I’ve had an election post bubbling around in my head for a around a week now.  However, I read an article in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee entitled “Your heart might say Clegg. But vote with your head.” which has pushed me over the edge (very slowly, it was over a week ago!).  In the article, she says that the Liberal Democrats are a hopeless case, with the system stacked against them.  Since they cannot win, she argues, we should vote tactically to prevent the Conservatives from getting into power.  So in any given constituency, Polly thinks that we should vote for the party to the left of the Conservatives that has the biggest chance of winning in that constituency.

This view may be pragmatic and sensible for people with a “keep the Tories out” agenda.  Personally, though, I find it soul destroying and  depressing.

The  reason that we need “tactical voting” is because the electoral system is broken.  Tactical voting depresses me because a tactical vote is not for a person or party, but against a person or party.  It is fundamentally negative.

This week, in 2010, tactical voting feels to me like surrender.  Surrender to the brokenness of the electoral system, and surrender to the profoundly depressing idea that there really is no choice of a government outside of the Labour and Conservative parties.  I have gone along with this in the past.  I remember tactically voting for Labour in 1997, because as part of the “keep the Tories out” deal with the Liberal Democrats they had promised electoral reform.  This promise was discarded once the size of the Labour majority in Parliament became apparent.

So we need to fix the electoral system.  Except, we are told, we can’t do that because it would result in a “hung parliament”.

Certain elements of the press are very exercised about what they are portraying as the awful spectre of a “hung parliament” or “coalition government” as the rest of us might call it.  Unfortunately, the media are politically active entities, with the possible exception of the BBC which at least tries to be neutral.  Media organisations have a stake in how elections come out, and I increasingly believe that it is very often to do with placing more power and money with very rich people who don’t live here, and much less often to do with right and wrong, or what is best for those of us who aren’t media barons.  At the very least, there is room for voters to question their newspaper’s opinions in the light of its interests.

Oh, and by the way… if Murdoch is so keen for the Conservatives to get in, that’s a definite strike against them in my book.

At any rate, I don’t feel inclined to swallow whole the media view of the disastrous nature of government by coalition.  Clearly it will be challenging – we haven’t had to work this way for over 30 years, but disastrous?  Really?

The thing is that I’m not so sure that we’ve been well served by the thirty-plus years of overall majorities that we’ve just had.  The bigger these majorities have been, the more that they have been abused to push through crap legislation.  The Poll Tax and ID Card bills both spring to mind.  Except when large numbers of MPs rebel against the whip system, which very rarely happens, it is very hard indeed for anyone except the governing party to exert effective influence on the actions of the Government, however bonkers.

Perhaps if we’d had a coalition government, the undemocratic ramming through of the awful Digital Economy Bill could have been avoided!

To be honest, I quite like the idea that the power of politicians is limited by the need to maintain a coalition.  I want them to have to debate properly, and explain themselves, and compromise, and think twice, or even thrice.  This makes a coalition parliament very attractive to me. In one of the debates David Cameron said that the politicians in a coalition would spend all their time “squabbling” rather than taking action.  I think he should take the lead and make a personal commitment to not squabbling should he find himself leading a coalition government on Friday morning.

So how do we get electoral reform?  Well, Polly Toynbee’s tactical voting might keep the Tories out, but I don’t believe that an overall majority for either Labour or the Conservatives will achieve electoral reform.  I think that their instincts go against it, because the current system has served them so well in the past.

So, I’m going to vote for the party whose policies best match my beliefs about what is right for me and mine, and for the UK.  In other words, I am going to vote for something, and not against something.  I hope that everybody else in the country does the same.

If the result is that the popular vote and the distribution of parliamentary seats are substantially different, then I hope that we will be able to use that to mount a vigorous campaign that will force our politicians into actual change – change of the electoral system.

If we can have that then I, at any rate, will consider it a win.

So, these are my 2010 resolutions. I have learned some lessons from last year’s exercise, and I think that 2010’s resolutions are better as a result – at least in the sense of being more specific and measurable.

First off then, following the miserable hell of November and December 2009, I am resolving to get ruthless about allowing access to my time (not ruthless in general as the picture might imply!).  I intend to use my calendar, or a spreadsheet, or an OmniPlan file or some other tool to reserve time for everything I’m working on that takes more than about an hour.  I will use this to ensure that I have time for stuff that I’ve said I’ll do, and also to make it a lot harder to add new stuff to my workload when I’m already busy.

In addition, I am resolving to keep a daily journal.  This will help me to monitor some things in my life, including my progress on some of these resolutions, but mainly I am hoping that it will help me to reflect both on things that happen and things that I do, so that I can better learn from my experiences.  It’s a bit experimental for me, however a lot of people maintain that it’s a very useful exercise, so I am going to try it and see.  I haven’t yet decided whether to do it electronically, or on paper.

In the creative section at the bottom left of the mind map I have been much more specific, and have resolved to produce something, rather than just suggesting some areas to play with, as I did last year.  Last year, my “creative output” was really only in the area of photography.  In the other areas, I didn’t do anything that amounted to much more than messing around with the tools, which is fun but not that rewarding.

After the Great North Run last year, I decided that I wanted to keep on with the running, but then didn’t quite manage to follow through. The 500 miles that I have resolved to run in 2010 equates to about 10 miles per week, which should be very achievable.  Having said that, I just fell over on some ice and hurt my ankle, which probably won’t be helping me get off to a great start.

Last year, I didn’t manage to consistently eat better or sleep more sensibly, so these resolutions are carried forward.  It’s well worth continuing to work on those fundamental things.

I’ll report back in December 2010 when as a result of the above I will be happier, more accomplished, more healthy, and less stressed.

Some might remember that at the beginning of this year, I posted my resolutions for 2009.  This would seem to be an appropriate point to run through them, and say how I did.

So, clockwise from the top:

1. Sleep 11 to 7 (Mostly)
   Well, I’ve had at best patchy success at this.  During the last quarter of the year, my sleep has been awful, involving several instances of being up working at 4am and one all nighter. It was better earlier in the year, but I can’t honestly chalk this one up as a success.  I will carry this one forward into 2010.
2. Cycle to work
   This has been much more successful.  Mostly, this year, where it has been possible I have cycled to work. I’ve bought some waterproof trousers and a jacket which have kept me cycling during this winter, and my Brompton remains a credit to cycle-kind.  I’ll keep doing this in 2010, but I don’t think I need to carry it forward as a resolution, as I have cracked it!
3. Be Creative
   Mostly due to the Ilkley Flickr Group Meetup, I have made some good photographs this year. The On The Spot Challenge [PDF] that we did this month was particularly good fun with some good results. On those other fronts, I have more musical instruments than I started the year with, although I can’t say I’ve made any significant music, I have a new book about drawing, and I have signed into Second Life at least three times this year.  Oh, and I tried to do NaNoWriMo, but failed due to bad timing – I tried to do it at the same time as November.
4. More Time At Home
   I probably spent a very tiny bit less time at home this year, as compared to 2008.  I don’t think I have much actual power over this, so it was probably not a sensible thing to resolve about. Perhaps I should resolve to leave Stevenage for the bigger IBM world, but I’m not going to do that at this stage, although it could well happen.
5. Eat Better
   Hm, perhaps I shouldn’t be reflecting on this just after Christmas.  I’ve eaten a very great deal of crap this year, much as usual in fact.  My weight this year has gone down (running and Weightwatchers) and back up again (run up to Christmas).  This one will be carried forward to 2010.
6. Great North Run
   Well, I did it in two and three quarter hours, which wasn’t too embarrassing.  Oh, and I raised over £1000.  So not quite as much as I’d resolved to do, but I’m still proud of myself and count this one as a success.

I shall soon be posting my resolutions for 2010.

Today is the first day of  National Novel Writing Month, popularly known as NaNoWriMo. Around ten years ago, a group of around 20 friends in California got together and made a pact that they would each write a 50,000 word novel.  Several of them actually completed their goal.  Since then, the event has grown to the point that this year’s event has over 100,000 participants around the globe, all of whom have made that exact same commitment to 50,000 words.  Feeling suitably inspired, I signed up around a fortnight ago.

I started my novel at midnight last night and wrote five hundred or so words quite quickly.  The problem is that I don’t know what happens next. I’ve started my novel with no preconceived plot, characters or settings. However, fortunately for me, the goal is emphatically not to write the perfect novel, it is simply to write 50,000 words into a first draft.  This means that I can just play it by ear, and however terrible the resulting novel is, providing that I complete the requisite number of words, I will be a winner.  The pace that is set by the 30th November deadline means that there is no time to agonise over plot points, or rework the beginning to fit better with the middle.  All the words that I write count as they are, and time spent changing them does not help me move towards the required total.  The trick is to plough on.

Traditionally, I’ve not been very good at writing big things. I’m hoping that my participation in NaNoWriMo will break through the barriers that inhibit my writing, silence my inner critic, and end in victory and 50,000 words.

If you’re a fellow traveller, then I would love to be your buddy on the NaNo site – click on the graphic to visit my profile.  If not then wish me luck – I’m going to need it!

The Daily Mail’s Jan Moir wrote a column on 16th October about the untimely death of Stephen Gateley of the band Boyzone. The column was originally entitled “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gateley’s death”, although it has subsequently been retitled.

A lot of people found the content of the article offensive, and a storm began to brew on Twitter, with a lot of tweeting and retweeting, some of it offensive in its turn to Ms Moir.  In her response to the furore, Ms Moir described the Twitter response as “clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign”.

To suggest that it is possible to orchestrate a campaign about anything on Twitter, or other social media, is a bit silly. Ms Moir said things in her column that offended a lot of people sufficiently for them to start talking about it. The more they talked, the more other people heard them, and some clearly felt strongly enough to begin talking themselves. The social media aspect has hugely accelerated and magnified an otherwise ordinary word of mouth process, but that’s all.

Instead of seeking to blame imaginary conspiracy theories, Ms Moir should exercise her empathy, and try to re-examine her column from the perspective of someone who is gay, or someone whose brother or sister or cousin or son or daughter has unexpectedly died at a young age. That might help her to understand that this strong expression of feeling is a consequence of the fact that the Internet provides a lot of “ordinary” people a platform in aggregate that is in some ways just as powerful as the one that she has in her newspaper column.  It’s not a conspiracy, rather it is democracy.

Columnists like Ms Moir need to understand that if they are going to use their platform to publish controversial content, then we might equally use ours to object.

It’s only fair, after all.

Amazon Kindle

When I found out that Amazon had released an International version of their Kindle e-book reader, I knew immediately that I wanted one.  I love the idea of e-books, and e-book readers.  I love the thought that I can carry a bookshelf round in my bag, and that I can add to it wherever and whenever I want to, especially without even needing to mess about with a computer.  Add to this the bookmarking, annotating and searching, and it starts to sound as though the e-book is far superior to simple ink on mere paper.

It’s not that simple though.  I was brought up in a house that was full of books.  I read compulsively as a child, devouring my parent’s bookshelves at an ever increasing rate, as soon as I first learned to read.  When I start to think about it, I find that I want my children to grow up with the same access to books as I have had.  Not unobtrusive insubstantial digital copies that must be sought out, but the real physical object stored in long uneven shelves with all manner of different colours, sizes and bindings.  There’s something magical about actual real books – something in the feel of the paper, and the way they age, picking up marks and coffee stains and wrinkles as you read them and re-read them.  A tablet made of glass and plastic just can’t compete with that.

I suppose that the function of books, which is to say the conveying of stories or information, is captured at least adequately by e-books.  However the physical form of books – the covers, bindings, and pages – this is a different matter.  This design has had centuries of usability testing, with incremental improvements and modernisation along the way.  Although there are some very well designed e-book readers, they just don’t yet come close to having had this level of scrutiny and refinement.

Of course, the other thing about a physical book is that once it is in your possession, you have it.  You can lend it to a friend, register it on bookcrossing.com and give it away, or put it on the shelf, knowing that you can come back to it in 30 years time and read it again.

This seems much less certain with some e-books.  Astonishingly, the publishing industry seems to be devoting effort to the non-problem of pirated e-books rather than the real problem of the decline of reading. So yes, despite the lessons from the music industry, we are to be afflicted with the inflexibility, inconvenience and irritation associated with Digital Rights Management or DRM.

So, if I invest my pennies in Kindle, I won’t be able to lend my books to my friends, or read them on a Sony e-Reader or other device of my choice.  Amazon’s proprietary file format and DRM has seen to that.  The ePub open format for e-books is better, but since it provides a framework for DRM, and not the actual DRM scheme, there’s no guarantee that an ePub reader will read any given ePub book.  The device would have to support the same DRM as well as supporting ePub.

In fact, it’s all just too complicated.  Conveniently for the vendors, therefore, you will probably end up buying the books and the reader from the same source, just to have a level of reassurance that it will be compatible.

I still own (and sometimes even read) books that I bought in 1979. Will I be able to read today’s DRM protected e-Books in in 2039?  In the last 30 years there have been many file formats and media types that have come and gone.  Many of these are extremely difficult to read today.  Do you still have access to a floppy disk drive? What about the ability to read files from Lotus AmiPro, the word processor I remember using when I joined IBM in 1994?  Where will Amazon and its proprietary formats be in 2039?  We have no way to know.

However, despite all these complaints, I have to say that I am reading e-books.

I’m doing it on my iPhone, using the excellent Stanza application from Lexcycle (I hope that their recent acquisition by Amazon bodes well for the future of that company’s e-book strategy).  What am I reading?  Well, Stanza knows about various online libraries, containing a variety of books, both free and otherwise.  I have read a lot of books ranging from The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine by H. G. Wells to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, and so have been able to download them all for free and from within the Stanza application.

This has been a positive experience that hints at what would be available with the Kindle, and despite everything, that is what I really want.  The DRM and proprietary nature of the Kindle stick in my throat, but I suppose I get the same thing from Apple, and somehow live with it.

I can’t decide…

2009 Resolutions

Originally uploaded by smithi1

These are my New Year’s resolutions for 2009 – the things I need to work on, or achieve. You’ll notice that there are no work related ones – well, that’s because the work changes I need to make will fall naturally out of doing these.

I’ll check back in at the end of 2009 to evaluate how I did.

Judging from the massive take-up of the feature, I sometimes think that I must be the only person in the world who thinks that automated blog postings full of people’s bookmarks on delicious.com are really annoying.  A lot of people who do this are excellent writers, producing content I love to read.  It’s always a  disappointment when a new post turns out to be an automated bookmarks post.

Of course, people have every right to put whatever they like in their blogs.  If you know that I read your blog, and you use this feature of delicious.com, please don’t consider this post as a demand for you to stop - just think of it as just a little bit of (minority?) audience feedback.  I’m still subscribed to you, despite your automated link postings.  However, if you find that you secretly agree with me, why not just provide a link in your sidebar to allow me to subscribe to your bookmarks, and discontinue the evil robot postings!

Then again, there’s always the possibility that this is all my own fault for using a news feed reader (NetNewsWire) that doesn’t appear to have a feature for automatically discarding or marking posts as read according to a rule.

What do you think?

Visiting the most excellent Ian Hughes last week, I spotted a book called Strengths Finder 2.0 on a table.

Ian explained to me that the book, along with an online evaluation tool, form a program to help identify personal strengths.  This immediately resonated with me, as it intersects with a long running train of thought that I’ve had ever since reading the highly recommended Adventures of Johnny Bunko – The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.  This is an entertainingly presented set of six rules (guidelines?) for career management, and the second rule is “Play to your strengths”.

Of course, this statement immediately raises the question of what these might be – it’s all very well being good at “stuff” but you need to identify your strengths more specifically if you want to plan your next job around them.

So, along comes Strengths Finder 2.0.  As is probably obvious, this is the second iteration of the book and online tool.  It’s based on research conducted by Gallup over a period of 40 years, which has identified what they believe to be the thirty four “most common” human talents.

The “certificate” in the picture shows the tool’s findings about which are my five top scoring talents from the list of thirty four.    Ian’s assessment seems to be bang on for him, but to be honest, I’m not entirely sure about a couple of mine.  One interpretation is that I’ve not yet converted all my innate talents into strengths, by exercising them.

The aim is to lead forward into some sort of action plan in order to start to exercise and improve the identified strengths.  I’m looking forward to doing that – perhaps I’ll publish the action plan on here in order to help gain a bit of accountability.

Recommended, I think.  To proceed, you’d need to buy the book and use the code in the back to access the tool.

When I hear people raving excitedly about a new social networking thing, I always go and look, just because I love these things.  I love connecting with other people, and finding things in common.  I just do, and always have.  Recently, though, I’ve started to notice a problem.

When I arrive at a new site, I register as “ids” if I get there first, or “smithi1″ or “idzni” if not.  Then I try and figure out what it is for.  This is where the problem comes in.  Blogging was obvious to me.  Twitter, pretty much so although I initially underestimated the value of it.  Virtual worlds, well… I’d been dying for those to exist since I first started talking about them in 1988 (along with certain other people – who know who they are!)  I understood last.fm pretty quickly, and Facebook and MySpace weren’t very difficult either.

However, the reason that I’m writing this is that I just signed up to blip.fm, and I can’t figure out what it is for.  This is not a unique occurrence, and I am experiencing it more and more often as I explore new and ever more esoteric social networking sites (are the obvious ideas all taken?) .  I mean, blip.fm looks very much as though it was influenced by Twitter, and it’s very obviously about music.  Here are some things that I *have* figured out about it:

• I can search for a song and “blip” it, and if the site knows about it then I get to enter my thoughts on it into a text box, and then the site plays it to me somehow.  Subsequently, the song appears in my list of blipped songs.
• I can embed the song, along with my comments, in another web page – presumably I can also do this with anyone’s songs or comments.

• I can add people as favourites, and get a twitter-like page with the aggregation of all their blipped songs on it.
• I can press play and start listening to all the songs on any page which works like a sort of playlist.  Presumably the speed of my listening is a lot slower than the content provided by multiple people blipping, so my playback will fall behind.  Or something.
• It’s almost like I’m a DJ.  Or something.

Perhaps I’m just getting stupider with age, but these individual features don’t seem to me to hang together in a coherent whole.  What I need is an enthusiastic friend who gets it to excitedly tell me about why it’s so great.  They could give me the two or three patterns for using it that illustrate why it’s good.  That approach is very effective for me on those occasions when I am coming to a new thing via an enthusiastic friend, and I quite often do it in the other direction when I’m enthusiastic about something.

Wouldn’t it be great if blip.fm (and the rest) provided the “enthusiastic friend” explanation somewhere.  Perhaps they could put it in the FAQ, as an answer to the question at the top of this post.

“What’s it for?”

Update, 01:20am: From Annie Ok, the one liner I needed: “it’s for posting songs to twitter”.  So you get it to tweet when you blip – that single fact made it all come into focus.  Thanks, Annie!