So today, instead of caving to Rosa’s request to watch some more TV, I suggested we do something creative together instead. I am not usually very good at making suggestions like this, sadly.

It was also about time we tried that copy of Frameographer I had bought in a moment a couple months ago. This is a rather nice app for making stop motion animation from the guys who created the Glif iPhone tripod clip thing.

Rosa came up with an idea for a movie; arranged the characters and set; took most of the photos; and after Frameographer did its stuff she sat beside me and dictated the choices of titles, music, and sound effects in iMovie.

Here’s the result:

A good couple hours of fun in there, and one very pleased small auteur at the end of it.

The weather has suddenly gone all settled and warm. This is perhaps not unusual for autumn, but given the crap summer most parts of the country have had for the past few months this is somewhat unexpected. In fact the forecast for Easter was so dire that it played a reasonable part in us deciding to hunker down at home.

Anyway, yesterday being another in this run of fine, fine days, I thought we should all trek into the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, or Zealandia as it is now called. This, for those unfamiliar with it, is a large area of wooded valley not far from the centre of Wellington that has been enclosed by a rat/cat/possum/stoat-proof fence, with lots of fairly rare native species “liberated” inside. We’re members, but we never remember to visit often enough.

This time, I really wanted to get further up the valley into some areas I had not been to before, and also to see if I could spot and take photos of the resident falcons (Kārearea).

The first of these objectives was reached, but not the second. Lots of good exercise, and many not so good photos were taken…

Bear with me while I horribly and lengthily belabour an analogy.

The Magic Book Shop

Imagine a magic book shop that delivers. Imagine that if you want to read something, you just announce your request into the air, and the book appears on your bookshelf.

Of course, this still costs money, but the books are cheaper than those from your regular book shop, and the selection is an order of magnitude better.

Sounds great, doesn’t it. You’d quite like to live near a book shop like that.

But what if this book shop only sells books that are a certain shape? It’s a shape that is fitted to a little book case the shop has individually made and sold to you.

Well, you say, that’s OK: although I did have to pay quite a lot for my special book case, it is magically small and portable, and all these books can be with me all the time. So what if they are a special shape?

Well then… what if you wanted to lend your new favourite book to your friend? Great! Except that, while your friend also bought their own book case from the magic book shop, theirs had its own peculiar shape and your book wouldn’t fit on it.

So, no more lending your favourite books to them, nor they you. Everyone has to buy their own from this book shop. And don’t even think about going to a second hand book shop, or borrowing from the Public Library: their books won’t fit in your book case either.

Still like this book shop?

Worse, what if you buy a book from this book shop, only to find that at some point later the shop has reached into your house and removed the book from your special book case, casting it down the memory hole? It’s magic, right? Anything can happen.

A bit worrying though, eh.

Ignoring all that

So yeah, I figured it would be good to get a special book case Kindle.

I am a sad, sad gadget-loving geek. I knew the issues but I did it anyway.

I made excuses. I figured that it might be a good way to get hold of various textbooks I need for work; and also to provide a bit of convenient holiday reading and the occasional free classic from Project Gutenberg.

I got a no-ads Wifi Kindle 4, as per Marco’s review. And… I like it. A lot.

It turns out that the Kindle is simply superb for consumption of the linear narrative: any book that you can start on page one and read to the end without breaking out to refer to a map, an index, or some earlier passage, is well suited to the device.

This means that your holiday reading is well looked after; and the low power requirements of the e-ink display means you’ll almost never run out of battery when you need it. It’s the perfect travel companion. SOLD!

It’s not so good for those textbooks though. Mostly when I’m trying to learn something new I have to re-read chapters, jump back and forward to refer to facts and concepts mentioned earlier, and generally consume the thing in a non-linear fashion. You just can’t do that easily on a Kindle.

There are exceptions: the eBooks generated by Instapaper are wonderful examples and come with an easy-to-navigate table of contents and the ability to easily jump backwards and forwards between “articles” – but most electronic textbooks I’ve bought so far don’t use this kind of formatting. (Ironically, a very useful and completely free textbook does: Pro Git.)

Perhaps advances in technology will improve upon this aspect of current e-reader technology and make riffling, referring, and re-reading through an eBook just as simple and convenient as the paper version. But maybe not.

So what to do?

Thinking a bit wider, I am a little worried by where this eBook thing is going. The Amazon ecosystem is incredibly tempting, but it comes with real restrictions.

I have made a point of stripping the rights management off all the Amazon books I buy, so that they can be used on any other eBook reader I might purchase in future.

That’s good for me, but it doesn’t alter the bigger problem. By supporting the Amazon ecosystem with my cash, I am also reducing the viability of my friendly local paper book store. Over time, collectively me and all the other eBook buyers will affect the rest of the community through a reduced paper book availability as local book shops either disappear or stick to higher volume titles.

As more of the book market moves to electronic formats, the ability to read and gain new knowledge and enjoyment from books becomes dependent on being able to afford a proprietary book reader and the associated technologies required to access the electronic book shop.

And that’s a couple of gatekeepers that we don’t have now when we pick up a paperback, or buy a book for the kids’ birthdays.

So I’m definitely conflicted about the whole thing. It’s a great device. But I’m thinking I’ll just use the Kindle for the kind of shitty holiday fiction I’d be too ashamed to buy; reading the classics; occasional textbooks; and for Instapaper.

Books that I want to own and keep and re-read: those I’ll continue to buy on paper.

Textpattern is a great PHP/MySQL based CMS for blogs and small websites. It’s small, elegant, fast, and well featured… and also sufficiently obscure that it does not attract the kind of black hat attention that Wordpress does. I’ve been using it on my website for over six years now.

Recently though I decided to switch my blog to possibly the most popular of the emerging “baked” blog solutions: Octopress. At the same time, I decided to switch domains, just to make things more interesting. (My other two Textpattern sites will remain as they are: it’s still a fantastic light-weight CMS solution for me.)

The following describes how I did it.

…At a new URL, but with same old content.

I have lots of reasons, not all of them well-founded, for doing what amounts to a geographical from my old site.

But I’ve migrated everything over from the old place; most of the old postings (even the crap ones – and there’s lots of those); most of the comments (even some of the spam ones, I now notice); and wrapped it in a very purple variant of the default Octopress theme.

All that technical mucking about was quite fun. What now?

I know it wouldn’t be top of the list for most people, but I’m a bit pleased about the new walking route to work I figured out last week. (In case you haven’t noticed, I lead a quiet life.)

I live in the suburbia behind Te Ahumairangi Hill, and to get into town I must traverse the hill’s shoulders (over the top is doable, but not paved). For the last ten years I’ve walked around the southern end of the hill; and this has been from where I’ve taken this series of 211 photos over the past seven.

But it turns out that my new away, around the northern shoulder of the hill, is about 500m shorter, and quite a bit faster with a long shallow gradient that can be walked down at speed. And I get to look at a whole new bunch of things on the way.

This morning I had to go to work a little earlier than usual and the sun was just over the eastern rim of the harbour. I was rewarded with this photo down Wade Street:

And closer to town there was this rather large chap:

It (probably a “she”, but I’m not sure) had been sitting on a pole beside the Molesworth Street overbridge most of last week, the only nearby cover a patch of low and likely inedible conifers, and I meant to shift it into the undergrowth before it got eaten or otherwise killed.

Each day I would note the beast but keep walking on, fixated on reaching work in time (why, I know not). Usually a couple hundred metres down Molesworth Street I’d think I should have rescued it but of course by then I was never going to circle back for it.

Even after the weekend’s storm I was surprised to see it was still there today, so I picked it off and carried it into the nearest patch of likely looking native plants, its legs slow windmilling until it found purchase on a broadleaf.

This was, I am pleased to report, the highlight of my working day.

Predictably, nothing much has eventuated thus far from my firm post-Webstock resolution. Whatever.

Even more predictably, I am now considering moving this blog to a new platform. I have my eye on Octopress.

Octopress is a set of Ruby scripts that more or less takes a folder of text files, in Textile or Markdown, on your local machine, converts them to HTML, wraps them in a nice template and uploads them – via rsync – to your webserver. There’s no PHP, no CGI; nothing has to run on your webserver. All the heavy lifting is done locally. This makes it pretty secure as blog platforms go, and better yet, it lets the webserver get on with very very quickly serving static files.

But the disadvantages of this approach over more popular systems such as Wordpress and Textpattern are many:

• With no PHP or similar server side scripting available, there’s no built in commenting system. While Octopress does integrate easily with Disqus, a pretty nifty third-party comment service, I’d still be ceding content to a place not owned by me.
  • On the other hand, I get very few comments these days.

• There’s no built in image processing services: no automatic thumbnail generation and the like.
  • On the other hand, I hardly ever need that kind of thing – I tend to use Flickr (though I want to pull back a bit there too).

• Customisation of the built-in templates will take a bit of learning – there appears to be yet another abstraction on top of the CSS. The existing template is very nice, but as most installs seem to have kept it unchanged, my install will need to be modified significantly if my blog is not to look like almost every other Octopress install.

• Importing of old postings from my existing blog is proving… interesting. I am not a Ruby hacker but I may have be soon.
  • On the other hand, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

• Exporting of old comments from my existing blog to Disqus, and association of these with their equivalent new postings in the Octopress version of the blog, just may not be possible at all. This is actually a bit of an issue as some postings, such as this one and this one, have built up little communities there in the comments which are still useful to their participants even to this day. I may be able to torture Textpattern, Octopress and Disqus into working together, but I am not at all sure I can.
  • On the other hand, how responsible do I need to feel here?

• Matching of the URLs between the systems also may not be possible. This means that any bookmarks or links to existing pages will be broken (and this affects me more than anyone else, given how much cross-linking between blog postings I do).
  • On the other hand… do I care? Google will re-index everything within a few days; and I can emplace URL redirects for the more popular pages, just as I did when I switched from Movable Type to Textpattern all those years ago.

• The local heavy lifting required for large Octopress blogs can be quite intense. Apparently a few hundred postings can easily take several minutes to rake generate and rake deploy, so there’s no instant posting/instant feedback like one gets used to with Textpattern or Wordpress.
  • On the other hand, this is an unavoidable consequence of the technology. (And ironically so – how I used to complain about Movable Type back in 2003 doing much the same thing!) There may be some workarounds available though – for example, some older content may be best placed into a static structure that Octopress (or at least, my working install of Octopress) never touches.

So why would I do this?

I’ve been thinking a lot about content ownership as it relates to the cloud and that, in general, I should never put anything onto the net that I don’t have a copy of locally.

This sounds a little pretentious in the context of what is a pretty inconsequential blog read by very few people. But it’s mine, and there’s a lot of effort tied up in here; and this remains important to me if no-one else. So having a whole lot of stuff exclusively stored in an opaque database somewhere on the internet makes me nervous.

(I mean to think some more about this – does this mean I should, for example, be saving all my tweets? Probably. Does this mean I need to think carefully about what services I use on the Internet? Always. Am I over-thinking this stuff? Yeah, most like.)

With Octopress, whatever I do starts out locally, before being upstreamed (channelling Dave Winer’s Radio Userland a little there) to the Internet. If I have to switch hosts for any reason, it’s a simple change to some text files, followed by redeployment. I like that the primary repository of my content is local (and that for added safety, I can set up a Git repository to hold the off-site backup).

So now I’m happily experimenting away, seeing if there is a way I can bend this thing to my will. And as always, it’s nice to be learning something completely new.

There’s barely a morning left as I write this, tired but now human after sleep and some coffee.

The last few days I’ve been at Webstock, whose after-party ended late last night. I went home on the bus clutching my very own giant plush Pinkie Pie (long story) and sat up later still, buzzing away. I may write about this too.

In the meantime though, I want to say this: I want to try to pull back from the Twitters and the Four Squares and all those other sharing apps. I’m reconciled to sharing – I even enjoy it… but it should really be on my terms and owned by me.

It’s not that I’m suddenly rage-quitting all that stuff, just slowing down and realising they’re a tool, not an end in themselves.

And I do want to return to this blog, which is now nearing its 10th year. It may take a little more work to express myself here, but it’s mine.

That morning has passed now. Better make some lunch.

Unusually for Wellington, today is a day of vertical rain. The sun pokes through from time to time but generally it’s a soft light, a growing light. Sadly for our tree, the sparrows have returned again this year: it is they who account for the fallen blossom, not our wind. We are lacking a tuī to take a stand and own the tree against all comers.

And I regret now the freakshow filter I put on this hastily shot iPhone photo. But here are plenty from earlier years to make up for it.

Previous springtimes:

• 22 September 2010
• 4 September 2009
• 21 September 2008
• 10 September 2006
• 11 September 2005
• 29 September 2004
• 2 October 2003
• 22 September 2002

I’ve never been much of a sports fan. This is partly related to the fact that I am terrible at every sport I ever tried except the one that involved a good deal of lying down (small-bore rifle shooting, before your mind runs away with you).

At our country primary school there were two sports available in winter: netball (for girls) and rugby (for boys). Our school was very small, and there weren’t many boys in mine and the adjacent year groups, so it was semi-compulsory to play just so a team could be fielded.

I never really enjoyed it. I was much smaller than the other boys, and my lack of speed, complete unco-ordination, and poor eyesight (I couldn’t wear my glasses playing) meant that often as not I was placed on the wing where I could trail around after everyone else without being expected to either catch the ball or pass it on, two things I was pretty hopeless at. Many games I did not even get to touch the ball, and any attempt of mine at tackling the opposition usually resulted, at best, in being shrugged off like an errant piece of dandruff.

On the plus side, there was always the pie and fizzy drink at the end of the match. But the attractions of these were not enough, and I refused to play in my last year at primary school¹. The next year, at boarding school, despite the plethora of new choices available, I again refused to play any winter sport. At one point I was threatened with the cane unless I took one up (they were very interested in keeping the boys gainfully occupied at the weekends: sport on Saturday mornings, church on Sunday mornings) but by keeping a very low profile out of view of the masters I was able to quietly read books instead.

That year was the year of the Springbok Tour. A prefect, the same one who in the interests of science had once attempted to fold me into a small cupboard above a wardrobe², now visited each boy in turn, asking them pointedly as to what their views on the tour were. There was little doubt as to what the correct answer should be.

At that time I had no view (and at the age of 13, why should I have had?), but I resented being forced to have one under threat of violence. So then, and more so over the next few years as I came to an understanding of what happened in 1981, rugby became associated for me with fascistic compulsion, mindless violence, racism and societal conflict. I came to hate it.

That was a long long time ago. It became OK to like rugby again, after the so-called Baby Blacks won the inaugural 1987 World Cup (even though over half of the players in that team had been on the rebel tour to South Africa the previous year). And I have to admit to having enjoyed watching the occasional game over the years: many sports, when played at the highest level, can have a beauty and power that transcends their form, and rugby is no exception to this.

But even today I find myself disinclined to be interested in the upcoming Rugby World Cup, in a way that never happens for any of the other quadrennial sporting events that pass by. I am disturbed by schools having Rugby World Cup teaching programs; school holidays being moved to accommodate it; the government having a minister for it; sponsors trumping the rights of free speech; ad campaigns of unprecedented, though amusing, idiocy; tenuous but intrusive product associations; endless parade of “Official Providers” of this or that; the expense of the tickets; and the general implied assumption that all New Zealanders love the game and should be so jolly pleased to have the Cup here (and stop your moaning: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things).

I feel like I have to give a shit: I am writing a blog posting; I am thinking about it. I don’t want to.

Countering all this long and complicated personal history, baggage, and (I admit it) general whining though: maybe I should just lighten the fuck up. Rebecca and the girls carry none of this and are more interested in rugby and the tournament generally than I am. For example, Bella proudly told me the other day that she had asked to play in a “tackle-rugby” tournament for her school³; while Rosa, out of the blue, explained to me who her favourite All Black is (Conrad Smith). Their excitement is uncomplicated and true, though perhaps borne of the hype that surrounds us like air at the moment.

Why should I be the wet blanket then? The Rugby World Cup is an Event, the likes of which we shall not see here again. Soak up the atmosphere; join the party; submit to the inevitable. Don’t think, enjoy.

So I relented and booked tickets for us all to see a game⁴; and the girls are very excited at the prospect.

I’m a little bit excited too. Just a little, even though I don’t really want to be. I will probably summon the kind of coolly logical interest that, with a bit of infectious situational enthusiasm supplied by others, leads me to follow the Football World Cup every four years with a degree of closeness. We’ll have fun at the game; we’ll stick up a wall chart and follow the teams we saw on the pitch. I may even come to know enough to have a passable conversation about rugby at work.

Let RWC Inc. chalk up a small victory.

And though I may be crushed, I am not completely bowed. A small piece remains mine. Yes: nothing, ever, will make me like Heineken.

¹ The one exception to this was in a weight-graded tournament – probably the only time I ever enjoyed playing the game – where I, at 12, was captain of a team of 9 year olds, and for once better co-ordinated, faster, and harder than my team mates and opposition. Not that it resulted in much winning, of course.

² I did not fit: my head stuck out. Even slamming the cupboard door repeatedly did not seem to alter this fact. (But I should also say that this sort of thing was pretty rare and in especially in later times, I was no innocent victim either. This was nothing like the Rugby School of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.)

³ Although the tournament is weight-graded, she has not played any contact sport before. And she’ll be playing against a whole lot of boys who have. I suspect she may have an idealised view of what all this will involve, in which case participation may prove traumatic. But I would be happy to be proved wrong.

⁴ Though not one with New Zealand in it as that would have been too expensive: we’re off to Tonga vs. France.