door and the wasps in the roof. But those three months didn't seem like an upgrade, and you weren't especially excited by all the new things you had to learn. The gain was too marginal; the learning scale too steep.

It is increasingly the case that upgrades and redesigns are actually transitions. They come online because the old item is too damaged, can't cope with modern hackspam, relied on something that's been lost in another upgrade on another system, had one fix too many on top of all of the other fixes.  The sites and systems are seldom honest about this; amazing redesigns and fantastic upgrades and new features!!! interrupt me so regularly now I feel little more than a small stab of annoyance when invited to view a five page introduction to the obvious way to use the new page. When asked to trawl through five videos in order to try and find out where a useful function has gone when the answer is it's not possible to implement under the new system - well, that's a bit more than a stab.

Not that there's much that can be done about all this. I'm absolutely aware that the developers have no time for anything beyind the first working position either. 

Solution du jour for viewing notes data in Flickr

So here I am, faced with the awkward discovery that I left my instructions for making home-made wine in notes on a photograph in my Flickrstream. "Well, where's the problem with that?" you might ask. Hmmm. Well, if I can get this right, the flapping back and forth caused by Flickr's incredibly successful and/or famously distastrous redesign  and the various redesigns of the redesign means that a few of the features - most notably, notes - have been left behind for "technical reasons".

I've always been a big notes user on Flickr. In addition to the winemaking diorama (below) I've also used them creatively with friends (that mass of chicks all have "secret thoughts" penned by friends), to identify products (all those small press comics are labelled with creator and source) and of course for the flickr groups What's in your bag? and What's in my fridge?, among others. You can't see any of that, of course, you'll just have to take my word for it.




But of course it isn't until you go and try and find if there's any way to turn a thing back on that you discover that other people felt very differently. "Graffiti on photos!!!!" and "Runs the purity!!!" and "Hate the way strangers can comment literally ON my photo" and my personal favourite, "A great picture of a butterfly's eye does not need a rectangle drawn around the eye and the comment "great eye" added. Fair enough. Looks like there was, once again, a whole pile of shriekyweb going on that was pretty much invisible from my calm, early adopter*, civilized corner.

Still. I'd already made notes re-appear once (I needed them to label some flowers) using the recommended-on-help-forum hack of viewing the site in French (which I can read, though I talk it very badly) which meant an older style sheet, notes still show, blah-de-blah, worked for a few months, but at some point it had stopped working, and I'd switched back to English till the next time I needed the notes.

That day was today, and at first I was wondering if the data I'd entered was even still accessible anymore. It is, and thanks to Elmophoto,  I have a new trick -- switch to viewing the site in an obsolete browser (you don't actually need an obsolete browser, that link there sets you up with a plug-in that will allow your modern browser to pretend it's an obsolete browser for a single site) and ta-da! The information reappears. That seems to be working for now, though of course no-one else will see the notes, unless they install the same plug-in, ugh, of course.

Funny thing, notes was (and is still, I think) unique to Flickr. But instead of a USP, it seems to be being treated like a random annoyance - a relic of the web before. Like me, I suppose.

*I wasn't a tester, but I was a sufficiently early adopter that I remember the site before anyone had paid for advertising and it was all just random hamster-related google ads.

creative output/traumatic insemination

There's been some very innovative music release actions this year. First there was Beyoncé's 17 videos vs Bowie's secret album and oh the world was full of delights and mysteries, and any morning might bring an unexpected creative explosion in the most unexpected places. What joy!

Then, of course, it had to get creepy. I'm looking at you, Thom Yorke. The decision to release via Bittorrent doubtless felt very right and now as it was happening. Perhaps he had been advised that everyone with a computer had Bittorrent, but that's not exactly true, is it? Perhaps he had also reflected on those old early-days CD releases which would install some bit of crapware on your computer and thought, this isn't unbroken territory! Perhaps there was some thought that only people who were able/willing to install a piece of 3rd party software on their computer should be able to purchase the album - a sort of initiation test, the music hidden behind a technical tiger. So we had Bittorrent. Briefly. And felt slightly violated.

But worse was to come. Itunes is of course WAY more ubiquitous than Bittorrent. There are three iterations of it running in this household alone (if you don't count the ones on the i-pods, and if you do, there are five*) and that meant potentially THREE copies of a U2 album we never ordered parachuting into the household. Alas, I'd lost my iTunes log-in in a password reset fiasco about four years ago and never got round to fixing it**, so it was only my dearly beloved suddenly exploding in a pile of swears. "Violated!" he choked, "By Bono!"

Unusual. But it got me thinking. Why are we staring at Beyoncé and Bowie going ooooh! aaaaah! like kids looking at fireworks, and going uuugghh aaaaaah at Yorke and Bono waving our hands like teenagers startled by a creep at the busstop? There's the obvious difference of course (the former being glorious edifices of alien glamour and the latter being essentially middle aged men with ponytails) but there's something more going on I think; and I think that we must reach for gender studies.

We choose what entertainment we let into our homes (and our computers are our homes, or at any rate an important part of them). We choose the providers and tools and methods and programmes that make up our own individual technical support zone. This area holds our memories, creative output, social group and task lists. Our body doesn't end at the skin, it extends outward, into our household and its echo, in the remote servers of the cloud; and for most adults*** access routes to that body-echo is as carefully monitored and controlled as access to our actual body.

What then of the music release that requests that you download and install a programme that you are fully aware of but consider a risky access route? It strips choice away from the receiving partner. There's a power shift, a power imbalance. Consent is compromised, or at least carries an unwanted freight, and one which exposes you to further risk. The act of receiving the music requires an act of self-compromise. Like certain encounters with gentlemen (or ladies) you might have had in your early twenties, it's not technically what you'd call .... awful ... but it leaves you feeling nasty and desperately scrubbing the programme from your computer, thinking, I didn't want this.

Bono, of course, went rather further. The traumatic penetration of iTunes libraries resonated around the world. Of course, it made a bigger splash than Bowie and  Beyoncé. He'll have made more money (does he need more money? do any of them?) and got more media coverage. But he's also joined that long list of powerful men in the entertainment industry who feel you should be grateful for (you may insert pretty much anything here) . Last I heard, Bono was being chased down the street by angry Germans, and I laughed, along with the person telling me the story, because I have been (like many people of all genders and ages) a powerless girl, and, oh, wished for that, or something like that.

*The extra ipod is fully functional bar the sound chip which got fried in a tragic headphone jack/power lead confusion incident.
**As I already have a surfeit of entertainment channels and music acquisition routes.
***Children's access is moderated by their parents/carers/schools.

43 things I need to do now 43 things is closing down

It is a sad moment when one of your bookmark links announces that it is closing down. I clicked through absently to 43 things - a website where I keep a heady mix of hopelessly optimistic, vaguely aspirational and eminently achievable goals - and discovered it was closing. Sad days.

I'd always quite liked it. Neither a bucket list nor a workplan, just a list of wishes that strangers turned up and cheered, randomly. You could record didactic how-to instruction lists, steps on the way, meditations on the unachievability of your goals. Anything you wanted.

Everything you finished went onto one list, everything you decided wasn't worth the bother and gave up on went into another. It could be structured or free form, loose or tight. You could be cryptic as you liked. There was a separate bit for New Year's resolutions. And so it was that I turned goal-setting into a game, and quite a fun one. at that.

So, why did they take it away?

While we wish the site could live on, it has suffered from a number of challenges - changes in how people use the site, the advertising industry, and how search engines view the site. We wish the outcome was different – but we’ve always been realistic about when our goals are met and when they aren't.

That's a little vague, but fortunately I was able to spot more-or-less what had happened just by glancing at my profile, which had a short deleted comment appended to all of my "How to Guides" and - oh yes, look - here's what's being deleted, on one of my entries. A comment in ALL CAPS promoting a visibly broken "earning link" to a major internet retail site.  Spam comments. It's been brought down by spam comments.

These probably aren't being added by hand. It has the look of an automated injection attack of some sort. Just the sort of horrible, intractable thing that script kiddies think is hilarious to fire at a a bunch of well-meaning do-gooders until they crumple.

Well, that's one interpretation. Another is that they looked at their quite sweet old project that was clearly well-liked (if a little creaky round the edges) and considered the amount of effort that it would take to fit up this site, built for the positive, prosocial internet of the early adopters, into enough of an iron-bound, copper-bottomed, radar-lidar-laser-shark protected behemoth that it could survive the slings and arrows of the bottom half of the internet...

...and closed it down, with a pang of regret, but not too much, because when you have 43 things on your list, there's always another place to put your time, energy and enthusiasm.

In the meantime, happy days. 43 things saw me get a glamorous cocktail cabinet and bake dinosaur shaped biscuits and start topiarising the front hedge.



It saw me get a rescue kitten, stop pulling my hair, and make a music video. All in all, I did 149 things, gave up on 26 (including, slightly tragically, "Turn the Bathroom into an Alien Tiki bath-hut") and had 41 still on the list when the site switched to frozen, including the very first goal I ever set for myself which was learn to set things in resin.

Too bad, I had another one to tick off the list. Grow Nosferatu Chilies well enough to give some away to friends.  Done that. Achievement unlocked.

But now how will I tick that box?