Blog: A Day In The Life
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Tuesday, 23 February 2010
ITV Fixers & Absolute Radio
On Sunday morning I was at my computer, surfing the web and doing some programming. I kept an eye on Twitter, noticing that Dave Gorman was tweeting about the radio show he was broadcasting at the time (Absolute Radio). The theme of his show was people's odd routines & rituals; things they do all the time, without questioning. People were texting, emailing and tweeting in saying things like they always put their left sock on before their right, or that they always eat food in a particular order (crisps: large to small; skittles: yellow first; etc.), when they changed the volume on the TV it would have to be even or a multiple of 5, and other things like that. I sent Dave a tweet saying I don't have lucky numbers, but criticise people whose lucky numbers are non-prime..., thinking little of it at the time. A couple of hours later I happened to check my ReTweets (my tweets, retweeted by others) and noticed that several people had retweeted this tweet, none of whom I recognised until I noticed that among the retweeters was none other than Dave Gorman himself, meaning that he must have seen it in his mentions, liked it and retweeted it, then several of his followers must have seen it and retweeted it themselves.By the time I had seen this it was towards the end of the show so I waited for the show to be made available as a downloadable podcast (similar to iPlayer, et al; watching shows after they were broadcast). I downloaded and listened to it when I got home last night, listening out for my tweet to be read out. Unless I missed it, I don't think Dave actually read it out on air, but at one point one of the co-presenters performed a song about the things people had sent in - and he mentioned it! That part went like this:
I'm normal you know. I'm normal you know.The podcast can be downloaded from Absolute Radio (21st February).
I sort out my sweets in an orderly row
In case I end up with too many yellows.
I'm perfectly normal, aren't I?
I'm perfectly normal. I'm perfectly normal.
I have to read an old book at bath time.
I don't have a lucky number but if I did it would be prime.
I'm perfectly normal, aren't I?
Now allow me to explain my prime number thing. I don't have any numbers I would consider my 'lucky numbers', partly because I rarely find myself in a situation where I need to pick numbers in such a way, but mostly because I know there's no such thing as luck and cannot stand people's attitude to sticking to their 'lucky numbers', especially when it comes to things like the Lottery (I hate the Lottery and despise people who play it thinking they have a reasonable chance of winning, but I think I'll save that for another blog post). Being a mathematician, the only method I would use to pick numbers where there was no indication of any difference to be seen between them at the point of selection would be to select mathematically interesting numbers. Usually number selection of the nature to which I am referring is between 1 and 10, sometimes 1 and 20, 30 ... 50 or around that area, so you're looking at relatively small numbers (note that seriously interesting numbers are numbers like 33 550 336, 9 814 072 356...) so the even numbers have little appeal as they're common and have many factors or are factors of other regular numbers, which pushes me to go for the primes. Having said that, 6 is a wonderfully interesting number as it is the smallest perfect number (the sum of its factors 1, 2 and 3 is 6), and 2 is the only even prime.
Recently I was contacted by an organisation called ITV Fixers, which is a project to give 16-25 year olds the chance to do something to help others in their area of interest or something they are passionate about. We arranged for the Manchester parkour group to take part in this to launch a project to promote our view of parkour and show people what we do. They filmed us doing some training last week and we shot some interviews, and the week before, Paul & I attended the exclusive launch event (ITV Fixers has been running down South for some time and is just launching in the Northern areas now) where I was introduced to the regional news reporter Tony Morris who asked me to speak about the project during the official launch.
The main show will be shown next week but the preview (meet the fixers) was shown yesterday (watch from 2:18):
EDIT: Something I forgot to mention; Dave Gorman has to be commended for his commitment to replying to people on Twitter. He makes such an effort to reply to people who mention him in tweets, which is a great thing for him to do. If you remember reading on this very blog almost a year ago, I posted explaining what had led me to start using Twitter (Tweet Tweet); it was due to a blog post of Dave's in which he explained the one-way system of connection (as opposed to becoming someone's friend on Facebook, Twitter lets you follow someone to see their tweets without them having to see yours, only whose they decide to follow). He explained then that he always tried to reply to people who sent him tweets, which made up for him not following people back, and still meant that he could use the service the way he wanted (i.e. following only people he wanted to.
I happened to mention Dave in a tweet a couple of weeks ago ('Googlewhack' was trending at the time), without demanding or expecting a reply, but one came. I replied back and so did he again. The next day something else came up and he replied again. This was actually the day before I saw him do standup at Sheffield City Hall, and that night I mentioned him in a tweet saying the show was great and I'd really enjoyed it - he sent one out thanking everyone who'd tweeted about the show, that he was glad they enjoyed it. Then this week he retweeted my prime numbers thing during the radio show, and after I posted a link to this blog post (mentioning him) he replied saying:
@Ben_Nuttall Just so you know... it definitely was read out on air. Sometimes a link doesn't get into the podcast for tech reasons.He's actually followed the link and read the blog post and replied to me to assure me that he had read it out on air! How brilliant is this guy!? As I said, Dave has to be commended for his commitment to replying to people.
Labels: Featured, Internet, Maths, Parkour, Twitter
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 14:34 
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
What's The Score?
I remember in Junior School when we used to play football every lunchtime; it was always the same game - always the same two teams against each other. We'd try so hard to win every time; it was so important to always know the score at any time, and at the end of the game the winners would boast in glory at the opposition's defeat. This taunting may have gone on in to the afternoon's lesson, but was completely forgotten by the next day. We would start again, 0-0, and the whole thing would recommence - the obsession with trying to be (even slightly) better than the other team that lunchtime.I have many memories of this state of mind from my youth. It seems that it was ever so important to everyone that they always won at everything, despite the fact it meant nothing whatsoever, would be immediately forgotten and had no bearing on future events. The same would be seen in P.E. class - if it was a game of rounders between two teams, each one would thrive to get more points than the other, going to the extreme of arguing over each disputed point, cheating, accusing one-another of cheating, lying and changing the rules to fix the outcome; all this just for the sake of winning that one game, the outcome of which would be discarded within an hour of the game ending. But in that hour the pride of the winning team's members (even those who had no input in aiding the victory) would shine and the shame of the losing team would show in the form of bitterness and shear bad losing.
I was reminded of this mindless desperation to win this evening at a pool session with my canoe club; we decided to have a game of canoe polo to get people more involved and give them more of a reason to put their skills to practise. I really enjoyed the game - we all did - it was a great way of getting people to use their skills to chase the ball, paddle forward quickly, stop immediately, turn on the spot, paddle backwards, and so on. However, it became apparent that people were more concerned about what the score was (whether they were ahead or behind, and by how far), which made me think about what people's motivating factors are. It annoys me that people have a tendency to only do as much as they need to, so if they were five goals ahead that they would relax more and not try as hard - but the team five goals behind would be fighting for their lives to try and catch up (unless they had given up).
Another thing that came up was a touch of cheating, foul play and attempts to disallow valid goals simply out of annoyance at conceding. People were gloating when they were ahead, and after every other goal they would claim it missed or that there was some rule to say the goal shouldn't count. Then when it came close to the end of the session people were arguing over when the game would end (next goal wins / first to ten / end at 9:00...)
In a way it was great that we found a way of getting people to practise their skills properly but I just don't see why we had to being the concept of winning and losing in to play. I couldn't care less what the outcome was, although I did try my very best to win each point - regardless of how many we were in front or behind. Some people with a very anti-competition mindset would say they would rather lose a game if they were playing one, because it meant they had to work harder and that they would feel pushed. Personally I always try to win for myself, regardless of what my chances were, and I'd always try my best to perform to the best of my abilities.
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 23:46
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Goodbye Blogger...?
Blogger have announced that they will be discontinuing their FTP service, which means that users will no longer be able to publish to their custom domains. This severely affects me as my blog is powered by Blogger and I publish via FTP, which means I will have to come up with an alternative solution to continue my blog.Funnily enough, I'm quite glad of this announcement. Yes, it's forcing change up on me, but it's change I've been considering for a little while now, without knowing I would actually have to. I've started to notice the limitations and drawbacks of using Blogger to power my blog - things like its annoying way of interpreting markup, and it being difficult to update the template (especially for older posts) which makes it difficult to roll out template changes, minor or major. Also, I have been learning PHP and now I power all my sites with it, so having pages controlled and restricted by Blogger makes more work than necessary, which can be a pain to deal with.
Blogger does have some good purposes which do help me out, like its rendering of serveral pages containing different blog posts - so say one post could be shown on the homepage (if it's one of the latest 3 posts), it would also have its own permalink (a page containing that one post by itself), and if it's been tagged with 'Parkour' then it would be viewable on the 'Parkour' tag page too. At the moment I wouldn't be able to write self-updating functionality like this myself. I could do it manually but this would just be time-consuming and very inefficient.
I have to make a series of decisions - where do I take the blog, and how do I get it there? Do I migrate to another blogging service - and if so, temporarily or permanently? Do I write my own temporary fix? Do I write my own blogging platform - and if so, would it work in the same way Blogger did?
Ideally, in time, I will write my own Content Management System which will manage my entire site, not just the blog. It will work exactly how I want it to, and it will be perfectly suited my own personal requirements - bespoke for my own purposes. PHP may be the language I write this in - it may not. By the time I get round to doing it properly I might be writing in a completely different language. If I do a proper CMS in PHP I will have to utilise a MySQL database to manage the content.
It'll be sad to leave Blogger - I've always been proud to say I use Blogger and described myself as a blogger. I've been using it for nearly 5 years now (this is my 84th blog post!) and I've even got the t-shirt:
Labels: Internet, PHP, Programming
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 01:08
