theduty:

Nickelback Shreds!!

The best one yet.

Edit: Some updates from suggestions from Mitchell

David said that they had an IRC channel; just for work. He said a lot of other things too, but the main reason he said that he loved his new job was that there was an IRC channel; just for work.

David’s a bloke I used to see maybe once or twice every six months or so. And whenever I used to see him it was, as it always has been, excellent. And he’d always go on about this IRC channel they had; just for work.

Now David’s a smart bloke who knows a surprising amount about stuff like making internets and mediaeval architecture - and we’ve chewed a good deal of fat over the years about various important topics - but I was genuinely puzzled as to why he’d had his mind blown by something like that.

Fast forward a couple of years and reader, I joined the company. And they’ve got an IRC channel; just for work. And its a fucking productivity tool. And it’s mind-blowing.

Its mind blowing because a) Its the old rule of ‘the simplest of tools have the most profound effect*’ writ large and b) its made me realise that a number of modern, sexy, whizzy applications that some companies spend actual money on are just gilded lilies; resource heavy, time expensive re-imaginings of something that was pretty much perfectly realised in 1988.

The only improvements from what you might call ‘IRC Basic’ that Isotoma have in place - and someone will presumably correct me if I’m wrong - is that there’s a bot who reports SVN commits as kills - complete with Unreal Tournament sound effects for double, triple, ultra and mega kills.)**

And that’s basically it. The whole company - in house and remote - on one channel, everyone with ops. And it works. And it’s wonderful. I’ve hastily thrown together some of the reasons I think this.

• Everyone knows what’s going on. There’s no eternal internal email hell. There’s one internal place for everything from “What’s for lunch…?” to “Has anyone seen the…” to “Fire alarm drill at…”. Everyone is on and, because of the non-linear nature of IRC, when they’re not available its easy to leave a message.
• There’s a feeling of social cohesion that comes right out of the box. The overall rules of the channel are easy to grasp for new starters - and quite satisfyingly complex should you wish to analyse it that far. (And you don’t. You really don’t).

(Note: There’s a much longer blog post in this, but its always been my contention that a) IRC is in general the most civil of web based communication mediums and that b) Pretty much all ‘web based’ social conventions are born or find their antecedents in the conventions of IRC channels. But that’s another story for another time….)

• It acknowledges that there’s always going to be dicking around, and the social norms - of our channel, at least - kind of encourage that too. But the dicking around is metered, on-record and public - so on one hand you’ve got encouragement of a friendly workplace; while on the other you’ve got quite a powerful tool that tells you when someone needs to be busier.
• The bot that reports SVN commits is useful as it allows senior developers to say “Aha! Person X has changed that file, let me go and check it.” and the Unreal Tournament sound effects are a (tiny, miniscule) pat on the back when you’re really cracking through it. (Let’s not get into an argument about quantity over quality of commits. Suffice to say, if you’re confident enough to repo something then you’re at least *trying*)
• Finally, and most importantly for me, its a great tool for short, technical questions that really easily fall down the cracks between Trac, staging, live and documentation sources like wikis and specs. So for example today I could see that Ticket X said that “N work” had been done, but I couldn’t see where that work had been deployed (Because I’m new, not because of some process failure.) I could either traipse around the office asking various people what was going on - or I could just dump the question into the channel and be sure that pretty soon I’d have an answer.

So at Isotoma we’re using IRC as an internal email client, an IM tool, a meeting space, a status feed, a Facebook wall, a Basecamp substitute, a noticeboard and a means of executing a particularly vicious form of mob justice. There are even most of the aspects of Wave that hipsters are wetting their pants about. Not bad for something that in Internet years is about as old as its possible to be.

In fact I’m beginning to think that if someone were to put together a simple installer with a little GUI and some relatively intelligent auto-config goodness, you could actually kick start a mini IRC renaissance in the kinds of agencies who are alwayslooking for new ways of improving internal comms and organisation. In other words: All of them.

I’m kind of expecting a few replies to this post along the lines of “Of course we use IRC in our office. Who doesn’t?” So to be clear, I’m talking mainly about web agencies at the mar-comms end of the spectrum who are, let’s face it, the least well organised, the most desperate for organisation and the most likely to spring for a few thousand dollars worth of enterprise level appallingness in order to try to attain it.

I’d say to all of them: Give it a whirl.

Finally, and most importantly, #bunnies FTW!

* Even more profoundly, the simplest application of the simplest of tools.

** Actually, its also integrated to a certain extent with the company Squeezebox with a bot that reports what’s currently playing and allows a basic “skip this song” voting mechanism. There’s also pubbot who essentially spouts Markov chains to general amusement.

eagleflieswiththedove:

French military recruitment poster

via the splendid Mr Scully’s Facebook.

revdancatt:

“If you drag it about with a tractor, it leaves a relief of LA on the sand.”

Santa Monica Art Tool (via Xurble)

One of the things we said we were going to do a few months back was actually use the office as an office - i.e. Actually work in the fucker. With my new job I’ve taken some steps to actually making this happen - but to do it properly will require some plumbing jobs from an IT perspective. If I make this list public, it stands a good chance of actually being something I get round to doing. I’m not married to any particular company, brand or action so if you have any better ideas or experiences to share, I’d *really* be interested in hearing them.

1) Bite the bullet and spring for BT to come and put a landline back into the house. Hopefully they’ll do it for free.

2) Get Zen Internet to swoop in and give me some form of obscenely powerful pipe with a static IP

3) Get myself setup with some form of cloud storage so I can sync music and files across locations. Ideally G-Drive - so hurry the fuck up and launch it, Google.

4) Reformat cranky old 300gig warhorse hard drive and use it as a physically present backup drive probably using Time Machine or something automagic. I will rename this drive “Failsworth” as it will be a failover and this is howlingly amusing.*

5) Think about finally and forever throwing away the 5 year old, 1.8 MHz Pentium 3 Shuttle PC that currently powers the office UNLESS networking it and using it as some kind of central music repository turns out to be easier than it sounds.

*All drives and computers in the Saunders household are named after Manchester boroughs - except my new one which is currently named “Serious Callers Only” after one of the ships in Excession.** I may have to change this as I hate inconsistency almost as much as I love a good naming convention.

** Many have expressed surprise at how dorky this is. My reply? Go boil your head.

Your friday earworm.

wreckandsalvage:

The Dude Abides. (via iri5)

The dude in VHS. Click through and see the whole set. Damn.

The footage in the second video above was only uncovered a few days ago - the guy who filmed it donated it to the Space Exploration Archive shortly before his death - and they themselves have released it in the run up to the anniversary of the disaster.

I know its kind of macabre, but I’m fascinated by the two videos considered together.

One is horrifying because of its detached professionalism; that long, awful silence after “Go with throttle up” that leads to the almost comically procedural “”Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.” I think its the helpless inevitability of it; we do this thing, we do that thing, we do another thing - a thing we’ve done a thousand times before - and then, from nowhere and for no reason, disaster.

The other video’s folksy dismay horrifies me equally though. ”That’s trouble of some kind, George.” he says, all Bedford Falls about it; unaware that history is happening around him.

This just happens to have been on my mind recently - and there’s an unpleasant aspect of voyeurism to all of it, so to make up for it, I thought I’d draw your attention to the speech that Ronald Reagan made in the aftermath of the disaster that is possibly unfamiliar to most of us here in the UK. It’s a great example of a beautifully and sensitively written piece of oratory from a man not remember (by history, at least), for that kind of thing.

The speech brilliantly references a beautiful but still relatively obscure poem, High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr. which I’ve reproduced below. The last line, for my money, still has the stopping power of a punch to the solar plexus.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air… .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

James Ward recently wrote a blog post about tracking down the owner of a secondhand book in his possession. Its excellent, and worth giving your full attention. But the reason I mention it is that he quotes from Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road - which is the book we bought my sister and her husband as a wedding present, and is the starting point of the following semi-literate wankery. The quote goes:

“I wish you hadn’t been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.)”

And the reason I mention that is that only moments before I read James’ post, I was thinking about Emma C, my first proper girlfriend, and an inveterate margin-note-maker. Like Wooster’s Honoria Glossop, she was trying - I felt at the time - to mould me into something a little less like the adolescent mouth-breathing masturbator I was, and a little more like the rakish and sophisticated polymath that I could have been. (She was a whole school year my senior, and a rakish and sophisticated polymath to boot - which made me *very* happy, though presumably I was something of a worry to her.)

So she’d lend me books, and the books were all very improving and I suffered through all of them. But the remarkable thing is that they’d all have little hand written annotations and comments highlighting significant passages or bits that resonated with what we were doing at the time. Appallingly, horrifyingly, at the time, I hated this tendency of hers; A) Because I interpreted it as a form of passive-aggressive intellectual bullying and B) because she had the most amazing tits I’d ever seen and sitting around reading seemed to be the acme of wasted time.

Reminiscing on this (my wife has been in Shropshire all weekend and I have had nothing better to think about,) I wandered over to the old bookcase and pulled down the copy of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote she gave me. (A book that, despite what I’ve written above, I loved on first reading and continue to love.)

What I’d interpreted as an invasion of my intellectual space; an attempt to drag me to a level of respectability that I was falling all too short of, I now realise was her way of making it seem like we were reading the book together. Akin to the gentle elbow in the cinema I’d give a friend if we were watching Ghostbusters and the bit where Bill Murray collects the mucus was coming up. “This”, she’s saying, “is awesome, and I’m glad that you’re here with me to enjoy it.”

The realisation of this made me feel first guilty, for what kind of person is so selfish as to not appreciate something like that, then it made me glad that at least after 18 years or so I finally got it. (Yes, another blog post wherein I realise I am a schmuck. Deal with it.)

Emma is now as lost to me as its possible to be in the digital world: Our relationship was short and pre-email, she married, I don’t know her second name and I’m no longer in touch with anyone who even knows her. (Except, I think, her younger sister who its possible will see this and pass on my sincerest of regards.)

On first deciding to write this blog, I’d intended just to quote the passage I liked and not tell the above story. Then reading James’ post made me think again. Now having completed it, I’m actually not going to quote it at all, just give you the photo and tell you its on page 49 of the Penguin edition. Truth be told, I can’t tell you why she liked it - or thought that I would - but that’s not the point.

The point, I guess, is that we should all be so lucky to have girlfriends with amazing tits who think enough of you that they’d annotate books just for you. Thanks Emma!

The following is extracted from Chapter Seven of Jeremy Paxman’s (really rather splendid) book “The English”

In 1835, a young Englishman named Alexander Kinglake decided to mature himself between leaving Cambridge and taking up a law career by travelling across the Syrian desert on a camel. He was making for Cairo, accompanied by ‘a brace of pistols and a couple of arab servants’. After several days’ travelling there emerged from the desert three other camels, coming towards him. As they drew nearer it became clear that two of the camels carried riders, while the third was laden with baggage. Nearer still, and he could see that one of the riders wore an English shooting j acket and had a European face. The closer they drew, the more agitated Kinglake became:

As we approached each other, it became with me a question whether we should speak. I thought it likely that the stranger would accost me, and in the event of his doing so, I was quite ready to be as sociable and chatty as I could according to my nature; but still I could not think of anything particular that I had to say to him … I felt no great wish to stop and talk like a morning visitor in the midst of those broad solitudes.

Luckily for Kinglake the man on the other camel was also English, an army officer making his way back to England overland from India. As, at last, the strangers met in the middle of nowhere, ‘we lifted our hands to our caps, and waved our arms in courtesy, we passed each other quite as distantly as if we had passed in Pall Mall’. Not a word was said..

In the end, the inhibitions of England were defeated by the camels of Arabia, which, having passed each other, refused to go any further. The two men turned around and walked their mounts back towards one another.

He was the first to speak; too courteous to address me, as if he admitted the possibility of my wishing to accost him from any feeling of mere sociability or civilian-like love of vain talk, he at once attributed my advances to a laudable wish of acquiring statistical information, and accordingly, when we got within speaking distance, he said, ‘I dare say you wish to know how the Plague is going on at Cairo?’

This has floored me. As I said on Metafilter: The guy crying at 2:33? I know why he’s crying. Its because a part of him has been walking around for his whole life wishing that something as beautiful as this would happen.

I choose to believe you.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

citationneeded:

It was nicknamed the “tiddler” on account of its size, and soon became Britain’s least loved coin.^[2]The Treasury had continued to argue that the half penny was important in the fight against inflation (preventing prices from being rounded up),^[2] but by the early 1980s it was practically worthless and its main utility was as a driver of small screws.^{[citation needed]}

Link

(BTW [Citation Needed] is my new favourite blog)