Data that matters has impermanence – One thing that springs up periodically is how older electronic data becomes harder to access.
Whether its floppy disks that are no longer readable or optical disks which have become corroded through chemical reaction over time electronic data is generally impermanent.
I lost a substantial amount of the posts on this blog two years ago when the server I used over at Yahoo! Small Business hosting went into meltdown 90 per cent of my blogging output between December 2006 and January 2008 disappeared. I managed to recover 10 per cent of the content from the Google cache of my blog.
However it isn’t only digital artifacts that are at risk. I was going through bags of old papers and found my old P60s some of which could no longer be read since they were printed on thermal paper and my first payslip which was barely readable.
This was from my first full-time job cleaning and repairing equipment that was rented out to building contractors including lawn mowers, concrete mixers and Makita power drills.
You can also see paper go yellow from the acid used in its manufacture as well as fade from the carbon paper print.
I had obviously put it away to keep it for posterity, but I decided to keep it in the cloud as I figure that it might last longer that way now. Though your guess is as good as mine. The thermal paper and Flickr’s business model are both tough things to fathom how robust they will be.
The problem with this is often the data we don’t want to keep stays like embarrassing pictures on Facebook or a drunken rant on a Usenet forum, whereas the stuff we want to keep too often fades away. So how do we get better at looking after electronic data that matters? More online and internet related posts here.
Pat Law published her list of 50 things that make her happy, which reminded me of a list I made back in November 2008 on things that made my day. Why 50 tings that make me happy? The 50 is a challenge and a limitation in the writing of this post. Like Pat, I am not from Bhutan and maybe the wrong person to write about happiness, but what the heck. So this is where I started in coming up with my 50 things in no particular order:
When someone gives their seat up on the tube for an elderly person or pregnant woman. Its a nice reminder that although civic society is on its knees, it isn’t dead yet. Saying that I once offered to give up my seat and the woman attempted to hit me, it seems she was just fat rather than pregnant – but don’t let that put you off being civic-minded
Hallowe’en. Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday of the year. Its celebration doesn’t start in August like Christmas does in most supermarkets, it finishes the following day. It’s has the kitsch of Christmas trappings, but without the expense. Oh and settling down with a bag of popcorn to watch The Exorcist and The Crow is more fun to watch than an epsiode from the James Bond movie franchise and White Christmas
A sunny spring day on Thurstaston Hill. Spring on the Wirral has an immense sense of energy, a sunny day lying on Thor’s Stone watching the clouds coming in from Liverpool Bay like a candy floss armada sailing over the Wirral
Knowing that I love and am loved
Getting to watch St Helens Saints winning games. Rugby league was once described by an Australian writer as a working-class opera and St Helens have been one of the most successful teams in recent years. I only really gained an appreciation of rugby league during my time at college in Huddersfield. Despite the poor performance of the Huddersfield Giants, the town had league in its bones – The George Hotel by the train station being the birthplace of rugby league. Unfortunately I don’t get to see them as much as I would like and the sport still doesn’t get the coverage that it deserves on television
Fly New Balance kicks, my current favourites are the MT580 which I have in various colour-ways
Flying business-class with Cathay Pacific – they won’t go on strike, the food is decent and there is bound to be a couple of films on the entertainment system that I haven’t seen and are worth watching
Getting to put on my favourite flannel shirt. This shirt is an old workshirt from back when I worked in the oil industry that has been washed a huge number of times, making it unbelievably soft and giving it a faded check pattern that would be at home on My Name Is Earl. After putting this on, you can understand why grunge took off as a style – I know that my Australian colleague Nick Osborne thinks that this is a classic Bogan-style
Getting to watch For A Few Dollars More. No matter how many times I see this film it still gives me an immense amount of pleasure to watch it. It is not as grand as Once Upon A Time In The West and not as well known as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but it has probably the best performances of Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood together on screen
Watching pretty much any Wong Kar-wai film, but I have a particular soft spot for 2046 and In The Mood for Love
Getting some time on my decks. Whilst many DJs have moved on to MP3s and CD players there is nothing quite like the tactile experience of mixing with vinyl records. Being able to read the track by the changes in the grooves, the sensation of low frequency sounds and the feel of cueing a heavy vinyl platter are unique
Eating a slice of freshly cooked soda bread. Unlike yeast bread, I prefer to let the soda bread cool properly first and then tuck in.There is something about the whole tactile experience of eating soda bread with a thin scrape of butter and honey or as a side to some Galtee black pudding and white pudding
A warm autumn day with haze so thick you can smell it
Looking out on Victoria Harbour from the Harbour City branch of Starbucks
My Cuisinart coffee machine in action
Motorway driving at night with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld or The KLF’s Chillout album on the stereo
Finding myself in an airport on the far side of the world and being able to find a good newspaper stall, and have the time to sit down and read a copy of the Irish Independent or The Examiner
Wondering around the Science Museum with my Dad and have him tell me about the different equipment in there and the machines that he has come across in his 50 or so years in engineering from lorry engines, to ships pumps and industrial motors
Pottering around Gosh Comics and discovering a new graphic novel author. Forbidden Planet feels too much like a supermarket in many ways, whereas Gosh feels like the independent vinyl record shops that are rapidly disappearing from Soho
Watching a good film in a decent cinema, despite all the technology there is still nothing quite the big screen. I love the passive entertainment of the cinema – very un-tech of me I know, but its true
Waking up on a Sunday morning and hearing it raining outside whilst I am tucked up in bed
The mid point in 50 things that make me happy: Hong Kong-style milk tea though its pretty hard to track down a good cup even in Chinatown, London. Caffiene and condensed milk mean that all the main food groups are covered
Eating with friends in the Tsui Wah restaurant chain
The smell of a turf fire
Getting a new watch
Taking a really great picture, mainly because it’s due to serendipity rather than any skill on my part
Buying vinyl records, I love rifling through the trays at Phonica in Soho, it breaks my heart that great shops with knowledgeable shop assistants like Anthony Cox at the former Flying Records in Soho have been replaced by vegan fast food joints, wine bars and hedge funds
Tripped out visuals like SIGGRAPH CGI shorts
Reading the print editions of Wired (US edition) and Monocle magazines
Shopping at a 7-Eleven in East Asia when the jetlag won’t let me get to sleep – its something about the colourful packaging design, retina-toasting lighting and junk food that they sell which fits in with the disconnectedness I feel
The half-awake feeling you have when your duvet feels like you are wrapped in cotton wool
Walking around Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Its a weird mix of space station and holy place. The light through the stained glass is spectacular
Touch typing on a decent keyboard. How people are supposed to cope with the modern rubbery keys on Apple’s defaults keyboards now I have no idea. How the hell does a keyboard make you happy? I feel at one with the machine, I become less conscious of my own typing. The same goes for using a Kensington Expert Mouse rather than a conventional ‘hockey puck’ or trackpad
Enjoying a modern art exhibition with someone knowledgeable so that you can discuss what you’ve seen
Oil refineries at night, they way they are lit up like fallen down Christmas trees. I love asian cityscapes like Hong Kong island and Tokyo for the information overload and the intricate lights
Going to sleep to the sound of a washing machine, sends me straight off, the white noise seems to give me interesting dreams as well. No idea why
The night sky on a clear summer night at my uncle’s farm so I can see the delicate star structures
The feeling of smugness that I get after I have cleaned the house from top-to-bottom
Buried in a good book whether its Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, a business book, graphic novel or an old counterculture text
Sitting on my sofa and doing nothing after I have come in from a great night out. I tend to enjoy warehouse and squat parties now more than clubs in London at the moment. Think its the music and the vibe
Finding a really great piece of design, whether its a cool piece of software, website, my Mystery Ranch backpack or accessible product design (like the Red Bull ring-pull with the bull cut out)
Finishing a blog post, particularly if I have been using the post to think a concept out fully. I will often mind-map it in my moleskine as well
Seeing my ideas make a difference, whether its to a clients business, changing the outlook of a course or conference attendee or having someone come up and discuss something articulated on here
Winning an eBay auction, paying less than I had intended to
Going to a really good thought provoking event like LIFT or some of the Barcamps
This has felt like a marathon of a post! The final item in my 50 things that make me happy: when I interact with a bureaucracy and things turn out alright with little-to-no effort
You’ve heard about the 50 things that make me happy, what would be the 50 things that make you happy?
Google has finally left the Chinese market for search, so I thought I would try the alternative, hence an unscientific assessment of Baidu. My trial is unscientific in nature and not particularly rigorous. I did what most consumers would have done and searched for myself.
I was quite open-minded about this, on the one hand Google has been killing the search market in Europe, nothing can touch it in the EU and they have made moderately successful forays into other sectors as well. I also know that Google is not all conquering. In fact the wheels start to come off the Google search wagon when you venture into areas with non-Roman languages such as Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
On the other hand, Robin Li over at Baidu is no slouch. Baidu is famous for is huge index and its continued appetite to crawl content whenever and wherever it can find it.
Baidu like its Korean counterpart Naver has also managed a successful social search product running a question-and-answer service like a better version of Yahoo! Answers – largely free of spam and a more middle-class range of participants provide highly relevant quality content.
It is also blatantly obvious that Baidu doesn’t care whether it attracts a potential English-speaking audience as the entire site apart from investor relations is in Chinese.
I was expecting some divergence between Google and Baidu search engine results pages for a number of reasons. Google crawls an estimated 15 per cent of the total web, and Baidu is likely to crawl a slightly larger amount. That means that their search indexes are likely to be slightly different. Secondly, both will have started with slightly different algorithms and these will change over time with a experience of what users want. Finally, the results are usually ‘flavoured’ according to local market preferences such as language and local content.
I was a bit surprised at the level of divergence between Google and Baidu, which was great than I had seen between Google and Yahoo! in the past.
First of all flavouring. A comparison between the Japanese and Chinese versions of Baidu show a high degree of variance between the two versions of the Baidu search engine.
Part of the reason for the difference may be due to Chinese regulations around permitted services, for instance an educational video of me by Econsultancy on YouTube is the top result on the Japanese site and a couple of twitter related hits come in at six and seven. The Japanese site skews much more toward video services than the Chinese site which picked up profile services Plaxo and Naymz.
Interestingly, the Chinese site picked up the re-direct URI for my blog (renaissancechambara.com), whereas neither the Japanese or the Chinese versions picked up my proper domain (renaissancechambara.jp) at all. Even when I clicked a few pages down.
Plotting Baidu China against Google Hong Kong produced an interesting diversity of the results.
Their one point of correlation, my profile on Naymz. Again part of this may be because of my presence on services that don’t do business in China for instance YouTube and Twitter. Google rightly puts more weight and a consequently higher ranking on my Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles than Plaxo which appears a couple of pages down on Google.
Baidu obviously puts much more emphasis on a historic redirect URI I have for my blog than the ‘real’ one and doesn’t seem to crawl the site in any great depth. I am guessing that this is because of its largely English language content.
In Japan, the Baidu | Google comparison told a similar story. The Google flavouring between Hong Kong and Japanese versions wasn’t that great only showing differences at position five and lower on the page. Baidu Japan managed to pick up my last.fm profile and twitter profile, but didn’t pick up my blog or any professional information on the first page.
In conclusion, my unscientific assessment of Baidu has shown provides a great search experience for consumers. But I am uncertain how valuable it would be for people in a professional context, for instance researching foreigners with whom they may be doing business or finding foreign presentations. I can understand why Chinese scientific audiences would be concerned by the departure of Google.
I also suspect that optimising content to make it searchable on Baidu is different to the process that I would go through for Google or Yahoo!, but that would merit far more investigation before I could blog with any confidence about it. More Baidu related posts here.
Former CEO of Fujitsu Nozoe Kuniaki (野副州旦) – blackmail forced his resignation | Japan: Stippy – interesting story of boardroom intrigue. Nozoe Kuniaki was originally said to have resigned due to ill health. The FT reported that Nozoe Kuniaki was really forced to resign by Fujitsu. Apparently Nozoe Kuniaki was forced to resign over links to a company of “unfavourable reputation”. The FT hints the roots of this palace putsch: apparently Nozoe Kuniaki was opposed by colleagues due to his drive to refocus the group on IT services at the expense of unprofitable electronics divisions, including its hard disk drive business.
Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com – “Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera?” and “Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever.”
When I discovered the idea of the naked official I was pondering the similarity that the Chinese have with the Irish. In both cases immigration is part of their psyche. Reading an article in Sina.com, I was reminded of one particular tranche of Chinese immigration. The immigration that happened prior to, and after the handover of Hong Kong. A number of rich and middle class families chose to move to Canada and other countries. The families lived in places with large existing Chinese communities like Vancouver and the patriarch would often commute to do business back in Hong Kong. These commuters were nicknamed astronauts because they spent so much time in the air.
A trend for the families of Chinese officials to conduct a similar kind of transplanted lifestyle has spawned a new term of naked official. A number of officials whose families had emigrated abroad (presumably beyond the reach of the state) were subsequently convicted of charges relating to them abusing their position. Naked officials are considered to be suspicious of preparing a bolt-hole abroad. Although moving abroad is a widely held middle class Chinese aspiration.
