Walking West

Saturday, May 19, 2001

It seems that Philip K. Dick was a stool pigeon [via Ethel the Blog]. Anyone who has read Lawrence Sutin's biography of Dick will know how loopy he was, but when he wrote books as great as A Scanner Darkly, who cares? And the whole thing seems strangely appropriate, in a way; as one 1992 critic wrote:

Dick's paranoid fantasy seems to retroactively undermine the whole point of the effort to apotheosize him as an icon of critical, anti-establishment SF. The historical situation is profoundly, unnervingly Dickian. Even as the earnest critics are trying to establish models of resistance and redemption, their hero is secretly undermining them.

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SBS screened a French documentary last night about the autistic Dr Temple Grandin, the 'anthropologist on Mars' of Oliver Sacks's book of the same name. Her autism has proved a valuable asset in her career as a designer of livestock equipment, as she describes on her site. Elsewhere, she has talked about how she explains her way of looking at the world to others:

There is nothing out there closer to how I think than the World Wide Web. The way the pages are linked associatively is exactly how I think. I tell people, if you really want to understand how I think, why don't you just go to the Internet, type the word "streetcar" into it. Start there, and see where it takes you.

So, is weblogging a mild form of autism?

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A further note on my point below about slicing images versus using image maps. Owen has pointed out that you can, of course, slice up an image and position it with CSS. True; but then you run the risk that the results will look awful in a non-CSS browser (or a CSS-browser with CSS switched off, or user-specified style-sheets, or whatever). And the alternative of using tables is exactly what we're trying to get away from: we should try to use them only for the presentation of tabular information, shouldn't we? Otherwise it's a hack. (Bad, naughty hack! Slap.)

My beef here isn't with CSS, it's with current browsers' rendering of the particular XHTML standard I was discussing—in other words, with the lack of support for onfocus/onblur in image-map <area> tags in IE5/NS6 for Mac. There are real benefits in using a single image with an image map rather than several slices stitched together with tables or with CSS positioning. With an unsliced image and an image map, you should get good results in everything. PDAs and Text-browsers like Lynx won't see it, but alt tags in the image map should take care of their needs. In a graphical browser with CSS missing or switched off, it looks fine, because the image isn't sliced up and CSS-positioned. And you aren't using tables in ways they shouldn't (ideally) be used.

Certainly, because images aren't viewable on text-browsers or PDAs you wouldn't want them to be the only way of understanding a page. But if they're viewable, you surely want them to look right—or at least not too screwed-up—otherwise why have them at all?

The enhancements to a page provided by graphics and mouseovers should be optional for imparting its intended message, but you wouldn't want them to get in the way of users who can't view them properly, as a heavily-sliced graphic could. If you slice up a large image and position the slices with floats in CSS, they could end up as a jumbled mess in a non-CSS browser. If you don't slice the image up, you'll still have a page that's comprehensible (even if it isn't as perfectly laid-out) in a non-CSS graphical browser; and in a non-graphical browser, a user will simply see (or hear, if they're using a browser for the blind) a few relevant alt tags.

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Friday, May 18, 2001

In the 'browsers aren't quite there yet' category: getting rid of tables for layout means ditching sliced-up graphics. Ditching sliced-up graphics, in turn, removes one avenue for using mouseovers on a large image. Say, for example, you want another image to change depending on which part of the large image you mouse-over; well, now you can't use a script attached to an <a> tag wrapped around a slice of the larger image to do the switching.

So you try keeping the large image as one graphic and putting an image map over it. Fine for assigning links to different areas of the image, but what about the mouseovers? Well, try putting 'onmouseout=...' into the <area> tag... and hey presto, it works!

But now your page won't validate as XHTML, because 'onmouseover' and 'onmouseout' aren't allowed in <area> in XHTML; you should use 'onfocus' and 'onblur' instead. But 'onfocus' and 'onblur' don't work in IE5 or NS6 (on Macs; I don't know about others). So unless you revert to sliced-up graphics tables with individual <a> links and mouseovers... you can't do it. We're not quite there yet. Dammit.

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Caterina Fake investigates Television's Dismaying Sameness.

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Jurassic Park's CGI looks prehistoric by comparison: stills from Final Fantasy. [Via realkosh.]

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Now this is a discovery. A search for 'Scott of the Antarctic' led to this terrific find: a set of original black-and-white slides from that fateful expedition, along with accompanying text 'adapted from the hand written notes, we believe, of the expedition surgeon Dr. Atkinson'. They've been posted by one of Atkinson's descendents, English engineer Arthur Mitchell. The slides are stunning—particularly Mt Erebus, Ross Island, North Bay and Cape Evans:

The Clarity of the air may be realised when we recognise that the iceberg seen in the foreground of the picture is fully a 1/4 mile from the ship, yet despite the distance every rope of the rigging is clearly seen, and the stillness is such that human voices speaking in ordinary tones could be heard at a distance of almost one mile.

But even the slides can't match the impact of the tragic tale told alongside them. An early jolt comes from the story of Ponting and the killer whales. Another comes when the fate of the ill-chosen ponies, 'covered with ice and standing deep in snow', is sealed.

It was Captain Oates who sacrificed himself with those famous words quoted below; soon Scott was writing 'My right foot has gone and nearly all my toes. Two days ago I was the proud possessor of the best feet.' His final diary entries remain intensely moving.

Do kids still learn about Scott today? Probably not. I'm just old enough to have done so in high school, but I imagine that nowadays his story would have too many echoes of Empire. It's a fascinating case, though, and one that prompts in the most vivid way the question raised by every doomed adventure: noble failure or foolhardy waste of life?

At a time when every disgruntled stock-broker seems to be scaling Everest or sailing around the world, often at great cost to themselves and others, the example of Robert Falcon Scott remains relevant.

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Oh no. No. This is not supposed to happen.

I've completely forgotten my PIN number.

Before you say 'so what', let me add that this is no ordinary PIN. This isn't one of those here's-the-PIN-for-your-new-store-bonuses-card numbers. This isn't a website-you'll-never-visit-again number. This is my main PIN for every bank account and credit card I have.

I know you're not supposed to double up on PINs. But ten years ago, when I was on about my fourth in the space of months, I chose one and stuck with it—because otherwise I'd end up forgetting all of them. I've used this thing constantly for ten years, and then today I rock up to get some cash from an ATM, and... bing. Gone.

I'm standing there, staring at the message saying '***INCORRECT PIN, TRY AGAIN***' and thinking: This can't be right. This number is deeply etched in my brain. It's got to be in there somewhere.

It's not gone completely, of course. I can remember the first two digits. I think. Unless I've got them back-to-front. I stand there, trying another permutation, hoping that my body-memory will take over... tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap... ***INCORRECT PIN, TRY AGAIN*** tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap... ***INCORRECT PIN, TRY AGAIN***... and I dare not try again in case I see ***INCORRECT PIN, I HAVE EATEN YOUR CARD, HAHAHAHAAAA***.

This is serious. I need cash. I have eighty-five cents. Raiding the coin-purse in the car is only going to snare me another two bucks.

I walk uphill to the ATM for my main credit card, which I've visited at least six times in past months to make payments; maybe the unusual keypad on the other ATM was throwing me out. After all, I've been using this number so long that it's no longer a series of digits, it's a series of movements. It's passed from numerical memory into motion memory. Maybe one keypad is 123-456-789 and the other is 789-456-123.

Tap-tap tap-tap tap-tap... ###WHO DO YOU THINK YOU'RE KIDDING, I SAW YOU DOWN AT THAT OTHER BANK—NOT EVEN CLOSE###. Tap-tappity tappity-TAP TAP-TAP GIVE-ME MON-EY YOU-SOD-DING-MACH-INE.

So this is it. The first sign of senility at the tender age of 33. A forgotten phone number is one thing, but this... this is severe mental hard-disk damage. This is a corrupted boot sector. This calls for a reformat, a complete reinstall of Red Hair Pinux, and restoring everything from back-up.

Except, of course, being security-conscious (apart from using the same PIN in more than one place) I have never written this magic number down. Anywhere.

Suddenly I am suffused with an all-too-familiar dread. The dread of having to ask bank tellers to change your account details.

In the words of Scott of the Antarctic's doughty companion, I may be some time...

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Not only was yesterday a big day for the Web, it was a big day for Jeffrey Zeldman, who launched his new book and a noncommercial web initiative. Congratulations on both, JZ.

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The Web turned ten years old yesterday (watch out—puberty isn't too far off). Tim Berners-Lee's conclusions to his presentation to CERN contain some advice that's still sound—'You should remember the philosophy that academic information is for all, and it is our duty to make information available'—and some that's proved hopelessly wrong—'WWW [creates] no extra work for information suppliers' and 'allows data to be ONLY STORED ONCE'.

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Thursday, May 17, 2001

Since it's possible that not all of you visit it daily (gasp!) I thought I'd mention that I've revitalised The Stand-Up, the oldest part of this site (it once was this site), by stripping out the tables, converting it all to CSS layout, and dressing it up a bit in the process. I'm still pretty proud of the ol' thing, and it was looking a bit ordinary next to all of this newer stuff.

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Good stuff: Michael Kupperman comix. [Via synthetic zero.]

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The virulent Graham has started a collaborative weblog of record reviews and revisitings called Records Ad Nauseam, and like a mad postin' fool I've signed up. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson with Funny Ha Ha, but nooohhh...

I couldn't start with a boring old 'Here's the new album by such-and-such' review, so instead have written something that I've been intending to for months: a review of a little-known classic called Hot Westerly Winds of Mt. Isa [mirrored here].

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Happy blogday toooo meee... It's one year exactly since I started posting in the precursor of Walking West. That's right: it's -45 Weeks to Madagascar.

This is where other webloggers would normally list a 'best of' for the previous year's posts, but in all honesty (and no modesty) I wouldn't know where to begin. Blogging may be a trivial form, but I've tried to approach it seriously, and I'm pretty happy with the results. So if you came in late, head over to the comprehensive index of the archives for WW0-2.5, and then follow it up with a recap of the past two months at WW3. There's gold in them thar' hills.

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If you liked those old 1930s/40s advertisements I ran here a few weeks back (scanned from a stash of National Geographics bought in a Huonville op-shop in March), you'll love Ad*Access, a Duke University project presenting 'over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955'. [Via Lukelog.]

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Tuesday, May 15, 2001

I hadn't linked the first MeFi thread on DNA's death because it was a depressing squabble between critics and fans, but the second has a couple of good links: a lament by Richard Dawkins; and a 1999 story by Adams about the Internet.

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Shipping containers revisited: Steve, Jane and I further discussed this fine new form of housing on Sunday. Once you get past the A$30,000 price tag, it offers tremendous potential for surreptitious squatting. I suggested putting one on the traffic island on Southern Road, just outside our front door, but Steve said the council may have something to say about that. After all, it would look a little obvious (see photo below).

Future ShackWell then, why not position one down on the docks? Take off the roof and presto, instant camouflage! Steve asked what you would do if other shipping containers were unloaded and stacked all around you. Call on a mobile phone for help, I suggested; but he pointed out that several layers of shipping containers would limit its range—you could end up being accidentally loaded onto a ship bound for Trinidad. Even better, I said: cheap housing and a free cruise!

I then followed the stacking theme and pointed out that there's potential here for a cheap way of building Japanese-style capsule hotels: stack shipping containers side by side and five layers up, with a very tall ladder for access.

Steve suggested that you don't need to buy land for your new shack at all: you could just put it on tall stilts out in the bay. The problem there, I said, is the 25-mile limit; put your shack inside that and you're in trouble with the government. So you'd have to stick it in the Tasman Sea or the Great Australian Bight, with mile-long stilts embedded in the sea floor. Then you'd have a fifty-mile round trip to get some milk. And you'd have to buy a boat.

Future SubWhich is when the obvious solution presented itself. An outboard motor, Selleys® No-More-Gaps to seal the cracks, and a periscope, and you've got yourself a fine shipping container submarine.

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Monday, May 14, 2001

After mulling over last week's discussion, I've tweaked the browser upgrade page and the general approach to the issue at this site. It seems a little extreme to strip CSS from every page on the site and to put a 'please upgrade' notice on every page—as extreme as playing the same advertisement at every ad break on TV (not that that stops Channel Ten). So I've pulled the notices off most pages, other than index pages and those that are botched by non-compliant browsers. And I'm letting users of older browsers see some CSS again by combining the import hack and regular style-sheet linking, except for the CSS-positioning (as used here) that would make pages unreadable. I've put the 'display:none' declaration for the upgrade notice into a separate imported style sheet, and have done the same with 'display:block' (which is necessary for NS 6 to display tables of sliced images without gaps, but which in NS 4.x turns the same table into a jigsaw puzzle).

That still leaves a few areas—like Grinding Noises—where the results aren't great in Netscape 4.x, mainly because NS 4.x hates CSS/table combinations. Tough. I'm not about to write two versions of any page at this site for the benefit of non-compliant browsers. I'll write multiple pages and browser sniffers when someone pays me to.

One last thing that's long bugged me is that text-browser users and search-engine robots see my upgrade notice. I've addressed this by using an image with a blank alt tag to display it, rather than text. This also means that users who switch off images to speed up their surfing—who probably also switch off JavaScript, CSS, and any sense of aesthetic desire or taste—won't see the sort of reminder message that would send them into a fit of apoplectic flame-spewing rage.

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Saw Thirteen Days yesterday. An excellent, tense, chilling movie: it's disturbing indeed to see exactly how close my generation came to being born with three legs and having to live off cockroaches and tumbleweeds.

It's also a pointed response to those who paint politicians as the lowest scum of the earth. Yes, lies and compromises and backroom deals are part of their stock in trade, but those exact traits have saved us all in the past. The general public are so used to talking about 'the government' or 'Canberra' or 'Washington' or 'Westminster' as the source of all their woes that they forget that other forces in public life have the power to make our woes far more woeful. If you have a hide-bound military armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction and just itching to use them, you sure as hell want a stubborn, stone-walling wheeler-dealer right there in the room with them.

Last week I also went to see Memento before the buzz died down completely. It didn't seem quite as great as some critics have made out, but it's still a good, suspenseful noir thriller, well-acted by Guy Pearce. It seemed to end abruptly, but on reflection I think it played out its themes well; to keep them going would have been superfluous. There's a good comment in Wombat File (possible spoilers).

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More Douglas Adams: the HHGG adventure game has been rewritten in Java and released to the world. I remember playing it on an early Mac. I never got out of the bedroom.

Neil Gaiman's blog entry on DNA is touching. Gaiman knew Adams, and once wrote a 'guide to the Guide' (it's well worth reading, if you ever spot a copy).

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I'm wary of the weblogging tendency to post obituaries for public figures, although I've indulged in it myself and am about to right now; it can look as if we're all trying to claim a piece of people we've never met. But perhaps it's because they've already claimed a piece of us. Certainly, any future archeologist excavating my own comic history will find a prominent layer in the year 15 R.E.—just above The Goodies and just below The Young Ones and Python—devoted to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whose author, Douglas Adams, died on Friday.

Hitchhiker's—the book—took over my life that year, along with Lord of the Rings. Unlike the latter, it had the pronounced advantages of being (a) funny and (b) short. But like Rings, it had an epic sweep—never fully realised, despite the appearance over the years of four sequels—and a prodigious amount of invention. Like Tolkien, Adams had the gift of being able to find perfect names for his characters, names that suggested a strange and wonderful universe: Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz; Max Quordlepleen; Slartibartfast; Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged; Vroomfondel; Zaphod Beeblebrox. Names that I can pluck from memory nearly twenty years on.

I was Zaphod Beeblebrox that year. I pinched the cool one's moniker when I was calling the local AM station's request line, and snuck past their 'no nicknames' policy by convincing them off-air that all the kids at school called me that (a blatant lie). Once I was talking to the DJ I launched into character with a 'Heyyyyyy, Bill baby!', and within a week the evening airwaves were full of teenagers doing bad impressions of their favourite TV characters.

In truth, I was more a blend of Arthur Dent and Marvin the Paranoid Android, which pretty much sums up your average 15-year-old male nerd and pretty much explains Hitchhiker's huge success. But that success wouldn't have been possible if the books and the radio series that inspired them weren't funny, which they definitely were.

It's difficult to impress on anyone who hasn't tried to do it just how hard it is to write comedy, particularly in novel form. In performance, comedy is pared down to the essentials, to the pithiest of gags, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps; try to fill them yourself, and you labour the joke and kill it. On the page, you must fill the gaps: a novel can't work as one long string of one-liners. The risk is that by writing in the structural elements that will make it work as a novel you'll write out the jokes that make it work as comedy.

Adams solved this dilemma beautifully by creating a novel-length structure that was itself a fertile source of comedy. He started by portraying the destruction of the earth as a routine council demolition; explained away outrageous coincidences using amusing deus ex machina (the Infinite Improbability Drive); and built up to awe-inspiring answers to Life, the Universe and Everything that turned out to be intentionally ridiculous anti-climaxes. Threaded throughout was the device of The Book itself (the eponymous Guide), allowing him to drop in non-sequitur sketches that were often funnier than the surrounding main plot. Rarely has anyone devised as successful a framework for a comic novel.

Unfortunately, Adams was unable to repeat this initial success; once the structural logic of Hitchhiker's had played out over the first few books, he had only the traditional novel forms to fall back on, and those just weren't as funny. So Long and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless were contemplative works of middle age, overly focussed on Arthur Dent at the expense of the other elements that had made the series work. In two Dirk Gently novels Adams tried to break out of the Hitchhiker's mould, with some success, but it was clear that for all his continuing inventiveness he would have trouble matching his earlier work.

My favourite Adams book of later years is none of these; it's Last Chance to See, a travelogue following his journeys to remote places to see endangered species before they were gone. I suspect it's had more of an influence on me than I would ever have predicted. When I travelled to the South Island of New Zealand, it was with memories of his search for the kakapo in mind; wandering around the valleys of the Southern Alps I was sorry not to hear the booming call he had described. Even travelling to Madagascar had echoes of Adams. His Guide to the Galaxy was, after all, inspired by his own travels in earlier life.

Adams was never really part of a comedy group or movement, though he was sometimes involved in the work of others—Graham Chapman (whose 'Liar's Autobiography' he helped to write), Monty Python, Dr Who. At Cambridge, he did more with his own comedy duo than with Footlights. He spent most of his life finding his own paths and exploring the potential of different media. Hitchhiker's was a set of incompletely overlapping Venn diagrams: a radio series, a series of novels, a couple of comedy records, a television series, a book of original scripts, a text-adventure computer game, a website, and an ever-evolving, never-filmed movie script. With Starship Titanic and h2g2 he was bringing his own stamp to multimedia and the web. Not a bad record for someone who was notoriously late in meeting deadlines; not a bad role model at all, really.

Read between the lines of Hitchhiker's and it seems obvious that A.D. is D.A.—that many of Arthur's character traits of quiet English bewilderment and frustration are also the author's. Perhaps a bit too obvious. I'd rather remember Adams as Ford Prefect: funny, sharp, wide-eyed, hitching rides around the universe and reporting about it to the rest of us.

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