E-books, and why I'm apparently worse than Hitler.

I love reading. It is a huge part of my life, and it is my go-to when I don't know what to do with myself. Sometimes I schedule time in my day (when I'm really busy, which can be fairly often) to read. I read before going to sleep (in fact, I can't sleep unless I've read a couple of pages of whatever is sat next to the bed). I enjoy train journeys where there won't be loads of people crammed in like sardines so I can get stuck into something that I've been meaning to get a good run at, and if I weren't too distracted by trying to see what's on the ground I'd be reading on planes too.

Books have a hold on me; I once pledged to give 50 books to a charity shop. This was a total failure, because I gave away 17. Out of the thousands of books I own, I gave away 17 and I can remember what most of them were. Books make incredible furniture, ice breakers, friends, companions, comfort blankets. They're food for the mind and soul. They smell incredible. They last for years, even after you've dropped them in the bath, spilled tea on them, carried them in a backpack for months, taken them up mountains and down valleys. They whisper to you, tell you things that you'll dream about, educate and enhance your life. You'll probably only have time to read maybe 8000 books in your entire life (at current rates I've got another 4200 left in me, assuming I don't get hit by a bus). Many people won't read a tenth of that. A few will read more.

So, why is it that as soon as people buy an e-book reader they go nuts on the Amazon store, buying ebooks because they only cost a quid, of things that they will never, ever read? I know people who have bought kindles and then downloaded the entirety of Project Gutenberg. There are 32,000 works on Gutenberg and nobody - and I truly mean nobody - will read all of them. This is the equivalent of buying a 160Gb iPod and then filling it with a third of a years worth of continuous music. You'll buy all this stuff from iTunes and listen to it precisely once, and skip it if the shuffle ever brings it up. It's the same for downloading movies, or vast swathes of text from Wikileaks. Why do people do this? Are they collectors of media they will never, ever see/read/hear? Finish something, for goodness' sakes!

I actually have several problems with ebook readers; that they encourage you to download and collect far more than you'll ever need, which leads to option paralysis and thousands of things started but not finished is probably my biggest bugbear. But: they're not allowed to be read when planes are landing. Not even Lady Chatterley's Lover is banned on planes (any more), but you could be trying to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to your offspring and be told off by the crew for endangering the lives of you and everybody around you for using an electronic device during landing.

Hypothetically, you could read your ebooks in the bath, although if you drop it in then... well. It'll cost you a couple of quid to replace that copy of Sense & Sensibility if it were a paperpack. Ditto reading a battered Chris Brookmyre in the rain on a Welsh promenade, or on the beach with a sudden sandstorm. If you spill your tea on Lord of the Rings it probably won't even get past Rivendell, but on your Kindle? You could lose everything. And I've been able to read Eric Newby on the top of mountains; would the battery on your shiny electronics hold out in subzero temperatures? Speaking of which; I've never yet had to recharge an Agatha Christie just when Poirot declares his denoument. Did the butler do it? Probably not, but all I have to do is turn the page, not find a computer with a USB cable.

Sure, I could carry around every book I've ever wanted to read in my satchel. Except until the next model comes out, at which point format incompatability kicks in. So like the White Album I'd have to re-purchase something I already own (or rent; if you read the T&Cs on most ebook suppliers you don't actually own what you buy) just so I can continue to read it. And I lend books to people, too. Can't do that with that electronic version of Nights at the Circus - it's a T&C violation, even if you could be bothered to hack the DRM out of it. And you can't sell on ebooks, or even donate them to Oxfam.

Point any of this out to someone who has drunk the Kindle Kool-aid and sold all their books, or freecycled, or - heaven defend us from these people - thrown them away, and you'll get a strange look, like I'm some kind of wierd luddite. Press the point and you get all kinds of arguments thrown at you, about how the future is here now and I'm stifling progress. How I'm destroying the planet with my dead-tree-loving ways (as if paeleolithic trees were being used to make the paper, and the ink to print was hand-squeezed from Kraken), and how gazillions of gallons of water is used to make my planet-killing books. If I mention the Congo or other African conflict regions where rare minerals are mined to make electronics then conversation rapidly decends into Godwin. So now I don't push the issue.

However... I could find a use for an ebook reader. I read a lot of PDFs for my day job and reading on a monitor is unpleasant for any length of time. I end up printing them off, which is a bit pointless when there are devices that could, in theory, read them. The problem here is that ebook readers can't natively render PDFs. They have to be converted, which defeats the point of a PDF in the first place - you lose formatting, pictures, graphs, page breaks. Don't mention the iPad, please - that's £400 of something accident-prone people really shouldn't be allowed in charge of.

Show me something that could natively render PDFs properly and I might be able to find a use for an ebook reader. But otherwise? You can keep them.

BGL

It occurs to me that I've not actually started redirecting people over to Beyond Guardian Leeds yet. Which is bad, because it's been going for eight months. That's at least one post every weekday (apart from 2 weeks over christmas) since the end of May last year.

So, go to Beyond Guardian Leeds for daily news aggregation posts about what might be going on in Leeds and West Yorkshire. You can also follow us on twitter as @BeyondGdnLeeds. A couple of us use that account, so don't try to contact just me personally on it.

FWIW, my personal account is @nalsa on twitter. Not sure I should have said that out loud.

Dang.

Beyond Grauniad Leeds

As I'm sure many people are aware by now, the Guardian Leeds experiment is drawing to a close, and John Baron is moving to The Northerner. This isn't a post about "but why?" or "those dastardly rotters!", but about where to take it next, which sort-of began a couple of weeks ago at WePublish, and was explored again last night at Megan Waugh's #AltMedia.

The meeting was to look at what people may want in some sort of gap-filling way to @GdnLeeds vanishing on Friday, and asking if an alternative newspaper in Leeds was feasible. Alas, a lack of agenda and structure to the meeting meant that people weren't really thinking strategically about how to go about doing something, just what the end product should be. Nothing about what we do now.

There were arguments for a "scare everybody" newspaper, for WebTV, for podcasts and community radio. The ever-dependable Mr Chitty mentioned that there's a fantastic noticeboard network in Leeds that is massively underused. Arguments for web-only versus traditional media outlets were put forwards and there was a serious split in the room between those who thought that print is dead - and we shouldn't even be trying to engage with those who don't "do" the internet - and those who wanted to produce something that included those who were digitally disenfranchised.

This was getting frustrating, and not just for me. Lots of what comes out at the end, nothing about what to do next.

I have no problem with running before you can walk but we have an exploitable resource - 15k uniques per week to Guardian Leeds with the majority being to the "what's going on in Leeds today" -style posts, along with 3.3k twitter followers on @GdnLeeds - that needs to maintain momentum. The project ends tomorrow (that's Friday 27th May 2011, if you're reading this in the future), and to just switch all of that off is a collossal waste of effort. Far better to put in something - nearly anything will do - that maintains momentum.

So, when one chap started explaining how Wordpress works I gave in. I asked what was going to happen to the twitter account, was told it'd lapse. I posited that if the most popular articles on Guardian Leeds were the news aggregation posts, those that collected interesting blog and newspaper articles with a hyperlocal focus, then surely continuing to do those (with some sort of technical solution, the details of which were not relevant to this discussion), and posting them to twitter under the @GdnLeeds account, would be a decent interim solution whilst this AltMedia project tries to find its feet. I was asked who would do it.

Yes, I think you can see where this ended up.

So, pending approval from John's bosses in That London, I want to start continuing the "what's going on in Leeds" posts, with blogs, newspaper stories, interesting curatorial points and the occasional rant. I don't have time to do everything John did in the 16 months of sterling work he did for GdnLeeds (I'm not sure anybody would have) but at least I can make a start on it. It won't be on the Guardian's website (unless some sort of miracle happens) but it's something worthwhile that needs to be continued. And hopefully, when the Alternative Media in Leeds project knows what it wants to do, there'll be a place for the daily roundup posts there as well.

Concerning injuctions

Ok, look. There's a couple of things about the recent superinjunction snowball that really needs to be brought into perspective.

1. If you don't want the world to know about the fact you can't keep your dick in your pants, then just try harder to keep your dick in your pants.

2. There is a right way and a wrong way to maintaining your right to privacy. Going to court for a gagging order is the wrong way. The right way is "maintain some decency and eventually everybody will forget about it". One of the parties being outed is the wrong way. Having some modicum of respect and dignity is the right way.

3. Really, nobody gives more than the tiniest shit about who is having affairs, except for the holier-than-thou parade who can look down upon the sinner and cast stones (Oh, wait, I forgot that sanctimony is a defining human trait). I mean, really, someone has been having sex with a former Miss Wales. In what way does this bear any relevance - I mean, any - to my, your, our lives?

4. The big story here is the one everybody is ignoring: the taboid press have a moral obligation to make everybody's lives miserable. "Look how pretty these people are? You don't have that. Look how much money these people have? You don't have that. Look at how EVIL THESE PEOPLE ARE? You don't have that, that level of public hatred, but you can feel morally superior for the fifteen seconds it takes you to read this article. And then you will hate yourself. If you don't already."

5. Actually, there's two stories. The second is called Trafigura, how big multinationals get away with stuff because they have gagging orders. We only know about Trafigura because the Guardian called their bluff (which is what will forever be known now as "The Twitter Trigger" or some other nonsense) and the courts backed them up. We don't know about any others. But that could be because there are other superinjunctions in place.

But really, there was no way on earth this was going to end well, the moment, the instant that the bloody idiot in the middle of this first thought about going to the courts to get this whole thing hushed up. The more people you have to tell to be quiet, the more people are going to know that there's something to be quiet about.

If anything, this proves the pure and simple axiom that our parents drilled into us as kids: if you tell the truth you may be punished, but nowhere nearly as badly as if you get caught in a lie.

Quick note about other stuff I've been doing.

I've been making sourdough; from this:


to this:



Which I need to write up for T&C. But, speaking of T&C I've been making muffins; details here!

I also went walking, fixed the garden gate, booked on a beekeeping course, put together a proposal for Light Night, visited YSP, saw four pieces of indie theatre in the space of a week, made a tonne of cake, photographed some platespinners, and read quite a lot. I also photographed some jellyfish, but that's a post all of its own.

Sorry for brevity - I'm still trying to sort out thoughts as to what I've been up to.

Jim fixed it for me

Photo from Emma Culturevulture, photo in Backwards Lion's picasa.

One of the things I have the occasional issue (and rant) about is the idea that the argument, or the debate, or the conversation is a great starting point. It is a great step along the way, but the start of anything is the idea. The conversation elps it along, and I agree with all of that; where I get unstuck is that many people - myself included - don't seem to be able to see past the conversation. Talking endlessly about an idea isn't actually getting the idea done, and so, like so many of my doomed projects, time runs out and you find yourself feeling like a failure, or worse; you forget about the idea. I've been trying to stop myself from endlessly getting 70% of the planning done and then abandoning stuff because it turns out to be a nightmare to get onto the 71% stage, without having even started to execute the plan.

And so, to me, Cultural Conversations seemed a bit like another line in the endless round of meetings and chats over beer and puzzling over spreadsheets at 3am; organising the enterprise without engaging the endeavour. (Plus, they're held during the day at a time I'd normally be at work.) So I wasn't really thinking about going to the one held on Friday, the We Are All Jim event. But, a chat with Emma convinced me to book the afternoon off and see not just what my city could do for me, but what I could do for my city.

I arrived to see a pile of tea & coffee supplied by Shine and the instantly recognisable cakes of Sunshine Bakery, gawd bless 'em all. The rules were set out (want a conversation about something? Put it on the wall and see who else is interested) and so, because of a minor faff about Bake Battle, I put up a request for a conversation about a baking competition in Leeds.

About a year ago, myself, The Secret Underground Tearoom and Lay the Table got together to start organising a baking comp. It went well but we kept on coming unstuck on the final logistics, the "where to hold it" and for one reason or another it sort-of fell apart earlier this year. 70% complete, 71% being that little step too far. Anyway, the upshot is that we decided to keep the ball rolling (the logo designer was paid! In cake, admittedly, but that's the currency we work in) and leave the tech infrastructure in place while we took a step back to see what we could do.

And so, my conversation quickly took an interesting turn, with having representatives from Leeds Libraries, a retail giant and the people who would be interested in having such an event, taking us into a fascinating, enormous project scope that involved roadshows, workshops, community engagement and possibly getting word out into the adult education and school sectors as well. One of the things we wanted from the beginning was a community involvement element and the ideas that came out of my/our chat were making great strides in that direction. What remains, then, is to take the next step and untangle the jumble; who we want to target, which organisations can we help and can help us, the education question, the events programme, what a workshop or roadshow could entail (and getting, perhaps, Leeds Loves Food involved in this would be fun), potential prizes and support. Location may need to be rethought (but I'm now thinking in terms of mobile kitchens, like you see in big marquees on Masterchef and Hairy Bikers, in one of the empty buildings so many arts orgs can find their way into nowadays) and perhaps we should be drawing on food as art (and art as food?) to tap into those elements.

I was able to hand out some of the tasty shortbread Jim'll Fix It badges (again, big happy thanks to Sunshine Bakery for those, as well as Elly Snare, who had to tun out for more ribbon twice) which got me into some more conversations; a joining the dots thing, a database of people who are willing to do stuff, a community cafe. The next thing I felt I could offer a contribution to was a Fab Lab, explaining different ways on how to get kit rather than focussing on the money (I ought to take my own advice, sometimes) and exploring different ways in which continuing revenue to keep such an enterprise going could be generated.

So I left the day with much to mull over; Leeds is apparently the debate capitol of the North, with over 40 groups and orgs whose sole purpose is to talk about stuff (next time I get a spare hour I'll research & make a list of all of them) and a lot of talking went on. How much of it translates into action is another thing, but I did get to talk to many interesting people and got quite a few interesting thoughts out of them. I guess time will tell; the bigger the project then the harder it gets. We'll just have to see whether anything comes out of this.

Oftentimes I'm quite cynical about this sort of thing. I think that this time I am genuinely hopeful. Big thanks to Emma & Mike Chitty for doing the hard work!

As an aside, I did meet some lovely people there who I'd be more than happy to take for a beer one day. Someone needs to restart the (alas, long lamented) LeedsBeer email flashmob list; sign up, and if someone posts to the list saying "Beer?" people can go "yeah, ok" or ignore it. I probably should have brought that up at the Conversations, too.

Is This The End of the IT Department? Answer: no.

T'other day (about 10 days ago at time of writing) I saw what I consider to be a bloody ridiculous article from a "noo meedja" company. The article in question, entitled "Is this the end of the IT department?", is yet another rehash of something which I think I first saw as an article in about 1997.

Today's articles are very similar, and the one I saw might as well have been called "a manifesto for using the cloud" or "why google docs wins every single time" or "I don't give a monkeys about intellectual property rights or proprietary information, so why should you?" There's a couple of good arguments in there if we were still stuck in 2002, but as with all these articles they are buried under the raft of assumptions that many short-sighted beancounters in businesses make when they discover that IT is a cost sink and the only way they can reduce that sink is to outsource.

I love this particular line, though (which is new, and crops up more and more in recent articles pf this nature):

Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.

Yep. Because the only things people need in an office are basic - as in, ultra-basic - spreadsheets, a WP and email. Maybe a presentation package if you need to get the venture capitalists on board. Of course that's the case, because who needs to do anything else? There's nothing else you can do with computers in the body corporate, surely?

Rubbish IT can be very expensive, because you pay first for a shoddy service and they you pay more for a decent service to patch up the holes your first service made. Good IT can be comparatively cheap, because you pay once. Would you feel happy contracting out an enterprise service to the lowest bidder? Sure, if they have proper method statements and procedures, a signing-off list and an audit trail, but nobody who is cheap does any of those things. Should the contractors have access to confidential data, or the customer list? I can think of at least two scenarios where someone would bid deliberately low just to get the contract and access to business data, and the crucial thing about data is that once it is in the wild it is impossible to get it back again.

Admittedly: these articles are inevitably very US-centric and of course there's no such thing as the DPA or RIPA in the States (that demands quite so much), and 20-people offices generally don't have the requirement for storage that a defence contractor has. But... when someone says "I need better stats than google spreadsheet can give me" the whole cloud concept goes out of the window. When the person on the next desk installs Inkscape to design a logo for the company, what's the backup strategy? The CIO - although, in a non-IT shop, what's the point in having a CIO? - could need to run a database, and if they're sensible they're running it on a server instead of in Access on a shared directory. Although you'd need an IT guy to rig up the shares, because if you do it wrong then Guinevere on the front desk will inevitably discover that Alice earns 40 times more than she does, and that Barney spends his entire work day playing Farmville. Let's not talk about what Chris gets up to, but Guin, or Fred, or Eva, or even poor old Hector, pushing the janitor bucket along will inevitably find out all kinds of stuff they really shouldn't if you don't have a guy in the server room keeping an eye on stuff.

From an EU perspective the whole idea of cloud computing should give everybody with commercially sensitive or proprietary data the wiggins, but I've gone on about that at length beforehand to anybody who foolishly asks me about this over a pint. In the old job I regularly had to go to academic staff and kick them with pointy shoes whenever they started talking about Mobile Me or Dropbox, because their data inevitably contains stuff that could be useful to competetors, foreign governments, marketing managers, nigerian crown princes or script kiddies in Xinghao. The point is that no matter what you may think your data is useful for, someone else will find it useful for something else.

But I've given up that argument now; there's only so much I can care about and whilst I appreciate there may not be a requirement for a bunch of guys to show Guin how to use a word processor any more (although there almost certainly is), having a decent IT department is ultimately a cost effective concept, simply in terms of the vast swathes of knowledge and metaknowledge about all the different aspects of IT they will have. And they're usually too busy to find out who has spent the day playing Farmville or discovering just how far Rule 34 extends. But tell that to the beancounters? Nah. They have to pay the rent, and they have to pay the electricity and rates and taxes. IT is a simple thing to shed because all it does is - on paper - cost money. But the value-added is worth so much more.

Meh, what do I know. I've only been doing this for 15 years.