What I have gained from this programme so far
Rejuvenation and extension of the things I learned last year: new widgets to fit to my blog & Twitter feed, knowledge of what one actually does with a Creative Commons licence, tricks for editing screenshots.
Opportunity to measure, and reflect on, my changing way of using Delicious and bit.ly . My subjective perception had been that I was now using bit.ly in preference to Delicious. But, after counting posts from equivalent months in 2010 and 2011, I came to see that my ratio of Delicious use to bit.ly use had been roughly equal in both years, and that my use of both had declined to roughly equal degrees. A valuable corrective, as statistics often are.
The question those figures can't answer by themselves is "Why?" Yes, I know. On that I am still thinking, and maybe I'll find some hypothesis that can have statistics thrown at it.
Which thing I particularly liked or disliked
Oh I did enjoy showing off what I had found about Google Calendar! Almost as much as if I had invented it myself. And demonstrating it with LightShot & all.
Which of the forthcoming things I really can't wait to try
QR codes. I have been using them increasingly at the Haddon, picking up scraps of technique as I go along, and I look forward to reading how to handle them properly.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
The just's umbrella
I was having lunch in Costa Coffee today, when the lady on the next table -- a complete stranger -- asked me to lend her a pen. I lent her one, and she set about filling in an eight- or ten-page application form. I decided that I would ask for the pen back if I had to leave for work before she'd finished. In the event, I didn't have to ask.
Allow me to blog a poem that I wrote some years ago on the subject of lent pens. It was published in Popshot 1 (2009), p. 34, with an accompanying illustration by Matt Dent. The poem's title draws on a squib by the nineteenth-century judge Charles Bowen:
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.
THE JUST'S UMBRELLA
Redistribution of the air
means weather-frights and asthma, true,
too much air or too sick, but few
complain they do not get their share.
Redistribution of the cup
means visible hands' work. Someone
must drive cup, saucer, plate and spoon
across the node of washing up.
But will you please give back again
that borrowed biro, mine, not yours,
seeing nor gales nor nodes will cause
redistribution of the pen.
Allow me to blog a poem that I wrote some years ago on the subject of lent pens. It was published in Popshot 1 (2009), p. 34, with an accompanying illustration by Matt Dent. The poem's title draws on a squib by the nineteenth-century judge Charles Bowen:
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.
THE JUST'S UMBRELLA
Redistribution of the air
means weather-frights and asthma, true,
too much air or too sick, but few
complain they do not get their share.
Redistribution of the cup
means visible hands' work. Someone
must drive cup, saucer, plate and spoon
across the node of washing up.
But will you please give back again
that borrowed biro, mine, not yours,
seeing nor gales nor nodes will cause
redistribution of the pen.
Monday, 15 August 2011
Cam23 2.0: Week 9, extra thing: Creative Commons
by Shannon Henry
This week's extra thing is one I've wanted to read ever since last year's introduction to Creative Commons licences: how to reproduce a Creative Commons image with its licence attached. Now I know. Call me lazy, if you like, for waiting this long, and not racing Facebook and Twitter for the information; but now I've got it I'm going to use it. See the above picture.
My first use of Creative Commons in this way is dedicated, without permission, to Clare on our 13th wedding anniversary. Watch out for Haddon-Library-related images on the Haddon Library website before long.
I expect that I will sooner or later be sticking CC licences on poems of mine when I blog them. However, I can see that that will need caution. I don't blog poems of mine that haven't been already published somewhere. I consult the publishers about this by email. If I'm going to start sticking licences on the poems then presumably such emails need to contain a bit more than "I'm blogging xxx, which you printed in 2004. Hope that's OK."
I will wait a bit before trying that experiment.
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Cam23 2.0: Week 8: the extra things: tumblr and posterous
I do enjoy Tumblr's Cambridge Noir, yes; I've no doubt I shall be enjoying more content from Tumblr and Posterous, as I'll be enjoying content from some blogs that are on Blogger and some blogs that are on Wordpress. But I don't immediately get the differences between Tumblr and Posterous, or the differences between both Tumblr and Posterous and other sites. The post comparing them washed over me, and I don't feel any urge to experiment with Tumblr and Posterous at all.
Eurgh. My previous post showed how my use of Delicious and bit.ly has fallen by around 60% over the past year. I think I must be getting jaded. Goodnight.
Eurgh. My previous post showed how my use of Delicious and bit.ly has fallen by around 60% over the past year. I think I must be getting jaded. Goodnight.
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
Cam23 2.0: Week 7, thing 12: Bookmarking tools
Only this: a year ago I rejoiced in the Delicious cupcake logo, feeling that the utility of the site excused such hedonism. But now I compare Delicious with the URL-shortener bit.ly. Delicious has the things I will read if I get round to it; bit.ly has the things I have read and think worth passing on.
So now Delicious charges me not just with icing but also, even more than last year, with not having read. And I find myself using it less often, probably in consequence. The statistics are glum. In June-July 2010 I added 23 sites to Delicious (not the 23 Things); in the equivalent months of 2011 it was just 10.
Have you had a comparable experience?
Ah, there might be some such comparables in those 23things posts I missed while Clare & I were biking home from Chester last week. But that means more things I haven't read!
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
So now Delicious charges me not just with icing but also, even more than last year, with not having read. And I find myself using it less often, probably in consequence. The statistics are glum. In June-July 2010 I added 23 sites to Delicious (not the 23 Things); in the equivalent months of 2011 it was just 10.
Have you had a comparable experience?
Ah, there might be some such comparables in those 23things posts I missed while Clare & I were biking home from Chester last week. But that means more things I haven't read!
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Sunday, 7 August 2011
Farewells to cars
I myself do not drive, and probably cannot be taught to. My reaction times are fast enough for cycling, but no more. However, I like the challenge of writing poems to order, and the order has occasionally included a request from a friend grieving for a car. Two such elegies were published in the church magazine Streetwise 16, October 1994, p.25.
TWO ELEGIES FOR CARS
(i) In memory of Amy Dolomite Triumph-Ettrick, died of rust, January 1993
A much-loved car may turn more pain,
passing away, than should be true:
it had the life it had from you,
and cannot give it back again.
The business of the parting (make
internment to interment, led
for Amy, long already dead)
is after Christmas, and grey ache.
Here is the yard where every state
of wreckage -- loss of faces, hearts --
waits rusting, gives up fewer parts,
continues to disintegrate.
Leave her poor corpse for fifteen pounds,
fifty of which will have to go
towards the new car's tyres, which blow
bathos in those appalling grounds,
and see the roads keep pumping life
mechanically through the town,
racing or jammed or slowing down,
stoppable, yes; not for this grief,
and kids notch pencil gates, five bars,
adults, parked oddly as the Ark,
click little counters as they mark
the passing of the vans and cars.
(ii) To Clare on the loss of her Metro
Awkward, you were, at the acquisition --
flushed, almost as for a dishwasher,
as much as for a man,
lots more than for a television --
high-minded to make a healthy
reduction in your use of the road:
by trains for cross-country travel,
buses in the city, or your bike,
and where the streets are steepest, walking,
paying to go green as the policy
insures drivers against driving and its embarrassment,
anxious to justify journeys, or excuse them,
ashamed of leadening the Leeds air.
Well, the stained air can be said to have won:
August, and work is all washed up,
beachedly dull like decaying boats,
and moist has crept through the car's metal,
rendered its body brittle with rust.
THANKS FOR THE JOURNEYS TO CHURCH AND STATION,
THANKS FOR PRAISING MY NAVIGATION,
BEARING MY MISTIMED SPECULATION
ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE'S ORIENTATION,
BIT OF A HARD AND KNOTTY CLUMP
TO PULL UP AND THROW AT YOU ALL OF A JUMP
SHORT OF A TRAFFIC-LIGHT, DRIVING THROUGH RAIN
AND LEEDS' ONE-WAY SYSTEM IN TIME FOR A TRAIN.
AND KNOWING THAT YOU AND I GO BACK AS FAR,
MORE OR LESS, AS YOUR Y-REGISTERED CAR,
I THANK GOD, HEARING SOME OF THE THINGS I HAVE SAID,
THAT ONLY THE CAR IS CORRODED AND DEAD.
A more recent elegy is for a car that was stolen from outside our house in the night of 27/28 April 2004, and discovered, even before we knew it had gone, in the grounds of Soham Village College. The poem was published in Orbis 135, Winter 2005, p. 61, and includes some amendments suggested by Orbis editor Carole Baldock.
OUR CAR, ABANDONED NEAR THE SCENE OF AN OLDER CRIME
(to Clare, again, on the loss of a Metro)
Deep in ancient embarrassments,
I did not see
that I'd put my bike through
where our car ought to be,
and I could not recall,
when you rang with the question,
if I'd seen the car then
or mere auto-suggestion.
But before you rang,
the car had been found,
fourteen miles away, early,
in a school ground.
So before I pushed bike
through car-space and mind's nettle,
the car was already
a wreck of burnt metal.
Perhaps, like a churchyard,
the grounds of that school
are marked for outrageous
breakings of rule.
I can’t tell if that’s so
from my tiny self-knowledge,
full of my idiocies
at school and college.
But after the breakings,
do the breakers find
they can silence the growth
of nettles in the mind?
The car's replacement is still with us, but we have for many years been following the advice in the book Cutting your car use by Anna Semlyen. In 2003, we drew up a pledge form for others who might wish to make a thing of cutting their car use. Feel free to download....
TWO ELEGIES FOR CARS
(i) In memory of Amy Dolomite Triumph-Ettrick, died of rust, January 1993
A much-loved car may turn more pain,
passing away, than should be true:
it had the life it had from you,
and cannot give it back again.
The business of the parting (make
internment to interment, led
for Amy, long already dead)
is after Christmas, and grey ache.
Here is the yard where every state
of wreckage -- loss of faces, hearts --
waits rusting, gives up fewer parts,
continues to disintegrate.
Leave her poor corpse for fifteen pounds,
fifty of which will have to go
towards the new car's tyres, which blow
bathos in those appalling grounds,
and see the roads keep pumping life
mechanically through the town,
racing or jammed or slowing down,
stoppable, yes; not for this grief,
and kids notch pencil gates, five bars,
adults, parked oddly as the Ark,
click little counters as they mark
the passing of the vans and cars.
(ii) To Clare on the loss of her Metro
Awkward, you were, at the acquisition --
flushed, almost as for a dishwasher,
as much as for a man,
lots more than for a television --
high-minded to make a healthy
reduction in your use of the road:
by trains for cross-country travel,
buses in the city, or your bike,
and where the streets are steepest, walking,
paying to go green as the policy
insures drivers against driving and its embarrassment,
anxious to justify journeys, or excuse them,
ashamed of leadening the Leeds air.
Well, the stained air can be said to have won:
August, and work is all washed up,
beachedly dull like decaying boats,
and moist has crept through the car's metal,
rendered its body brittle with rust.
THANKS FOR THE JOURNEYS TO CHURCH AND STATION,
THANKS FOR PRAISING MY NAVIGATION,
BEARING MY MISTIMED SPECULATION
ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE'S ORIENTATION,
BIT OF A HARD AND KNOTTY CLUMP
TO PULL UP AND THROW AT YOU ALL OF A JUMP
SHORT OF A TRAFFIC-LIGHT, DRIVING THROUGH RAIN
AND LEEDS' ONE-WAY SYSTEM IN TIME FOR A TRAIN.
AND KNOWING THAT YOU AND I GO BACK AS FAR,
MORE OR LESS, AS YOUR Y-REGISTERED CAR,
I THANK GOD, HEARING SOME OF THE THINGS I HAVE SAID,
THAT ONLY THE CAR IS CORRODED AND DEAD.
A more recent elegy is for a car that was stolen from outside our house in the night of 27/28 April 2004, and discovered, even before we knew it had gone, in the grounds of Soham Village College. The poem was published in Orbis 135, Winter 2005, p. 61, and includes some amendments suggested by Orbis editor Carole Baldock.
OUR CAR, ABANDONED NEAR THE SCENE OF AN OLDER CRIME
(to Clare, again, on the loss of a Metro)
Deep in ancient embarrassments,
I did not see
that I'd put my bike through
where our car ought to be,
and I could not recall,
when you rang with the question,
if I'd seen the car then
or mere auto-suggestion.
But before you rang,
the car had been found,
fourteen miles away, early,
in a school ground.
So before I pushed bike
through car-space and mind's nettle,
the car was already
a wreck of burnt metal.
Perhaps, like a churchyard,
the grounds of that school
are marked for outrageous
breakings of rule.
I can’t tell if that’s so
from my tiny self-knowledge,
full of my idiocies
at school and college.
But after the breakings,
do the breakers find
they can silence the growth
of nettles in the mind?
The car's replacement is still with us, but we have for many years been following the advice in the book Cutting your car use by Anna Semlyen. In 2003, we drew up a pledge form for others who might wish to make a thing of cutting their car use. Feel free to download....
Monday, 25 July 2011
Cam23 2.0 Week 6, Thing 11: Reflection
What have you learned that's new?
Blogger template change and Twitter display; Lightshot; Pushnote .
What have you enjoyed about '23 things' so far?
The discipline and regularity of getting to grips with at least one new thing a week; the challenge of explaining myself.
Which of the things do you love/hate?
I enjoy the Twitter display on my blog. Like the advanced Twitter search on my homepage, it lets me get a substitute for my Twitter fix at times when I'm too busy to get to Twitter itself.
Which ones will you carry on using?
The Twitter display on my blog carries on happening without further input from me, so I will carry on using it almost literally in my sleep. Lightshot I found useful in explaining a Google wheeze. I learned the basic screenshot trick in the 2010 23things; it was very useful when explaining to geeks in what way I had screwed up some application. My use of it fell off as my inertia and inherently unpictorial nature reasserted themselves. If the same thing happens in my use of Lightshot, which is screenshots + editing, I will have let a very valuable resource go to waste.
Can you incorporate the things you're learning on this programme into your (working) life?
Well, yes. The uses I have described are part of my working life. And I might additionally go back to the instructions for screencasting, which I read but didn't try or blog about, with view to helping users of the Haddon Library blog.
Blogger template change and Twitter display; Lightshot; Pushnote .
What have you enjoyed about '23 things' so far?
The discipline and regularity of getting to grips with at least one new thing a week; the challenge of explaining myself.
Which of the things do you love/hate?
I enjoy the Twitter display on my blog. Like the advanced Twitter search on my homepage, it lets me get a substitute for my Twitter fix at times when I'm too busy to get to Twitter itself.
Which ones will you carry on using?
The Twitter display on my blog carries on happening without further input from me, so I will carry on using it almost literally in my sleep. Lightshot I found useful in explaining a Google wheeze. I learned the basic screenshot trick in the 2010 23things; it was very useful when explaining to geeks in what way I had screwed up some application. My use of it fell off as my inertia and inherently unpictorial nature reasserted themselves. If the same thing happens in my use of Lightshot, which is screenshots + editing, I will have let a very valuable resource go to waste.
Can you incorporate the things you're learning on this programme into your (working) life?
Well, yes. The uses I have described are part of my working life. And I might additionally go back to the instructions for screencasting, which I read but didn't try or blog about, with view to helping users of the Haddon Library blog.
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