RSS feedLast week I said I’d put a manifesto up here, to guide my blogging. Aside from it being the current fad, I decided I needed a little more focus to my writing. While my web site dates back to about 1993 or so, I only started blogging, albeit exceptionally intermittently, back in October 2001. A recent day job foray into blogging technology however, has spurred me to start writing more often.
So ultimately, this blog exists mainly to help me research the blogosphere, to get inside the heads of bloggers by being one myself, and to use this knowledge to help build better tools and technologies for the blogging and microcontent space. So without getting too serious, this is my blogging manifesto.
I want to experience and experiment with the three main blogging types:
- Original writing from original research
- Advance, extend (and credit) other writers
- Refer readers to other research/resources that relate to my writing
In support of these, I’ve defined the following guidelines for my writing:
- Be pedantic, be cynical, but do it with humor (U.S. spelling due to Macquarie boycott)
- Make people think, when they ordinarily may not have
- Have an opinion, but don’t be opinionated
- Don’t insult, abuse, ridicule or belittle other writers, but do point out corrections and inaccuracies in their writing
- Don’t get too serious, and save the theoretics for my work blog
Ultimately, if you as a reader can laugh at, learn from and then think about one my posts, then I guess I’ve succeeded.
Stop press. 7am. Richard wakes up to sound of roofers giggling hysterically in front yard. Having gotten back to sleep, at 9am he hears… the nail gun.
What a strange start to what I assume will be a weird week. I woke up on Sunday morning to the sound of lions, as I was staying at Western Plains Zoo (turn your sound down) with extended family. I consider myself an animal activist to a certain degree, but these guys are doing great work for the conservation, protection and repopulation of endangered species. I know some people feel that any caging of animals is offensive, but I believe the cost is justified, and if you saw how Western Plains treat their residents, perhaps you’d also care a little more for their fabulous work. Personally, I sponsor the beautiful Cheetahs, currently classified as “vulnerable”, and my partner sponsors the hippopotamus. Say hello for us, next time you visit them at either Western Plains or Taronga Zoo. Anyway…
So I wake up on the Monday morning, sick with a head cold, to the sound of some guys ripping the roof off our house. The 6am sunlight blazing through the cracks between the down lights and the roof mounts was quite overpowering, but the nail gun attaching the aluminium waterproofing to the roof studs really made my morning. I’m a 9am kind of guy, but I figure by 8am they had most of the roof removed. It wasn’t until late afternoon that I learnt about the water leak next door, for which the roof refactoring was their saviour.
Tuesday morning, 6am, I once again wake to the rhythmic tones of nail gun and roof tile. This time however I delighted in filling the roof cavity with steam from a hot running shower. Spent Tuesday night audio engineering our new TheatresportsTM show, trying to mic up a disaster of a theatre venue.
Wednesday morning, what aural delights await me? If I hear another fucking nail gun…
Update: next…
Jo Ito points to a list of U.S. soldiers moblogging from Iraq. Unfortunately no feeds, but worth a look, especially if you’re a pacifist militarist like myself.
The official U.S. government time site, accurate to within 0.6 seconds. Sponsored by the official world peace keeper, accurate to within 3 nations.
I don’t want to harp on about having blue hair or anything, but at least it’s something unique to bring to the blogosphere.
Anyway, I recently spent some time in our wonderful capital, Canberra, speaking with government I.T. people. When confronted with the blue hair, especially when it matches so well with my black suit, I often get the comments I wrote about here, but more often than not with work relationships, I get the more neutral:
So why the blue hair?
And when I reply with:
Oh, because I do part time theatre and impro comedy.
…they usually nod their heads knowingly. This wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the theatre and impro comedy people asking the same question, and me replying with:
Oh, because I’m in I.T.
They nod, knowingly.
I just changed a bunch of URLs around today, so apologies if your permalinks or feed got messed up in the process. It’s computing damn it, if they stayed permalinks, we’d lose our industry’s bad reputation! The new RSS URL is http://www.kashum.com/rbf.pl?c=blog.xml, and the old one will go away in about a week.
I had an interesting Google referal the other day: Which state has the world’s largest chocolate factory, which came in to this post of mine on Nestl. Regular readers don’t need a heads up, but just in case, even if Nestl weren’t the world’s largest junk foodconfectionary company, would you assume that the world’s largest chocolate factory would be in the U.S.? Or am I the only one not assuming that state means a U.S. state? Maybe it has something to do with the World Series? Or is that simply assuming that baseball is the World Game?
Came across this post from Richard MacManus’ Read/Write Web, about Australian taxi driver strategies. Traffic works much like sand in an hour glass, if you know how the dynamics of sand works, and have an idea of the type of people travelling at that particular time of day, between those particular two points, you can have a pretty good guess at the optimal route. Drive it at least once a week and it becomes second nature.
I’m not sure if Richard is a driver himself, but this isn’t confined to taxi drivers. Most people I know that love to drive, including myself, have these same strategies. Driving the same route to work and back each day is a perfect example, but there are many other routes people take throughout the week that are equally optimisable.
The interesting thing about taxi drivers however, is that most of them have an innate ability to optimise their fares. For example, taxis have a driving rate, and a waiting rate. When the speed of the taxi drops below a certain threshold, the waiting rate kicks in, which is less than the driving rate. This is obvious, because it’s printed on the fare sheet in the taxi. To optimise the income for a fare, you’d think the driver would delay the trip as much as possible, choosing routes where traffic jams extend the time it takes to get to the destination. Lengthen the journey, and the fare increases over time. However, the driving rate is higher, so there is a speed at which the combination of fares and travel time is the optimal for the driver. In most cases however it is better for the driver to get you there as fast as possible, getting the initial hiring charge plus the driving rate, which may be less all up than having to wait several times at traffic lights.
This complex relationship between rates, time, speed, traffic congestion and initial hiring fee, seems to be completely subconscious for most drivers, yet if you question one about it, they usually can’t actually explain it.
So, at times cabbies do strange things, they’ll get you to your destination quickly or on time, but every now and again they’ll make a turn that ends up in traffic or they’ll accidentally miss a traffic light, but will still seem to get you there quickly. They can’t explain it, but it’s them optimising the fare.
So next time your cabbie makes a seeming mistake, just bite your tongue, he’s doing it for the fare, and the more you point it out to him, the more of your money he’ll take.
The ever wonderful (yeah yeah, you get the picture) Gizmodo has a follow up on the recording and selling of live shows at the gig. See, I told you it was a revolution! 😉 Personally, I can’t wait until you can get a scratch and sniff of the gig, but I’m apparently a bit weird.