The Ringtail

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.

I am keen to write a new application. I have been searching for an application where I can dump snippets of text to record notes, dreams, thoughts, story ideas, events and observations, but I always reach a stage where I’ve put a certain amount in and things are beginning to get lost. There is a trade-off between ease of entry, ease of search and ease of discovery.

Notes need to be easy to make (the easy bit), easy to search (the not-so-hard bit), but also easy to re-discover (the hard bit). If notes are really easy to make, you can make thousands and, with a bit of tagging magic, you can make them very easy to find again. The trouble is that you don’t always know when a note you made might be desirable to find again. By necessity, successful search can only really work if you either know the note you need to find, or you had a clear idea when you made the note of what it might be useful for in the future. You can search for, say, all notes that you have that concern Project A, but that won’t turn up the notes that you didn’t realise at the time you made them were relevant to Project A (tag search), or that you explicitly know will be useful (text search). It certainly won’t turn up a note that was made before you had even started Project A (no relevant tags) and can’t remember making (what text would you search for?). Clearly you will get lucky sometimes and relevant notes from the distant past will contain the right text to be returned on a search, but what about the more obtuse notes? Ones that don’t contain the “correct” text? Ones that highlight dim connections that the software couldn’t hope to make unaided?

The benefit of paper is that you touch, see and read other notes as you flick through looking for the note you want. It may take longer to search for a known note, but the act of searching gives you refreshed perspective on notes that otherwise would have remained unseen. Electronic tools are good at creating groupings based on tags and text, but paper notes can create groupings based on how you scooped them off the table when you finished brainstorming, or how they were shoved in a drawer and mixed in with your other notes. Real notes, whether on sheets of paper or individually recorded on Post-Its or notecards, can have spatial relationships that have no dependence on their contextual relationships. As I look through to find a note relating to a fishing trip I made four years ago, I may see a note that I made at that time which gives me a great new insight into a current project. Would I have reviewed that old note if I had searched in a database for the fishing note? Probably not. Does it matter? I think yes.

What I want is an application that can give me a refreshed perspective on all of my notes, and preferably at a time when it will be relevant. Clearly it can’t simply be a case of periodically showing me all my past notes with no sorting, as that would mean I reviewed far too many notes that were interesting but not useful. But how do I know which old notes might benefit from this refreshed perspective? If tags and text search don’t cover it all, what connections can be made to provide this oblique search? What can I do to create spatial connections between collections of zeroes and ones on a magnetic storage disk?