On my way?

Yesterday I finished my second short story, well the first draft of it anyway. The first one was done a couple of weeks ago but I did not rate that a significant achievement. Firstly, doing something once does not mean I am going to stick at it: this I know from LOTS of previous experience. And secondly, it was not what I considered publishable, or, not worthy of sending off to a publisher. The story started well but ended up going nowhere. The one real significance of that effort was more that I finished it given that I was only about 3k words in when I knew it was not worth sending out and it ended up being 7800 words long. In the past I would have simply given up on it at that stage but writing it did teach me stuff about writing.

The second one felt right from the outset. I’d had the idea for some time, sitting in my very long list of ideas. When the first story was nearing completion, I looked into that list for the next one to start on because I knew that if I delayed even a little on starting the second, I might never do so. About the second day into thinking about it, I thought of a twist that made the story work, that better said what I wanted the story to say. That was when I thought the story would be worth sending out. Of course, that made me extremely nervous.

Halfway through writing the story, I thought of a way of wrapping it up that I hoped would improve it, that would let me keep all the action to a single day but still properly ‘conclude’ all the characters’ arcs. This, of course, made me even more nervous and I blocked for a few days. It ended with driving up to the motorway junction, grabbing a coffee, and sitting there until I broke the block. I finished the last 2400 words in two days.

Now, though, I look at the story and wonder if the plot ‘twist’ is naff and the mode of keeping it all to one day is overly pretentious. Ho hum! I guess I’m never going to be a very confident writer

Time to dig out the ideas list again (yay, Evernote).

 

Bye, bye, redundancy money :)

Well, my redundancy money is pretty much gone now. What did I spend it on? Not books as those who know me well would assume.

First was a new camera. I already have a Nikon Coolpix P50 which is fantastic for carrying around in a coat pocket and a Nikon Coolpix 8800 which Vicky is now using but I wanted to go the DSLR route. As is obvious, I’m a Nikon fetishist so the new one had to be that rather than the other brand which does not begin with an ‘N’. And the price could not be such that Maggie dropped dead right on the spot (so leaving out the D3X and D300s, drool!). I settled then for the D90 and really love it: the speed, the feel, the ease of shooting, everything about it.

Next came a new PC. I wanted to start seriously manipulating my photographs so wanted kit that would enable me to do this to the best of my ability (limited) and budget (even more limited). I checked out the reviews at the PCPro website. They do a great job on tech reviews. I didn’t find anything that leaped out at me but I did notice that Chillblast seems to always be near the top of the review list. I looked at their site and, right on the front page, was a machine aimed at photographers the Fusion Photo OC III. Really nice looking piece of kit: 12Gb memory, i7 chip, 80Gb SSD and 2 x 1Tb drives. I did some research on monitors as well, using the expertise on DPReview mainly. Looked like I needed some sort of IPS technology based monitor and the DELL 2408WFP offered by Chillblast was one such: very expensive though. In the end, I stuck with the Dell and just cut out all the extras I was planning to buy with the computer.

The PC arrived a week ago. It was bigger than I imagined so is now under the desk rather than on top as I’d planned, which is fine. Lots of pretty blue lights as well I’ve now got it pretty much set up with Win 7 64-bit Home Premium, all the necessary software and loads of peripherals plugged in (Logitech Wave keyboard/mouse, Logitech 2.1 speakers, Wacom Graphire 4 pad, HP 4850 scanner, Canon iP5000, Airport and Belkin USB Network hub).

Only thing missing from all that, if I’m going to write, is a laser printer. Again looked around and found a pretty cheap one, Brother HL-2037 (black version of 2035 AFAICS) on Amazon. That arrived yesterday and is now plugged into the Belkin hub so we can use it from any other computer in the house.

Anyway, that is pretty much it for the redundancy money. Now to earn it all back selling stories and photographs (where is a smiley for wry hopeless grin when you need it?).

 

Retired, bemused

At the end of June the SKUA project finished and so, too, did the only contribution to my position at Leicester: I was receiving 0.3FTE towards my salary. After June, nothing. There had been several irons in the fire (and a lot of time spent organising and writing proposals) but all came to naught and, around the end of September, the university served notice of redundancy. October was spent negotiating this and the upshot was that I took early retirement.

And it is truly weird. We had already booked a couple of weeks up in the Scottish Highlands at the end of October, so the last two weeks of my employment were spent on holiday and so the date of retirement passed largely unnoticed. I still, two weeks later, feel as if I am on holiday. I guess I am at that … until I drop dead that is.

No idea what I will do in retirement (even typing that is surreal: I am too immature to be retired!). Idea of a PhD in Philosophy disappeared when I discovered that I would have to fund it myself: my meagre pension would not cover that. The current plan is to write and I’m working on, initially, some science fiction stories. It is well known that no-one gets published straight off so what I will do when I receive nowt but rejection letters, I do not know. I do not take rejection well.

I bought a DSLR at last (Nikon D90) with some of the redundancy payout and have also ordered a new computer with the idea to use it to work up some of my photographs for display. That at least is something I can do solely for my own pleasure (whereas writing has to be published IMO).

And, there is always art: I like drawing and would like to learn how to paint but I am not sure I am ready yet to join all the real OAPs at the village hall for watercolours.

First thing to do is to get off my butt and finish at least one story. More on that later…

 

Mobile downside?

I just witnessed one of the downsides to mobile phones (is ‘downside’ a downside to the Americanisation of our language?). Our postman just delivered the mail. I could hear him coming from up the street as he was talking on his mobile all the way here and all the way on. I remember (oh dear, it is one of those posts) when the post arrived and you had a quick chat to the postman before he moved on (and it was all men in those days). I used to chat to the two previous postwomen who did our route (latter was born in Adelaide before being removed to this country while still a baby) but there was obviously no chance of talking to the guy who turned up today.

So, I guess the mobile phone has made it easier for us to chat to our friends and family — that is, people we know — but more difficult to strike up conversations with strangers.

 

Back to the drawing board

Ever since I completed the MA in Philosophy at the Open University, I’ve thought about doing a PhD. One of the subjects I’d had in mind recently was free will and determinism: the thesis being, as I’ve laid out here, that they are not only compatible but essentially interdependent. I’ve been thinking about this subject and making notes for a few months. I then came across an article on Philosophy Compass, Recent Work on Free Will and Moral Responsibility. This pointed me to the book by Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. There I discovered, not only that my great and original thinking had been done before, but that this had been said as long ago as Hume and Mill and as recently as Dennett.

This, of course, points up the problem of doing an MA without the preceding undergraduate work. I shall finish the book before attempting to think of any further problems in free will that I might attempt!

And, I still have the idea of what might a robot mind look like: I’m almost afraid of looking into that subject now .

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/philosophy-ma/index.html

 

Politeness

I was sat on the train to London this morning, laptop out and doing some work. A woman got on at Leicester and sat opposite me – diagonally opposite fortunately, so I was still able to keep my legs stretched out. She seemed pleasant, didn’t acknowledge me but sat down, got her own laptop and papers out and started looking over some printed figures. She had nice features, looked like someone used to telling others what to do but also looked like someone who was able to smile and laugh with others. The ??? woman came along shortly after the train left Leicester (what do they call the people who check your tickets on trains now? I’m sure they aren’t conductors and ticket collector doesn’t sound right any more either.). Woman opposite got out her travel pass (so obviously a regular journey for her) and held it open ready. But she continued reading her notes right up until the train woman had reached her, checked her ticket and passed. At no time did she acknowledge or look at the other woman. Was her work so important that five seconds taken out to smile at someone would bring down her company? I don’t think so. Manners, people. A little politeness costs nothing but makes others’ jobs a lot more pleasant.

 

Libraries galore

Just a link but a very worthwhile one:

Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries | Curious Expeditions

 

Pratfall

Well, this prat is keeping up his ESWC record. Those who remember the multi-coloured eyes I was sporting on return from Tenerife and ESWC 2008 will not be surprised to learn that I’ve taken another tumble over here. Nowhere near as serious this time. Was walking along the plastic pathing spread along the beach (shingle) between the hotel Maggie and I are staying in and the one the conference is held in and went to give way to someone carrying a couple of glasses, tripped on the broken plastic strips and went sprawling. Scraped up hands and knees with right knee bloodied but nothing serious – one plaster and no concussion! Hopefully will make it back to the UK in one piece with no more pratfalls.

 

Semantic Wikis

I’m typing this up sitting at a poolside bar with a glass of Mythos (local beer, very nice, but served in Stella glasses!). Could almost be on holiday – well, except for being the dork with a laptop open and having only two weeks to get an outline proposal written up which not only satisfies all the partners to the bid but is attractive to funders. Still – bit nicer view than the window out the AstroGrid basement at Leicester.

Was in the Semantic Wiki Workshop today (Monday 1st – our anniversary btw – in case I get this posted late) which I wanted to attend because the JISC Semantic Technologies Working Group will be discussing how it moves forward after I get back and one item on the agenda will be to set up a wiki for ourselves. Would be only appropriate for us to ‘eat our own dogfood‘.

There were several interesting presentations and it sort of narrowed down the ideas for platforms to use. The most obvious is of course Semantic MediaWiki: it is the oldest (AFAIK) and certainly the most well known (which might be why there were no presentations on it, only one extension to it). KiWi looks pretty good (and not just because of the antipodean name and icon). AceWiki uses a controlled natural language but I found the idea of a ‘controlled wiki’ something of a contradiction in terms. KnowWE looks quite extensible and is based on the popular JSPwiki platform.

I think I’ll look further into KiWi and KnowWE: see if either are available for deployment outside their projects and how stable they are right now. Otherwise it’ll probably be Semantic MediaWiki.

Note to self: look at how KnowWE are synching with JSPWiki: if and how often and how conflicts are handled.

 

Really tagged

I’ve just been RFIDed. At ESWC the Tagora project is providing RFID badges which people can link to their social system usernames (delicious, Flickr, Facebook etc). Everyone is shown on a map, you can find people with similar interests etc,  by going to the http://social.eswc2009.org page.

Wireless here is dire so won’t be saying much.