Basheera Khan

52 Projects: A Not-To-Do List

52 Projects: A Not-To-Do List

This just in: There may be life beyond BSG.

"Winter is coming to HBO. Hot damn." George R R Martin confirms it: HBO is filming a pilot of A Game Of Thrones.

This seems an appropriate moment to say: "SQUEE!"

(Via Virtual Economics of all places!)

Thou shalt not steal if there is a direct victim

Sadly, the chaps who yesterday helped me fall victim to a classic scam as they liberated me of my iPhone probably don't listen to Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip.

Sitting in Starbucks on Southampton Row, using my laptop and phone trying very hard to get online to meet a deadline (I'll save my BT Openzone nightmare for another post), I was approached first by a homeless man begging for change and in his wake by two guys carrying Oystercard forms which they thrust under my nose, jabbing and pointing and demanding something in a foreign language.

It was quite disconcerting and I first mimed not being able to understand and then, as their yammering became more insistent, I couldn't take it anymore and responded by miming complete disinterest in their 'problem'. They reached a climax in the harassment of stressed out journalist on deadline and then suddenly shut up and left. I locked eyes with one of them through the window as they walked up the street, shooting him a look of what I hoped was 'look, I'm sorry but I really didn't know what to do for you' as he shot me a look of what in retrospect must have been 'well yeah but screw you anyway'. It was only a few minutes later that I realised that yes, those thieving miscreants had lifted my iPhone from my table under cover of Oystercard form.

Bastards.

I was just going to leave it at that, and hotfoot it to the nearest O2 shop to block the phone, but then decided to tell the store manager in the hope that if they knew pickpockets targeted their shop, they could put up a sign to prevent other dopes falling victim to the same sleight of hand. And thus came Minor Outrage #1: the exact same thing had happened in the exact same way to someone just three days ago (she lost an iPhone too). So where was the fucking sign saying, 'Pickpockets are active in this area'? But well, fine, whatever. (My inner critic says: where was your trademark South African wariness when you needed it most?)

Aga, the Eastern European store manager who, with her height and striking looks is the spitting image of a young Angelica Huston, was entirely compassionate and very sympathetic. I'm sure she could sense I was on the verge of tears. She offered me a drink and I was tempted to say, well, I think I'm in shock, so something hot and sweet, please! (I didn't). She filled in a Starbucks incident report, said that she'd be looking at the CCTV footage to see if they could identify the filth in question and gave me three (yes! three!) drinks vouchers and directions to the O2 shop near Holborn station.

To O2, I say: Terrific move to forego training your staff to at the very least feign compassion for someone who's just had their phone nicked. The blasé apathy goes down a lot better, particularly if you then couple that with burying your option to report a stolen phone at the very bottom of your interactive menu and employ call centre staff who maintain a robotic cheeriness all through a conversation about being a victim of theft, and then instruct me to file a crime report without giving me the information they know the police are going to ask for, necessitating several return trips to the shop to make the same phone call a few more times for good measure.

My trip to the police station restored some sense of perspective, surrounded as I was by posters detailing information about the Child Death Helpline and the support offered to victims of rape and sexual assault. These people work at the edge of human experience, I thought, as I watched the desk sergeant, cloaked in the aura of calm that clings to people who regularly find themselves in charge of situations that can turn volatile without warning. He moved in a pool of the sort of vibe that talks people down off ledges, or persuades them to put down the firearm without harming others or themselves.

I watched this man in his late 30s, with silver rimmed glasses and a gently receding hairline, speak with immeasurable patience to a short elderly lady who looked cold and confused. He got up at one point and walked to a nearby coat-stand, searched through the pockets of a fleece. A stream of silver coins passed from his hand to hers; he took a Tube map from a cupboard and gave her a detailed explanation of how to get where she was headed. Then he left his protective glass cubicle, walked her out of the station, offering her his arm down the stairs and directed her onward. I was left with a single thought: this is what it means to be of service.

In the end, it took me four hours to go from the shock of a stolen phone to the relief of knowing that the handset and SIM had been blocked, the crime reported, the insurance claimed on (with a relatively minor excess charge of £25) and a new handset ordered for delivery the next day. There are many, many ways in which it could have been a lot worse, and I'm grateful for the many, many ways in which it wasn't.

omg, I'm on an album cover :-)

Andy's finally got around to putting the work of a dozen years of "mildly frustrated but entertaining knob twiddling" on Last.fm - check them out if you're a fan of electrosmooshy dance/trance/random goodness.

In true "Mr. Organised, King of Spreadsheets, He Before Whom Messy And/Or Chaotic Data Quakes" style, he's organised them into four albums complete with digital artwork, and yes, that is yours truly with the artist on the cover of Bandycoot Beats. Trés cool.

The Sartorialist: On the Street...The Sculptor, Moscow

The Sartorialist: On the Street...The Sculptor, Moscow: She looks like an Audrey Kawasaki creation come to life.

Twitlove

Twitter continues to delight and amaze me, despite the absence of The Perfect Twitter Client™. Tangential software blathering alert-- I use Twitterific and am generally quite happy with it, though in the style of the dysfunctional on again, off again relationship, I do sometimes find myself seduced all over again by Twhirl's superior feature set (integration with TwitPic and Friendfeed, easy retweeting and search, along with a slew of other nice-to-haves). Inevitably though, Twhirl's look and feel and lack of keyboard shortcuts start to grate; I return to salve my punished eyes in the balm that is Twitterific, and the cycle begins anew.

Despite the hype and obvious love from others, I cannot bring myself to enjoy using TweetDeck - it is entirely too overwhelming and claustrophobic - a great idea, poorly executed. Of course, my perception of TweetDeck and Twhirl may be skewed by the fact that I'm still on my old faithful PowerBook G4, which doesn't seem to cope well with the memory-hogging AIR apps.

Anyway. Twitter is a box of delights, and one of the coolest things about it is the occasional serendipitous finding of friends and other interesting people; most recently David Tebbutt, who I first came across at the beginning of my explorations into organised productivity. David, now a researcher/analyst of human and environmental aspects of computing, is one of the brains behind the information capture/planning application BrainStorm, a tool I used for a while back in the day before I made the switch and began my slow migration from kGTD to OmniFocus to Things -- which it must be said is just a *joy* to use on Mac and iPhone. Aaaand I'm back to the software blathering. Whoops. :-)

The internet is like...

... walking into a room in your house that your never knew was there - scary!'

Tricky Googles himself: A marvellously funny, excellent piece of music journalism masquerading as comic writing by Michael Odell in this weekend's Guardian.

The job hunting continues...

I heard back from The National Archives a few days ago; I didn't make the cut for the second round of interviews for the three positions of sub-editor they're looking to fill. I suspect it was the subbing test that was my downfall; the text I was given to edit focused on Britain and Europe rebuilding their respective economies post World War II and I wasn't at all certain of which facts were true and which red herrings. No internet connection, so no opportunity to fact-check with Google, either.

I can't say I'm all that disappointed; the job seemed interesting at the time I applied for it, but when I got to the interview stage, I knew instantly that it was not for me. The atmosphere, the energy, the vibe was all wrong; very public sector, surprise, surprise. And I know for a certainty that I want the thrill, the rush that comes from working in a fast-paced newsroom. So here's hoping that my other hot prospect pans out the way I want it to. :-)

My life in clouds

For a long time, I've resisted the allure of the data cloud, feeling quite uneasy at the thought of my information not being on a system under my control. Not that I'm a remotely capable sysadmin (the clue's in the phrase 'wannabe geek'), but there was a certain sense of security that came from knowing the intangible stuff that essentially makes up my life could be physically located on a tangible piece of hardware that I held in my hands.

It was also difficult, as a South African who remembers the painfully slow and extortionately priced bandwidth of my youth (which sadly persist to this day), to get over the hump of committing to a service which would require me to be online for significant amounts of time in order to use it. But my resistance slowly wore down, and a few years ago I took my first tentative steps into the cloud.

Red Hand Truck Blues

One of the things I enjoyed most about working at Swansea University was the constant little theatre of the human condition that played out daily on the staff mailing lists. Sad to say, we never had anything half as amusing as this: "What happens when the muses take hold of an English department, and focus their will upon the lowly subject of an errant red hand truck."

(Via Neil Gaiman's Journal.)