u0421793

Conversational

2011-05-30T09:00:00.002+01:00

It’s not social media that we want, it’s “conversational media” instead. We just want a place to carry out a conversation.

The thing about ephemeral social media

2010-08-31T08:20:00.001+01:00

iS-500 APX100 RodinalSt 016, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

By ephemeral social media, I mean things like status messages, tweets, etc. The ingredient that makes them work is a small granular satisfaction event formed by completing a loop through the transmission of the content of your output, the reception of your output by someone to whom it might mean something, and the completion of that loop by the overt recognition afforded by the receiver. It is all the more enhanced when the receiver turns out to be of a “high profile” category, such as an important person in an industry or trade, or a “famous” person. The individually crafted recognition is valuable, yet still ephemeral, although it might seem to have contributed to a tangible change or adjustment in the course of the output of that other party, thanks to something you said.

In this respect, it is very similar to a phone-in radio show, and the personable nature of response afforded by those social media matches the similar kind of dynamic represented by a radio station and the presenter, in broadcasting. It is just about as important — and no more.

Up

2010-02-23T23:15:00.001Z

mju-II,TriX,HC-110-016, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

We never really actually needed any markup languages. And those markup languages we did end up with shouldn’t have been container formats, they should’ve been style-sheet languages instead.

You’re all stupid.

2010-01-23T21:59:00.002Z

Bastards, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

A group of people go to a restaurant, and obviously, different people order different things, which of course, cost differing amounts. Why the bloody hell does the restaurant default to aggregating each person’s order into one single bill? That’s just bloody idiotic. Now we have to spend half an hour - using up a table that they could’ve seated another group at in the meantime - deconstructing, dismantling and reverse-engineering their ridiculous single combined bill that is no use to anybody, into the correct form of separate listings of what each person ordered.

Are they that utterly stupid that they don’t see that nobody wants a single bill? Are they that moronically cretinous that they can’t - in the 21st century - provide proper bills? Nobody wants a single bill. Anybody who wants to just divide the huge single bill up into equal parts is just as bloody idiotic - that can and will never work.

Obviously it can’t work. Nobody ever goes as a group and orders identical quantities of identical choices. Obviously that never happens. If you divide the bill up into equal parts, the other bastards will order more. This is only of benefit to the restaurant. Nobody wants that. I certainly don’t want to subsidise a bunch of other people who eat more than I do and are daft enough to spend more than I decided to. That’s just unacceptable.

No, the restaurant should default to providing proper bills - itemised by the person who ordered which food - without needing to be asked. The default should be that sensible structure. If you’re idiotic enough to share equally, or have someone who is sufficiently corrupt to have a job that lets them pay for the whole bill in one go, then that should be an electable option - but certainly not the default.

Why are restaurants so bloody primitive and stupid even in the second decade of the 21st century? Why are customers so stupid that they don’t object to this? Why would they be so stupid as to even think of dividing it equally as a way around this obtuse mistreatment by restaurants? What those bastards are doing is cheating the customer, in the favour of the bastard restaurant, by making it so much trouble (but not too much trouble) to do the job properly ourselves that they think people will just give in and pay more than they have spent. Bastards.

It’s no different to a supermarket charging an entire queue at the checkouts an aggregated price and letting everybody sort it out themselves. Everybody should complain. Everybody. Any other way is just stupid and wrong.

If art makes you laugh

2009-11-22T13:35:00.000Z

PB102114, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

When I first went to art college, it was more out of a notion that art made me laugh, rather than one of art making me think. Of course, decades later, art makes me think constantly, yet there's not much laughing going on. It's deep, it's analytical, it's meaningful, but it's not really funny any more. However, the transactional reward is far higher. Perhaps in the beginning I got it wrong and I thought there was funniness in there where there wasn't. Maybe what I should have done is gone to amusing college instead of art college, if there was such a thing. The trouble is, I think that this is a mistaken entry point that a lot of people make - I'm not alone in thinking that "this modern art stuff" was hilarious and quite funny and a bit of a laugh and therefore we feel free and safe to get involved with it.

I think that having a line that goes between "I don't get it" to "I get it" isn't sufficiently explanatory of what the actual shape involved is - it's not a straight line. It doesn't go from "I don't get it" at one end, which translates to "I don't like it, it's not an old-looking painting of someone famous, in an ornate frame, etc, like normal art is - I don't know how to process this - what am I expected to do with it?". To the other end, the "I get it" of which would translate as "It makes me laugh, it stimulates me, I giggled, it reached in and touched me, I became a part of the process, I like it", which is equally missing the point in many cases. These aren't ends of a continuum. Are we mistaking art for comedy?

Our acceptance or non-acceptance of art is probably irrelevant, based on the premise that our starting point as consumers is uncontrollable and variable and quite likely wrong in most cases. What if, why not just go straight to the comedy part, if that's what the acceptable component of art consumption is seeking? Art should become comedy, and it should present the challenges that art does, but with an obvious punchline. Maybe this is what advertising is? That way we have a commoditised and consumable form of provocative art, which channels the end-result into an easily predictable format of a surprise package that makes you think it is making you think while it is in fact only making you laugh. You can tell art isn't comedy isn't advertising all the time. Otherwise there'd be adverts that shock and distress as their leverage that affects you and shifts your perception in connection with the thing the advert is selling. The amount of adverts that actually come close to shock and distress is minimal, and when they do, it doesn't go far at all. It's probably preferable to make the audience laugh if you want to sell stuff, than be traumatised, although both establish associations.

Of course, normal comedy already is comedy. How should art comedy differentiate itself? Perhaps art comedy will have a higher level of "I don't get it" in the same way that normal comedy sometimes does, and that art does when people were expecting something differently established. But in that case, perhaps I don't care whether you get it or not. In the case of normal comedy, of course, the quality criteria is whether enough people get it - if nobody ever gets it, then it's perhaps comedy with a quality problem. In the case of art comedy that nobody gets, I'd say there's an opportunity to position it as that being the fault of the audience for not positioning themselves appropriately. Maybe they're too aligned to consume in a certain established pattern. Maybe they're expecting reception of what wasn't delivered. Maybe they don't get it because they haven't done the work involved. It's not a cheap laugh. It might involve significant transposition of positioning to make it function.

Art that attacks comedy on it's own ground. It's not funny. At least, not on the surface. It doesn't have the same end-product, even though it follows the same structure. For example, an example of art attacking comedy in the form of a stand-up routine might be one of the established form of comedian, mic, stage, executing many consecutive instances of the 'joke' unit. The joke unit might be one of a verbal set-up, followed by a 'punchline'. The verbal setup might consist of straightforward selective narrative, or sometimes it might involve dynamically exaggerated narrative for extra comedic effect. The joke terminates in a violation or surprise against the trajectory of the premise of the set-up. These all assume that the audience understands the setup, the premise, and also understands why the punchline violates it.

But this assumes that the audience has a level of quality that they bring with them in their ability to process modern language. What if, as artists, we took control of that aspect of the process also? What if I the artist presented a self-consistent setup and premise that you the audience simply didn't "get" or relate to or understand or engage with? What if I then violated this setup with a functional punchline that you equally didn't "get" or understand? But in all case, the consistency and validity of the process was intact. It just didn't rely on the audience to "laugh" at it to validate it. And yet, the truth of the structure is valid - it would be a joke, and it would be a highly funny one, if the premise and setup were transformed from where they describe within language to another position. One way of doing this would be to shift the meaning of all surrounding language around the premise and setup. Once all peripheral language surrounding it is shifted in meaning, then this setup and premise now means something different to what the words merely said on their surface level. And hence, with this shifted surrounding meaning, the punchline works. But if you don't go through that process, it's not funny - in fact, it's meaningless. But did the art go away just because you didn't laugh?

I don't need to explain

2009-10-17T11:22:00.001+01:00

P1010028, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

The internet seems to force the explanation of things - motives, decisions, opinions. Everyone wants to know why such outcomes were arrived at, in an audited sense.

I don't have to explain why I've done certain things, why I like certain things, why I've made certain decisions. I don't think you need to either. It's not the requirement that people inevitably treat it as - I simply don't have to respond to demands for explanation. I don't even have to appear logical or externally consistent if I don't wish to. If you want to know something, figure it out yourself. If you ask me, I might be able to help, or I might just as easily mislead you because our experiences and requirements are mismatched. What if I like something for an entirely irrational, unquantifiable and illogical reason. The amount of work involved in dredging through any possible reasoning (or even just making it up) in order to relate it to someone else is frankly not worth it - what do I get out of it?

Obviously there is a requirement for 'warning' or 'recommending' others regarding purchases, configurations, etc. The whole world of the review is heading in the direction of satisfying that need, although embryonically at the present. Right now, the review is only hinting at the value that it could offer as a literary form, but suffers from undeveloped structure as well as amateur standards of content quality. But is it right that someone should feel they can absolve all responsibility for making a decision simply by acquiring a thin thread of recommendation from other people with other purposes, other scopes and other objectives? The consumer of an opinion or reason must equally share a load of the responsibility of fitness for purpose of the information, and this is simply not being formalised in a recognised manner at all.

Where word processors went wrong

2009-08-19T12:23:00.001+01:00

NikonF4_100TMX_Tmax_009, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

A long time ago, there were programs for the early computers which were known as ‘text editors’. These allowed a person to create a text file, and perhaps later edit it. The text file might be for consumption by another person, or it might contain a sequence of instructions or settings, even constituting an entire computer program, which a (not necessarily the same) computer would run.

Ignoring the ‘consumption by machine’ cases, the early text editors were in effect an extension of the more sophisticated typewriters of the day. By then, typewriters were not just dumb appliances that if you struck a key, the corresponding letter would appear on the paper. They could do far more. They attained a feature set that allowed a degree of automation in the office, and productivity for writers. And yet, the final output of those typewriters was nevertheless in terms of sheets of paper.

As text editors on computers mutated into more fully featured word processors, the advantages of working with screens and mass storage were utilised. Mail-merge programs, using a boilerplate template and a database or tabulated list of names or data were now easier to manage than the same task ever was on a sophisticated office typewriter (however - it certainly was possible on the higher-end models of typewriter). Hundreds of tailor-made individually addressed letters could be printed out with ease, and edited with ease, and the files could be managed and the output could be adjusted.

The transition from dot-matrix or daisywheel to the first generation of laser printers such as the Apple Laserwriter, and the corresponding transition from character-based screens to WIMP GUIs such as the Apple Lisa or Apple Macintosh meant that more flexibility or time could be applied to the specific styling of the output. Typographic presentation was now a very flexible capability of the system, and the people producing such output would spend considerable time in that part of the process.

Where it went wrong was not, as I often thought, at the point where word processors effectively couldn’t decide whether they should become fully-fledged typesetting systems and hence, desktop publishing applications, or whether they should still claim to be word processors, yet all the time adding this feature, that feature and bolting on other capabilities that are outside the strict realm of word processing. For example, the typewriter can tabulate, but the word processor can also range copy to the left, to the right, centred, or even justified (with appropriate algorithms) in a similar way to the more sophisticated phototypesetting systems of the day.

Soon, to add to tabulation, justification, a range of typefaces and fonts in various sizes, demand for actual tables was catered for (in perhaps a not very interoperable manner). Tables could be drawn up using a different action than simply setting tabs and drawing rules. Tables required a whole new interface built into the program, and as this was the wysiwyg age, the table construction had to happen right there in the middle of your page, as you worked.

After tables, the addition of graphics. This was perhaps an odd decision - a word processor program that can actually embed graphics into the page - and show you them as it does it! Is this now a DTP program? If you took this word processor document and used it as the copy for an article that were being set in a DTP application, you might find that the tabs didn’t match what the author saw on their screen (as authors rarely understand tabbing), the table was interpreted in a variety of ways by the DTP program, and perhaps even that the graphics and other non textual content were stripped out by the time you saw the copy flow into the galleys on the DTP program.

If you were lucky, the WP program and the DTP program understood each other in terms of fonts and typography, and if you were even luckier you could set up matching style names on each and they would be respected throughout the workflow. Soon, the perceived demand for not only tables, but tables that behaved (or in fact were) just like a small chunk of spreadsheet was satisfied. You could set up a small table in the document which linked some of its cells to live data or external data, and some of the other cells might contain formulae that operated on the content other cells, producing results. Is this what word processors should be doing?

So, word processors have always had the temptation to bloat in various unmanageable and uninteroperable ways, continually striving to be a more accessible or immediately usable alternative to a DTP program, and increasingly adding features the relevance of which to the act of processing words is mystifyingly remote.

No, none of this is where it went wrong for the word processor (and by extension, the ‘office suite’). Where it went wrong was more subtle and less obvious. Where it went wrong was when we slipped unknowing and unaware into the age where the intended surface for consumption was not a sheet of paper any more, but the actual data file! The word processor file is now vital, whereas previously in history it would and should be of no interest outside the office or organisation that produced it. Now, everybody thinks they have to be able to read other people’s word processor files, which is a frankly ridiculous situation, and one that nobody has clearly spotted that we’ve got ourselves into.

There is not a tangible or appreciated boundary between creation and consumption. By sending or accepting a word processor file, where are you? Still producing - or worse, finishing the unfinished production initiated by someone else; or are convincing yourself that you are in the act of consuming? There needs to be a clear boundary between production and rendering, and there needs to be education that the intended consumer only having access to the rendered output is a good situation. After all, in the days of the electronic typewriter, there wasn’t a ‘typewriter file’ that you gave to someone else to somehow read as the default finished output. No, the paper output was the final rendered product. It involved decision making at the editing phase, and a clear demarcation between that production stage and the finished output stage ready for others to see. This isn’t there any more, and it is this precise problem that word processors have led us into.

The Science of Belief

2009-01-06T13:11:00.002Z

, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I'm not anti-science. Science as a (relatively young) activity is never going to go away, is never going to diminish, and is never going to cease to have support by the correct-thinking person. My stance is just that it is merely one activity of the typical human, and that it acts as a counterpoint to the irrational to the level that it is afforded almost 100% credibility without even thinking about it or putting it to the test by the average person. If it's scientific, then it's so. If it's not scientific, then it's just your belief or my belief that it's probably so. My stance is that there's a lot in science that is incomplete and of 'placeholder' level, more so than the average person might realise, so it's not always an absolute arbiter of what the concrete reality is out there that we're perceiving (although it's easily the best one we've got).

In no way will I knock science - it's the way I think, after all. Right now, we live in absolutely fascinating times where vast developments are being made as we sleep in so many different areas of research, many of which will reach the average person in our lifetimes in some positive way or another. Times are absolutely great right now, this is a really good time to be involved in the direction and progress of the human race. Understanding and comprehension of the real world and the universe is proceeding at a healthy and encouraging rate, and hopefully will continue to do so.

What I do tend to perceive is an unspoken war between science and religion. There really is no reason or logic or model for religion to exist - there's no proof, no testable evidence of any of the main ingredients of those ridiculous fairy stories such as an afterlife (especially one with a level of variance that pivots on our behaviour and choices during our lifetimes), an invisible god somewhere (I mean, that's just absurd, and what economic or ecologic reason would there be for a god or many gods to exist? What's the stimulus that makes it necessary? Don't forget, monotheism is a relatively new twist anyway), and a set of behavioural values that are extra to our existence as human beings.

None of these actually exist at all, other than in the heads of those that think it does. And those people are clearly mad. Obviously. It's ridiculous that there are people wandering around that believe in a god, or gods, to the degree that their lives are profoundly affected by it, and it becomes a problem because they then try to normalise the situation by spreading this condition. It's ridiculous that people like that aren't locked up, or healed somehow. When you live your life according to superstition such as what the horoscope says, or what a bible says, then there's an obvious social problem and it needs to be attended to with great urgency. "When you believe in things that you don't understand you will suffer. Superstition ain't the way!"

On the other hand, there's clearly a lot of events, patterns, phenomena that science is yet to express a viable model for (it can't do everything at once), which leaves great big holes in our understanding - presently filled with wonder and awe at how wonderful nature is. When science can explain these things we'll be filled with wonder and awe at how wonderful science is, because we'll be experiencing it as a science artefact then. Among the many things that I don't derive a satisfactory explanation from science are a lot of questions that I could rope into a 'how did it come to be that way, against all odds' grouping.

For example, the way that a caterpillar changes into a butterfly. This is distinctly complicated. Never mind about the actual process of the weeks spent as a chrysalis, but merely the part where the caterpillar (in some species, notably the nymphalidae, and others which hang down as chrysalids) sheds the skin at the final instar, revealing a soft chrysalis casing, no legs, no limbs, no eyes, and the first thing it does is to unhook itself by the tail from inside the shed skin, 'crawl' across the wrinkled bundle of dried shed skin by its tail hooks (during which time it is attached firmly to - nothing), and through a series of wiggling manoeuvres, re-hook itself to the silk pad previously attached at the point of suspension of the caterpillar. Without falling off. I know it's evolution in a reductive sense (ie, the chrysalids that weren't all that good at that were eliminated long ago), and I know it's all mechanically possible and explainable, and I know it's not really related to irreducible complexity (an argument that seems clever but fails each time it's put to the test by real scientists), but, you know, it's pretty bloody amazing how this can even happen at all. Wasn't there an easier, simpler and more systematic way that appeals to our risk-management driven conveyor-belt neat and tidy mentality models?

Another example would be the one I alluded to above, where small parasite organisms (ranging from highly complex and advanced wasps (which are themselves among the more highly complex and advanced insects, prior to bees and ants) to fairly simpler organisms such as a vast range of parasitic worms) have the effect of distinctly altering the behaviour of their host victim. Such repeatable behaviour changes are a phenomenally high level effect - although admittedly a kind of 'macro' action of leverage by a smaller and less sophisticated systemic alteration elsewhere. The whole science of parasite study is only now demonstrating that there's a complete other perception of how life is arranged on this world - that there isn't just a 'hierarchy' of lower life forms, then more complex ones, then even more complex ones, then us. There's a matrix arrangement, or a network arrangement of interrelationships between life forms at so many different levels of purpose and behaviour, such that a quite highly developed kind of life form might play host to an altogether 'lower' kind, all its life. And in many cases, the rate of parasite infection can reach nearly 100% in localised populations, such that the entire species might exist as nothing but a vehicle (sometimes quite literally) for a completely different but opportunistic species. This is a new arrangement, away from the Darwinian christmas-tree of life. It doesn't explain the archeology of dna progress (like evolution does), but it can show a 'phase-space' view of why things are why they are now, if you like, regarding economic niches and their value.

Science is as far away from explaining anything of real impact (to the average person) regarding dreams, as it ever was. Most people have other models to explain dreams (ranging from dismissal to attempted interpretation), but not scientifically-derived ones, because there aren't any useful ones yet. But this isn't because dreaming is not scientific, but rather more because the scientific method is a poor fit to observation and inference regarding dreams, partly because of the subjective barrier of the only access to the subject being through asking a person "about" their dreams. It's an effect that's not easily measured or tested directly.

On the other hand, much as I look down on the religious (am I right in thinking that the only type of person interested in proactively engaging in war these days are religious types?) as deluded fools, there is a considerable utility in this sort of misguided faith or belief. Let's assume that there is no god, which of course, as far as I'm concerned, there isn't. Let's say that it can never be proven or disproven - ever. Then as long as belief in your god or gods bring a beneficial behavioural effect, or social code of conduct, then it's useful to believe in it as much as you like - believe away - and the outcome is always going to trend towards a positive outcome for people in general. Another form of faith utility: let's say you're worried about the safety of a person, in a situation. There's almost nothing you can do about it, because you're not there with them right now. Yet you pace up and down, worrying, distracted and otherwise consumed as far as your attention is concerned. The non-religious person assumes all of the responsibility in this situation - they wouldn't necessarily consider that outside help is going to allow them to forget about the situation and relax. The religious person prays, and performs other similar rituals, and has a significant belief that it's "god" (or whichever brand of imaginary friend they place their faith in) that will help them, help the subject of their worrying, and will play an active part in protecting (somehow - unspecified - probably in mysterious ways) or otherwise acting as a beneficiary agent in the matter. This has a significant advantage. The religious person isn't "doing it all by themselves" - they have assistance (even though it's only placebo assistance) and are able to position themselves further in progress in dealing with the situation, because the responsibility is out of their hands (which it is anyway, in both cases). In such situations, this assistance acts as a useful tool or lever or walking stick with I would say a measurable effect.

I still think the notion of belief in something like a god or gods when there's absolutely no indication of the existence of such things, no reason whatsoever that there should be one or more in the universe, and all indications that there might be one or more are entirely fabricated from the stuff of human storytelling and nowhere else, is plain ridiculous. But if it helps on a personal level, then go ahead - believe in it, and you'll gain advantageous utility more often than not. On the other hand, this doesn't take into account the devastating effect that religious idiots historically and currently are responsible for. On a global societal level, I would say that the benefit is actually negative. The damage is great, despite any personal-level advantage gained by belief in something that doesn't exist. I consider that the world at large would be significantly improved if the religious believers were removed (or their beliefs removed at least). I think that it's in everybody's interest to quickly, definitely, once and for all demonstrate that there really isn't a god or gods, and that it's antisocial and harmful to allow belief in such, beyond a village-sized scale. We live in the world (even the americans do, much as they'd pretend otherwise) and religion is a poison or a cancer, when taken at this scale of the organism.

Whatever happened to the “World” Wide Web?

2008-08-20T20:06:00.004+01:00

iS500_Delta100EI200DD-X-007, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

The observation:

Increasingly, one encounters a certain phenomenon in online publishing: a tendency to communicate assuming that the author's entire audience is in the same sort of vicinity as their own local neighbourhood. That is, an underlying assumption that they are all familiar with the same products and trade marks as the author, speak the same colloquialisms, know the same people in the news, share the same formative memories of popular culture, use exactly the same currency and even share the same values. This irrational behaviour, I find, peaks with the most audacious assumption - that it is simply not necessary to even mention which country the author is writing from - at all. Sometimes, of course, it is simply not necessary. In many cases, however, it is utterly necessary in order to contextualise much of the 'furniture' of the message that the author is attempting to convey.

The typical case seems to be one in which the reader starts to consume the article and increasingly finds themselves at best unconsciously irritated or discomforted, and at worst, alienated, by what they read. As the consumption progresses, it dawns on the reader that they are reading something written not for a world audience, but for a quite local region - a select boundary - and with no indication that this was the case. References are broken, disconnected and lacking in context, experiences that were probably intended to be shared, are not formed in that way.

The result is likened to one of encountering someone with no manners, no grace, and no particular care for the comfort of their reader. A brash, unaccommodating and small-minded person - perhaps unaware of the world at large. Surely this isn't the case, but that's what it seems like to the audience. This is the feeling that one is left with, and I would propose, largely unconsciously - no matter how much conscious adaptation, adjustment and rationalisation occurs.

The problem:

The problem is that authors are increasingly subjecting widely-situated audiences to an unconsciously uncomfortable experience (perhaps unwittingly, but nevertheless, the alienation is not attractive, it is repellant, even if only to a minor degree). Objectively, this is pretty much the opposite of what good communication should be about, and it might be noticed to be an increasingly prevalent trend. It's a bad experience on behalf of the reader, and in turn it's a problem for the author if they're inadvertently installing alienating feelings in their readers. So what is the solution?

Solution specification:

Obviously one can't simply fight back each time, pointing out the error of the ways of the author for not remembering that they are publishing on the World Wide Web. Obviously one can't successfully impose a set of rules or etiquette - what if someone ignores it, or doesn't like being told what to do. Such measures would always be too overt, too conscious, and too total in intent. It might result in politeness, but might instead result in even greater rudeness.

There needs to be a way of inducing people to communicate for an audience that consists of the world (even if only the English-speaking world for those that are writing in the languages that English-speaking people understand). There needs to be a means to remind people that they are authors in the act of publishing - an action that 20 years ago was relatively expensive, intentional and laborious, with nowhere near the wide reach and immediacy offered by today's publishing channels - and that responsibility for what is freely published rests on the author's shoulders.

I haven't got a solution - all I've done is identify a fairly concrete phenomena. If there were a solution, it'd be along the lines of a 'global manners' ethos, I'd hazard a guess, whereupon it becomes a bit socially un-cool to speak from a local, regional, boundary-evident stance when one is knowingly addressing the entire world but not accommodating this aspect. I don't know. I don't know if it can be done, how it can be done, and even if it should be done this way. I don't know.

There are no such things as trees

2008-08-16T01:02:00.004+01:00

Shadow tide, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I suggest that there really aren't such things as trees. They don't exist. Never have done, certainly don't now, and never will, either. They're an illusion. A figment. It seems as though they should exist, and the model certainly has assisted the transition into the age of reason and enlightenment tremendously. The mania to shoehorn everything into a taxonomy makes even evolution seem logical and undeniably true. The classification into hierarchies emphasises differences. It is not a good model for viewing similarities as relationships. The canonical layout of religious thinking falls into a similar trap - that of logic appealing to the progressive mind, and hierarchies and taxonomies and classifications appear to come handily to the aid when in fact they are mere illusions.

Looking for a song name generator

2008-08-10T14:34:00.001+01:00

Nik20mm_Delta400+1_DD-X-006, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Song name generation: Can anybody help? I want to generate a list of 'song names' for music compositions I've done in the past but have not named.

It occurs to me that I could generate them from a tag cloud, perhaps a combination of my flickr tag cloud, as it's big, and my delicious tag cloud, for the same reason.

But what I'd also like is a (computerised?) way of assembling one, two or three-word phrases that sound like plausible phrases, according to parts of speech, so that I can play my creative part and sit back and choose from the infinite variety of the possible.

Any ideas, anyone? (I know nobody ever reads my blogger posts, or at least, nobody ever comments on them, so the chances of a response to this are minimal, but I'll ask anyway just in case someone sees it on friendfeed).

Teh infosphere helps you to ignore what others are too

2008-07-21T13:35:00.003+01:00

East India Dock Basin infrared, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Social networking, forums, blogs, scientific commenting and online publishing in general has an interesting effect.

Many online publishing forms have a severe temporal bias. Forum posts are always promoting the 'latest' posts, rather than the 'more significant' ones. Vital bits of information can disappear simply because it's not in any recent view. Then the same questions get asked over and over, much to the annoyance of people who get annoyed by people asking the same questions over and over. Search facilities are frankly too primitive at this stage to provide a useful fan-out of topic, and are only just stepping out of the days where an exact literal string was the torch that directed the search. If you don't know how exactly a thing or an aspect is described (in the words of the original poster, not your own conception of how it should be described - and in all probability, the original poster is culturally different enough to describe things in a completely different idiomatic manner) then how can you be expected to search thoroughly at all?

That search mechanisms are lacking is news to no-one, and that they are evolving is welcome, but search still has the tendency to be only a narrowing funnel, rather than a way of poking one's head above the maze to see what else might apply, or even what else might be more fun or productive than what one is currently pursuing.

Social networking sites such as delicious indicate (again with a sharp temporal bias that perhaps shouldn't even play a part at all ideally) what everyone's fussing over right now. So, of course, you poke your own face in to see what's afoot going on behind your back, right under your very nose.

Then you bookmark it yourself, perhaps. Then this act gets transmitted through myriad services that tell the world when you've farted and what you had for dinner (manually driven, for the time being, although with improvements in ambient computing I'd expect our facebook status messages to migrate into full maintenance-free automation any time soon). This often bounces the act notification from service to service, in a manner that indicates that the conduits are of such high resonance and Q that they exhibit ringing and almost feedback effects.

That the infosphere* is a high-Q filter system is shaping what people are temporally paying attention to - as the cursor of time passes over topics, we shine our spotlight of attention onto it. By definition, then, we ignore everything else, and because of the resonance of the infosphere, we all tend to ignore the same things, by definition, if we're all attentive to the same things.

If we took this to be an implementation or instance of the 'wisdom of crowds' mechanism, and if we also assume that there's generally a continuous high risk of information overload in today's modern world, and if we also chuck in a stance that the infosphere has an inherent high signal to noise ratio (looking for a certain ratio), then perhaps this is the infosphere's way of directing one to the stuff that matters. Ignoring what others are ignoring is economical.

So, as we can see, the more people attend to a certain item of published thought, the more people attend to a certain item of published thought. Which inherently means that if everyone is ignoring everything else, then it's probably worth ignoring (!?) and was only more likely to be a waste of time than the stuff you chased when it was dangled in front of you.

* by infosphere, I mean the sum total of understanding, 'knowledge' even, and awareness that comprises the human race's collective thought-forms to date. In that once someone somewhere thinks of something, it can't be un-thought, and once more people think about it, that in itself forms a relational entity or form too, that can't be un-existed. The infosphere might describe every item of information we have ever transitioned through, and perhaps recorded, since history, and perhaps prior to that in common sense and folk wisdom and music and poetry and artworks. It includes the libraries, the collective learning of various institutes and the Internet and the new-fangled 'clouds' of information and facility that are popping up. Many clouds - all floating around in the infosphere that surrounds us and give life to and allows our language sentient forces, that we all host, to breathe.

A million backwards trumpets

2008-07-08T10:39:00.001+01:00

F4+50mm_D400_IlfosolS14-029, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Stop collecting. The storing of information is a reflex, a hang-over from the days where information wasn't as high-volume as it is now. Was there ever such a time? Of course there was. Only a few generations ago, the current of information that flowed into the infosphere was very simply less - less intense, less frequent, less wide. You could still spend a lifetime overloading yourself in a library or similar place of research. You could still listen to the radio all day or read newspapers for the bulk of the morning* but the volume and diversity and sheer speed of update wasn't there to the degree it is now.

We tend to squirrel away information that vaguely fits our interest profile, partly because we think it might be useful to us one day in an unspecified future - in a kind of reference building activity. We also now do something that wasn't strongly evident before, and that is we squirrel into public view the information we're squirrelling away. This we might do to demonstrate our persona in a similar way that there's some value to be gained by broadcasting the information regarding what's currently playing on our own computer's iTunes right now, or that via Facebook others learn that that we've just scratched our arse. The building of an information interest profile is something a lot of people are actively interested in demonstrating to others. So a lot of information is not just squirrelled away for future use, it's used to paint a picture of who we are by what we find interesting.

Whether we ever return to anything we've starred, shared, bookmarked (socially or otherwise) is a completely different problem - for most occasions and I presume most people, the act of bookmarking is a write-only experience.

The deluge of information isn't just information, though. Because we know what kinds of information comes through which conduits, and because we've built up a mental profile of what that conduit in each case characterises, we tend to treat the information we get from the channel as having a 'flavour' or resonance that was given to it by passing through that channel to get to us. Our expectations of a channel form a resonant shaping of the information that we suck from it.

It's like a million backwards trumpets - each trumpet has its own resonant frequency, each trumpet has its own characteristic tonality and timbre, and each trumpet is facing us. Perhaps the trumpets aren't blowing information at us in discordant cacophonic unison, perhaps we're sucking the information back through the trumpets, to us.

footnote:
* strangely, I've never actually bought a newspaper to read, and almost never read them - I've can probably count the occasions on my hands that I've read more than a page of someone else's newspaper - I simply don't like them, and it's always been that way. Now, of course, many new generations are growing up with no attachment to newspapers, but I'm 47 - I grew up in the 60s and 70s and rejected that media during that time, unlike my peers who are habitual users.

I predict a simultaneous invention

2008-06-28T10:05:00.007+01:00

iS3000Del400IlfosolS1+9-032, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

If I may offer a prediction: I predict that this summer (ie, from now, June 2008 to about Oct 2008) an invention will be announced by several people simultaneously around the world.

That invention will be a hat. Or a helmet. Or an item of headgear. This headgear will consist of active technology that will enable two phenomena to be enhanced or perhaps even controlled (or give the illusion that it is).

The first thing that the headgear will do is to help direct attention - it will cause the user to what might be loosely termed 'focus' their attention, but more accurately might be termed 'directing' attention in the correct direction, by making it more apparent that there are different directions that can be attended to, and making it much easier to select one and adhere to it.

The second thing the headgear will do is to attenuate distraction. This may seem like another way of saying the first point, but it is in fact subtly different. The act of maintaining an alertness to outside influences has become modified into a behaviour trait that causes us to continually assess the current action and weigh it up from an economical stance as to whether time might be more valuably expended elsewhere, or whether the grass really is greener, etc.

The limitation of distraction will be effected by attenuating the brain's ability to evaluate the current task comparatively against the requirement to be alert to new distractions. Actual distractions, of course, aren't to be ignored, but to actively and cyclically seek out possibilities that other as yet unknown channels and information sources are more profitable than the one in front of you is fairly unhealthy.

I predict that something that can achieve at least a demonstrable effect along these two actions could be announced this summer as a 'working' prototype. I also predict that it will not come from one source, but several, and all at around the same time.

I also predict that an aspect of the theory behind all of this will involve modulation schemes of harmonising consonance and dissonance patterns, that resemble the three basic patterns in the repertoire of a cuttlefish - uniformly textured, mottled or disruptive - and that the signal itself will come to resemble 'music' if it were demodulated into sound alone. This will give rise to the possibility that a future 'iPod' might be able to connect to appropriate headgear, to enable attention control to be selected from a 'playlist' of your favourite compositions (may vary from person to person).

References:

"Attention Training" via Meditation Influences the Ventral and Dorsal Attentional Networks Differently [Developing Intelligence] http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2008/06/attention_training_via_meditat.php (retrieved June 2008)
Want to Enhance Your Brain Power? http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=78b5c9910e718d7a3b5017740d6d1d7f (retrieved June 2008)
"Untraining" The Brain: Meditation and Executive Function [Developing Intelligence] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/ScienceblogsSelect/~3/320043796/untraining_the_brain_meditatio.php (retrieved June 2008)
Multi-tasking, task-switching, and humans -- or why I didn't finish writing this post three hours ago [Cognitive Daily] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/ScienceblogsSelect/~3/318327173/multitasking_taskswitching_and.php (retrieved June 2008)
The Octopus: Smart, Dumb, Other? [The Loom] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/ScienceblogsSelect/~3/317835485/the_octopus_smart_dumb_other.php (retrieved June 2008)
Is Google Making Us Stupid? [EvolutionBlog] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScienceblogsChannelTechnology/~3/316510966/is_google_making_us_stupid.php (retrieved June 2008)
Brain wave music now a reality [Neurophilosophy] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScienceblogsChannelTechnology/~3/315309214/brain_wave_music_now_a_reality.php (retrieved June 2008)
Enhancement of Intelligence By Training Controlled Attention: Far Transfer from Dual N-Back at the Group and Individual Levels [Developing Intelligence] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScienceblogsChannelTechnology/~3/313910076/enhancement_of_intelligence_by.php (retrieved June 2008)
What happens when a lifelong reader stops reading? [bioephemera] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/ScienceblogsSelect/~3/313133155/what_happens_when_a_reader_sto.php (retrieved June 2008)
Why Online "Noise" is Good For You - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_online_noise_is_good_for_y.php (retrieved June 2008)
The External Reality Filter: A Right-Hemispheric, Ventral Attention Network [Developing Intelligence] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/ScienceblogsSelect/~3/306234263/the_external_reality_filter_a.php (retrieved June 2008)
Cuttlefish camouflage life.nthu.edu.tw/~ccchiao/CC_pdf/jeb2001.pdf (pdf) (retrieved June 2008)

Is the Earth suffering from scarcity this year?

2008-06-20T00:23:00.002+01:00

Scar City, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

The news media seems to have a flavour. Last year the flavour was violence. The main headline hook to scare people into buying more newspapers all the time was to conjure up images of how violent the world is, how violent the people around you are, and how violent your neighbourhood really is.

This year, however, the flavour seems to be different. This year is all about scarcity. As if from nowhere, we hear nothing but stories of how there is no money, no food, and how everything costs considerably more. All the while, these points are hidden behind some vague veil suggesting that it is a complex concert of forces such as the “credit crunch”; bio fuel production causing agricultural producers to forget to grow food in farms; circular arguments that highlight how some minor thing like sawdust is now very expensive, which has a knock-on effect on chickens which makes eggs more expensive, or similar nonsense about some other mundane by-product which has recently gone up in price, that gets used in various other processes which in turn makes all our food very expensive.

The idea is extended and transposed across a considerable array of examples of how things are now more expensive. Petrol prices, for example, are now generally accepted to be high not just within the UK, and not at the fault of anything we’re doing wrong in the UK. Energy costs in general are warned to rise by 140% soon from their already astoundingly high cost since this winter.

Is the world simply running out of stuff? Have we reached the finite boundary of providence? Is this a world of scarcity now, not plenty?

One thing that has irked me for the past couple of decades is how there has been almost no media fuss about the ridiculous population explosion that we are facing. This used to be top news, but it seems that it is currently out of fashion to suggest that it might be the root cause of our problems.

Perhaps there’s no easy way to point a finger at those useless selfish fuckers who insist on breeding like there’s no tomorrow, pumping out equally useless screaming kids at a rate far higher than is desirable. The amount of people in the world is a critical measure. The irritating thing is when people look at the UK’s population growth and consider it fairly safe, fairly okay, nothing to worry about. But don’t we live in a world, not just one archaic boundary of a single country? The whole world certainly isn’t heading for a safe, okay and inconsequential population growth, it’s rocketing towards an insane growth. All these new useless undesirable children are using up more food, more energy just by living and doing things that people do – except there’s more of them, and increasingly more of them.

The last thing anyone should do is be encouraged to breed freely. That’s just insane. And yet, it’s simply not headline material for some reason – the blame is pushed elsewhere onto banking bad strategies; bad agricultural strategies; supply problems with fuel; high energy costs; air travel costs; lower production at the factory gate. Wait a moment, that last one may offer a more accurate clue.

I would propose that the fault is not so much directly caused by the credit crunch; by biofuel displacement; etc.

I would propose that the real cause lies with other factors: Facebook; eBay; YouTube; MSN messenger; blogs; etc.

I would suggest that the vast majority of the world that calls itself developed is, for the last five years, in the grip of a drug more serious than cocaine or heroin for destroying productivity. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average productive span during a workday is no more than about one and a half hours, at the most. The rest of the time is spent on Facebook; YouTube; eBay, etc.

The fault is simple – why on earth are we using the same implement as a working tool, and as an entertainment toy? If we could somehow supply Playstations to workmen to fix the roads with instead of shovels, well, of course, they’d spend the occasional few minutes also playing a game or two with it, wouldn’t they? Why do we consider the computer such a productive labour-saving organisational tool when it is quite clearly nothing of the sort. The industrial world is trapped in the grip of a highly distracting drug, which we can’t work without at all. We can get nothing done without computers now. And it seems, we can get nothing done with them, either.

You are now in 1968. What now?

2008-06-15T19:36:00.002+01:00

Boy, Girl, Park, Grass, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Let's play a game. Let's say that through some freak accident on your way to work tomorrow you suddenly end up in 1968, along with all the clothes you're wearing, and the bag you were carrying. Assuming you realise somehow in a non-dramatic manner that it's 1968 as soon as you arrive there, what do you do next?

Bear in mind that none of the money you are carrying is legal tender in 1968. Credit cards, oyster cards, pound coins, £20 notes - all useless. Your mobile. Useless. Do you actually need any money right away, though? What's the plan. Let's say that there's no way back, for the foreseeable future (which of course begins forty years ago in the past, but you know what I mean).

You have something that everyone else on the planet doesn't have right now - access to asymmetrical information. How would you capitalise on that?

I'm using my blog (http://u0421793.blogspot.com/) as the playground for ideas on this topic, mainly because I want to use this example as an illustration in something I'm currently writing, but I want to see what diversity there in the way I'd approach things compared with other minds. My wife, for example, would do a completely different thing to me (but which I won't discuss).

Jeremy Beadle, RIP

2008-01-30T14:02:00.000Z

Comfort

2008-01-08T00:34:00.001Z

ETRsi_HP5+RodinalSpecial015, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I'm wondering if my working environment is not comfortable enough. Or maybe it's too comfortable (doubtful, but possible). Maybe it's not facing the correct way. Something about it is highly unproductive. Ever since I put the desk where it is, I've ground to a halt. It's the desk I used to use about four years ago, too - I liked that one, even if it is arranged lop-sided with everything in the wrong place and no ergonomics.

However, the environment seems to be having no impeding effect whatsoever on any of the many and various displacement activities I submerse myself in, so it can't be entirely down to the environment, the desk, or the direction, otherwise I'd also find it difficult to do so much time-wasting.

What actually matters?

2008-01-03T11:33:00.001Z

What actually matters?, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

What's needed is a pair of glasses that allows you to see what matters. Some device or web service or new product that allows you to see a concept or a thing or a mindset or the growth of an activity over a long period of time, and show you what about it actually matters. This might not be the things you thought were attractive about it in the first place to you.

For many people of a technically inclined nature, technical advantages are attractive. People become involved with a certain product type, a certain hardware configuration, a certain software platform or programming language framework, etc often because they initially saw some kind of technical advantage - it does something slicker or more powerfully or more efficiently than others, for example.

Initially, at the entry point, this seems to be a good idea, it seems to have sufficient advantages that you hope that in the long run will return your initial investment in attention, loyalty and maintenance.

This 'what actually matters' pair of glasses, when worn, will de-emphasise the attraction of whatever advantages you first saw about the thing in question, and will emphasise the long term shape of how the thing comes to fit into its world: the shape of the community; the kind of people it fosters; the kind of person it makes you; the opportunities it proffers. Even, or especially, the opportunities it takes you away from because you're involved in this thing and not some other thing which everyone else turns out to be gravitating towards.

The initial attractors are often quite disconnected with the things that actually matter, about a thing. Unfortunately, the initial attractors persist in shaping our perception of a thing throughout our involvement with it. What actually matters about a thing should be more important, but is more often than not completely eclipsed to those on the inside of it.

Mist

2007-12-23T19:29:00.001Z

DSC 8825, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Today was an extremely foggy day. I took this photo of a horse. Foggy all day - still foggy and it's night time now, 19:25. It's interesting that the LCD screen on the back of my D50 seems to possess an unnaturally high contrast. I had noticed that when I shot a scene, I'd then see more detail on the camera's LCD, such as trees, than I could with my bare eyes. Of course, when I took the RAW photos through Lightroom to process them, they appeared normal. I strived to make the shots realistic by countering the tendencies of both camera and software to make things seem more vivid and brilliant than they actually were in real life. After all, I remember exactly what I saw - I was there. It looked like this.

Bleak

2007-12-12T16:45:00.001Z

C330S+65mm_100TMX_Tmax003, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

It's winter, it's freezing cold, it's actually quite sunny these days, for the few hours that the sun is actually up. Then when the sun goes down, nearly 4pm, the temperature plummets from very cold to considerably colder.

I'm not getting very far with a writing project I've set myself - I've only just come round to doing a TOC over the past day or so, which in turn has upset another project - a web site I'm updating for a client. Then I've got to do my teaching tomorrow and Friday, and I've absolutely no idea what I'm going to stand up there and teach Project Management again this week - it's pretty much the last week and I predict there'll be no students, unless they've all decided to attend this time. I think I'll set them a bit of an interactive test. Last Friday I did a sort of review of the whole subject as we've learned it over the weeks, introducing nothing new, but just a quick tour through it all again, as a sort of recap. But I only had six students, as the others were all handing in another project so they worked through the day in the labs. Fair enough. However, last week's topic review is probably what I'll set the unannounced test about. Hope they've all brought in pens and paper!

Incidentally, I've noticed that all my past blog entries have absolutely zero comments on. However, over there in "Multiply", where this blog is also published to, there's often a few comments. But they don't seem to make it back to the original blog location. That doesn't seem right, does it?

Pre occupied

2007-09-24T22:03:00.001+01:00

F4-50mmGr_JP400S_Ilfotec042.jpg, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Currently I'm wondering what it must have been like living under an occupying force. Many countries during the second world war were under occupation by the Axis forces. Much of occupied Europe was under the rule of Nazi powers, including a portion of the Channel Islands. A fair amount of the South Pacific was under Japan's occupation. Iran was occupied by British and Soviet forces. I suppose there's many facets of occupation. One is the immediate obvious overt threat to your current way of life. Understandably, most people don't want to change the way they live their life, and simply adopt a new external way of life. Of course, suppose they did - is this new way of life inherently deficient compared to the extant one? It might be different, but it might not necessarily be bad. It's difficult to tell at the time, though, as one of the effects of occupation is demoralisation - often intentional.

The history of the world is full of occupations, eg: The Roman expansion deployed occupation as an expansionist strategy. The Mongols managed to occupy vast areas and diverse societies, catalysing their responses.

Contemporary occupations, such as by Israel, Jordan and Egypt, in the mid-latter part of the 20th century, and many areas of Africa, must have been extremely strenuous to have lived through. The overhead of just maintaining a lifestyle while instability surrounds, can't contribute much to a sense of security and prosperity. Or can it?

The list of current military occupations is quite long, and yet for most of us in as-yet undisturbed comfortable English-speaking subtitle-watching countries such as the UK, Australia & NZ, North America, it seems like something one might read about but still has a safe distance in time and space enough to ensure it'll 'never happen here'.

Does the threat of occupation, if you discount the cruelty involved in the demoralisation effort, really actually amount to a shared-experience threat to the sense of self? In other words, it's an individual threat to the ego, but felt by everyone simultaneously. The drive to maintain a self identity all the time being forced to be made stronger in the face of pressure to diminish the former self.

Sunday Afternoon

2007-09-03T20:17:00.001+01:00

C330S_100TMX_Tmax051.jpg, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Yesterday afternoon I took the Mamiya C330S with three lenses and a deep red grad filter and some Kodak Tmax 100 roll film down to East India Dock to take a few shots near the bird sanctuary and across the road to Bow Creek where the DLR crosses it overhead.

This shot was taken with the 80mm lens (the medium format 'standard' focal length). The shots after this were taken with the 135mm lens, and the final one on the roll was a wide-angle shot of Bow Creek, with the 55mm lens. Each of these lenses have the same filter thread - 46mm. None of my other Mamiya TLR lenses have the same thread. This let me take one adaptor ring for the filter system, and one deep red half-grad filter (which on black and white film turns the blue elements of the scene darker, typically the sky within clouds, if the grad is pointing up). It got cloudy, and a bit cold, so I didn't hang around and shoot all that many shots.

I processed it later in the afternoon, and it's turning out that this Kodak Tmax 100 film continues to amaze me - developed in Tmax developer it results in film with an immense tonal range. Very nice to scan, and on bright days (on other days - see last week) and if I've been accurate with my metering and developing, it can even easily exceed the tonal range of the scanner. I'm reluctantly coming round to the idea that it might be vastly better than any other film I've ever tried.

Upon Reflection

2007-08-27T11:08:00.001+01:00

Upon Reflection, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I think there’s a market immaturity in our modern consumerism society that devalues design maturity through refinement of iterative testing and improvement, and instead promotes fairly wholesale ‘start again’ initiatives each time a pseudo-revolutionary product is launched. In effect, there’s never enough time to fully debug the design or the user-assumptions of a product during its lifecycle, before it’s now fully obsolete.

Perhaps a solution is to continue to evolve product but not in the quite disconnected discrete jumps we have where each new improvement is given a new model number or name, a new ad campaign and a new superiority over the existing or older renditions that people have already bought and are happily using. Instead, strive to differentiate less instead of more. The consumer will seek the differentiation themselves, and if they don't it doesn’t matter (to them).

So instead of obsolescence, we demonstrate that a product is maturing. It’s pretty much the same thing, but the emphasis is different, and with a smoother ramp. Instead of abandoning the extant in favour of the not yet announced, which demonstrates that manufacturers, of all people, have very low faith in their older and current products, it would emphasise that they were on the right track in the first place, you can trust it, but here's a few tweaks and adjustments that'll make the consumers life even more enjoyable.

I’d trust a manufacturer that places faith in the strength of what they’ve already done. This aspect is of value, and is currently not being capitalised. Quite the opposite in fact.

Rain

2007-08-24T08:02:00.001+01:00

F-801_50mm_Jes100_Tmax024, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

It's still bloody raining. This was taken yesterday in Holborn. It's so dark I have to use my SB-24 flashgun, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the British summer. Nikon F-801, Nikkor 50mm f1.8 lens, Jessops Pan 100S film, Tmax developer 22° for 5mins 15secs.

Horrible weather

2007-08-18T10:59:00.001+01:00

F801_35-70Or_Jes100_Tmax962, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

It's dark, grim, cloudy, stormy, rainy, wet. At least, most of the time. Occasionally there'll be sun, and for the most part it's warm enough to be wearing short sleeves except sometimes. There hasn't been a decent bit of summer for months.

All the more annoying as I'm shooting 100ISO black and white these days, keeping the 400 for later in the year. It's only just bright enough in most outdoor circumstances to use 100 right now, but many times are fairly borderline. This is completely wrong. It should be more than adequately bright enough to use 100ISO film right now, even without having to have the aperture wide open and select a shutter speed of 60th or below and hold one's breath while releasing the shutter. Then five minutes later, the sun pours out from a hole in the clouds and we're back to normal. Preposterous.

Still, I'm devouring the first bulk roll of expired Jessops Pan 100S in the bulk loader quite nicely - about two thirds into the 30m roll so far, I reckon (the first bulk loader's counter wasn't working so I exchanged it, but this left me with an unknown count on the roll I'm using).

C330S80S_100TMX_Ilfotec326

2007-07-22T12:09:00.001+01:00

C330S80S_100TMX_Ilfotec326, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Yesterday I went to Limehouse and walked along the Thames path approaching Westferry and the Canary Wharf pier. The weather was dramatic and audacious, sometimes bordering on the impertinent (with critical reviews). I took with me, in my bag, a Mamiya C330S, a 55mm lens pack, an 80mm 'S' lens pack, and a 135mm lens pack. These all have the same 46mm filter thread. I also took with me a newly and cheaply obtained sheet filter holder (a Jessops one, with a built-in lens shade) designed to accept square filters. I also took with me four newly and cheaply obtained Jessops grad filters, but I decided to only use one of them - a dark red grad. I shot on Kodak Tmax100 120 roll film, which expired in 2004. Typically I exposed at f8 at 250th. The dark red grad was set in the middle of the lens, so that it progressively darkened any blue in the image increasingly toward the top of the frame.

I processed the film when I returned home in the over-used stock solution of Ilfotec LC29 mixed as a litre of 1:19, at 24° for 6min30sec. The film was an absolute bastard to load - I'm beginning to go off expired film, as it becomes too curled to easily use. Many frames were touching other parts of the film and the leading edge got creased in loading. It's surprisingly thick film.

I went out after it was processed and shot some more at the same location, but only using the 135mm lens, to re-shoot subjects that didn't turn out right first time. By then it was about 19:00ish but the sun was still evident, and the clouds were still misbehaving.

I processed the second roll similarly - and had similar loading problems. I think by the second roll I'd begun to fully exhaust the developer - I can tell that the next film through will suffer in the shadow detail, so I'll dump this batch (this is the eighth film it's had through, for a batch of dev that was only specified to last for five films!). As a result of Jessops branch closures, I now have plenty of developer anyway, so there's no point in trying to needlessly economise into risk, now.

When three sevens clash

2007-07-08T13:14:00.001+01:00

Jet set, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

This was taken on the seventh of the seventh, two thousand and seven, at East India Dock, on my Nikon F-801 with the MF-21 multi-function back (which imprints data such as the time, date or exposure settings, among other useful functions). The lens was the 35-70mm AF Nikkor at the widest (35mm) angle - one of those situations where I should've taken out the 24-50mm instead, but the rest of the day was perfectly suited to the 35-70mm itself. The film was fresh Ilford FP4 Plus, developed later in the evening in a new stock solution batch of Ilfotec LC29 diluted 1:19 at 24° for 6.5 mins. I think it's a slight bit overdeveloped, so next time I'll drop the time to 6, or perhaps even 5.5mins. I did two films at once in the dev tank. Ilford FP4 Plus really is such a nice film. I think I've also had enough of using expired film, as it curls too much and causes difficulties when scanning, and this distortion almost certainly affects the focal plane when shooting.

underdeveloping

2007-07-03T22:52:00.001+01:00

Scala-YashicaT5-Ilfosol-071, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Today I nipped over to North Greenwich with the C330S+80mm lens and my new Neotec tripod. I only took two photos on it, but the weather was very changeable and dramatic, and it started spitting a bit. I also had my little Yashica T5 in my pocket, loaded with my last roll of Scala. I took this shot of the O2 (as the millennium dome is now known as) as I walked past it, then popped home briefly then out again to shoot some more cloudscapes on 135.

I took the partly-used roll of Scala out of the Yashica T5 in the dark, and discovered that the T5 can't release the wind-on mechanism partway through a roll. I ended up having to rewind it, and then spend a while trying to pull the film out of the canister. In the end I popped the 135 canister open in the dark and pulled out the tongue of film then closed the canister seal shut again, and placed the resealed 135 film into my Nikon F-801 and fired 13 blank shots to get past the frames I used on the T5 (which worked - I only lost a gap of about a frame and a half of blank film).

When I'd shot it all, and returned home shortly after, I processed the film in my remaining Ilfosol S developer, diluted to 1:14 as all my previous usage has been. This time I processed at 25°, for 5 and a half minutes, in an effort to reduce the dev time. The previous processing of Scala I think was reasonably overcooked which compressed the dynamic range a bit and increased the contrast too much. This one, however, at only five and a half minutes (down from 6.5 mins or 7mins) seemed to be underdeveloped. Even the leader tongue came out a slightly transparent grey instead of black.

It scans well, but is very prone to dust and dirt and scratches showing up within this density range. More so because I ended up scuffing the film as I tried to get it out of the T5 which wouldn't let go of it. I've scanned them using either of two special custom contrast curves for sunny days or mixed days (as appropriate per frame), so that I've got full dynamic range, proper mid-tones, but every detail of the bright clouds too. I've uploaded the pick of the bunch to flickr.

Facebük

2007-06-30T10:08:00.001+01:00

1980party01, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Facebook shouldn't be a web site. It should really be a super-IM package. It just needs the appropriate client, and that client isn't a web browser.

Who am I?

2007-06-29T20:02:00.000+01:00

What kind of photographer am I, and what kind should I be? I don't really like the bulk of the photos I've taken in the past.

Initially, when I worked as a professional photographer in the mid 80s, the firm I worked for was a two-man company specialising in 'commercial and industrial photography' as their door sign said. This mode appealed to me, and eventually I got sort of good at it. Later, when shooting for magazines such as ST World and the like, I again did the industrial and commercial photography thing, and even built up a small in-house studio in a borrowed room, to continue shooting objects and things. Adding to this, I found myself also shooting events and shows of the computer-related sort, which was always a bit haphazard but we got workable results in most cases.

A growing trend in these days was shooting famous people that were roped into the promotion of various product, so I frequently ended up shooting prominent people and places as the journalist interviewed them, so we had a story and picture package in one go.

On Mayfair mag, this sort of thing continued - pack shots, product shots, and some out and about event shots such as the first few Erotica shows, and a smattering of famous names, such as a session with some big scruffy bloke I'd never heard of (but my editor was obviously a big fan of) - a Mr Marks (he seemed quite nice). To be honest, I could never be a paparazzi - I've never heard of most of the famous people, I'm not competitive or pushy in getting into places or situations, and I'm often more attention-grabbing myself than the subject is.

One thing I've noticed I've drifted into is taking pictures wherever I go. Actually, this isn't new behaviour - since I picked up a camera (an Olympus OM-1 with Zuiko 50mm f1.4) in 1979, it went everywhere with me, and was always at the ready. All through art college I had it round my neck constantly, and shot vast amounts of pretty much anything (within financial constraints of course). Similarly, in the late 90s I shot a large amount of film, generally snapshots (although these were snapshots shot on a Nikon F4 or Contax TVS). Lots of miscellaneous and peripheral shots that would now be classified as 'street photography' (a term I despise - or would if I knew exactly what it meant).

Now, over the past few years, after the economic disaster of 2000, which saw an increasing accumulation of exposed film I couldn't afford to process gradually pile up for later years (only late last year did I clear that backlog) and a consequent slow-down of shooting, then a temporary switch to digital, I find that I'm shooting something most days, and have a flickr stream in the thousands. However, I'm not one to upload many similar shots - in a typical day's results I'll be quite severe and whittle down to a very minimal subset to upload. Nevertheless, there's plenty of shots up there.

The thing is, most of it isn't what I feel is representative of my style of photography. Obviously it's representative of what I shoot the most of, but I don't like it. There's a lot of shots of buildings, scenes around town, urban landscapes if you like. I hate those shots. I've taken a lot of them, but I really don't like them. There's a lot of shots of candid 'street photography' of people in real-life settings. I've no idea who these people are and don't really want to. I don't like that sort of shooting. I certainly wouldn't like to be any more intrusive than I already get. Those shots of people in typical urban settings aren't what I like, even though I shoot a lot of them. I don't like most of my unplanned accidental "let's go out and see what I shoot today" results. Yes, the bulk of my photostream is that.

I do like taking my time to plan and craft a photo. I like applying my own lighting. I like to position the subject and the background how I think will make a good photograph. I've traditionally never considered myself good at people photography, but I think that's simply because I've less experience with them, compared to industrial photography where I'm shooting an object or product, or an interior or set.

The sort of photographs that others take, that I take notice of, seem to be portraits and fashion - exactly the sort of photography I've never done professionally. I'm really not interested very much in landscapes, in urban street photography or photojournalism (with the exception of the few very obvious lucky shots which invariably involve a lot of planning and engineering to be in the right place at the right time). I'm slightly awed by war photography but who isn't - better them out there than me. I'm not interested in music performance photography, architectural photography or a lot of wildlife photography.

Although I've been in the business for a fair while, surprisingly I'm not very interested in much glamour or related photography, unless it is spectacularly good, and usually what appeals to me is if it comes close to a fashion shoot, rather than just being more of the same as far as the endless supply of girl shoots goes. It's only recently dawned on me that a fashion shoot is really about the products and not the model themselves. I like good industrial, commercial and advertising photography, especially when it's so good it's transparently good - you simply don't notice what you're looking at is the result of a very well executed photo session, you're only aware of the subject itself.

As for fine art photography, I daren't - either I'd immerse myself fully into it, or I'd immerse myself fully into it and turn out to not produce anything worthwhile in the end. I must admit I'm becoming more interested in the abstract, and more interested in creating an end result that is as far away from reality as is necessary to achieve my aim. However, what I'm becoming increasingly interested in is shooting people as my subject.

What I am aiming for now - my current core brief - is to shoot 'luxury' - that's not just a theme, I want to progress my style so that it is associated with 'luxury'. Of course, there's perhaps less than a handful of the shots in my flickr stream that can fit into that category. Most of them are the opposite - far too realistic, far too depressing and most of it not very aspirational. Lately my shooting has turned a corner, and I look back at what I shot last year and want to scrap a lot of it, only keeping the odd few. I think I eventually will do some such house-cleaning, soon.

Is the twin lens reflex still a valid design?

2007-06-29T15:10:00.001+01:00

Mamiya C330 with 65mm lens, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Although I'm a very enthusiastic fan of the TLR, and own several, I am now starting to question whether the design has any place in this century?

Of recent months, I have been musing over whether rangefinders are the kind of thing I should become involved with. I've always considered my TLRs to be vastly superior to any rangefinder. After many months I now conclude that I wouldn't really like to use a rangefinder at all - certainly not a cheap Russian one, and probably not even a decent modern Voigtlander Bessa (although I think I'd like to give one a try, really). I think a well-designed 135 SLR beats an equivalent rangefinder in most respects, for most of my usage. However, I've never really considered 120 SLRs to be quite as good for my purposes as a 120 TLR. Now I'm wondering if this is an incorrect stance.

Many years ago I regularly used Hasselblads at work, and borrowed a Mamiyaflex for leisure use. This caused me to seek out and purchase a secondhand Mamiya C330 in the late '80s, and a set of secondhand lenses. This has proved immensely enjoyable to use, and I still use exactly that equipment to this day. A few years after that, I purchased a brand new Mamiya 645 Super system, with the addition of the AE hood, power winder and extra backs (including a pointless Polaroid one) and in addition to the 80mm lens the basic camera came with, I added a superb but expensive 55-110mm zoom. Some years later, I ended up giving that whole system away. I just gave it away. I kept the older, tattier C330 system. At the time, I felt it was the more useful system, and it certainly had a slight edge in that I was actually using it marginally more.

Today, I have more than that C330 - several TLRs in fact. The little Rolleicord II is very compact and handleable and gives good results. However, I'm now envisioning what it might have been like if I'd have kept the Mamiya 645 Super system and gave away the C330 system instead. Would I be looking at the Fuji 645 rangefinders? Would I be looking at the Mamiya 7 II rangefinder? I suspect that the Mamiya 645 Super (and 55-110 zoom) was actually the camera I should be using right now.

Essentially, to take a photo in a camera, the lens projects an image onto film at the back of the camera, via an opening shutter. There's several ways of ascertaining what scope of scene that lens is taking in, and whether it's in focus or not:

One is to have a simple viewfinder (ie, a rectangle of wire, or a similar passive frame) and look through it, knowing that this viewfinder shows you a similar scope to the lens. This is perfectly workable, but a bit low-tech for most people. In fact, it produces probably the brightest viewfinder on any camera. It should be more popular than it is.

Another is to have a viewfinder as a visible rectangle through the camera, involving optics and glass, and in more advanced cases, an integrated rangefinder too (early on, rangefinders and viewfinders were separate holes you had to look through independently, depending whether you were composing or focusing).

The TLR, in a manner similar to periscopes, employs another viewing lens with similar properties to the taking lens, and an angled mirror to deflect this view upwards. In complexity, it is slightly simpler than a rangefinder, but with the duplication of cost of a lens, it could be seen as a trifle extravagant.

The SLR, on the other hand, views through exactly the same lens as the taking lens, but has a mirror that dodges out of the way in the instant the photograph is taken. There's still the same focusing screen (and often a prism, too) and still the same mirror, but this time it moves - however, there's now only one lens.

I'm coming round to the idea that the SLR is actually a considerably more valid design than the TLR or rangefinder actually is.

Epson Scan is my enlarger

2007-06-23T14:46:00.001+01:00

Scala_F4+24-50_Ilfosol990, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I am currently realising that my scanner, and its software "Epson Scan" is proving vastly more flexible than an enlarger and photographic paper in the darkroom ever was. With the ability to draw custom curves, it's possible to invoke transfer functions that would otherwise be considerably more difficult to do with paper in the darkroom through techniques such as pre-fogging or flashing or base exposures, to shift contrast and range.

Not budgeting for time

2007-06-16T09:02:00.001+01:00

DSC_7725@31 mm.jpg, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

There are things in life that I like to do, and these things simply don't get budgeted in terms of overall time taken to complete the process.

Greater London House

2007-06-09T12:43:00.001+01:00

Greater London House, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Well, it seems as though this is where I now work, at least part of the time. If the job lasts, that is.

The most boring job I've ever done (lately).

2007-06-02T14:50:00.001+01:00

BWdev135Ekta400TooDense829, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I've got a new job, and I hate it already. I'm doing Brad, for emap. They're in Bowling Green Lane, which I can just about get to in an hour or so, by going to Farringdon. Next week they're moving from the scruffy tip they work in, to a new building opposite Mornington Crescent, which a] I probably won't be able to find, and b] is bound to take me vastly longer to get to than the hour I allocate to get to work anywhere I have to work in London.

I hate that job already. It's excruciatingly boring, lots of manual labour in dtp'ing, and uses antique old equipment because the antique old software only runs on OS 9 and QuarkXpress 3.n. But then, looking around the office, it would appear that their corporate ICT strategy for the publishing front line is to accumulate old shit-heap computers that should by all rights be on the scrap heap, and hope they keep working until they don't. Ridiculous. I look forward to my next job, wherever that's going to be. I hope this one doesn't last much further - I don't think I can tolerate another week of this nonsense.

It's a phone, not an agreement to consume

2007-05-10T10:52:00.001+01:00

Walkman, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Getting a phone isn't a signal that the user wishes to spend lots of money on everything it can do.

DSCN8644.JPG

2007-04-26T19:01:00.001+01:00

DSCN8644.JPG, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I took this on the way back from the dentists this morning. I had a checkup, a filling and a polishing.

Nikon F4 & Micro-Nikkor 55mm AF

2007-04-19T20:48:00.001+01:00

Nikon F4 & Micro-Nikkor 55mm AF, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

The F4, taken under the D-Lites. I've come to the conclusion that the D50's 18-55mm kit lens is among the best lenses I have. Certainly it's the best of the wide-medium lenses by default as the others I have are all knackered. The 20mm is scuffed and scratched so I'm sanding down the surface. The 24-50mm was faulty but I took it apart last weekend. Now it seems to take a better looking image, but I noticed during this shoot that the aperture is a bit sluggish, so it couldn't auto return properly from f22. Similarly, the 35-70mm still has a very sluggish aperture return, despite my dismantling it many months ago and replacing the spring with another. It's still slow. That leaves only the kit lens. Once I get to 50mm or 55mm I have several excellent lenses to cover that, and then there's the absolutely superb 70-210mm AF zoom - probably the best of the lot, together with the 55mm Micro-Nikkor seen mounted here on the F4 body.

Motorola F3 phone

2007-04-19T20:36:00.001+01:00

Motorola F3 phone, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I've been taking some more pictures of the F3, but this time with the Elinchrom D-Lite 2 set, both with softboxes, both very close and pointing down. They shut off after a while if you point them downwards - they have no ventilation of their own.

Beckton Corridor from the pond

2007-03-25T00:19:00.001Z

Beckton Corridor from the pond, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Two shots taken with the Mamiya-Sekor 80mm on the Mamiya C330S, digitally composited together to make one wider picture.

I must remember to change the foam on the light seal on the new C330S - it's starting to deteriorate, to touch.

Motorola Motofone™ F3

2007-03-14T13:38:00.001Z

Motorola F3, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

This is a very interesting new phone I've just bought. It does pretty much nothing other than make and receive phone calls. That's all. It can just about manage text messages too. It has a very novel user interface - it speaks to you. The display is an Electrophoretic display (sort of e-paper technology), which is very low power consumption, and even holds the last display state when you remove power.

It's a very slim phone, with an incredibly long battery life. It's very robust, designed for dusty environments. It was launched first in India a short while ago.

Mine's unlocked.

Lunar Eclipse Sequence

2007-03-05T00:28:00.001Z

Lunar Eclipse Sequence, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

On Saturday night we had a Total Lunar Eclipse. Not just us, pretty much everyone in the North American/European/Middle-Eastern/West Asian/North African footprint of totality did. I photographed it on the D50 and 70-210 zoom, at full extent. The initial exposures were 160th at f11, at ISO 200, and increasing the exposure gradually as the light dropped, until the final ones were 3 seconds at f11 at ISO 200. I made some very long exposures at totality - 15 seconds and 30 seconds, but they weren't usable because of the motion of the moon - the image streaked considerably, so I didn't use them.

RolleiScanfilm_F-801_083

2007-02-20T22:02:00.001Z

RolleiScanfilm_F-801_083, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Yesterday and today I shot a short (12 exposure) 135 roll of Rollei Scanfilm in the Nikon F-801 + 35-70mm lens. In the evening I had it processed at Asda. For some reason the first few frames have some sort of fogging remaining in the sprocket area. Maybe this is from processing - pulling the tongue out badly.

The film isn't purely clear in the base - I thought it would be. I thought it would be exactly like slide film but with negative images not positives. it doesn't have the orange base layer, but it does have a sort of denseness to the clear areas. The dynamic range of the exposures isn't greatly different than that of normal C41 neg film in some instances, and in other instances approaches that of tranny film (but not quite as wide). It's remarkably difficult to correct manually - it might be entirely possible to correct accurately but I didn't find it easy. Having said that, I didn't use the auto exposure on Epson Scan - I only used manual adjustment per channel.

To be fair I will shoot the other 12 exposure roll I have on a bright sunny day, to see what difference there is.

Canary wharf

2007-02-13T08:56:00.000Z

Clerkenwell

2007-02-09T17:02:00.000Z

Lunchtime, walking back from the Holborn direction. This is at Clerkenwell.

Bedford Row pump

2007-02-09T13:48:00.000Z

Lunchtime walking to Holborn and back, saw this pump on the way back.

Holborn

2007-02-09T13:29:00.000Z

Lunchtime walking to Holborn and back.

It snowed overnight

2007-02-08T11:37:00.001Z

Me in the snow, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

It snowed overnight, just like they said it would. Deli took this pic on the D50, as she was staying home looking after her foot (but that didn't stop her coming out to play in the snow and soak the D50 with snowballs!). The BBC weather people predicted pandemonium, gridlock, the entire country slowing down due to being submerged in snow, and the end of civilisation. True to their word, it snowed quite a bit overnight. About 4am it hadn't settled on the grass, but was a thin layer on cars, by the morning it was thickly laid everywhere. It was still snowing as I came in to work eventually.

Coming Soon

2007-02-07T21:36:00.001Z

Coming Soon, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Gilbert & George at the Tate Modern, apparently.

It snowed overnight

2007-01-24T13:01:00.001Z

DSC_6837, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

This morning we woke up to a layer of snow everywhere outside.

Me

2007-01-10T17:16:00.001Z

Me, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

This is an edited-together set of four photos taken on my Sony Ericsson Z710i phone, sent as a single MMS containing four 640*480 photos. It came in as four separate blog posts, but I've aggregated them all here. It cost 30 pence to send to flickr which then blogged it to blogger (as I've got things set up). This compares with about 40 pence or more (on Virgin's extortionate and frankly absurdly high data rate) to send one single 640*480 photo using the 'blog this' feature, which sends directly to blogger over GPRS. Sending an MMS allows more content to be crammed in, and won't cost more than 30p (probably - not sure what happens if you really overload an MMS).

S

2007-01-10T11:25:00.000Z

Way in

2007-01-10T09:48:00.000Z

This is an example of photoblogging using a Sony Ericsson Z710i phone. I took it on my way in to work this morning, then blogged it as I came in, directly from the phone. The Z710i has the facility to very simply blog any photo upon taking, to blogger. Seems to work quite well. I might drop the resolution down to the lowest size, as it's not worth sending a 2 megapixel photo to blogger. This was set to 1 megapixel. The camera isn't autofocus, but I don't think that actually matters all that much, in practice.

Mark

2007-01-06T19:48:00.001Z

Mark, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Mark

Beaun park types

2007-01-06T19:40:00.001Z

Beaun park types, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Beaun park types

Unprinting

2006-11-10T12:42:00.001Z

DSC_6245-35.0-70.0 mm f-3.3-4.5@45 mm, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

The new media state of spelling is effectively the opposite of the birth of printing - it is undoing the crystallisation of spelling, back to the fluid state it occupied originally.

The rest of the world moves faster than us

2006-11-01T09:47:00.001Z

Across Old Street, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

The aggregated effect of developments and advances in web usage gives the impression that the rest of the world is moving far faster than any of us individually are.

Dentist this morning.

2006-10-26T16:41:00.001+01:00

Coefficient, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

I went to the dentist this morning. I had a check up, and he attended to a cracked tooth that already had two large fillings. He did an x-ray, and then cleaned up my other teeth, then anaesthetised that tooth and removed the cracked part and filled it further. All fixed and sorted, and a good job done. Totally painless. NHS. Excellent work.

Propelled by our delusions

2006-10-02T12:31:00.001+01:00

Fruit, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

We have an interesting characteristic - well, two interesting characteristics perhaps, the second one is one of hoarding, collecting and the otherwise improportionate tendency to squirrel away embarassing amounts of excess and excessive equipment 'just in case'. But the former interesting characteristic is more embarrassing, I feel, and it is this. We tend to be hugely self-delusional in a most fantastic array of tangents and directions. We think that we're this famous photographer or that famous writer or artist, or else we think we're just one opportunity away from selling that fluke money shot, and we like to stalk around the world garnished with the trimmings and trinkets of our delusions (eg, cameras of bygone ages, if we think we're a Weegee or a Brassai, or bristling with modern cameras of stupendous specifications, if we think that we're one day going to be called upon to deliver that critical 'right time right place' shot that makes history and solves all ills worldwide and turns one into a hitherto undiscovered hero).

This latter one - the tendency to ridiculously overspec our requirements - is no news to the manufacturers of gear, and probably no news to the victims of their own delusions. It is, however, very interesting that most people would rather spend more than is necessary to take their average photos than less. Why? Is it embarassment and inadequacy when someone else has a bigger willy, I mean, lens, than you? Is it such a stab that we must take all measures and expenses to prevent this situation from even occurring? Aren't we just responding to the constant barrage of so-called solutions to the perceived inferiority of our protrusion in life?

Most people would nod in agreement at this, but actually, I think it's not this at all. Yes, I think it's to do with inadequacy, but it's deeper rooted than that. I think it's because the victim somehow in their path through life has acquired an unspoken condition of operation that they must always be the provider of service and facility. It's not just photography, obviously - it's any arena where toys of any pasttime can be passed off as essential by instead becoming ridiculously expensive high-performance semiprofessional, er, toys. People strive to provide their families with very high fidelity audio, with faultless performance and any ability you could wish for. Never would a visitor be able to criticise the family stereo system - it's just too good, there's no grounds upon which to possibly criticise.

Similarly in other areas. We feel the need to overspecify to ridiculous and preposterous levels. One thing that I think might be a factor (but I'm not so sure) is that the person who is connected to a social grouping (friends, family, workmates, etc) that the person thinks the group thinks that the person (in turn) is there to be the provider of facility for, then that person will use that as an excuse to spend any amount of money they think is required to kit out to be fit for purpose. Nobody asked them to spend that much on such overspecified but sexy kit. Well, their own delusion asked them to. Their own delusion portrays them as the provider of facility. In some cases, if they're lucky, this delusion propels them to become exactly that in reality and they start to make a living out of it. In most cases, however, the delusion remains a part time activity - it doesn't require satisfying in such a logical and ambitious mode.

It's quite amusing, really. What's wrong with accepting a little ribbing - a little criticism for having a crap stereo or an out of date phone or a camera that's frankly aimed squarely at the masses? I suppose what else is there in life but to keep up with our delusions? And you've got to admit - being the one kept busy propelling the impressive camera at parties certainly beats having to be just like everyone else and join in.

Orange filter on black and white on the W800i

2006-09-21T14:50:00.001+01:00

Urban Spaceman, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Yesterday (and today, and the day before yesterday) I took the Rolleicord II out, loaded with Acros 100, a black and white film. I've also got a Photax orange filter in Bayonet 1 fitting (for the Rolleicord or a Yashica Mat). I took the opportunity to try it out over the lens of the SonyEricsson W800i phone also set to black and white. The results are quite good - a recommended technique.

Desire paths

2006-09-05T11:56:00.000+01:00

Here's a picture I took a few weeks ago on my F-801, with a 20mm lens (pretty super-wide) and Jessops slide film in there.

Posting it to flickr reveals that it is what's called a "desire path". I didn't know that was what they were called. I do know that the residents of Beckton, surrounding Beckton Park have carved it into the grass over the decades, leading to and fro between where we live (ahead) and Beckton Park DLR station (behind).

This morning the Northern Line was incredibly packed - I had to let five trains go by before being able to squeeze into one. Ridiculous situation. And I'd left the house so as to be even earlier than normal, too.

The pursuits of a document engineer

2006-09-04T10:05:00.000+01:00

Today the dlr was delayed horrendously by a broken train in Bank tunnel. A large queue of trains formed behind, including the one I was on. From Westferry to Shadwell it wasn't sure if it was to go to Bank as indicated, or divert to Tower Gateway. In the end, at Shadwell, it simply closed the doors and off it went. It turned up at Bank, fortunately, although about 20 minutes too late.

Nobody's sure at work if they still have the jobs they thought they had. There's a lot of talk of slimming the production department down to about three staff in total. Where this leave me, with a temp agreement until the end of Sept, is very unclear - no doubt it means I'm off in a few weeks, or it means I'm required because there's no way three people can manage the workload in the manner they're used to. Who knows.

The solution is clearly to become a millionaire. It must be far easier today to become a millionaire, as the relative value of a million quid is vastly greater than it was in the Victorian days when there were indeed millionaires and considerably more poor people, separated by a very wide economic gulf. One thing is becoming clear - a] I'm pretty much shit at running my own business, any time I've ever tried it, I have no clue what I'm supposed to be doing to make work happen - nobody ever gives me any work to do; and b] I'm not aware that sitting at a desk, temping in an office, can prove to be the path to millionairedom. Here's a picture of people at a desk, in an office, presumably not being millionaires. I took it about six years ago, on Ektachrome, recently found the film, and had it cross-processed in C41 on Saturday, whereupon I scanned most of it.