Simplify, Refactor, Simplify

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Welcome back to WordPress, my journey back through development, Joomla and pain.

I had lofty design and functionality aspirations for my personal domain. It was my space and I was determined that, with a little inspired and creative thinking, the wheel could get a radical overhaul.

Version 1 saw me playing with the Bootstrap framework to deliver dynamically adjustable content across a variety of devices. I cracked my knuckles, dusted off my propellor hat and threw together a website, shopping cart and RSS parser in Ruby on Rails. Then I hit deployment pain and I remembered a past life’s Ruby upgrade pain and I thought of the hours I’d just spent creating a website to deliver simple content when what I really wanted to be doing was delivering content; writing stories and sharing them with people who love stories.

It lives!

Version 2 saw me archive up my Frankenstein creation and tinker in Joomla. Content was what I was after and once I’d set up a site structure then I could concentrate on the content. After watching a few tutorials to get across the powerful but bizarre configuration options, my Joomla site was ready. You can still see it here. Problem is it looked like a dog and ran like a half crippled ferret. I’d gone from Frankenstein’s monster, a pretty nice guy by all accounts, to The Thing. Anyone with a propellor hat can look at the page load statistics and see that it was throwing Javascript and styling around like a club-weilding Cro-magnon. Content, yay!; performance and asthetics, vomit!. I did look at what it would take to strap on the Bootstrap framework into a Joomla template – a Ph.D in advanced theoretical physics, twenty years experience at the NASA propulsion laboratories and more propellor spinning than I cared to invest.

Version 3 So here we are. What a lot of effort. One click WordPress setup using the simple scripts provided by FatCow, my hosting provider of choice. A thousand beautiful templates. More plugins than points on a Mandlebrot fractal and plenty of tools and applications to allow me to provide that content.

Turns out the wheel worked pretty well before my need to reinvent it.

The Real World

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There are so many things in my life keeping me out of mischief which is a shame because I’m quite partial to a spot or two of mischief. I am the proud father of two boys; one two years old and the other eleven. This means, among other delightful activities my time is taken up by: lots of laundry, school lunches, planning and executing on balanced meals, laundry, homework, potty training, laundry, extra-mural sport, grocery shopping and more laundry. Then there is the thing called the full-time job that pays for irritating necessities like school fees, and rent, and food that the kids ungratefully turn into poop and more dirty laundry. My wife loves animals so we have an abundance of clawed, furred and finned things which are constantly intersecting your path like intercontinental ballistic missiles whenever you find yourself carrying shopping or anything breakable – it’s uncanny. As I write this my male Bengal is trying to compete with my Macbook for my attention by valiantly inserting his claws into my arm while biting the screen. These little shits need care and attention too – walks and games and clean underwater castles to float past – all of which sucks up time like a sponge; a big juicy time sponge called life.

Then there is the stuff I don’t have a lot of in spite of my best intentions to not compromise. My writing time, and sitting quietly reading a book time, my me time. There’s always a feral two year old who needs to be carefully pried from his older sibling’s room, milk that needs to be bought, a litter box that needs cleaning, a dishwasher than needs packing or laundry. Laundry is the whitespace in modern life; the sticky awfulness that seeps between the letters and around the punctuation and fills the page with it’s depressing pervasiveness.

All in all this is known in the colloquial as the ‘fucking real world’. My parents warned me about it, often with a heated comment to grow up and join it, though I never saw the attraction; I was not in any tearing hurry thank you very much, I’m still not all that enamoured. But, despite my best intentions, we all fall through life’s sieves. Down through an ever refining series of holes along with all the other grains; falling in a series of familiar repeating patterns and routines.

Would I change it for the world? Probably not – would I like some more me time. You betcha.

Dementors

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Dementors

With mouths elongated; drawn like dripping wax they cluster in all the raw & hollow places, moaning and groaning to end their torment. Perhaps JK Rowling is the only other person who knows Dementors are real.

Is Rapportive violating our Privacy?

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I’m worried about the new trend in social aggregation software. I recently had an issue with the Google Mail plugin written by Rapportive.com somehow finding a connection to my Twitter account and serving it up in my colleague’s email at work. Now, I use social media in a number of different ways. Twitter, which is not linked to my name or work, is used as an anonymous forum to be completely honest about how I see the world around me; as such it can be quite controversial at times. Facebook is the place where close friends and family congregate and I share photos of the kids and find out what people did on the weekend. My website is where I work on targeted information, like my writing or my hobbies. LinkedIn is where I keep my professional credentials up to date.
These channels have different uses and should stay seperate unless I choose to link them together.

Enter rapportive.com’s ‘rich contact profiles’. These guys clearly feel that your data is a free-for-all. In a way they’re right, they’re collecting public data aggregating it, and making it available in one place. What they’re not doing is taking into account whether people want all their private channels mushed together and served up on a plate.
We’ve known for a long time that written content, things like email and instant messages, are not the best form of communication and can often lead to misunderstanding. I’d hate it if people I don’t know suddenly started making spot judgements about me based on my last three tweets. If you still think I’m over-reacting then consider the next time you’re looking for a job and are communicating with a recruiter. Let’s hope every byte of your digital presence is absolutely squeaky clean.

Are we losing the ability to visualise the future?

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The human race: born with the singular potential to reach the stars and an primitive willingness to remain stuck in the mud.

Future Cities

I read on the Internet today that NASA was cutting funding to space exploration, again. There has been a slow disinvestment in space exploration for years, an insidious and gradual closing down every source of funding that does not have anything to do with war or the repercussions of the global financial situation, finally culminating in the closure of the shuttle program. Obama said this would free up NASA to focus on the bigger picture the exploration of Mars and beyond, it’d be a good thing, and most of us believed a politician.

As a child I absorbed any books I could find on ‘the future’. I spent hours pouring over the hand drawn pictures found in the Osbourne Book of the Future and a vision beyond 2000. Mankind would be free of disease and poverty and, as a species, ascend to the very top of Maslow’s pyramid by exploring the limits of our world, the ocean and the vast tracks of interstellar space. And who could forget the visions of Stewart Crowley? I spend four months scraping together enough pocket money to buy Spacebase 2000 and, later, Spacewreck. Those haunting pictures of derelict wrecks floating in the cold vacuum of space; the long forgotten detritus of some vast interstellar battle would chill me as I played out the battles is my imagination. Even now, sitting with my eleven year old thumbing through a very used Spacebase 2000 I still feel that sense of awe and wonder. There was also an optimism prevalent in the literature or the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, in the fundamental unstoppable spirit of mankind and the unavoidable migration of humanity beyond the narrow confines of our solar system. These days we have vampires or stories about human savagery in a post-apocylptic hell. We’ve lost something, we’ve fallen foul of a series economically and socially defined limitations, we’ve imposed mental barriers: that this stuff is hard, that there isn’t enough money to reach for the stars, that there are more important issues we should be focussing on. Thing is, that could have been said at any point in human history. I’m sure there were really serious social issues that could have been resolved rather than wasting time inventing the telephone, or the steam engine, or vaccines. Neal Stephenson is right: we’re no longer thinking about the big ideas. A person transported from 1900 to 1960 would not have recognised the landscape they’d arrived in, the wouldn’t have the language or the mental ability to understand the changes in technology or society. The same couldn’t be said about someone from the 1960’s transported into today’s world. There are newer versions of old things. There are still aeroplanes. There are still televisions. There is no space program to speak of, a person from the 1960’s would rightly feel proud that men from their era could send people to the moon.

We are a species rapidly outgrowing the limited resources of our home. Over-population and climate change paint a very bleak picture for our children and future generations. There has been no time in our history when the vision of big thinkers is needed more.