Too busy to…

India Knight wrote in today’s Sunday Times that she could not understand the modern penchant for recording and posting one’s life to YouTube. Tomorrow’s children, she claims, will have an all pervasive collection of images (currently still but increasingly moving à la Harry Potter) of their parents’ lives whereas she has just a single photograph of her parents together.

After reading two earlier stories based on research into archived correspondence—one on the forthcoming Official Biography of The Queen Mother which used correspondence as the main source material, and a second about how actress Vanessa Redgrave’s life almost took a very different path—it struck me that this notion of having a record of life is perhaps not so new after all, although the medium has changed from prose to digital visuals which makes for a very different kind of record. Our descendants will know much more about how things looked but how will they learn the story behind the photograph?

Fortunately letter writing has already made something of a comeback thanks to the convenience of email and combined with the ubiquity of digital cameras, a future generation of biographers should have a very rich library of material to draw upon. The weak spot is there are many threats to digital collections: corporate email retention policies which automatically expunge emails after a certain period of time, hard drive failure and theft are some of the most common, yet in many cases the (incomprehensible to those of us that value privacy) desire to publish this material can produce a useful safety net against digital loss.

This website moved tonight, seemingly without any disruption thanks to the awesome people at Retrosnub who are my new hosting provider. If you spot any problems, please let me know in usual way, or leave a comment below.

After receiving some ‘bad’ luck in being on the rota to work the wet and miserable Easter weekend, on Easter Monday we headed down to the South Coast for a belated long weekend in the pretty Medieval port of Rye. Last year our Easter day trip to the South Coast was blighted by a shower of snow so we packed warmly and consequently boiled in the hot sunshine!

Rye is a small, cobble-streeted village which must have more tea shops per square mile than Rome has churches. When we arrived early Monday afternoon the place was overrun with out-of-towners but since they were patronising the tea shops, the surrounding countryside provided a pleasantly tranquil amble and by the time we returned the tea shops were all closed and the streets empty. A lovely place (if you like tea and cake), but best avoided on a bank holiday I think!

The following day was spent in Hastings, featured in at least one recent travel supplement as an ‘up-and-coming’ weekend getaway destination. The sea-front is very similar to Brighton, but less tacky, and while some bits were in the process of being renovated there was plenty that looked rather run down. After a morning of walking along the beach and feeling rather uninspired we started back towards the town to find some lunch. By chance we wandered into a lane to look at the menu for a café only to realise that it led to a whole street of smart(ish) cappuccino lounges and artisan shops that had been entirely invisible from the beach! We also spent a wondrous hour browsing the memorabilia and photographs in the Old Town Hall museum which gave us a flavour of how Hastings and the Cinq Ports have been the first line of England’s defences for over 1000 years. In the same street there is an organic bakery from which I purchased a very fine eccles cake for afternoon tea.

Hastings was too grey and overcast for good photos, but Rye was quaintly photogenic.

It was a lovely sunny day and there were some nice lilies in the flat:

Yesterday I upgraded my Ubuntu machine directly from Hardy Heron to Jaunty Jackalope (release candidate 1), in defiance of the release notes. I could not find any specific problems indicating what would happen if I broke the rules so I went ahead anyway and it worked fine—fortunately there is no Change Management Board in this flat!

Upon first boot it is not immediately obvious what is new in this release, although the new ‘Dust’ theme is so polished it feels like my desktop has received a heavy application of windolene, and it was nice to see that my widescreen monitor was now recognised automatically rather than requiring the installation of an additional package. Moving to Jaunty also brought an upgrade of my entire application set, including the latest version of Gnome Do which features an OS X-style dock.

Rarely is an upgrade without issues but this was a pretty good one:

• The Gnome desktop sharing service (vino-server) now causes X to consume 60% of CPU time even when no one is connected. The only workaround is to turn off desktop sharing.
• The new human-theme package conflicts with the Blubuntu theme packages. I just left this un-upgraded since I really like the blue theme.
• Not so much an issue, but after three years of successive upgrades there was some junk that needed to be removed manually: php5 and emacs22 are now default/production (and you still need emacs-snapshot for anti-aliased fonts) so I removed all the php4 and emacs21 packages. There were also half a dozen old kernels that were too out of date to be any use.

Back in February, the twitter-verse reverberated with a post describing a system for using twitter as a replacement for comments on blog posts. Regardless of the effectiveness or shortcomings of that particular system, I think the author explains very succinctly the failings of blog comments and the potential of using a social network to overcome them. Recently another blogger noted that when it comes to popular websites:

I’d rather hear what any of my friends says on any topic, rather than what people I don’t know say about a specific article.

Sites such as Disqus and Intense Debate also try to address these problems but populating yet another website with ‘friend’ information seems like duplication compared to using an existing network like Twitter, or Facebook.

Facebook recently released a very simple Comments Widget which I have installed below as a trial-replacement for traditional comments. To leave a comment, click ‘Connect with Facebook’ and authorise toobusyto.org.uk as a Facebook application, then leave your comment in the box. Regular comments are available below the Facebook Comment widget for people without Facebook accounts but since the Facebook widget can be customised to support anonymous comments, if the experiment is successful I eventually plan to turn that off. Let me know what you think!

PS – The ‘number of comments’ stat on the front page will be inaccurate due to the new system.
Comment counts should now (mostly) be accurate.

About half way through my holiday to New Zealand I noticed that my blog posts were becoming a little repetitive. The problem was that New Zealand has such varied scenery, all of which is either beautiful, impressive or spectacular, the holiday blogger quickly runs out of superlatives and is forced to spend more time consulting a thesaurus than actually writing. Thus, some retrospective opinions now I have more time to spend polishing the prose.

Firstly, travelling from north to south works better. The top of the North Island has green and gentle rolling hills that would not look out of place in the UK. The countryside is as beautiful as many places in the UK, but if you are from the UK there is a familiarity which means relatively it causes less of an impression compared the scenery further south. As one travels south, the green and rolling-ness is disrupted by the geothermal activities (grass does not seem to thrive around boiling mud pools and sulphur vents!) and even after the green returns, every view is dominated by an active volcano or a lake formed as a volcanic crater.

At the top of the South Island, as we journeyed in-land, the hills from being “pointy” in shape to having odd-shaped bumps which stuck out at all angles (sadly no photos!). Slowly the green and grassy bumps evolved into brown rocky outcrops, the verticals began to soar rather than merely tower and then gradually we were surrounded by proper rocky snow-capped mountains! I have described it here in a few sentences, but in reality it was a gradual change that we observed over 2-3 days of driving and simply could not be captured on (digital) film.

The other thing that was striking about the Southern Alps was how the flat the surrounding plains are and how quickly the mountains rise at the edges. While the elevation slowly increased as we travelled South, once we were on the plains the mountains seemed to rise up very sharply from the edges with no gentle foothills to obstruct your view of the mountains’ majesty.

In the course of three weeks in New Zealand I took over 600 photos which is far too many to post to the web so I have been ruthlessly reviewing, editing and cropping down to only the real highlights. This takes a lot of time so I thought I would start publishing the highlights so far, and will update this blog post as each new album is posted:

• Auckland and Paihia
• Rotorua and Wellington
• Tongariro Alpine Crossing
• Taupo to Picton
• Queen Charlotte Track
• Abel Tasman and Kaikoura
• Mackenzie Country
• Doubtful Sound
• Catlins Coast and Akaroa

And that’s all folks – no more photos for this year!

Glowing review of a “make my files available everywhere” service called Dropbox. (Via Ranchero.com.)

…for the wrong reasons. It Died is a site which tracks the shutdown of web sites offering “Software-as-a-Service”. (Via Daring Fireball.)

Fiordland is a remote area in the South West corner of New Zealand’s South Island. It has high mountains and deep glacier-cut valleys which were subsequently flooded by the rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice-age. When they were first discovered by Europeans at the beginning of the 19th century they were assumed to be “Sounds” (valleys cut by rivers and flooded) as the Norwegian term “fjord” or “fiord” was unknown at that time. The most well known NZ fiord is “Milford Sound” since it is the only one accessible by road, but for this trip we decided to do something a little bit different and booked ourselves on an overnight cruise on Doubtful Sound.

Read the rest of this entry »

We arrived in Kaikoura at lunchtime on Saturday but sadly the conditions at sea were too rough to allow us to see, let alone swim with, any dolphins so we had to rebook for the following morning. Rosie loved it, but I am apparently not dolphin playmate material and they didn’t take much interest in me—I actually found watching their antics from the surface more interesting as these completely wild dolphins leapt from the water and did somersaults just for fun; under the water they just swam by me… Oh well, Rosie claims she made several dolphin friends so I think she enjoyed it enough for both of us.

After a couple of gentle days exploring Wellington’s excellent Te Papa museum and the Marlborough wine region, it was time to hit some more areas of amazing natural beauty.

First was a day hiking part of the Queen Charlotte Track. We started at Ship Cove, a picturesque spot which Captain Cook visited five times over the course of his three voyages to NZ. The area has never been farmed or forested so remains almost unchanged in appearance since Cook’s visit.

After five hours of walking through bush with fantastic views of the Queen Charlotte Sound (see photo), our return to Picton was via water taxi. This proved to be almost better than the walk as each of its three stops took us into another lush green bay lit up by sunshine sparkling off the clear water, and we even saw a pod of dusky dolphins playing in the sunshine! (Full photo album.)

Despite our long walk, the following morning we were due to be in Abel Tasman National Park so that evening we drove to Motueka. Abel Tasman is another coastal beauty spot, but unlike the QCT it has soft rock which leads to long golden sandy beaches and interesting rock formations around the headland.

Again we were taken out to one of the best bits of the park by watertaxi, but then our morning was spent sea kayaking–a good way to fully appreciate the coast line! We actually started the morning by kayaking off shore to a small island sea colony. This was unfortunately pretty dull, and the paddle back felt like a bit of a hard slog (especially when my paddling partner needed to rest every couple of strokes!) and I was glad when we pulled up onto a beach for lunch.

After lunch we set off for another walk through the bush. Unfortunately there were not quite enough viewpoints though and so we only caught fleeting glimpses of the sandy coves and turquoise lagoons below–we thought afterwards that perhaps a full day of kayaking would have been a better plan as in a way the QCT had been a more interesting walk, and also had fewer people and more birds, including some flightless Wekas which are unique to NZ!

Today we took a break from our hectic schedule of adventuring to enjoy a more sedate kiwi experience: wine tasting.

We learned:
* 35 years ago the main industry in the area was sheep and fruit;
* the vines are extensively pruned to ensure very high quality (and this low grape yields);
* 85% of the wine is exported.

The last two explain why we found that even here, local wine cannot be purchased for under £8. In fact the reasonably priced wine here is the same as at home: Aussie and Chilean!

We visited five wineries, of which my favourite was “Spy Valley” (the name is due to the US listening post located in the same valley!) because as well as their cool name and morse code adorned labels, I really enjoyed all of their wines, from the sparkling white (codename “Echelon”) to the soft Merlot which is not easy to grow in this area but they produce anyway because the vinters are big Merlot fans themselves.

There must be something in the air down here as completely spontaneously, Rosie (who claims she doesn’t like heights) decided to jump out of a plane! Apparently she was overcome by the outstanding beauty of Lake Taupo on a gloriously sunny day…

Here’s a photo of her about to board the plane, she even came back in one piece!