Fifteen Miles to Electricity

The broadband at Yateley Baptist hasn't been working very well for the last couple of months.  It broke down, stayed down for a fortnight or so, got fixed, stayed working for two or three weeks, and then broke down again - and it's been down for about three weeks now.  An engineer's coming on Tuesday.

Not very helpful when you've got sermon recordings to upload, or if you'd been planning to screen World Cup matches with free food as a getting-to-know-people-in-the-community exercise, and the screening was going to be done via the web.

However, I had an email last night which offers a timely dose of perspective:

I've recently been helping to prepare some booklets for printing, on behalf of YBC's missionary Ian, who makes radio programmes in French (mainly for broadcast into Francophone Africa) and writes up summaries of the teaching in booklet form.  It's an interesting exercise when I barely speak a word of French, although I can sometimes trace a few words back through their Greek or Latin roots and get some idea of what a sentence might be saying.  But the latest instalment gets even more interesting - it's not the French version (already published), but a translation into Lobiri.  I think I might have heard the name once or twice before the book turned up, but I've got to admit I haven't even got round to Googling it to find out what part of Africa it comes from!  The script uses some Latin characters, but also several others that don't appear in English and don't look much like Greek or Cyrillic, so I can't even guess at what's being said - I have to take it on trust that it's a straight translation of Ian's writing and doesn't contain any raving heresies.

I've been sent the translation in PDF format and it's proving difficult to transfer back into Word for processing, so I've asked if I could have a .doc version.  Then the reply came back, and this is where I return to my original point: apparently my request should be possible - except it might take a while, because the guy who translated the book into Lobiri doesn't have electricity.  The nearest town with electricity - never mind the Internet, just basic electricity - is at the other end of 25km's (or 15 miles') worth of dirt tracks.

Which makes my little gripe with BT Broadband seem a bit puny, doesn't it?


- The Colclough

Notice is Hereby Served

...of my intention to quit Facebook.

Because I can, is why.  If I can live without Facebook, I can live without it.  If I can't, then there's a problem, and I need to fix it - by the cold turkey route if necessary.

TBH, I think I can live without it quite easily.  I did for years and years, and I only got roped in to having an account because people at FCOT wanted to use it for coordinating college-related meetings and stuff.  So, now that FCOT is over, I've decided that for the sake of maintaining my individuality, free will and principles (yes, those), I shall deactivate my account.  The aforementioned principles are mostly to do with the fact that FB is a massive time-waster.  The vast majority of what goes on FB is a load of *beep*.

I've got a two-week timeframe.  There's a Root Hill reunion a week on Saturday, which is being coordinated via FB, but once that's over I shall quit.

If you want a more philosophical-sounding reason, then how about this: because your life should be more than the sum of your websites.  If you find yourself at the point where you couldn't survive without any given site, then that site has become too dominant over you, and you need to get rid of it.  I'm not ditching FB because I think it has come to that, but to prove that it hasn't.

I've just shut down my account on another site too.  That was Tailcast, past tense.

It began life as a social-networking-esque thing with an artistic slant.  The focus was on writing, drawing, painting, photography and music, as opposed to the "here's a pointless update on the banal stuff I did today" ethos of most Facebook posts.  A search through my old emails tells me that I joined on the 24^th of May, 2008 – nearly two and a half years ago.  That sounds about right.  It feels like a long time.

While I was there, I uploaded 81 visual pieces, and 27 written.  In total, over 100 expressions of myself, including some of the most personal and intimate things I have ever published.  The written pieces included my first blog (A White Horizon is my second).

But something went wrong – the seeds of it snuck in by the back door a long time ago, like so: “wouldn’t it be cool if we had a ‘shop’ feature, where you could buy cards and wall art and stuff featuring the artwork uploaded to TC?”  Well, fair enough.  But as time went by, and the site kept getting more and more polished, there was a gradual but definite shift in emphasis, away from the community spirit that made Tailcast what it was in the old days, and towards commercialisation.  At the beginning of September, I got an email telling me that any artwork which did not meet the minimum resolution for creating products would be forcibly set to ‘private’, effectively removing it from my profile unless I put in the effort to re-upload newer, higher-resolution versions.  Well, out of my 81 visual uploads, a mere 7 were deemed high-res enough to stay online, and the other 74 have vanished from my profile without a trace (unless I log in and click ‘manage profile’ – then I can see them, but they’re greyed out).

Now, having the option to make cards and wall art and stuff is all very well and good, but most of the time that’s not what people want to do.  Mostly, people just want to look at stuff.  I, for one, just wanted to look at stuff, not stick it on a mug.  And for the webmasters to make the unilateral decision that “low-res artwork is unworthy to stay online, even just for looking at” seems to me like shooting themselves in the foot.

I had been gradually (and unintentionally) drifting away from Tailcast anyhow, but that bizarre and unfriendly decision was the final nail in the coffin for my membership.   As of a couple of weeks ago, I have gone through all of my written material on the site and copied it all to my hard disk for posterity – didn’t need to do so for the visual stuff, as that was all on my HDD already – and about half an hour ago, I finally shut down my account.

Strange thing is, the whole website went HTTP 404 on me when I was about three-quarters of the way through copying everything.  It’s almost like the servers could sense my intention, and were making a last-ditch effort to stop me leaving.  But it didn’t work.  The site came back from the ashes, and I continued my exit procedure.

So, that's over.  And soon, FB will be too.  Not that I'm completely parting company with the internet, mind you - I've still got email, this blog, and my YouTube channel, among other things.  I'm just pruning off the sites that aren't contributing anything worthwhile to my life.

And who knows what else I'll come across later.  Watch this space!

- The Colclough

Prepare to be Addled...

I'd like, if I may, to introduce you to my latest bizarre and impractical invention.

It's a webcomic.

Depending how much of my previous output you've read, you might not think 'another comic strip' sounds like that big a deal - what with me having already written Grace and Caffeine, Cylinder and Miserable, and others.

Well... my friend Tim also writes webcomics, primarily Brothers in Shells, which is getting close to its first anniversary.  And besides all the cartoons, we and Tim's sister Sarah have also made various short films, and have another private fictional universe called Universe XGT, the contents of which are almost entirely unpublished.  So the three of us decided over the summer to start a new cross-continuity webcomic, in which we would throw together various characters from our different fictions in a shiny new environment, and see what happens.  We've written 25 strips so far, and we've already used representative characters from six completely unrelated narratives, with more probably joining soon.

We named it Fort Paradox, for reasons which will hopefully become clear as the story goes along.

I should warn you up front: the sanity levels are dangerously low sometimes, and if you venture into the Fort, you may well find your grey matter getting a bit overworked.  But in return, readers who persevere shall be rewarded with ninja snails and avocado-flavoured catastrophes, among other things.

 Anyway, enough talking... go and read the webcomic!

- The Colclough

The Internet Begins Here

Where does your internet start?

For many, it probably starts somewhere useful but perhaps a little dull, e.g. the stark white void of the Google homepage.  Back in the early 2000s, when the Lord of the Rings film trilogy was still in the making, I had lordoftherings.net as my homepage, to ensure I always knew what Jackson & Co were up to.  Then Rings finished, the site got a bit stale and boring, and so I used starwars.com as my homepage for the next year or two, leading up to the release of Episode III.

But somewhere around 2006, I decided that I'd be darned if I kept using anyone else's page as the beginning of my internet.  I knew enough HTML to write a custom homepage, filled with all my favourite links, and it would never get stale and boring because I would keep tweaking the code to keep the page fresh and relevant.  So I did just that, and in a rather atrocious pun, I named the resulting piece of hypertext "MatNav: Matt's Navigation & Links Page".

Over the last four years or so, MatNav has grown and developed, changing beyond recognition from the humble little bunch of text links which constituted Version 1.  As of Version 5 (created sometime last year, I think), I replaced most of the text links with graphical ones, which made them bigger, and filled the screen more efficiently.

Today, I completed and implemented MatNav 6, the second-most-radical overhaul the page has ever had.  I've re-done a lot of the graphics, rearranged the links using a more thematic grouping, eliminated a few old ones which I don't use any more, and added some new ones to reflect the latest changes in my internet-using habits.  Plus I've changed the stylesheet, to replace the long-in-the-tooth custard-yellow colour scheme of Version 5 with a new, moodier and more graphics-rich look.
Okay, so maybe the idea isn't completely original.  A similar setup is included in certain web browsers.  But I've never seen one where you get to decide exactly how many links you want, exactly how you want them arranged, exactly what each graphic should look like, etc etc etc.  That's what MatNav gives me.  And of course, there's the added bonus of individuality.  "What's your homepage?"  "It's a unique browser-independent graphical splash page that I designed myself."

So, from my point of view, this is the beginning of the internet, right here:

The magic starts here: Firefox 3.6 and MatNav 6.0

By the way: if you like the idea and you want to build a similar page for yourself, then I'd be happy to share my source code and graphics to get you started.

Okay, so that whole blog post was probably totally irrelevant to most of you, but I enjoyed writing it anyway.  So there 8]


- The Colclough

That's Not Very Coherent

I tried to access my blog updates list just now, and I got this:

Someone's been drink-writing again.  It should be illegal 8p

Um... yeah, nothing important to say this morning.  Just throwing that one out there for my own amusement.

Did you like Megastropulodon?


- The Colclough