jonobacon@home

From Blizzard.

It is my natural working posture. Honest.

Wow, Yngwie Malmsteen, notable guitar virtuoso, who I have been a fan of for years has just announced the cover for his new album Perpetual Flame:

Oh dear. That is very bad indeed.

Notable reaction from the album-buying public includes

Congratulations to the FSF for managing to get the legendary Stephen Fry to celebrate the anniversary of GNU. I am just somewhat surprised they decided to license it under a non-free license (Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States).

Boot’s on the other foot now, eh?

Wow. Everyone loves Buzzword Bingo, but sometimes it gets a tad ridiculous. Back in July I got a gem via email. It started off with this zinger of an opener (identities censored to protect the innocent):

It then went on to say:

Shazzam!

It is interesting that when you remove the company and the specific announcement, the rest of the paragraph is completely meaningless. What exactly is frictionless distribution? Are the rest of us somehow lumbered with friction in our distribution? From what I can tell “focused on leveraging community-driven development and frictionless distribution to extend the ecosystem” is a lot of words for saying “focused on Open Source development“.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand that language is a tool and a facility, and it needs to be carefully selected and worded for your target audience - the choice of language for an executive director varies from the choice of language for a member of the IT team, and that varies from the choice of language for a typical community member. It would be naive to suggest that everyone should consume the same words, but we have to draw a line somewhere between spiritless generic text and meaningless bullshit.

When I was a journo and I was learning how to write effectively, I became a big fan of William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well. This, combined with Strunk and White’s The Elements Of Style and a few books on journalism provided me with the chops for a career in writing. One salient point that Zinsser says is Don’t write like an institution, and it is something I have always taken as a core element in how I approach writing myself. His point is essentially the meat behind the point I was making above - don’t write meaningless institutional nonsense for the sake of it sounding professional - sure, write professional text that is carefully worded for you target audience, but there needs to be some real, accessible, understandable content in there

Lets look at this in practise. Lets take the original paragraph and re-write it:

My version:

…notice how I left in ecosystem and threw in emerging technologies to still play to the right audience.

Ding!

419 Eater always amuses me - it is a website scam-baiters follow through with those Nigerian scam emails. Today though I read a case where someone manages to persuade the scammer to tattoo Baited By Shiver on his leg.

Read it here.

Comedy.

One of the fun aspects of my job has been the opportunity to travel and see the world. In the last few years I have had the chance to visit some stunning places - Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Australia, Czech Republic, Portugal, USA, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Ireland and various other places. Of course there are many differences between all of these places - the sights, the sounds, the culture, the religion, the people, the food, the booze, the music, the weather etc, but there is one critical cultural variance that always strikes me when I travel - taxi cabs.

They vary on two critical levels - (1) how chatty and worldly cabbys are, and (2) how much they like to gently teeter their passengers on the edge of death.

So, first up it is how chatty a taxi driver is. Am I the only person who has noticed that particularly in London and the US (notably San Francisco and Portland), there are a large collection of frustrated academics driving cabs? The US particularly so - I have had conversations about Chinese politics, historical events in the UK, the industrial revolution, the development of the American constitution, the philosophical changes in the US since Bush came into power and various other topics. In London in particular, cabbys like to serve this kind of discussion with a garnish of comedy and sensationalism. I was once in a cab with Matt Revell heading to Millbank when a cabby expressed his not-particularly-happy views about David Cameron (current leader of the Conservative party) and then underlined them with the fact that “he had heard” that David Cameron takes Cocaine in very, very unconventional way. Matt and I were left stunned.

But the real gem is the second element - the variations in how a cabby likes to walk up to death and poke fun at it. Please, please don’t do that, think of the children. There are more than a few occasions when I have got into a cab and felt like my life was about to flash through my eyes. This was most notable in Porto Allegre in Brazil where it seemed the goal was to drive as fast as possible, discouraging the use of seat belts, and then drive as physically close to the car in front of you. I will be honest with you - I very nearly shit myself a number of times while in some of those cabs. I don’t mind hoying along at high speed, but holy mother of all that is good and sweet…that was just a whole new level. Oh, and then there was Istanbul. Aside from when a cabby drove Mirco Muller, Michael Dominik and I 30KM outside of Istanbul as something of a con, there was one particular incident when said cabby decided to overtake traffic by driving onto the wrong side of the freeway, swerving from on-coming traffic, and then driving back onto our side. I think I must have buried eight holes into the sides of that car seat with my fingers. My most recent trip in Argentina was pretty similar - it seems the goal there is to drive the smallest possible car in the world, with un-adjustable seats designed for children, equipped with some kind of jet engine in it to drive as fast as possible, and…and this is the important bit…brake as late as humanly possible. Oh fun. Believe me, after two days of solid travelling and getting to Mar Del Plato at around midnight, that particular experience bloody wakes you up.

Despite this world of academia, decedent exploration of the unusual, and rollercoaster-like fun, it most be difficult being a cabby - how many times do you really want to be asked whether you have been busy on your shift and what time you finish? I got a little concerned about this with the cabbys that drive me to the train station in Wolves when I travel to London or Heathrow, so I try to mix it up and ask more unconventional questions. Then again, maybe this is why I get myself into these odd conversations with cabbys. Hmmm…

Well, after all of the theory and contemplation of how to resolve burnout in companies, teams and communities, it seems that one link has the complete solution.

Ahhhh…

Pointed to me by Aq - what happens when the legendary Van Halen play the multi-million selling Jump live while the backing tape with the famous synth from the song is played back at slightly the wrong pitch? Well, you get a combination of the following:

Oof, I feel for them…

twitter.com/jonobacon is lies. Don’t believe it. Another vicious act at the hands of Alan Pope and Dave Walker. Another victim of identity theft…

UPDATE: The twitter account has been retrieved! Another glorious victory over Alan Pope.

Right now I am over in beautiful Prague for FossCamp and the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Running and attending these events is always a real treat - there is always a genuine feeling of free software in action; a real meeting of minds coming together with a common ethos. Part of why I love the FossCamp/UDS trip is that it involves a huge amount of diversity. Here at FossCamp we have people from a tonne of projects, including Ubuntu, Jokosher, Sun, EFL, Terminator, Strigi, Xesam, Ubuntu Brainstorm, Linux User Groups, GNOME, Glom, gtkmm, Campware, KDE, Amarok, KOffice, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Tango, Novell, Red Hat, Inkscape, freedesktop.org, OpenSuSE, OpenChange, Samba, Debian, MOTU, swfdec, gvfs, OpenOffice.org, eBox, LKSCTP, Elisa, HAL, dbus…

Its been a busy time recently and I have been out on my travels over in San Francisco, Boston, Cambridge, Detroit and London. Its been a hugely fun time, and I got to meet some incredible people - thanks to everyone who made me feel exceptionally welcome. I also want to give a quick shout out to the folks at ubuntu-ma, PenguiCon, CommunityOne, Creative Commons, Mako, Matt Lee, Barton, and my friends over in Lexington who are making Ubuntu work on things that live in your pocket.

Oh, and as a slight postscript, I have finally fulfilled one of life’s little ambitions - to not only meet, but a share a photo with the venerable tron guy:

Not only did I have a photo taken with tron guy - he came looking for me to deliver a parcel with a fake beard in it. While it was happening I felt like I was in some kind of acid trip. We then had a serious and detailed conversation about MOTU, while he was stood there in full tron regalia. Just when I thought my world crazy, it got a little crazier…

I was going to finish this entry here, but sod it, here are a few other things living in my brain right now:

The Severed Fifth machine continues to roll - the server is up, the mailing lists are on their way, the announcement is written, the logo ideas are flowing in, the photo-shoot is in post-processing, and the content is nearly there in terms of initial work. Thanks to that group of amazing people that are making it happen. You know, gyms never really had an appeal to me, but I have been a few times recently - I had a really good session in there a while back and figured it would be fun to repeat. Wow, it seems this post of mine caused a bit of a stir over what is considered music. Always amazes me when people accuse creativity that does not meet their taste as being unintelligent or just noise. I am not expecting people to like the music I like, but I am expecting people to understand and respect the work that goes into any art-form, irrespective of their taste. Everything is worth listening to, even Cannibal Corpse, lounge style or flute beatboxing. Someone should invent an “anti-mint”, something you put in your mouth to take away the taste of mint. Imagine those situations when you wake up in the morning, brush your teeth and then want to drink orange juice. Personally, I want both clean teeth and orange juice and to not sacrifice one or the other. Someone…the anti-mint…lets make it a reality. I bought GTA4 and it rocks. It also drove me to be involved in a police chase, but that’s a story for another time. While in video game news, I got totally whipped at Guitar Hero III, and while despite fervent denial, I got completely annihilated. Mind you, I spent more time posing and prancing around the living room at my competitors apartment than focusing on the game in hand. Well, that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it. Recently jonobacon.org seems to have been picked up in some of these “top blog” listings. You are as surprised as I am, but for my regular readers, thanks for helping to push my little chunk of randomness up in the blog ranks. It really does go to show how many bored people are populating the Internet. You know, Cancun is an amazing looking place, would love to get over there sometime. Thinking of a new phone - Nokia N95 8GB or a Blackberry? Any thoughts? It should be good for email, have a decent camera, preferably have a GPS and preferably have an alpha-numeric keypad.

I think that’s enough for now.