Older blog entries for Skud (starting at number 159)

My mostly-mobile Internet workflow

One of the biggest changes to my Internet use over the last year is that I no longer spend all day in the office sitting in front of a computer. It used to be that if something interesting caught my attention, I’d open it in a browser tab and in the next slow patch — perhaps over lunch, or during that long dark teatime of the soul that happens around 4:30pm when you’re watching the clock, or the far more pleasant beer-time of the soul that happens when you stay at the office after everyone’s gone and actually get some productive stuff done — somewhere in one of those times, if I felt the urge, I could easily whack out a blog post if I felt the urge.

These days, I mostly check Twitter on my phone, and just reading links that get posted there turns out to be a bit fraught, let alone actually doing anything with them. All too often, when I click on a Twitter link, I wind up on a page that’s been “helpfully” (please visualise my sarcastic airquotes) “optimised” for mobile users, which means I have to click through a suggestion that I install their special app (no thanks!) before winding up on a dumbed-down version of the site’s front page. Any link to the actual article I wanted to read in the first place is, of course, absent.

Assuming I can get to the article, what I can do with it is more limited, too. My Twitter client of choice includes a cut-down browser which is great for quickly checking out ephemeral links, but opening in “real” Safari requires a couple of clicks. (You can do it by default, but that is overkill for most links, so I choose not to.) Once in Safari… well, a mobile browser is no place to get real work done. Nevertheless, I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to bash my newly-mobile-centric Internet workflow into shape, and since I’m rather proud of it, I thought I’d post it here.

The key parts are:

  • Pinboard — a bookmarking service which I started using as replacement for Delicious, and which has the feel that Delicious did back in the good old days, before anyone invented the term “folksonomy”.
  • Instapaper — one of several “read later” apps (the main other contenders are Pocket and Readability); one of the features that endears it is that it integrates well with Pinboard and with other apps I use.
  • WordPress — this blog runs on it, and I’ve got a bunch of handy plugins installed (and wow, sometime when I wasn’t looking, WordPress plugins got really useful).
  • ifttt — “If this, then that”, a glue application that connects various online services based on triggers.

Bookmarklets everywhere

So, I’ve now set myself up with these three bookmarklets everywhere, including on my mobile devices:

  • Pinboard bookmark
  • Read later (Instapaper)
  • Press This (i.e. Create a blog post here)

Installing bookmarklets on mobile browsers is a bit fiddly. Instapaper has a setup wizard that takes you through the steps, but most other bookmarklets don’t. Luckily, as you may have seen in a recent link post, there’s this bookmarklet viewer which makes it easy to grab the Javascript for any bookmarklet and add it as a bookmark on your iPhone or iPad (and probably on other mobile devices, though I’m not quite sure how their bookmarking works).

Read later with Instapaper

I use Instapaper for things I want to read later (obviously). I can add webpages to Instapaper via the bookmarklet, via the Instapaper link that’s native to my Twitter client, via the integration with Longreads (whose app I’ve recently installed), or, through the magic of ifttt, by bookmarking something on Pinboard and tagging it “instapaper”. (You’d think that Pinboard’s “read later” checkbox would do this, but it doesn’t; the Pinboard/Instapaper integration, from Pinboard’s point of view, consists only of automatically adding items from an Instapaper folder to your bookmarks. Anyone got any other insight on this?)

Instapaper, of course, has apps for my phone and tablet, as well as the website when I’m at my computer. I always have something interesting to read. The question is what I do with it after that.

Recommending interesting links

From my experiences over at GF I’ve found that most links I want to do something with come down to either “this is interesting, and I want to point it out to people” or “this is fascinating and/or enraging and I want to respond in detail”. So, I have workflows for both of those.

For the first category, I bookmark them on Pinboard and tag them “rec” (short for “recommended”). Through ifttt, these get posted immediately on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. But on WordPress, I’m using the Postalicious plugin, which supports Pinboard and lets you collate a number of links into one post. I post this under the user “autoposter” and in the category “Autoposted”, which makes it easy for people who don’t want to see them to skip them through clever RSS feed selection or whatever other filtering means appeal to them. (I use this myself later, as you’ll see.)

Writing about the really good stuff

For something that’s fascinating or enraging enough that it deserves its own blog post, I’ve got a “Press This” bookmarklet in all my browsers, including the mobile ones. While it doesn’t actually do much — just opens WordPress’s posting interface with a little bit of pre-filled text — the fact that it saves me several clicks and some copy-pasting (especially tedious on mobile) is enough, I hope, to get me at least starting a rough draft or placeholder for things I mean to write about.

Normally I’d write on my laptop, not on my mobile devices, because of the keyboard crappiness. I learnt to touch type for a reason, dammit! But I’ve got the iOS WordPress app installed (it’s really slick, by the way) and once I’ve saved a placeholder draft via Press This, I can open it in the app and write, if I am so inclined. (Whether I will or not remains to be seen, but I can see it being workable for short posts at least.)

The WordPress app is also great for comment moderation and other admin tasks, and since I really want to encourage commenting/discussion here going forward, this is going to be pretty handy for staying on top of things.

Pushing blog posts out

I’ve recently realised that I really ought to make a bit more of an effort with Facebook since most people outside the tech industry don’t use Twitter, but I don’t like it, and I certainly don’t want it to be a central point in my online life or the primary host for my updates/writing. So, my plan is to push out updates to Facebook when I post here on my blog, and I’ll also post links on Twitter and Tumblr at the same time. I do all this via ifttt. (I previously used Twitterfeed, but it’s far more limited, so I’ve shut that down and standardised on ifttt for now.)

ifttt supports triggers from WordPress (either wordpress.com, or self-hosted if you use version 3-point-mumble or above) and also from RSS feeds. However, the WordPress triggers are limited to “any new post” or “any new post with tag or category”. If you want more flexibility, WordPress’s wide selection of RSS feeds can be handy. For instance, I’m using my author RSS feed to catch everything that I personally write here and post it to various places. This skips things posted by “autoposter” which generally aren’t content original to this blog and which I don’t want to propagate from here (I’d rather propagate them from their original source). Of course, I could have done this using the “Everything Else” category, which currently includes all non-autoposted material; either would be fine, really, except that I can foresee myself messing with categories in future and breaking stuff by accident.

Other

The other important bit of workflow’s going to be actually doing it. My schedule’s full of classes, lately, and they’re pretty mind-numbing. Apart from that, I spend a lot of time at gigs and in the studio. I’ve taken up bike commuting again, so I don’t have much time on public transport. None of this is particularly good for engaging with the Interwebs. I’m hoping, though, that all this stuff I’ve set up will help me snatch moments for it in between other things, rather than feeling that I can’t possibly do anything now I’m not sitting at a desk for eight or more hours a day.

Syndicated 2012-05-14 01:30:45 from Infotropism

A whole lotta hoot, and just a little bit of nanny

I’ve recently had the misfortune of having had to sit through a series of classes on Western Music History that managed to make just about every form of music prior to 1900 seem deathly dull, irrelevant, and inaccessible. It amazes me how they can do this. I mean, it’s not hard to find some truly amazing stuff even within the confines of “Western Art Music”, and present it in a way that’s engaging. So why don’t they? Do they not know? Are they just teaching it out of a sense of obligation? Did they sit through dull music history classes back in the day and figure that we have to suck it up just like they did?

The Medieval period. What we learnt in class: there was Gregorian chant, which was basically monophonic vocals without much rhythm or melody to speak of, and then mumble mumble something happened and there was polyphony, SURPRISE! RENAISSANCE!

Yeah right. As if that’s all that was going on musically in the middle ages. We’re talking about an era that gave you St Vitus’ Dance, an uncontrollable urge to dance all over the place as if possessed by the devil. You think they did that to Gregorian chant? Of course not.

Here’s Corvus Corax with a little something to show you how it’s done:

Yeah, those dudes have a lightshow and moshpit. Their interpretive choices for this Saltarello (a 13th century number, if I recall correctly) are, ahem, somewhat non-standard, but no more ridiculous than the early music ensembles that play medieval dance tunes as if they were lullabies and dirges. No self-respecting medieval musician would’ve been able to earn his or her living unless they could get the village green jumping.

Corvus Corax use a range of medieval instruments including medieval-style bagpipes, ear-shattering shawms (clocked at 98dB!), and of course a buttload of percussion. But if you really want to appreciate the full ridiculous awesomeness of medieval instruments, you need to check out some of these Youtube videos:

  • The krumhorn, which is what you’d get if you crossed a kazoo with an old-fashioned walking stick turned upside down.
  • The hurdy-gurdy, which would be the medieval answer to the keytar, except you have to wind a handle to play it.
  • The portative organ, which is basically the bastard child of a pipe organ and bellows, giving you a kind of early accordion. There are quite a few home-made portative organs on the tubes — looks like they’re a great hacker project.

Syndicated 2012-05-13 18:50:26 from Infotropism

A new comment policy

This is a copy of the comments policy which I’ve just posted under the “About” section of the site. That one is the official version, and may be updated from time to time; this one is included here just so everyone sees it up-front and can comment on it (ah, recursion.)

And so, without further ado:

Contribute positively

The golden rule of this blog, as far as comments are concerned, is that every comment should contribute positively to the discussion.

Here are a list of things that contribute positively to the conversation:

  • Kindness
  • Humour
  • Novelty
  • Creativity
  • Helpfulness
  • Cleverness
  • Insight

And some things that don’t:

  • Bigotry
  • Small-mindedness
  • Creepiness
  • Repetition
  • Repetition
  • Wilful bloody-mindedness
  • Spam

Comments that do not contribute positively to the conversation may be deleted on the whim of the moderator (i.e. me, Skud).

Unacceptable comments, safer space, and trigger warnings

I try to maintain a space that’s as safe as I can manage for all my friends and friends-to-be. Bigotry and *isms, including (but not limited to) sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, sizeism, etc. are not welcome here, and may result in your comment being deleted or edited. This includes both outright slurs and comments which tend to support *isms, even if expressed in apparently inoffensive terms.

That said, things occasionally slip through moderation. I’d like to ask everyone here to call out bigoted or otherwise problematic behaviour if they see it. You’re especially encouraged to act as an ally when it comes to comments that don’t directly relate to you. That is to say, let’s have each other’s backs.

If you are discussing or linking to something which may be upsetting to some readers (for instance discussion of sexual assault, graphic violence or hate crimes, suicide and self harm, death or harm to children) please provide a “Trigger warning” alongside the link. If you don’t, I may add one for you.

Anonymity and pseudonymity

Anonymous comments are not permitted here. You must use a name of some sort (a pseudonym is fine) and provide a real email address (visible only to me and any other moderators I appoint). Please use the same name and email address each time you comment, to build continuity and reputation.

(On occasion, anonymous comments may be permitted, but this will be the exception rather than the rule.)

Time limits

Posts are set to turn off comments after a certain time. If you want to comment on something after its time limit has elapsed, please post on the latest Open Thread.

My blog, my rules

At the end of the day, I’m responsible for what goes on here, and will do what I think is necessary to keep the comment threads ticking along smoothly.

Thoughts? Comments? Am I missing anything?

Syndicated 2012-05-13 04:35:27 from Infotropism

Fresh links for May 12th through May 13th

Syndicated 2012-05-13 02:34:37 from Infotropism

Back to where we began

I just realised the other day that it’s been very nearly a whole year since I announced what I called “The Plan”: leaving Google and the tech industry, returning to Australia, and taking up sound engineering as a profession.

I’ve spent a lot of the last year offline, sometimes in an intentional effort to get away from it all, and sometimes through happenstance, when other interests and activities have limited me to the small peephole to the Internet provided by my phone. In many ways it’s been good to disconnect, if only because it saves this happening every night:

Someone is wrong on the Internet (xkcd)

On the other hand, I’ve felt pretty disconnected from what’s going on in the world, and it’s definitely been hard on many of the (primarily online) friendships I’ve built over the last two decades. (More on that shortly, I think.)

The other day, as I was sitting around on the sofa clicking refresh on half a dozen browser windows, I found myself thinking (as I so often have over this last year) that I should get up and do something offline, since the Internet was so dull. I’ve been telling myself this a lot over the last year. Then I caught myself and said, “Wait a minute…” See, there was a time when I actually enjoyed being online, talking to people, sharing ideas, being creative, being inspired, connecting with strangers and broadening my horizons. It’s been one of the best things in my adult life. I didn’t always have this feeling of exhausted passivity, of feeling like I ought to keep up, but not really being interested in the stuff that’s being shovelled through the intertubes to my bleary, sandpapery eyeballs.

So, fuck it, it’s time to be active on the Internet again, participate, create, do stuff rather than just consuming. To give myself a bit of focus in my renewed Internet life, I’m relaunching this blog. A new leaf — hopefully a series of new leaves — and with any luck I’ll be able to write something interesting on each one.

The mechanics of it:


  1. All the old articles on this blog have been moved to The Attic. You can still find them there if you need them for archival purposes or whatever.
  2. The subject matter? Anything and everything. For a while I tried to keep my personal website “professional” but I’m not even sure what that means any more. So, the gates are wide open. You can expect to see posts on a wide range of topics.
  3. I’m attempting to optimise the the blog’s setup for comments/conversations/discussions, and I’ll be making an effort to encourage and nurture them; let me know what how it goes and whether you can think of any areas for improvement.
  4. I’m instituting a comment policy, which I hope won’t be onerous, but which I hope will keep the discussion threads here pleasant for all involved. I’ll post the details shortly.

I think that’s about it. I hope this’ll help me reconnect with at least some of my Internet peeps, and meet a bunch of new ones. Let me know what you think, and in the meantime, feel free to tell me what you’ve been up to in the last year.

Syndicated 2012-05-13 01:33:31 from Infotropism

Pardon our dust

Major site revisions underway. Stay tuned.

Syndicated 2012-05-12 01:28:22 from Infotropism

Rock ‘n’ roll makes you horny

Today was my first day of school: the Certificate IV in Sound Production, leading (next year) to the Advanced Diploma in same, at NMIT. It’s the next step on a journey that started in January last year, when Google decided I wasn’t their kind of nerd, and it started to become clear what their plans were with regard to Google Plus and names (definitely not their kind of nerd, since I believe people have the right to control their own identity). I decided to quit and do something else. I was recently going through my (locked) Dreamwidth posts from that time, and it’s funny how quickly I made the decision to change careers, even though I didn’t announce it publicly til May.

Anyway, today was my first day on campus for classes. I’m studying at the Fairfield campus, which is the old infectious diseases hospital. The heritage listed Federation buildings, well-groomed grounds, and natural light in the classrooms are fantastic, but the isolation and lack of lunch options less so. I caught the tram/bus down there today, but from tomorrow I’m going to be biking along Merri Creek.

The morning was spent in orientation sessions, which were just as boring as you might expect (I took my knitting), then the afternoon in going over the student handbook and assessment criteria, followed by our first class in Occupational Health and Safety. My cohort is approximately 25 students, of whom five are women (a better ratio, I note, than any tech job I’ve had in the last decade or so). Most are recent school leavers; among the “mature” students, I am apparently the most mature (ha!), being the only one who can remember the introduction of CDs in the early 1980s. Only a handful of students were born before 1990.

The course is vocational, which means it focuses on practical applications and only gives you the theory you need to get the job done. I have about 18 hours of classes a week, spread across four days (Fridays are free), and we’ve been told that we generally won’t get homework or assessment tasks that need to be done outside of our scheduled time. I’ve been explaining TAFE to my US friends as “community college crossed with DeVry” but in fact the curriculum is closer to DeVry; there are no general education credits, and no classes outside of our vocational focus. There’s also very little attention paid (as far as I can tell so far) to the sort of cultural analysis or free-ranging ideas-based discussion that I tend to get from the mostly university-educated nerds I hang out with.

For example, one of the instructors today, when describing an instruction unit called “Implement copyright arrangements”, stated outright that “copyright is the only way people in the music industry can make money”.

(Pause for all my copyright reformist friends to pound their heads on their desks.)

Another thing I heard today, from our OHS instructor, is that rock and roll makes you horny. Well, sure, I’ll buy that. But he said it’s because the sacculus (part of the inner ear) responds in a certain way to vibrations over 90dB (the volume at which rock and roll is typically played), provoking an erotic response.

Is this something that’s widely believed? All I found when googling “sacculus erotic response” was a scam trying to sell “Pherotones” (I won’t link), a sort of ring tone for your phone that makes you (the default heterosexual male customer, of course) irresistable to girls, based on magical frequencies that vibrate the sacculus in a certain way. Classy.

Google Scholar, however, turned up the work of Dr Neil Todd of Manchester University, who published papers such as Vestibular responses to loud dance music: A physiological basis of the “rock and roll threshold” (1999) and Evidence for a behavioral significance of saccular acoustic sensitivity in humans (2001). Their research was reported in New Scientist, which summarised it as:

Because the vestibular system has a connection to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain responsible for drives like hunger, sex and hedonistic responses, Todd believes that people might be getting a pleasurable buzz when they listen to music–which could explain why music has developed into such a cultural force. This buzz may mimic the thrills people get from swings and bungee jumping, where motion stimulates the balance centre.

But there is a proviso: the sacculus only appears to be sensitive to loud volumes–above 90 decibels. Despite this, crooners could also love their own singing because sound levels in the larynx have been estimated to be as high as 130 decibels. “It’s bloody loud in there,” Todd says.

[...]

“The distribution of frequencies that are typical in rock concerts and at dance clubs almost seem designed to stimulate the sacculus. They are absolutely smack bang in this range of sensitivity,” Todd says. Large groups of people singing or chanting together, such as a choir or a crowd at a sporting event, could also trigger the mechanism, he adds.

I haven’t read the full papers (ahem, mainstream academic publishing prevents spread of knowledge, blah blah copyright blah blah revolution blah blah first up against the wall), but as far as I can tell, the experiments involved getting a small number of subjects, taping electrodes to their necks, then playing blips of noise at certain volumes and frequencies and watching their neck tension. The neck tension demonstrates that the sounds are affecting the sacculus. What’s the connection between that and pleasure, though? Well, the participants are “required to rate the pleasantness of the stimuli on a nine-point scale”. So there is no connection between the two that’s not mediated via a subjective judgement. Oh… kay.

So I guess if you believe that the sacculus response and the pleasure are connected, that that pleasure is necessarily sexual, and that 10ms single-frequency blips are equivalent to, say, seeing AC/DC play live, then sure, rock and roll makes you horny. I could have told you that, but I probably would have mentioned something about low lights, sexually oriented lyrics, crowds of sweaty people moving against each other, and alcoholic disinhibition. Still, it was a lecture about hearing and hearing loss, not about cultural context, so that’s beside the point.

In passing, while looking for this stuff, I also found (in this article) what is possibly the greatest “no shit, Sherlock!” statement I’ve seen so far in the study of rock and roll: “Studies suggest that there is an increase in alcohol consumption in environments with loud music (van de Goor, 1990).” Apart from muttering “correlation mumble mumble causation” under my breath, it does occur to me that the field research for that one must have been fun.

Tomorrow I have classes in repairing and maintaining audio equipment (yay electronics) and editing dialogue (boo Pro Tools). I suspect once we pick up the pace and really get to work I’ll enjoy it more than I did today’s administrivia. Still, I suspect I’m going to have a challenging time focusing on the vocational skills that actually form the curriculum, and saving my semantic nitpicking, cultural critique, and plans for the downfall of the RIAA for more appropriate forums. Wish me luck.

graffiti and posters in Centre Place, Melbourne

One of Melbourne's laneways (Centre Place), Jan 2012

Syndicated 2012-02-13 13:06:59 from InfotropismInfotropism | Infotropism

Go to the show (a resolution)

I’m overdue posting about my New Year’s resolution, but better late than never I suppose. (Good thing I didn’t resolve to blog regularly, I guess.)

I’ve had good luck in recent years with vague resolutions that attempt to adjust my attitude. I think it was 2007 or 2008 when I said “never turn down an adventure”, and 2011′s was “be an artist”. Each of them requires a lot of words to explain what they really mean to me (tl;dr: it’s complicated) but they worked well for me at the time. Anyway, in that vein, this year’s resolution, inspired by Pam and especially this post (but also, just everything she’s posted in the last year about the shows she’s been to), is:

GO TO THE SHOW

The obvious point is to go to more live music shows, but it’s also an attempt to get off my arse and go out and do things rather than sitting around at home, as is all too easy.

To help with the live music part of it, I’ve actually set up a mailing list with some local (Melbourne, Australia) friends to plan what shows I/we want to go to. If you like live music, are local, and want to be on the list, then let me know. I may occasionally post upcoming gigs here, too.

Another thing I wanted to post about was this:

924 tattoo

I got it last Thursday, more or less on a whim, and it’s all tangled up with last year’s resolution and this year’s.

A week ago this Saturday — within days of Google’s hiring process screwing me over, and the beginning of what later became known as the #nymwars breaking out inside Google (yeah, that was quite a week) — I decided I was going to quit working at the Big G and study sound engineering. I didn’t announce it til May, but I started working in that direction immediately. Within a couple of weeks, I had rocked up to 924 Gilman Street and introduced myself to the head of sound and asked to be taken on as a trainee. I worked my first show there on February 10th, and worked an average of about one show a week, at first under supervision and eventually solo, til I finished up in August before returning to Australia. My last show there was a Black Fag gig. They’d been the first band I ever saw at Gilman, and they were the last too. A fitting conclusion.

Working at Gilman was without a doubt one of the best experiences of my life. From the first time I saw the rules inside the front door, to the experience of working huge shows and meeting some of the nicest people I’ve known in ages, to — most importantly, I think — the opportunity it gave me to leave the office on a Friday afternoon, get on a trans-bay bus, and do something awesome and in-the-moment and most of all loud. No matter how tired or cranky or outright depressed I was, by the end of a show there my shoulders had come down from up around my ears, and I could always stagger home afterwards and sleep soundly, knowing that I’d done my job as well as I could, and that once the show was over and the equipment powered down, I was free of responsibility til next time.

I miss Gilman a heap. I miss the people (especially my sound booth buddies), and I miss the bands and the kids who worked the front door and the graffiti in the toilets and the moshpits and I even miss that frigging stand for the kick drum mic that always fell apart no matter how much you duct taped it.

So yeah, the ink’s to remember my time there, and to commemorate the year I stopped being an open source geek and started being a professional music wonk, and to remind me (if I’m ever feeling like I don’t want to leave the house) how good it felt to go to shows every week and be a part of that.

Syndicated 2012-01-11 10:17:07 from InfotropismInfotropism | Infotropism

Written? Kitten!

Seems like everyone around me is either doing NaNoWriMo or is in the throes of fannish holiday exchanges. I refuse to make any writing commitments at present, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sympathetic to those that have them. And so…

This afternoon, my housemate Emily and I made Written? Kitten! It’s more or less along the lines of Write Or Die, only without the AUGH AUGH OH NO AAUUUUGHHHH DIEEE!!!!, and with more cuteness and fluff.

written kitten screenshot

It was a quick hack in an afternoon, and we only have the browsers we have at home, so if you find problems with it please let us know.

ETA: source code, if anyone cares.

Syndicated 2011-11-13 08:56:49 from InfotropismInfotropism | Infotropism

Announcement: I’ve changed my name to Alex Bayley

I’m not sure how to post this in a way that’s not awkward, so here it is: as of last week, I have legally changed my name to “Alex Bayley”.

The recent Google+ names debacle was the catalyst, but not the underlying reason, for this change. When Google insisted that I use my previous wallet name, “Kirrily Robert”, on its services, it made me realise how much I didn’t want to. I’m not strongly attached to “Kirrily” as a name. Among other problems, it’s hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and an all-round nuisance when working internationally and in the public sphere as I do. And more importantly, I don’t feel like it’s me — whatever that means.

Throughout my life I’ve chosen and used a variety of other names, of which Skud is the best known and longest lasting. In relation to Google+, a lot of people asked me, “Why don’t you just change your legal name to Skud?” The problem is, Skud isn’t an easy name to use offline. Like Kirrily, it needs to be repeated and spelled and explained each time I use it, and there are many offline circumstances where I simply wouldn’t be comfortable using it. Even online, I’ve come to realise that being legally mononymous can be rather fraught (just ask Sai or Stilgherrian). So, “Skud” is not the solution.

As I worked through this problem, I realised that my return to Australia, going back to school, and picking up a new career would mean introducing myself to hundreds of new people. I didn’t want to introduce myself as “Kirrily”, nor as “Skud”. The whole situation started to get me down, until I realised that I could choose something else to appear on my legal paperwork, school enrolment, and so forth, while keeping “Skud” as my name online and in the tech community.

To cut a long story short, for a range of reasons I chose the name “Alex” as my new given name. As there are already a range of Alex or Alec Robert or Roberts in the music and technology industries, I switched my surname to Bayley, a name belonging to an uncle, aunt, and cousins to whom I’m quite close. And, just for good measure, “Skud” is now my legal middle name. I figured it might come in handy.

I expect that most of my friends will continue to call me “Skud”, so it should be business as usual for many/most of you. Almost all my online contact details remain the same, however if for some reason you have my old gmail address you should know that I’m retiring it; please use skud@infotrope.net instead (should work fine for sharing docs, chat, etc). When meeting me face to face, please feel free to call me either Skud or Alex, not Kirrily.

Addendum for those who are interested: to change your name legally in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I was born and now reside, you simply submit a form and payment to the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. You are issued with an amended birth certificate showing your name change within 20 working days, or 5 working days if you pay the priority processing fee (which I did).

Syndicated 2011-09-20 10:10:05 from InfotropismInfotropism | Infotropism

150 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!