Joe asks 'Is it me or what?'

Survivor Guilt

May you live in interesting times is traditionally a Chinese expression of ill will. While there is disagreement whether it is actually of Chinese origin (most sources say not) we certainly are living in them - see the somewhat humorous note on the door of my local.

The lockdown measures are certainly causing problems in many areas, social and economic, but it seems that any relaxation at this stage would increase the number of lives lost to Covid-19. Perhaps we are reaching the point where people are prepared to accept that?

I don't like siding with the government as I think their motives are questionable but while certain sectors are clamouring for reducing the strictures there will then be blame from others when people die as a result. It seems that Boris can't offer a solution amenable to all until an effective vaccine and treatment are available and that seems a long way off.

The problem is I'm suffering from survivor guilt. I realise how lots of people are struggling both health and wealth wise and empathise with people in dangerous domestic situations.

The trouble is I'm rather enjoying lockdown.

Yes, there's job insecurity: if lockdown isn't eased soon it's difficult to see how many businesses will survive and nearly all will have to change dramatically to continue at all. At 57 I don't fancy looking for a new job in the ensuing debacle. And yes, I miss socialising especially restaurant meals with friends and family but on the other hand, there's so many things to like.

For one thing, I am writing my first post in ages due to the fact that things are less hectic.

Some of the plus points:
* A break from travelling between Exeter and London every week to work and the organisation needed to manage tickets booked months ahead, rented flat etc.
* More free time - I'm now on a four-day week along with most of my colleagues and although rugby is off the cards and bridge is now wholly online (which isn't the same) I am reading more and delighted to start some of the more serious books such as a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson that was a present from nearly two years ago. I'm currently getting through about three fiction books per week. I've always been a big consumer of podcasts when travelling and, while there's less travel, I still listen to these when exercising or just completing chores. They are a combination of tech, language (Something Rhymes With Purple), economics (Freakonomics) and radio shows via the BBC Sounds app (Old Harry's Game with Andy Hamilton is my current choice for comedy)
* Family time: I am currently ensconced in Exeter with my wife, son and girlfriend (his, not mine). It's been a nice balance of community versus personal space. There's enough room to spend time on one's own as well as enough to form a quorum for games and activities
* Nature's recovery: it's amazing how quickly nature seems to be regaining ground (both literally and metaphorically). Cleaner water in rivers, less pollution over major cities, wildlife flourishing etc. If that can start happening after such a short time then surely we can work out a way to continue the good work when the pandemic subsides?
* Appreciation of key workers: especially health staff. Let's hope that continues when it's over and manifests itself in something more tangible than applause every Thursday
* Acts of kindness: many examples from people sponsoring Colonel Tom Moore to the tune of about £32m to neighbourhood delivery services run by volunteers (I won't go on about why the NHS needs to be publicly financed when it already is paid for by tax)
* Finally a silly one - not worrying I'll run out of phone charge :)

So should I feel guilty that so far nothing bad has happened to me while others struggle - or do I just make the most of a bad situation?

It's Just Common Sense

I received a number of books for my birthday last November, that's the stock present for me, either a book or a bottle. I was very pleased as I'd been skimming through this particular tome in the shop only a day or so previously and had decided to get it on my Kindle.

It's by Duncan J. Watts and called Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer. It covers a lot of ground but concentrates on topics such as how predicting the future is inherently impossible. Most people (me included) look back on events such as government cock-ups and calmly describe how they were bound to fail because of X. The author argues that such hindsight is just fitting the appropriate facts to the event and shows why this is a fallacy. We tend to think, when things go wrong, that it is usually because we didn't have the full facts at our disposal whereas in truth we can never have all the facts and even tiny changes in one area can have dramatic effects in another. There are lots of examples comparing successful business strategies with failures and Mr Watts tries to show how these were largely a matter of luck, good or bad.

In another chapter he attempts to explain why the Mona Lisa is the most famous, admired, and valuable painting in the world and why, in his opinion, it's really just famous for being famous.

One of my favourite stories concerning hindsight and those who criticise such things as government research for pointing out what they consider the blindingly obvious. It concerns a survey of the military in the USA on those returning from World War II. One of its findings was that soldiers from a rural background fitted in better and adapted to the rigours of army life better than those from the city. Many complained of the obviousness of the results, of course these people would do better, they were more suited to outdoor life and rougher conditions than city types. There were other results published that were equally obvious to anyone with common sense. Afterwards the author of the report came clean, he had changed all the results to be the opposite of what they had actually found, it was in fact city dwellers who fared better in the army than their agrarian counterparts. Of course many now claimed that they suspected this all along, townies are more used to a chain-of-command in their jobs which fits in more with the military was one explanation.

I would recommend the book to anyone, it's a real eye-opener about the workings of the mind and how the actions of a crowd do not mimic the actions of its individuals, not can be predicted by such analysis.

Never Again?

Avid readers will have noticed that there have been fewer posts of late. The main reason for this is that I have spent the majority of my free time over the last year working on a new edition of Beginning XML. It’s about six years since the last one, which means about sixty years in non-IT terms. So much has changed and I was looking forward to the challenge of updating, rewriting and purging. Needless to say the reality was more of a struggle with authors signing up and then dropping out, deadlines being missed and coping with Wrox’s new authoring guidelines. Ask my wife how many times I uttered the phrase never again recently.

Anyway it’s now scheduled to be released next month and it covers all the basics as well as advances and changes that have happened in the last few years. As with most IT related books it’s probably already somewhat out of date but I think it’s an ideal introduction to a technology which is now deeply ingrained into many aspects of software, it’s hard to imagine any new tech product or system which doesn’t use XML to some extent.

Thanks to my two co-authors, Danny Ayers and Liam R. E. Quin, Danny worked on the previous edition and Liam, who works on the W3C, was drafted in at the last minute but completed everything on time.

Also thank you in advance to anyone who buys it and let me know what you think.

Secret to Success

I’ve been asked to update Beginning XML, one of the books shown in the left column. XML and its uses have changed so much since the last edition some five plus years ago. Over three-quarters of the content will be new and there’s only two authors this time, myself and Danny Ayers.

Wrox have tried to give me a few pointers on how to promote it, blog posts, Twitter etc. My own contribution is to write under a pseudonym, anything written by a Swede seems to sell well so I’m going to write as Henning Larssonquist and see if that increases sales.

Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns

I recently finished a technical review of a new book on Design Patterns for ASP.NET. It’s just out on Amazon and should be in shops too.

The author Scott Millett has done a good job of explaining what design patterns are and how to apply many of them to ASP.NET, especially using the MVC design.

My ambition is to get a project done using these patterns and without the usual hacks/compromises that are so often made…

Kindle Review

So I finally gave in to the gadget urge and bought an Amazon Kindle last week. So far it looks good so here’s a mini review for those thinking of buying. (I bought the one with Wi-Fi connectivity which costs £150 as opposed to the standard one at £100.)

On the plus side it looks good and is light and easy to hold, it’s bigger than a standard paperback, more like those special editions you get at airports. I didn’t get a choice of colour, it’s a sort of slate-grey. It charged in a couple of hours and seems to draw very little power. I left it on for ages and it recharged in minutes. It’s certainly easy to read content, it comes with just the user guide and I then copied some free books from Free Kindle Books to see what they looked like. Once that had gone smoothly I tried the Wi-Fi connection, worked first time, and also the text-to-speech converter. This enables you to have books read to you which is great if you’re driving or are in the middle of reading something and want to listen whilst doing something else. It’s not a patch on a real audible book though, the synthetic voice can be wearing, God help Mrs. Hawking, and there’s no infusion of dramatic sense and different accents for the various characters. It also plays music files and has a basic web browser, black and white obviously. You can also bookmark, highlight and annotate, useful for technical books.

I then took the plunge and bought something, the latest Shardlake adventure, Heartstone, for which I have the previous four in paperback. This downloaded in under twenty seconds whilst I was at the railway station. The idea of having a dozen books loaded up for holidays etc. is one of the main reasons for buying, so much easier than lugging around the traditional versions.

So much for the good side, what about the bad? Aside from the price you really need a cover and at £50, with a light, to £30 without, these are not cheap. I only looked at Amazon though, perhaps there are others elsewhere. The price of eBooks is also annoying. They come out on Amazon quickly, alongside the hardback and seem to be a few pounds cheaper than them. This seems a bit unfair but the fact that digital books attract VAT whereas paper ones don’t doesn’t help. Given that you can easily pass a read book on this is the biggest downside in my mind. This comes to another problem, if you go on holiday with someone you can’t easily share reading matter, you need two Kindles and swap them. My wife has already hinted at her next birthday present... Finally there’s the security issue. If I’m reading in public I’ll often leave a book on my table while I go to the bar, you wouldn’t risk this with the Kindle; likewise if you leave a paperback on the train it’s not the end of the world. All in all I’m happy, I’m going away this week for a long weekend and will certainly take it with me, I’m also keen to try a technical book to see how that looks with code listings and diagrams etc.

If any other pros and cons appear I’ll let you know and I’m happy to hear yours too.

P.S. Since looking at the Kindle again and being a bit more scientific about its measurements I realise that it’s about the size of a normal paperback with the screen displaying about one third to one half of a page of text if you’re using the default text size (which can be changed). I’ve also found that ebooks do seem to be cheaper once they’ve been published in paperback, not sure what the rules are for this. For example the book mentioned above, which is just out in hardback cost me about £10 whereas an old Harlan Coben I bought cost about £3.

What’s Your Style?

I’d never heard of Cory Doctorow until recently. He’s quite a prolific author of books, blog and newspaper articles. The reason I discovered him is this site, http://iwl.me/, which aims to take some of your prose and tell you who your writing style resembles. All I can say is that Cory’s books must be somewhat - shall we say unusual to be charitable? The reason – I pasted half a chapter that I wrote for Beginning Xml some years ago and this is who the site came up with.

Next time you get a long rambling email from someone you’ll know what to do with it.

Pride Comes Before a Fall

I was pleased when a colleague wanted to borrow my book, Beginning XML, the other day. It’s a hefty tome, nearly 1000 pages and probably needs an update in some areas but it’s still a good introduction to XML and how it’s used. My sense of pride however turned into one of disappointment when I discovered that they needed it as a stand for their monitor…

More Word Coincidences

I wrote some time back on how one often comes across a new word and then it appears again. In a similar vein have you heard of Ignaz Semmelweis?

I hadn’t, until recently, and then two people gave me books for my birthday that featured him. Semmelweis lived in the 1800s and was puzzled why the cases of women falling ill and dying whilst in hospital to give birth were much higher when the medical students and doctors tended to them than when midwives did it. You can read the full story elsewhere but he came to the conclusion that it was connected with the fact that the first group also handled dead bodies. He prescribed basic measures such as hand washing that today are taken for granted. At the time he was ridiculed and disbelieved by many, not until Pasteur showed the existence of germs did people realise why he was right.

The two books were both very good, only really using Semmelweis as examples in a larger picture. The first was called Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. Now I don’t know how you’d feel if you were given a book with that title by a direct report. I was a bit miffed at first. I shouldn’t have been, it’s an excellent book on how we can’t often see a problem when the problem is, and is hidden by, self-deceit. I can recommend it to anyone, not just those aspiring to leadership.

The second book was Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. This book really shows how science is misrepresented in the media as well as how many alternative therapies, homeopathy and the likes of nutritionism advocated by Gillian McKeith for example, are not in anyway based on open scientific research. By open I mean that the studies’ methods and raw data are open to inspection and by scientific I mean that there are control groups and other standard research techniques. It’s a great read and you’ll look at science journalism in a new light.

For those of you interested in new words I can suggest iatrogenic, a word Semmelweis could have done with.

Asleep at Work? - Blame Pinker

I've just started reading The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker the noted cognitive scientist and linguistic expert. I've read most of his other books, some more thoroughly than others, and this one has re-awakened a longtime interest in language, I might even say it's his best yet.

The early part concentrates on whether humans have an innate sense of what things mean or is it acquired, the old nature versus nurture argument. That's not to say they are born knowing a specific vocabulary but do they have a sort of internal concept of words that is mapped onto the language that they actual learn in their first few years?

Later topics explore why children's names go in and out of fashion and why swearing involves sex, bodily functions and religious entities.

He explores in depth why you hear:

The dog bit John on the leg

but not

The dog bit the table on the leg

I am really finding it hard to put down, I could have been found reading it at 5:00am this morning, sad eh?

Anyway, as you can tell, I highly recommend it - a real bargain at about £5 from Amazon, and it assures Mr. Pinker of an invite to my hypothetical dinner party of interesting guests.

 

Two serious posts on the trot, I really must get out more.