Category: toreview

This weekend, my parents visited, and I bought a powerdrill. I feel like this was the final casting-off of my childhood shroud, as I then spent Sunday morning hanging a very large mirror on the hook I had put up. For good measure, I sorted out the bit of the carpet edging that was sticking up, using a drill in a situation which was possibly inappropriate. What could be more manly that that, I ask you?

Good to see my parents, ate a nice simple meal at The Black Prince in Woodstock. We’ve been there once before, and it has been redone nicely since then. Very impressed with it as a good venue for a slightly posher pub lunch.

This week, I need to read a lot of geek, and do a bit of gardening. Even more plants arrived in my garden this weekend thanks to my mum, which have all duely been planted out. I am reading The Mythical Man Month at the moment, and need to get somewhat further into that.

I was thinking this morning on the way into work about social network technologies, as you do for fun in the morning. You don’t? Anyways, I was thinking specifically about the level of fear there is for both users and non-users of these services. I’m talking both about “friend and fuck” networks like Myspace, Friendster and the like, and more general services like Flickr (for photos), Youtube (for video) and indeed blogging inself.

There is a certain fear of having your privacy invaded, that people can know too much about you. I agree that there are certain precautions one should take online, of course. I wouldn’t give you my credit card details here. Well I might, but you would have to be really nice to me first. I wouldn’t shout my real name all the time. I won’t tell you exactly where I live. And I wouldn’t discuss something on here that I should talk to my partner about instead. My attitude is that apart from that, pretty much everything is fair game. And that is where the confidence comes that I suspect a lot of people either lack or fear revealing.

I just don’t think there is anything to worry about. Does it matter if someone I don’t know sees my face, hears me speak? Fact of the matter is that I am one very tiny voice in a seething mass of people. So few people would see it in the first place, and one way or another I will know most of those people anyways. So why worry?

To take this further, I was also thinking about how I would feel if my child was blogging, or on Myspace. I’m not a parent yet, but if I was, I would be happy for them to do so, as long as they obeyed the same sensible behavior I do, and also I would be subscribed to their site or blog, and actually read it all. I can’t see the problem about that either. I think what has scared a lot of parents is hearing in the media about what Myspace is being used for, and being scared and shocked that teenagers spend all their time talking about sex and music they themselves don’t like, and expressing views they totally disapprove of.

What I think is happening is that the teenagers on Myspace are expressing their interests and beliefs in a fairly unrestrained manner, and many other people used to being very careful and private on the internet, as they have been taught to be very security-conscious as a matter of course, find that hard to handle, along with their general distaste for the unknown. They have yet to get that almost aggressive Confidence 2.0 that their children have.

Not the busiest of weekends, but a good one. We took it easy on the Saturday morning, then after a very late breakfast walked into Oxford, and went for a wander around the Ashmolean museum. Some very interesting things there, but laid out in a somewhat chaotic fashion. Certainly needs the update it is getting at the moment. I will have to go back sometime and take more photos around it.

After that, we bought some books, including a good one on Scandanavian design (they seem obsessed with the perfect chair, which I can dig), then went off for a tapas meal. Avoided getting rained on, and home. All good really 🙂

I look out of my window to see that a curtain of darkness has covered the view. I can only see the faint black outlines of buildings. Shadows are everywhere, following people and cars, or just standing next to houses. Trees look like people, black as evil. An ebony black cat strolls around, its eyes glowing. There is a gloom around the town, nothing moves, as if the world had stood still.

I walk outside. Cars appear out of the gloom and murk. Back inside I fall asleep into a black, blank world, where I am unaware of anything, oblivion. In the morning the black night falls asleep, only to be woken by the yawns of the white day

I’ve just found this, a poem I wrote a little while ago. 28th April 1983 to be precise. I was, it is far to say, pretty fucking miserable at times when I was a kid.