The Ringtail

This may be a bit stream-of-consciousness, apologies…

I just read a post about a proposed addition to Ubuntu 10.04 - Ubuntu’s integrated music service. This sounds pretty good to me. Additionally, I can see that it might start to make people think about, at the very least, giving Linux a try. So far so just-what-it-says-in-the-link. My thought is really about the burden on a user such as myself when things like this happen. Why? Read on.

When I was a Mac user it didn’t really matter what I said about them as Apple’s marketing machine was quite capable of swaying opinion without my help. Ditto for Microsoft (the effectiveness or otherwise of the Jerry ‘n’ Bill ads notwithstanding). With Ubuntu I feel it does make a difference what I, and all other Linux users, say and do. If someone looks over my shoulder on the train and sees me using Gnome on Ubuntu they would probably be interested to find out what this non-Windows thing I was using was. If they see me using the Awesome WM under Arch Linux they will probably shake their head and look the other way at what a luddite I am. It doesn’t matter if I know that the command line is more pwerful, or that getting rid of distractions and unnecessary processes makes I and my laptop more productive. People will want a free alternative if it looks like something they already know.

At my old job I was running openbox. All was set up nicely except that I had to drop to the command line to connect to a Windows share. Someone came over and asked to see a document, I popped up a terminal to connect to the server and retireve the document and they said (in essence), “this is so much harder than using Windows, why bother”. Forget the fact that it was actually quicker to go from start to open document, forget the fact that all the software I was using was free, this was ‘harder to do’. Had I popped up Nautilus and clicked on the shared drive and browsed down to the file like I would have on Windows, I’m sure the impression I’d given would have been that it was at least as easy as Windows. And it’s free!? Sign me up.

Because of distros like Ubuntu, Linux is making ground. I’ve had quite a few people say, ‘oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to try that out’ when I’ve mentioned I use Linux. I’m pretty sure they meant Ubuntu, and I’ve always straight away arranged to get them a CD to try it out.

My overall question is - as a proponent of Linux, and someone who will happily bang on about it to others, what pressure is there on me to use a distro like Ubuntu? Is it something in the makeup of a Linux user that makes them try and make life hard for themselves or is that just me? Ubuntu does all I need and more so why don’t I be a good global citizen and use it, help to promote it, make it visible? I think its the ‘and more’ that puts me off (see last post about Arch), but I don’t think I could really say why I feel the need to economise on RAM, processor use and disk space when I have more than enough to spare.

I’m not really sure what I’m even saying here, but I think there is a sea-change in the offing, and Canonical may well be the ones to boot Linux into contention for once. I’m just not sure what my role in it should be, but I genuinely feel I can play a role in this, something I never felt with Apple or Microsoft. What’s a boy to do?

I was biking home the other night when I noticed the Russell Hotel. Not a particularly staggering building, but quite grand and enough to make me think, “It’s pretty eye-catching, why have I not noticed it before?”.

As a birdwatcher, the mantra was always “keep looking up” - mainly thanks to Bill Oddie’s books - because you miss lots of activity if you don’t keep an eye on what’s flying over. With fishing, “keep looking up” means you see where fish are moving nearby, you can respond to other factors that you don’t see if you become fixated with watching your float. And you get to watch the short-eared owl quartering the far field, or the barn owl hunting along the hedge on the far bank.

Seeing the hotel made me realise that I need to make space to “keep looking up” in all areas of my life. I need to see more of my journey than just my front wheel, more of the company I work for than just my screen and desk-neighbours, and more of the community I live in than just the pavement between home and the station.

This post is not about Google Wave, but the arrival of the hype around it is what’s prompted me to write. I’m not sure how I feel about the move to get my data online and in the cloud, but a voice in my head needs to vent some ideas and thoughts.

I feel increasingly resistant to services that want to introduce new ways to communicate, new ways to aggregate more and more types of communications, or new ways to move my data online and into someone else’s care. My data is important to me and I don’t trust many people to see it, let alone look after it. This applies to stuff that needs to go online at some point in its life (email, IM, tweets) as well as other stuff (documents, photos, writing) that I feel I am being a luddite by refusing to take online.

Take task management. There are a slew of online services (or services that sync with an online component), but there are still pitifully few task managers that do a good job of managing my tasks offline. Give me that first and then move it online, don’t give me a product that is shitty both on- and offline because you’re trying to address too many needs. I can’t believe that I’m the only person who, when I really consider my needs, doesn’t need 24/7 contact with my task list. With access what it is, I find there are more places where a service being online is a hindrance to me rather than a bonus (a data connection on my train journey is, at best, only about 50% but my local data is available for the whole journey).

Take document creation. I find the idea of working on a document on an online word processor abhorrent. It’s like writing the first draft of your novel on a whiteboard instead of a notepad - too visible and too likely to make you try and get it right first time so others don’t see your errors. I reserve my right to make a Shitty First Draft of anything I work on, and I want to know where that is at all times to contain the risk that someone might see it and judge me thoughts that I don’t know if even I agree with yet, rather than my considered opinion.

Even email I prefer to download and consume offline. I love the idea of being able to get my mail everywhere I go, but I don’t like most browser-based clients, and I’ve yet to find a mail client that doesn’t make dealing with IMAP anything other than a wrist-slitting exercise in trashed user preferences.

Am I a luddite? I don’t think so. I embrace new technology and I admire things that push in the right direction. I just think that some things are a problem solved that didn’t really exist. I’d be considerably less reticent to embrace the “everything goes online” revolution if the desktop apps I used all worked perfectly and had no room for improvement, but they don’t.

Perhaps my biggest issue is that I don’t want someone to own my data in the way that it being online dictates. Sure, I’m probably a bit naive to assume that Apple don’t know a lot more about me than I think they do, but I have all my data on the machine that is on my lap, and I have the right to unplug it and never give anyone a chance to see any of it if I so choose. I can’t work with an online service in that way. Moving online and ‘freeing’ your data is a fallacy - your data being online enslaves you to whoever is holding the key. We trust our money to the bank in return for the benefit of interest and security, but I don’t see a similar benefit for having my data online rather than keeping it metaphorically under my mattress. “It’s with you wherever you need it” - so’s my laptop. “It’s available 24/7″ - who needs the pressure of their work crying out to be done wherever (and whenever) they are? “It aids collaboration” - email and phone conversations do this more efficiently than I will ever need right now.

Reading back, I find myself agreeing with a lot more of what I have said above than I thought I would…

Well, as Jim Anchower would have it, “It’s been a long time since I rapped at ya”. I’ve been moving across to a new job and closing down my business over the last couple of months or so, and I’ve had some time to reflect on what I have and have not got time to do. I’ve decided that writing is one of the things I will make time to do, and this blog is one place I intend to do just that. I’m entering NaNoWriMo this year so I need somewhere to flex my pen as I prepare for the off. It’s a philosophical tract about zombies, since you ask.

But what to write about?

I’ve been putting off writing here as my posts have been rather fishing based of late, and I didn’t have anything I wanted to say about that. For some reason I was worried about putting people off if they turned up to read of my heroic struggle against the piscine inhabitants of the Milton Keynes General Area, only to find me rambling on and on about text editors (again). I also didn’t want to put anyone off who is really, really into text editors, but couldn’t care less what float and weights I used to land that unremarkable fish that I forgot to take a photo of a week ago last saturday. In reality, most of what I write is appealing to a niche audience of about one, and I only ever re-read when the post hits my aggregator and I do a last sanity check for typos anyway.

So here’s the plan. I will write every day, I will post it here, and I will write about whatever takes my fancy. I’m not going to imagine I have an audience, or that I should be trying to cultivate one. I would like people to read what I write, of course, but I think that will only happen when I write about what I want to, not while I’m trying to guess what other people might want to read. Mostly it’ll be fishing, noisy music, mac geek, zombies, photos and work - please let me know if any of it is interesting.

To paraphrase the mighty David St Hubbins, I hope you enjoy my new direction(s).

I don’t often link to other blog content, but I really liked this blog entry about thinking for yourself from Marco Tabini.