Kindles, Text to Speech and Audiobooks, oh my!

Cory Doctorow wrote this in the Guardian (and turned it into a Tweet, which is how I found it), which made me think about four things at the same time -

1: That settles the Kindle issue. I'm not buying one. If I own technology, it does as I say and does not run home to mama whenever mama decides it should.

2: I'm not actually surprised that Amazon have revealed they can do this. At some point in the development of the Kindle, after the boffins and geeks had worked out what it could do they let lawyers loose on it. The lawyers saw what the Kindle could do and then proceeded to work out what it could do that they could end up in litigation over. Once they knew that, they very sensibly advised the boffins to install an "off" switch.

3: Now that we know the Kindle can have a feature disabled (by code in the e-book, I assume) it's a matter of time before someone hacks it*(. Were e-book readers interesting before?

4: Audiobooks are a separate product, at least in my mind. So someone, somewhere, is potentially misjudging the audience. If, or generally when, I buy an audiobook it's because I want to hear the book being read by a specific voice. After an appalling experience with an audio version of "Ender's Game" I was reconverted by the performance - best way to describe it - of "Coraline" by Neil Gaiman. How cool, to have the author read his own work?

I would pay really quite a lot of money to hear an interesting voice read an interesting book, but I will pay no money to have a machine read to me. I want the performance, not just the sound.

Now, admittedly, there is something to be addressed about some people being unable to read a print edition, for whatever reason, and therefore buying an audiobook as a replacement for a print copy or e-edition; the kindle would cut down on that market. Audiobooks tend to be more expensive because of production costs, one assumes.



*wait...let me leap to a conclusion. If the Kindle runs code that interacts with hardware, and that code is based in the e-book, how long before the e-book reader becomes a target for malware of some kind? What sort of malware would a Kindle attract? Adware, one assumes, or if the Kindle connects with a PC it might be an vector for getting code past the normal defenses.

And if i've thought of it, I'm sure someone else will.

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What If? - Pinecones.

A comment engendered by Lucy's post "Yesterday" -

- Pinecones do not exist for us to observe them, we exist so that there can be pinecones. The job of humanity is to observe. We do not own, we are not the master of the world, we are the servant of What Might Be, making the world moment to moment so that all the wonderful things that might be in it have a chance to exist.

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Shoe Disaster

I've known it was coming for a while, but today my two pairs of much loved work shoes - suede slip on things that cost about $10 each, both died. They were starting to go at the back, the uppers parting company with the soles, and that's exactly what happened in it's entirety today. To both.

I have a pair of emergency work shoes, and a pair of desert combat boots, but these are stop-gaps. I needed to bite the bullet and buy some shoes. I chose to do so online. Thanks to a remarkably unstable wifi connection, it took an hour.

I noticed a couple of things: for a desert, Arizona is remarkably keen on boating and deck shoes. It's also keen on "board shoes" which appear to be for surfing in. There are lakes here, where one could yacht if one so chose, but there is no surf, no snow. Perhaps these are skateboarding shoes.

Secondly, there are no interesting shoes for men. This is a rant in itself, one that I shall post another time, but the really interesting thing is that the shoes there are have either staid and sensible names or really aggressive and macho ones.

Sometimes, they are named after cars.

They are also expensive. Very expensive. So I have bought cheap shoes, because 'pon my return to the UK I shall be buying Docs and shoes made of concrete to keep out the weather. However, American shoes are marketed on the assumption that all men in America have laughably small genitalia.

Seriously! Marketers the country over think that American men all need help asserting their masculinity. This is why the cars are big, why some of them are called "muscle cars" (and it ain't the biceps they're talking about), why the handguns come in everything from .22 to fifty-cal (and anything less than a .38 is "for girls"), why the steaks are huge and why the beer is weak (so you can drink lots and look like a Real Man without killing your liver in one night).

I know a few American men. Not that well, because I'm English and therefore after seven years I am only half way through the "casual nods at a distance" process of getting to know people, but well enough to know that by any sensible measure of manliness they're definitely owners of a Y chromosome. They aren't Hemmingway, but then who is?

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Rend! Tear! Fold! Spindle!

I have been sans-internet since this afternoon.

It's back now, because someone nearby is incautious with their very slow, very weak wireless connection. If I knew how to leave a note saying "dude, WEP key at least!" I would.

I think I have entirely failed to tweet, because when everything fell over I was setting up Twitter. Conspiracy? I think it might be.

On the plus side, I cooked roast beef. On the minus side, I have been moping. I am going to flip this thing over to Ubuntu, listen to some Doctor Who audio and attempt to be Zen - although we already know I am to Zen what Prince Phillip is to International Diplomacy.

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Damn you, BSG, Damn you!!!

I can't get "All Along The Watchtower" out of my head.




...this was possibly more a Tweet than a blog entry.

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The Lifeboat

I'm in an odd place; one of the things I am planning to do this year is return to the UK and find somewhere to live. This means that I need to think about packing and the extortionate costs of shipping goods across the Atlantic. If I were more Zen about this, I would be casting aside as many posessions as possible and just turning up with a suitcase.

It turns out I am less than Zen, because of my ongoing book addiction.

While I have steeled myself to not buying any more new books, something that grates at my nerves daily, and while I have steeled myself against buying new things generally, I still have a small collection - perhaps a couple of dozen books - that I cannot bear to be parted from. I now face the unhappy choice of deciding which ones come with me...and which ones don't.

I toyed, briefly, with the idea of putting up some kind of poll and letting other people help me decide. Then I decided that would be far too callous. These aren't people, these are books, they're important. Also, I can't ask people to decide on something so personal unless they have the same relationship with said books that I do. So it really comes down to me making the final cut.

This is an aspect of the final move I am really not looking forward to. It's odd, too, because of all the roots I should have put down in the last seven years this is the biggest wrench. This is the one that's difficult. Moreover, it's like a little window into mortality. At some time in the next...ooo...seventy* years or so someone else is going to have to go through my book collection and sort out what they want to keep, and what to throw away, and probably make little "tsk tsk" noises at my fondness for British fantasists with comedic tendencies. My bet is that they will box up the dusty tomes and ship them off to an Old Folks Home where people still enjoy print as opposed to reading things via direct retina projection (ooo - can we call the interface the iBall?) or having them channelled directly into their CNS.














*a wildly optimistic ballpark figure. If I get through today alive I will be impressed.

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The End of Battlestar Galactica

For the record, I enjoyed it.

I had to watch it, you don't miss that sort of thing. I wanted to find out how it was all going to be resolved.

Satisfyingly, I think.

Although I have no doubt that somewhere in the next six months to a year someone will point out to Ronald D Moore that all of that ending has happened before, most recently I think by Douglas Adams.

All is forgiven, though, for the fate of Starbuck (he's already catching a lot of flack for that, and I think Moore should shrug it off and keep going) because sometimes you don't get all the answers, and that's OK.

Look, if Battlestar can borrow an ending from DNA, I can borrow a line from Moffat.

Plus, the show wins for the final look at the eventual fate of the colonials and playing out with the tune that has haunted the series for a while.

On that note, it's probably time I called it a day here too. I think I would prefer to play out, like H2G2, with Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World."

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glædmód

It's Olde Englishe and it means "cheerful".

I thought it was worth recording here because the way it's constructed makes me see glædmód as "glad mode".

Which I like.

Glad Mode. I have engaged it.

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I never know how to deal with things like this, hence the rambly title

Last night, my old house was on the news.

Tangentally.

Across the road from us lived an older couple; he was retired and not in the best of health, but he - let's call him Fred - had an interest in reading and was generally a very genial man. My soon-to-be- Ex and I had dinner with them, chatted often. Fred's wife is a nurse, so we never saw much of her.

Last night, their house burned down. Fred was inside it at the time.

The house is just gone and the local news said that the Fire Department were suspicious about the cause of the blaze, the severity of it.

Fred, and I've changed his name because no one who reads this could possibly know him and I don't want the family to find this on Google somewhere, was a nice guy. He read a lot, he chatted endlessly but well, he had a lot to share. He was a good neighbor. I have missed him, in small ways, since I moved out.

My thoughts are, of course, with his wife; she has lost more than I can comprehend and I wish there was something I could do, something meaningful, that would help. Blogging seems so empty and futile, but, I think it needs saying: he was a good man, a good neighbor and I shall miss him.

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Teach Me 'ow To Be King?

According to this it seems that NBC are planning to show Merlin, the BBC Merlin, in a primetime-ish slot.

This could be interesting. I wonder if the suits have seen it, or whether they are hoping it will turn out to be a bit Harry Potter, rather than a bit homoerotic.

I still haven't seen it, so the homoerotic comments stem from the comments of people who have. Either way, it's nice to see the Yanks catching on to "just show the Brit version!", so perhaps Life on Mars didn't die for nothing.

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Retrospectively speaking

There's a lot to catch up on, I'm sure.

Firstly, I has New Blog called "Jingoistic Claptrap" which I will post stuff on from time to time that don't belong here. It will be of a fictional and possibly even satirical nature.

Second, having decided to take a break from a few sites and recover my enthusiasm, it turns out that I don't miss most of them. I'm a little bit worried about that. If I retreat any further into my shell, I will end up being all shell.

Thirdly, I still don't have anything interesting to say.

Which isn't strictly true. The looming divorce isn't as looming as it was due to a shortfall in finance - divorce being costly - but is still on course for this year. I want out, just to get it over with and be able to move on. It won't be pleasant to be a statistic, being one of the 50%, but I can live with it. I've been a statistic all my life. I'll continue to be one after I'm dead, somewhere, which is an odd sort of immortality.

I haven't written anything worth reading in far too long, which is really ticking me off. But starting 16th March I have a week off and have decided to see if I can't re-fire the creative bits by actually finishing that Time War stuff, and one or two other things I had in the works.

I'm reasonably enthused about that. As much as I am enthused about anything at the moment.

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I Think I Might Be Evil.

Only "might", because having seen the opportunity to do something potentially very evil I restrained myself.

One of the blogs I follow is currently displaying a post from a self-admittedly germophobe complaining about the preponderance of colds and the like.

Seeing this, the first thing that occurred to me was "I could sabotage this poor fool by telling him all about his keyboard". The thing about keyboards is that even if you take reasonable care to keep them clean, they still collect all the Yuck that positively sleets off the human body. And then Things grow in it. Terrible, infectious things that then plaster themselves to your skin just waiting for the slightest nick, the merest puncture, to facilitate their invasion and your transformation into a mass of suppurating agony.

Being part Shoggoth* I'm largely immune to human diseases, so the subject is one that provides much entertainment for me. A more evil chuckle still would have arisen from well meaning but deliberately misleading advice on the art of cleaning and disinfecting a keyboard. There are cleaning products available that will devour the average keyboard, leaving the poor blogger with a clean but non-functional input device and no way to express his or her rage.

I didn't, though.

For Good to triumph all that is required is for Evil men to feel a bit "meh".






*it's complicated, and you shouldn't ask because the answers will blast your sanity. It should be enough that you remember my middle names are "Squamous" and "Rugose". This is also why people sometimes think I'm Irish.

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Mr. Ebert, what have you done?

Roger Ebert is a greatly respected movie critic, an erudite chap and, more to the point, a good read.

He transgressed one of the Laws of the Internet recently. Thou Shalt Not Mock The Nerds is a good rule to operate by when online - not that you have anything to fear, but if you Mock then you can expect to have your inbox slowly fill up with hate-spam. There is no rage like nerd-rage.

Mr. Ebert has contributed to the stereotyping of a section of society that he feels are lacking.
The belittling of a social group because of a choice of self identification is wrong. If the group he were talking down to had made public their sexual, gender, ethnic or religious identity, we'd be looking at a lawsuit. Not from the individual, but surely a pressure group would have stepped in by now.

Ebert feels safe because fandom doesn't have teeth. IGetting fans to agree on anything is like nailing jelly to a ceiling.

If I were feeling spikey, I would suggest that writing a deft, pithy, entertaining review isn't a license to Other people.

Which is what he's attempted to do.

Suggesting that fans are in a cultural "dead end", that their Otaku collection and mastery of trivia, and their social ineptness makes them lesser. No one has to worry about offending them, they have no pride, they have no lives and to stand up to answer back is to invite ridicule. As long as everyone is reasonably sure it's not a variant of Autism.

He says that being a Fan these days is more about celebrating yourself, and that fans talk in quotes.

When Fandom talks in scripts, talks in quotes, what's really happening? Ebert talks about not having to ad-lib, but how much human conversation is ad-lib anyway?

Not much.

Think about the conversations you've had today. When we meet an acquaintance, what happens? We ask how that person is. If you're interested in Hacking the language when someone asks you how you are, tell them. Go for it. They probably didn't want to know about your incipient cold or the state of your love life - and oh god, the looks you get when you do enumerate the things that are wrong with you. You strayed from the path and now the conversation is deep in bandit country.

Conversation is a dying art, we're told, but it's really important to know who you're talking to and what it's safe to talk about so that you keep that vital social acceptance. It's built into Americans in High School, I imagine the same thing happens in other cultures at roughly the same time - as you construct your identity during your teens you also set patterns that will follow you for the rest of your life, patterns that are comfortable and safe, patterns that allow you to ask the question "are you like me?" of everyone you meet. If you want to call it tribal, or clannish, you can.

So why is it bad?

It's not. It's low tech RFID, social GPS. The main reason that Roger doesn't like 'em is that he doesn't like the source. If you can weave Kipling, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Russell, Marx (Karl and Groucho alike) into conversation you're Educated. You might even be Urbane and Witty. But dropping Lucas, Roddenberry, Spielberg, Snyder, Davies or Moffat, Moore or Whedon into a conversation makes you a hopeless fanboy, one of the Morlocks.

I have the distinct impression that this isn't going to change. A prejudice is hard to shake off, and by the time the works of people like Alan Moore are being spoken of in the same context as Wells and Verne, Roger Ebert and I will probably be long dead.

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