It was 30 years ago today...

 … that my first fully dated item appeared on my website: a review of Clannad’s 1996 tour at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, attended a week earlier.

I blogged about this piece of history 10 years ago.  What's changed since then?

Back in 2016 I was working at the University of York.  I have since retired, although I still have Emerita status there.

To date, on my website I have 623 non-fiction book reviews, 1094 science fiction reviews, and 82 other fiction reviews.  That's about 5 reviews a month averaged over the 30 years, although it had been decreasing, and was particularly low in 2016.  Over the last 10 years, that's a further 189 non-fiction, 250 science fiction, and 7 other fiction reviews, so a reading rate of about 3-4 book per month over that time period.  I hadn't decreased my reading, just my reading of books, as reading research papers took up a lot of my time at York.  There's a visible spike in number of book reviews last year as retirement kicked in, back to the previous rate of 5-6 a month.

There haven't been any major changes in the design of the website, just more material, mostly in terms of reviews, research publications, and solar power statistics.  So, maybe just more of the same in 2036, too?  Let's see!

book review: Because Internet

Gretchen McCulloch.
Because Internet: understanding how language is changing.
Vintage. 2019

---

Linguists study language in all its forms. Spoken language is the primary form, but written language is also of interest. Whilst most spoken language is informal, spontaneous, conversational, most written language is formal, studied, edited. Well, that was the case until the internet, with the explosion of informal writing in emails, texts, chats, and so on. This has provided linguists with a rich resource, with no recording and transcription required. McCulloch’s book covers a wide range of investigations into this informal internet language, and how it has been changing over time.

McCulloch explains why a full stop at the end of a text appears passive-aggressive, the evolution of emojis and why they aren’t a language, why the internet has enabled videophones when previous attempts failed, and multiple other fascinating insights into this new form of language.

This isn’t the post-literate world; this is a differently literate world. Because Internet.

---

For all my book reviews, see my main website.

Covid-19 diary : online ordering

Went onto Amazon to order more of a consumable item that I’ve been buying for a while now.

Click Add to basket, quantity 1

Error message: Minimum order 2.
The item appears in my basket, but with quantity zero.

Increase the order quantity to 2.

Error message: This seller has a limit of 1 per customer.
The item now appears in my basket with quantity 1.

Proceed to checkout.

Error message: Minimum order 2.
The item now appears in my basket with quantity 2.

Proceed to payment.

(At least it didn’t get into a loop.)

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CIII

The latest batch.  They didn’t all arrive at once; they’ve been slowly piling up, but I’ve only just got around to databasing them.

no longer an anti-social networker...

Farewell Google+.  Your interface was always clunky and annoying, but you had an interesting set of users.

For my 3.5 followers, you can still watch my eccentricities at my blog site (where I was always “archiving” my G+ posts anyway, in preparation for this day…)

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

feel old yet?

Do you think “that’s quite recent”, or do you think “I never knew there was a time this wasn’t possible”?

Mosaic, the First HTML Browser That Could Display Images Alongside Text, Turns 25

NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, was released on April 22, 1993. It was developed by a team of students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and had the ability to display text and images inline, meaning you could put pictures and text on the same page together, in the same window.

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

book review: The Geek Feminist Revolution

Kameron Hurley.
The Geek Feminist Revolution.
Tor. 2016

---

The Geek Feminist Revolution collects over 30 of Kameron Hurley’s non-fiction essays, on a range of topics: being a geek, being a feminist, being sick in the US, being a writer, being a woman SF writer, being a copy writer, sexism, sexism in SF (both in the community, and in the literature), being trolled. Some of these pieces are from her blog, one is her magnificent Hugo award winning essay “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” (reprinted here with added illustrations), some are new to this collection. All are worth reading.

The essays cover a wide range of topics, yet there is a common theme running through many of them: that of writing; from being a writer (including the value of sheer persistence, which here has to be read to be believed), to reviewing and critiquing the literature and community, all from an unabashedly feminist perspective. As always with books about writing, I look to see how well they take their own advice. Here, the prose style is admirably transparent, punchy, and readable. And the content is passionate, insightful, and well-argued. These essays make fascinating, if sometimes uncomfortable, reading. Recommended.

---

For all my book reviews, see my main website.

life on hold

AWS “down”

Means Trello is down.

Means I can’t do any work...
(or rather, I don’t know what work to do...)

Oh the joys of cloud-living....

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

It was 20 years ago today...

… that my first dated item appeared on my website: a review of Clannad’s 1996 tour at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, attended a week earlier.

Back in 1995 I was working for Logica UK, and they started allowing staff to have webspace.  I took up their offer, and decided to start a review site, to learn about the web (it was new in those days!), and to keep an online review journal.  I fiddled about with the pages for a while, adding a few reviews, then, on 23 May 1996, I started date-stamping them.

To date, I have 434 non-fiction book reviews, 844 science fiction reviews, and 75 other fiction reviews: an average of 5-6 a month for those twenty years.  I also have nearly 200 SF film reviews, and over 70 SF TV show reviews.

When I moved to the University of York in 2002, I took my website with me, and it continued to grow.  Being an academic, I also use it to keep a respository of my publications; there are about 240 of those now.

What does the past look like?  The oldest backup I can find is from October 1999 (on a CD: remember them?), when my front page looked like:

Today, it looks like:

In the intervening time, I have modified the site to use CSS.  But, actually, there hasn’t been a major change to the structure, just additional content.

So, check back in 2036 for the next 20 year update…

the invisible hamburger antipattern

A great talk about the website obesity crisis:

I want to share with you my simple two-step secret to improving the performance of any website.
1. Make sure that the most important elements of the page download and render first.
2. Stop there.

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

sob

Researchfish – profoundly changing global research assessment

but possibly not in the ways you might want.

It’s certainly profoundly changing my blood pressure.

If you have no idea what I’m on about, THINK YOURSELVES VERY FORTUNATE.

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

omnipresent advice

I had an annoying voicemail notification “stuck” on my phone (very annoying, as it was the result of a spam call).  I couldn’t get rid of it, so I googled the problem.  The web is wonderful!

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

don't wreck the net

I've just filled in the EU survey on Regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the collaborative economy.

After slogging through it, even with the help of this linked website, I had to vent my frustration in one of the text boxes:

This is truly one of the worst designed questionnaires it has been my displeasure to complete.  Questions are loaded and poorly worded, options are overlapping, explanation boxes only exist for the "desired" answer. 

If this is the level of your internet/web/cloud technical competence, you have no business thinking of regulating others!

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

never email a password

I’ve just registered with a new grant management system.  They wanted a password, obviously, and clearly wanted a strong one, because they required a minimum length, and a mix of characters from different classes.  They went one further, and also wanted an answer to a memorable questions.  So far, so good.  (Well, apart from one of the options being mother’s maiden name.  Not exactly secret in this day and age.  But I use a password manager, so I can easily provide a random answer without worrying about losing it.)

They emailed me confirmation of my registration.

The email contained my login id.  And my password, in the clear.

screenshot of email, modified

Sigh.

[while looking for an interesting and relevant link to add in here, I found this beautiful page.]

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

the power of the hash tag

People In Toronto Created A Memorial To A Dead Raccoon After The City Forgot To Pick It Up

#deadraccoonto 

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

gotcha

Note to self: two-factor authentication where your landline drops your internet connection, and then the web page times out before the connection re-establishes, is not useful.  (And no, I couldn’t change the contact number to my mobile, because to do that I needed to two-factor authenticate myself…)

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XL

The latest batch:

multi-address spam detector

I was doing a quick review of my Spam folder, which I do only rarely, as Gmail seems pretty good at removing only crud.

While running my eye down the list, I noticed two very similar emails.

Different sender names, slightly different text, but clearly the same spam.  These arrived at two different email addresses of mine.  I know email hosts can detect spam by seeing the same email sent to lots of different addresses.  Now I can, too.

type the two words you see in the picture below

I was registering for on-line access to my water bill.  Part of the registration process has a Captcha.  I saw:

“Oh, that won’t work.”  I clicked the refresh button.

“Oh. So what are the chances of that?”  I clicked the refresh button.

“Oh.  There seems to be a pattern here.”  So I typed “200” into the text box.  And got through to the next screen.

Well, I suppose that “two hundred” is, after all, two words!

impersonal personalisation

So there I was, typing up some text, going over to Google to look up a reference, when I saw the Doodle of the day:

That’s a coincidence, I thought.  I wonder whose birthday they are celebrating.  So I clicked through to see, and ended up on my own Google+ page.

Oh.

That’s cute, was my first thought.

That’s spooky, was my second thought.

That’s, umm, really disturbing, was my next thought.

This Doodle made me realise how much my online experience is now uselessly personal.  (I'm assuming no-one else got this specific Doodle, because that would be really spooky!)  I can no longer trust that my view onto the web is not being severely filtered, here presumably for fun, but what about at other times?  How can I trust that my research queries, which need to be impersonal, are not being helpfully, or unhelpfully, filtered?

Of course, I knew this intellectually before, but this incident brought it home to me in a very (im)personal way.