Julian Harris, Social Computing Guy

Posted this on Bodykind:

I’ve really struggled with grogginess, apathy, cravings for sugar and fatty foods in winter here in the UK. Turns out it’s all to do with lack of light rather than any general dispair at the futility of the state of the world.

I’ve had a Lumie body clock for years (the version I have doesn’t have the cutesy and unnecessary stars and moon as per above), and basically Lumie does the trick — if I got to bed at the right time, the light turns on slowly over 20 minutes or so, and wakes me up nicely and I don’t feel groggy even in the heart of winter. It’s all about stimulating melatonin it seems.

I knocked off a couple of points for things that could be better:

• no battery backup! You lose power, you have to reset it. Move it from one room to another, same thing. This is the 21st century Lumie!

• ergonomics: button placement necessitates fingers placed in front of the display. From bed, this makes it really hard to see what you’re doing when you’re pressing the buttons
• No way to easily use it as an ordinary lamp — you have to always use the fader, which is a bit tedious as it can take up to 10s to fade up and down. Annoying when all you want to do is flick a switch.
• Display is unreadable in direct sunlight.
• The whole ‘little dot for PM’ is a widely used, and widely irritating standard for indicating PM vs AM. How about ‘PM’??

Oh here’s where you find Lumie Bodyclock Junior replacement bulbs.

We live in a world of massive opportunities for overstimulation. A world of continuous partial attention, driven by an ever-connected world. The double-edged sword of connectivity allows for amazingly positive changes in how we live and work, but as it affects everyone, expectations change too.

I think we’ve all experienced the symptoms of this — everything and everyone is fighting for your attention all the time (which is why some call what we’re in an Attention Economy). Which means, not only is it hard to concentrate, but there is a generation growing up with very little general experience of what it’s like to concentrate for long periods of time.

This all increases stress as the pace implies a constant sense of urgency. I’m awful at it. I’ll check my personal mail 5+ times a day — probably closer to 10. With gmail notifier, it’s even easier to get distracted (usual disclaimers — actually I switched to gmail way before joining Google).

But now I’m back into the rhythm of work again, I can get back into the rhythm of meditation each day too. It’s like a bit of time each day just for me. Today I experienced a reminder of why meditation is so good for me — this incredible sense of feeling beyond time, beyond barriers, a deep peace which puts the world in perspective.

I’m not about to preach that everyone meditates — but I thoroughly recommend finding your own way of getting to this ‘zoned peaceful’ state at least once a day. I got a similar sense of this when I practiced Tai Chi some years ago — and some forms of yoga can help relax the mind too. If you are curious then the technique I use is called Integrated Amrita Meditation. (That’s plain spooky — this course is taught in the UK every few years, and look at that, there’s one going Sunday March 9. I genuinely didn’t know!)

I’ll finish with a lovely tranquil scene from our recent holiday in NZ:

And with that I have to go and make my poor sick but still lovely wife a ‘mega drink’ (lemon, manuka honey, garlic, ginger).

PS thanks for the welcome back Tom — nice to know someone still reads this blog

A lot has happened since I posted my last blog entry!

I got a job at Google and also had a 6 week holiday. All this has meant silence in my virtual world while I spent time IRL (In Real Life).

My focus was Social Computing while I was specialising on this at Conchango — in the coming weeks I’ll decide what to focus on now at my new job.

thanks for reading!

tnv girlscreampie blackmature hairyteen pantyhosegay strippersanima porngirl enemacum french Map

RIP Facebook? Not yet. Unique Visitors to Facebook.com jumped 20% in November

Why? Jay Meattle enlightens:

“Looks like regular Facebook users are mostly unaware of their worsening situation, or more likely don’t know what to do about it - not good.”

67% of Facebook users had not even heard of Facebook Beacon and the evil that it is (summary: it shares your profile information with third party vendors even if you’re not logged in and even if you have opted out of everything).

YouTube - Interactive Wall - Multi Touch

This completely rocks. There have been concepts of this for some time but allowing multiple people to work on it at the same time is… just amazing.

Facebook and The Myth Of Contextual Advertising

Alex Iskold was given some advertising for singles…

“Um… Didn’t I say on my profile that I am married? Okay fine, but even if I was looking, I would not want my THE ONE to look like this. Would you? Jokes aside, the advertisement below, which was displayed on my company AdaptiveBlue’s user group, is just completely inappropriate”

.. which was a bunch of scantily-clad ladies…

This is just plain weird. This plus the furor over Facebook’s shocking privacy violations are making it less a darling child and more a spoilt undisciplined brat.

Forrester research July 10 2007

So a week after needing to replace our washing machine, whaddaya know but our central heating goes on the fritz.

Central heating broken down and in Wimbledon?

First thing to know — check out the Corgi web site to find a Corgi-registered engineer. They follow a code of practice and Corgi does strike off people occasionally. Don’t look for FSA-style regulations here — it’s just a standards body that tries to support a baseline level of quality and customer service, for example this dodgy outfit in Holloway Road, North London, called 3 Heat Services:

Reason removed: Failure to rectify defects following a customer complaint.

TR Plumbing was the second on the SW19 search results and found Tom to be friendly, knowledgeable and affordable.

NOTE there is a bug on the Corgi web site so that search doesn’t work after you click ‘removed installers’. On Firefox at least.

UPDATE — Nxtbook got back to me. 10/10 for listening guys thanks. See comments section on how they’re aware of the issues. And the 50 page limit was publisher specific.

Three words for this product: avoid, avoid, avoid.

Nxtbook is having a major identity crisis. It seems to be a way of distributing print-ready documents electronically.

Except Nxtbook really doesn’t support online reading well

• Nxtbook has this weird ‘pseudo binding crease’ shadow in the middle of the screen that reduces the contrast of a page and breaks a 2 page spread up in a way that, well no book would ever want but is limited by ahh… physics. Why they’d want to do this explicitly on a screen is anyone’s guess. They’re not the first to do this — it’s a popular demo of ‘wizzy but useless stuff’ in the flash and silverlight’ — but it really is useless, and worse, it actually adversely affects usability.

• It also has this little ‘page turn’ device where you click to move between pages. No keyboard support — no arrows, space bar, or return to move by keyboard. Worst of all, it doesn’t even emulate real page turning well — the whole advantage of a page turn is that you can flip between pages in rapid succession. As my screencast shows, if you click rapidly you end up going to one page, then zooming in and out rapidly. Bah.
• Accessibility? Forget it. It’s just an opaque block of stuff.

So it’s not really for online reading.

It doesn’t support offline reading either.

Nxtbook has a really fiddly page printing mechanism that only allows 50 pages at a time UPDATE: this is imposed by the Enterprise Search crowd, not intrinsic to Nxtbook. Like that was going to stop me printing all of the pages? I’m reading this great source of content, the Enterprise Search Sourcebook, which has some excellent and generous content. But it’s like poking forks in your legs trying to get at the content using Nxtbook. I had to do 2 separate 50 page print sessions (which didn’t line up so I had a duped page in the middle), each of which took, I kid you not, about 5 minutes to print. Nxtbook then refused to print the final pages (some kind of lame copy protection feature?), so I had to open it up in my other browser to do the final bit. Ludicrous and pointless affair.

To see my frustration see see a quick clip I put together illustrating Nxtbook’s brokenness of the page flipping and hugely limited zoom (1:1 and window size).

Oh, and of course none of the content is searchable from the web either, because it’s a proprietary format search engines can’t access the content.

The fundamental question is: what on earth was wrong with PDFs? To the Enterprise Search crowd: could you release a PDF version?

It’s not all bad

There is one good bit however. Nxtbook adheres to Julian’s Flash HIG #1: allow deep linking to rich content sites.
And you can download it for offline use. If you have Linux or a Mac however, tough cookies as the offline reader is an exe.

A plea to Nxtbook

So I slammed Nxtbook. Some constructive points are only fair:

• Allow rapid page flipping between pages
• Remove the page printing limitation (and speed it up if you can?)
• Support better zoom — it’s flash right? So why not allow 3200% zoom. Some diagrams are very hard to read on screen and don’t print well.
• Basic key navigation: spacebar, page navigation etc.
• Have the option as part of a book distribution to hide the ludicrous crease in the middle of the screen
• Have the option for search engines to index the content.

Ed’s Tech Tips | Which Wiki?

“I installed it and I was sold. DekiWiki, which was orginally based on MediaWiki, has all of the best features of MediaWiki, but without the non-user friendly awkward interface. It is as easy to use as email, but with a lot more functionality than MediaWiki. Check out the complete feature list on the Mindtouch web site. The full unrestricted version of DekiWiki is avilable for free. MindTouch makes money like Red Hat does , by selling support for the wiki”

We’re trying it out internally for one site to see how it goes. Interesting — I didn’t know it was originally based on Mediawiki.

I still miss ’suggested tags as you type’ and RSS feeds for tags provided in SocialText. I’ve hacked around with PHP/JSON/AJAX style stuff before so maybe I can patch it. MindTouch looks fairly pluggable so we’ll see.

I’d also disagree with the blurb that says that DekiWiki has “Enterprise Strength Search” (Apache Lucene ported to PHP) — the reference point for “Enterprise Search” these days must contain natural language parsing to be a serious contender (no, Google Enterprise Search doesn’t have a semantic engine, and so it’s not really a serious player IMHO).