Joe's Jottings

Category: Personal Stuff

  • Reluctantly joining Facebook….

    Sigh…..

    That it should come to this.  Unfortunately a group I belong to is going to be using Facebook, and given that I’m supposed to be the IT guy, I am expected to know how it works.

    So, I’ve registered and am working out how little I need to put up there whilst still making any use of it whatsoever.  I have to say that you won’t find much in the line of my social and business calendar up there – I cannot understand for the life of me why people publicise where they’re going to be and when they’re going to be there!

    Or am I missing something?

    People I know have started increasingly living their lives through bloody Facebook and so as these folks are fairly normal, well balanced individuals I assume that there must be something there that I’m not quite getting.  I’m not at all convinced that social networking sites are going to be with us for much longer, and I await to be convinced by my experiences on there.

    Having said that, I just encountered this story on the BBC Website, which points to a future in terms of more local social networks.  Sort of like sites like Sheffield Forum or any other site of a similar nature that’s been around for 5 or 6 years.  There genuinely is nothing new under the sun…

    So, poke away – I’m to be found here.

  • A great site – www.thisisawar.com

    Earlier on today I was looking for the text of the ‘vision thing’ speech from the start of Jerry Maguire.  As to why I was looking for it – let’s just say I needed some motivation.  For those of you who’ve not encountered it, I include it here for your consideration.

    And by some strange fluke I encountered, by accident, a site that is one of the most motivational and uplifting I’ve encountered for a very long time.  It’s great!  There’s some excelent stuff here – I intend having a very good read of it, and I heartily recommend it to you!

    The site is called thisisawar.com.

    Enjoy. 

  • The Bus Book – w/c 17th March – On Civil Disobedience

    As the copy I have of ‘On Walden pond’ also includes this essay, it seemed churlish to not feature it here.

    Thoreau spent a night in prison during his time at Walden, because he neglected to pay a local tax.  Whether he would have spent longer in prison than a single night had the tax not been paid isn’t clear, but as a local resident paid the tax, he was released.

    The essay is an interesting diversion in to the rights and wrongs of civil disobedience, and is as relevant today as it was when it gave inspiration to anyone dealing with an unjust law over the intervening century and a half.  Thanks to people like Gandhi, the idea of civil disobedience as a valid and legitimate form of protest is something we take very much for granted today, but for Thoreau’s compatriots it must have been quite something.  Gandhi himself developed his techniques of passive resistance after reading this essay, and the comment “The Government that governs best, governs least’ is on the lips and in the heart of anyone who, like me, considers themselves to be a libertarian.

    See here for an article on the essay, and here for an annotated text.

    Thoreau’s issue with taxation was that he felt it was supporting the enslavement of his fellow man, through supporting a State legislature in favour of slavery.  He regarded not paying the relevant tax as a means by which anyone might raise a hand against the state; indeed, we need only look back to the ‘Poll Tax’ riots in the UK and the increasing numbers of people not paying that particular local charge non principle to see the impact.

    It also set off a few thoughts for me; when I was younger I was much more willing to go to the wire on issues; now I’m older I’m less willing.  Thoreau was a single man, with little to lose, except his physical liberty.  Indeed, I get the impression from reading his essay that he would have happily handled a longer time in prison.  When you’re older, have a family and dependents, have a house, job, etc. it takes little imagination to see how a few months in jail could easily lead to loss of virtually everything you hold dear.  Perhaps one of the great accomplishments of the Consumerist State is that it gets people to behave more effectively than almost any other means thought of short of execution.

    The times in my life when I have been willing to kick hard against the pricks, so to say, have been the time when the most has been taken from me and I was increasingly feeling cornered with little left to lose.  The balancing act between our consciences and what we’re willing to pay to be true to ourselves is what keeps us obedient slaves within our so called free society.

    Reading this essay has made me think deeply about what is important and how far I am willing to go in my personal life to do what is right.  And it pains me to say that at the moment my courage, like that of many of us in contemporary society, is somewhat lacking.

  • Arthur C Clarke – RIP

    Bugger.

    Like a lot of things, I guess that in my heart of hearts I knew that eventually all the venerable old writers of science fiction, the folks who I grew up with, would all pass away.  When it starts happening it’s a strange experience.  The world has enough obituaries for ACC – here I just wanted to say something about what he means to me.

    When ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’ – came out I was a boy of 7 years old and although it played the local fleapit I didn’t see it.  I don’t remember whether I was too young to go, but I remember my mum wanting to see it.  I never found out whether she eventually got to see the movie or not; I only myself caught up with it after watching 2010, which is pretty arse-about-face.   In other words, I came to ACC not via his most famous work, but in my own way.

    A British ‘boys weekly’ of the 1970s was called, I seem to remember, ‘Speed and Power’, and featured all sorts of machines, vehicles, etc. each week…aong with a short story from ACC.  And that’s where I encountered him first.  I still have a box of these magazines somewhere in the dark recesses of my attic, complete with the short stories which occupied many an evening, and encouraged me to go and find his other books.

    The first ACC novel I read was ‘A Fall of Moondust’ – a disaster story about a ‘moon bus’ full of tourists that gets swamped in dust whilst traversing a lunar ‘sea’, and the efforts of rescuers to get them out.  The novel of his that made the biggest impact on me was ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ – I still remember the first time I read it, and even now it holds up.  Lovely, wonderful, story telling that I never get bored with.  I have to say that I’m very excited about the prospects of a film being made of the novel – possibly for release in 2009.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

    But the short stories made the biggest impression on me.  As the years passed I just grabbed copeis of his collections of short stories from second hand shops, charity shops, wherever.  And of all of them, the ones that made the biggest and longest lasting impression were his ‘Tales from the White Hart’.   Quite why I have no idea – I guess that I just love ‘tallish tales’ that are just, maybe, plausible.  These stories, and those of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, have probably been the major influences of my short story writing.  So much so that I’ve written a collection of similar stories – an ‘homage’, I guess – called ‘Tales from the Oakham Arms’.

    I’m not even going to start on the technical innovations that ACC suggested, starting with his now famous Wireless World item on Geostationary Communication Satellites, that have now appeared in our lives.

    Like someone else said recently, I really hope that as ACC passed away he was able to look deep into the cosmos and utter those final words of Dave Bowman’s…”My God, it’s full of stars”.

    Thanks Sir Arthur.  My life would have been significantly poorer without your imagination.

  • The Gods of the Copybook Headings

    I cam across a reference to one verse of this poem by Rudyard Kipling the other day when I was reading, and given the news at the moment of collapsing banks and general financial turmoil, I thought it appropriate!

    The verse I encountered was:

    “Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
    And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
    That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
    And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.”

    Highly apt in these days when true value in the markets seems difficult to separate from what some over-paid analysts believe a company to be worth.

    As is said in the text, a poem of a man wishing to find solace in a very old fashioned form of common sense, and whilst I don’t 100% agree with his view, I can see where Kipling was coming from here.

    I actually remember being taught to write long hand with a fountain pen in the 1960s, but our copybooks were lacking the aphorisms that Kipling alludes to. 

    I was also reminded of the words of Richard Feynman after the Challenger Disaster Enquiry – “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”  Nature cannot be fooled.  And neither can the basics of life.

    Perhaps we need some copybooks re-printing and issuing to the bankers and stockmarket traders and analysts?

  • The Bus Book – w/c 10th March – On Walden Pond (continued)

    As you can see I didn’t do an exceptional amount of commuting last week, and Walden remained the Bus Book for this week as well.

    As I’ve progressed through it I’ve come to the conclusion that whilst I admire his ideas, I don’t think Thoreau would necessarily be a fun guy to spend an evening in the pub with.  I get the feeling from what he says that he was something of an aesthete.  I wonder if the ‘hair shirt’ attitude of some of today’s ‘extreme greens’ partially originated from here.  Sort of along the lines of if you’re enjoying it it can’t be truly environmentally friendly.

    His description of the pond in winter is masterful, with a keen observational eye which brought the whole place to life in my mind’s eye.

    I took a look at the Pond as it is today via the website here and also checked out a map from Google, below.  The map is movable – just hold the left mouse button down and move the mouse around.

    View Larger Map

    Even back then he was within a couple of miles of town – I suppose the invention of the car and the widespread use of bikes, etc. would today mean you had to be maybe 10-15 miles outside of the nearest village to get the same degree of isolation.

    One final observation – in the ‘Spring’ section there is a amsterful description of the patterns made by sand in thaw-water flows, as well as the similarities between natural shapes – leaves, snowflakes, etc.  Given my interest in fractal mathematics it was hard to ignore the fact that had he been a mathematician Thoreau may had discovered fractals 100 years early!

    Anyway…good book, worth a read…just don’t expect to find an easy read!

  • The Bus Book w/c 3rd March – On Walden Pond

    One of the long term running gags in our family is that given half a chance I would either run off to live in the woods or become a hermit in a Monastery.  Well, I spotted this story recently that made me seriously consider it…

    Here’s a guy who did it for almost 2 years – Henry David Thoreau, in the mid 1840s, spent time alone at Walden Pond, a couple of miles outside Concorde, Massachusetts, in a house he built himself.  There he studied his surrounding, wrote and further formulated the philosophies that eventually became part of the American Transcendentalist movement later in the century.

    Part natural history study, part philosophy, the book has become a rallying point and source of inspiration for generations of American environmentalists.  For further information, see the entry on Wiki.

    Last week was spent more at home than recently – so my bus based reading took a hit.  For that reason I’m only half way through the book.  The writing style is occasionally difficult – especially for those of us not well versed in the slang and culture of the mid-19th Century USA – but it is a passionately written and insightful book.

    I’m enjoying it – I’m not able to read it in long chunks, but read a little, chew it over, savour it – think on it and then move on.  Perhaps that’s the way this book should be read.

    It’s a fine book, thought provoking and empowering.  It’s also set me thinking about Bill McKibben’s ‘the End of Nature’ – perhaps I should dig that out soon.

  • Jeff Healey – Like a Hurricane

    Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey died this week, losing a battle against cancer.  I have to say that he’s a musician that I’ve heard occasionally and really enjoyed.  He was younger than me when he died – something that always brings me up short.

    Tonight on the Bob Harris show (http://www.bobharris.org/pages/playlist.asp?progcode=s08032008 Jeff’s version of Neil Young’s ‘Like a Hurricane’ – quite a brilliant version of a classic song.  Thanks Jeff!

    I have a definite weakness for this particular Neil Young song. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Hurricane_(Neil_Young_song)  It goes back to my student days when I was introduced to Neil Young by a housemate, who referred to the heavy electric version on ‘Live Rust’ as ‘Like a Steamroller’ – a phrase that I remember and occasionally use to this day, almost 30 years later.

    Like a Hurricane is definitely one of my favourite love songs – I think I’ve found a new favourite version tonight!

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourview/2008/03/memories_of_jeff_healey_1.html

  • The Bus Book – w/c 25th February – The Master and Margarita

    This week’s book was a very old favourite of mine – Mikhail Bulgakhov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’.  If you haven’t read it – all I can say is get a copy.  It’s a lovely, funny, sad, enchanting book which details the visit of the Devil and his entourage to Moscow, a novelist known only as ‘The Master’ who is incarcerated in a lunatic asylum after writing a novel about Pontius Pilate, and Margarita, the woman who loves him.

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  • It takes a lot to sleep through an earthquake….

    But I managed it.

    As it would be churlish not to mention the most powerful earthquake to hit England in 25 years, I feel honour-bound to post a comment, but my involvement in this national event is hardly glorious.  I was awoken by my wife who claimed the bed had moved, and could I check under it.

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