ITauthor

Over the past few days my broadband connection from Sky Broadband ("up to 20 Mb/s" so they claim) has been getting steadily more of a bad joke. In the mornings it's workable (today I was generally getting around 2.5 Mb/s download). After lunch it becomes sluggish and tiresome to use (round about 0.75 Mb/s). But from about 5pm you may as well give up. 

As I write my download connection is 0.06 Mb/s. Yes, that's right, a measly 60 kilobits per second. That means a long, long wait between clicking a link on a Web page and eventually having the result page in a readable state in front of you.

At this speed iTunes and Tweetdeck simply don't work.

This, I'm assuming, is due to Sky's wonderful Traffic Management policy: the more useful you find the internet, the more we're going to try and discourage you from using it.

So I logged into my Sky account and went to try and raise a Support call. Here's the form they present you with, saying: "tell us about your query":

What?!!! In that space? Now they're really just rubbing salt in my wounds.

OK, so, after writing out my complaint elsewhere and then copying it into this field and submitting it, lo and behold, as I suspected (but didn't want to assume, in case I had to get all the way back there again if I was wrong) there's a follow-up screen where you can pick from options and then you can send Sky Support an email. But honestly! Usability: ever heard of it Sky? Did you ever roadtest this on anyone? Did you ever think how it feels to spend 10 minutes on a grindingly slow connection waiting for pages to slowly load, just to get to this page.

So I'm off to have a cold beer now, watch some football and cool down a bit.

And maybe by tomorrow this page will have uploaded to Web host. And maybe Sky will get back to me. But at the moment I'm not optimistic.

I bought my first computer in 1989. I was studying for a Publishing degree and we used the little, all-in-one, Apple Macs, with tiny black and white screens, for writing essays and doing page layouts in Aldus PageMaker (not easy on a tiny, tinsy little screen). At the end of first year, we were encouraged to get our own computers so that we could work at home and give the next year's first years a chance to get on the Macs in the computer suite.

Naturally, I wanted a Mac. But I couldn't afford one.*  So instead I settled for an Amstrad PCW 9512, which couldn't do page layout but, as an alternative to a typewriter, saved me a lot of Tippex by allowing me to edit my essays on screen before printing them out to the daisy-wheel printer that came as part of the package. I had a small collection of typewriters that immediately became obsolete (although, all these years later, I still have them - but probably not for much longer).

A couple of months back I had a clear out and I took the PCW - which had been sitting, unused in a big cardboard box in a cupboard for the past twelve years since we moved house - and I added it to a pile of slightly less ancient computer equipment at our local recycling centre (otherwise known as "the dump").

This weekend I had another chucking out session and I came across the PCW keyboard, a collection of the sturdily built 3" disks that the PCW used and some books, including a well-thumbed copy of the original user manual. I'd forgotten what a good piece of documentation that was. Buy almost any hardware or software now and you'll get a flimsy little pamphlet, with health and safety warnings and some basic startup instructions, printed in 23 different languages. The PCW 9512 came with a really substantial book.

The PCW 9512 was sold as a "Personal Computer Wordprocessor". Its main market was small businesses that couldn't afford an IBM PC. It came with LocoScript, word-processing software, and a mail-merge program for producing personalised copies of standard letters.

But in the back of the user manual there were sections on using Mallard Basic and Logo. I immediately got deeply fascinated by BASIC and I started buying the PCW Plus magazine every month for the program listings they published. I ended up spending hours and hours, usually late at night, writing a Pacman-type game, instead of studying (or sleeping). Eventually this game got too big and unwieldy for BASIC - and the more functionality I added to it, the slower it became - so I started rewriting it in C. At this point it was becoming a bit of an obsession, with long, compulsive coding sessions, but the arrival of my daughter snapped me out of the habit and it was then several years before I did any more coding.

However, the starting point for my real interest in software - I mean writing it, rather than writing about it - came with this manual for the PCW.  So, I'm a little loathe to consign it to the dump, but it's just part of the general clutter I'm trying to get rid of, so it's got to go.

For more details about the Amstrad PCW, have a look at it's page on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

* I haven't been able to find the price for an Apple Mac SE in 1989 but, from memory, I think it was almost £2000, whereas the PCW9512 retailed for £499 + VAT and came with a bundled printer.

I've just been for a run: round the loch, up the hill and through the woods at Bonally, with Lottie (my dog). I was listening to Emma Thompson on Desert Island Discs. I love it when someone you've really liked for years confirms your good opinion of them. I loved her choice of music, her choice of things to take with her to the island, and so much of what she said.

Among the things that struck a chord with me was this:

"I think it was John Ruskin said, he was talking about Capitalism and he said, 'The acquisition of each new thing just engenders a new form of weariness.' And I thought, it's the most brilliant way of describing stuff: the stuff that we accrete during our lifetimes. Greg and I certainly have got to the point where we say, 'Could we get rid of this? Yes, come on let's chuck it.' It's like you're going along in your boat and you just want to make it lighter, so you can travel faster and you can go with the wind a wee bit more."

For some unfathomable reason, the podcast I was listening to is no longer available at the BBC website, so here's a link to my own copy (until the BBC tell me to take it down):

http://www.itauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DID-Emma-Thompson.mp3
© BBC, 2010

And - although she knows it anyway - Patricia, it's you I really love.

A couple of weeks ago I published a podcast on the history of RSS. One thing I didn't mention was how some of the early uses of RSS are now pretty much defunct, thanks largely to twitter.

Over the years I've used various feed aggregators, latterly Google Reader, to keep me informed of what the pool of bloggers I'm interested in are blogging about. I'm not a great fan of reading the news on the Web (I get my news through the radio mainly), but I know a lot of people also used to use feed aggregators to keep them up to date with news. I think this is largely a thing of the past.

In recent years I found that I was looking at Google Reader less and less. For the blogs I was really interested in, I used FeedBlitz to mail me every time a new post appeared on those blogs.*

But these days twitter has taken over as the main way I hear about stuff. I use TweetDeck as my window on twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, rather than ever actually visiting those websites. TweetDeck gives you a column of tweets by the people you've subscribed to, a column for FaceBook, a column for LinkedIn, a column for direct message to/by you, etc. But it also allows you to add columns for searches of hash tags. So I have a column that shows any tweets containing #techwriting or #techcomm or #techcomms (the last one may be unnecessary now I think about it). This provides a fairly constant flow of links to interesting information about technical writing. And the good thing is I didn't even have to go out and find these people and subscribe to anything - I just get everything going into twitter that's been marked in this way. Amazingly (so far at least) it seems to be free from spam. And it's really useful.

I used to find Tom Johnson's community blog Writer River good for this kind of thing, and I used to post to it, now and again. But it was cumbersome to post to using the Publish2 browser plugin (which is buggy and required me to enter multiple sets of login information every time I'd cleared my browser cache - which is often when I'm working on WebHelp) - so I got fed up - it didn't seem worth the hassle. And besides, it's so easy to tweet. Aggregators and aggregated sites like Writer River seem like a part of history already. Twitter is so immediate and so easy. It's 140-character limit can be a challenge, but it turns out to be one of the best things about twitter because it prevents verbosity.

Dave Winer's metaphor about news aggregators providing a river of news turns out to fit twitter perfectly. According to the metaphor, you don't need to be by the river every minute of the day, you just go down there whenever you feel like it, or whenever you can, and take a dip - or paddle about a little. Tweets keep on flowing, you'll never read them all - so you don't worry about it.

RSS is still great for a number of things (particularly, for me, the magic of getting podcasts onto my iPod). But as a way of keeping up with blogs you like, or finding out about the big new thing, or being alerted about important news, or telling people you've blogged about something, or telling people about something interesting you've found out there on the internet, RSS just doesn't cut it any more. Twitter beats RSS hands down for all of those things.

And yes, I tweeted about this blog post. 
    

* Want to use FeedBlitz to get emailed about an updated feed? Go to https://www.feedblitz.com and scroll down to "Subscribe to any blog" then enter the URL of the feed you want emailed about (e.g. http://www.itauthor.com/feed/), then click Subscribe.

The test drive pages for the current (functionality-limited) IE9 preview contain a little gem for those of us of a certain age who recall a simpler kind of computer game.

Friday/Saturday-night pub crawls in the late '70s were, for me and my band of pals, peppered with games of Defender, Galaxian (my personal favourite), Tank Commander and Asteroids. Here's what the original Asteroids looked like:

The IE9 test drive pages contain an SVG version called SVG-oids:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/35SVG--oids/Default.xhtml

Have fun and (for those of us of a certain age) relive the golden age of video games!

You can tell from my score (below) that I'm a bit rusty at this:

And for a more authentic experience, have a go at this version:

http://www.play.vg/games/4-Asteroids.html