Category: Stuff that doesn’t fit

Stuff that doesn’t fit in any category, or leftover posts from the big category revolution of 2009.

More Musings on My Blogging [en]

I’ve been a blogger for the better part of my adult life. At 34 this summer, I’ll have spent 9 years of my life writing in this blog (which started its life as Tara Star’s Weblog) — and you can add to that an extra year of online publication experience before I discovered Blogger.

I have never really tried to accomplish much with my blog: it’s really mainly a place for me to dump stuff in written form, reaching a certain number of people who happen to read it every now and again. Though I do try to “think of the reader” to some extent when I write, it’s probably obvious to most of you that I have not put a huge amount of effort into tailoring my blog to make it as successful as possible (define “successful”, while you’re at it).

In that respect, I’m a bit of an anti-ProBlogger. Not that I have anything against Darren at all — he seems to be doing good stuff, but… well, I guess I just can’t be bothered.

The result, I’ll admit, is that CTTS is not exactly very reader-friendly: long periods with nothing, then spurts of posts during a week or two, huge long unreadable essays, and don’t get me started on categories and cross-post navigation in general. It also doesn’t do the best job it could of showcasing my writing and expertise (as my most valuable or important stuff is drowned amongst the over 2000 posts).

So, in a way, despite the modest success CTTS has attracted over the years, I tend to consider myself a Bad Blogger. Not that I don’t know how to do it (I do it for my clients pretty well)… but I wouldn’t say I’m a role-model 😉

All this to tell you that I’ve realised, again, that the less you blog… the less you blog. Specially when you have a tendency to write long-winded essay-like posts that take days (or at least a full whole day) to write. Blogging, for me, used to be about jotting down quick tidbits, Tumblr-like, and I keep having to drag myself back into that here on CTTS, because otherwise I just remain stuck not writing posts about Big Ideas and Serious Research. When I do things, I like to do things well. It’s a disease some call perfectionism, and it gets in the way of doing things — I’m mostly cured but I relapse regularly.

When I don’t blog, it’s not that I’ve run out of things to say. It’s usually that I have so many things to say I don’t have the time to do it properly. So I don’t. Because maybe a part of me would like to be a Good Blogger, writing well-researched and well-built posts, and Getting It Right.

Once again, then: back to the messy writing you’re used to see around here. Oh, and if you have suggestions for 20 or so categories in which to sort my posts… I’m listening.

Busy Week [en]

[fr] Semaine trĂšs chargĂ©e. Toujours pas le temps de remettre mon blog en Ă©tat, mĂȘme si c'est la chose la plus prĂ©sente Ă  mon esprit chaque jour. En plus mon Mac m'a lĂąchĂ©e ce week-end (heureusement pas durant Lift!) -- rĂ©parĂ© dĂ©jĂ , toutefois, grĂące Ă  la cĂ©lĂ©ritĂ© de MĂ©moire Vive Ă  Lausanne.

To top it all, just after the Lift conference (you can read the notes I took there by looking at the previous posts), my MacBook fan decided it was time to die. Did you see me holding my ear up to my laptop during the conference? That was because it had started making nasty noises. Thank goodness it waited until the conference was over to die.

Hectic week-end, therefore, but very speedy repairs (thanks Apple Care and MĂ©moire Vive) — I gave my computer in on Monday, and had it back on Wednesday morning (only because I couldn’t make it on time Tuesday night).

Not having my blog online is turning out to be a rather big source of stress, specially as I have a huge pile of critical things to do for clients or eclau right now. I keep wanting to fix the blog “right now” but I can’t, because other things come first. And while it’s offline, it feels like a kind of part of me is missing — like I don’t have access to all my memories or tools. And that’s what it is, actually. I keep pointing people to stuff on my blog, because that’s where I write stuff I want to be able to point others to. And I can’t.

In addition to that, I understood a few important things about what I actually do for a living (my main focus/skill is strategic stuff), and understanding that is going to change the way I present myself quite a bit. Blog posts and site updates in perspective.

But for now, some sleep, before a horribly busy end-of-week: I need to cram about 3 days work in 3 hours, which is all the office time I’ve got left until the week-end (on the road quite a bit, as you can guess).

Lift09 — Pascual Oriol [en]

(Enviu Innovation Lab)

We believe consumers are rational, and if we provide information to them, they will act accordingly. *steph-note: big mistake!!*

The future of sustainability is in the hands of entrepreneurial people. People with Wow! ideas. Innovative solutions for environmental or social issues, who have a great business case, the potential for scale or re-use, and challenge others to participate or be inspired.

– Nicolas Negroponte: OLPC. (If netbooks are in the market today, it’s thanks to the success of the OLPC)
– Qurrent: transform the way we are going to generate, distribute and consume energy
– Happy Shrimp Farm: using the excess heat from an electrical thingy (where they make electricity) to keep the shrimp warm
– Hybrid Tuk Tuk: reduce CO2 and increase driver’s income by making the tuktuk more efficient in fuel consumption
– sustainable dance club: sustainability to increase the experience of clubbing => generate energy through the floor (materials which generate electricity when squeezed).

Lift09 — Globalism, Mobiles, and The Cloud — Juliana Rotich [en]

Global Voices.

blogs == good (control your vision, branding)

forums == ?? (echo chamber, what’s going on?)

Problems with blogs: too much to read, lunch photos, invisible breaking news, technorati is “just OK” (sorry!)

If you’re Kenyan and looking for Kenyan content, it’s problematic. (Safari photos.)

Network of bloggers from Africa, Asia, Europe… You get to hear stories which do not make it to the mainstream media. For example, Egyptian bloggers sued by chemical company for taking pollution photos. Madagascar cyclone.

*steph-note: this is making me want to dig deeper into Global Voices.*

English is not a global language. Lingua GlobalVoices translation project. Getting more content and context for what is happening around the world.

Africa: lots of text messaging. google Mobile SMS. Call and hang up before the person picks up = “I’ve run out of credit” — understood that if you Flash somebody, they’ll call you back. Then, text messages: “please call me, thank you”. Companies interested in using the space after that message to advertise.

Opera Mini (usage going up). 80% of BBC mobile site’s comes from Africa (the future is already in Africa!)

Mapping and Crowd-sourcing

Mapping election conditions in Zimbabwe. Ushahidi mashup, SMS gateway.

3 billion people with mobiles != 3 billion of citizen journalists.

Stuck [en]

All set to try importing old posts into a test database. Php.ini edited to allow big file size, long script execution times, etc.

But I get this:

Import WordPress

Sorry, there has been an error.

Failed to write file to disk.

I’m not the only one (google) but I’m stuck. Suggestions? I’m going to bed.

Here's the plan [en]

I have a wordpress export of my blog dated 24th october 2008. That’s good. I means everything published before that date will come back as it was.

The exception to that is the non-blog content of CTTS: the “pages” like the writing section, RSI page, About, etc. But I’ve got all those out of the Google cache (hoping I didn’t forget any).

Feedly, which I loved already, are saving my day by providing me with an export of my 1000 or so latest posts — more than enough to cover the bit that’s missing since October.

Backtype, as for them, have promised to get back to me with whatever comments they have for my blog, as they’ve been crawling it regularly for quite some time now.

So, I’ll have to reconfigure blog, theme, plugins, which is not the end of the world.

I have a copy of the last post I wrote and the ones before in case they hadn’t made it to feedly when I pulled the plug (haha). I also learned that you can access the cached version of a page directly if you know the url by typing cache:https://climbtothestars.org/writing/ in Google, for example.

Where’s the catch?

Integrating the exports I’ll get from feedly and backtype. Off the feedly export, I’ll have to:

  • remove delicious links posts
  • remove “similar posts” div
  • remove post language and “other language excerpt” from the top of almost each post
  • move the language and other language excerpt into the correct custom meta fields
  • find a way to integrate the comments gathered from backtype into the right place in the export file.

Thanks so much for everybody’s help. CTTS is going to be bonky for quite a few days, and not least during the Lift09 conference, which I’ll be live-blogging.

Oh well. Conferences seem to attract server disasters — in my case anyway.

Sometimes, I'm Awkward Around People [en]

[fr] Parfois, je suis un peu Ă  cĂŽtĂ© de mes pompes avec les gens 🙂

Sometimes, I’m awkward around people. Sometimes it’s people I know, and sometimes it’s people I don’t know. It might be people I know too well online, and with whom I just don’t know how to <em>be</em> offline — often because they scare me more offline than on.

People scare me.

That’s the basic premise.

I’ve come a long way of course, and I’m not that scared any more — but still: every now and again, I’m awkward around people.

I learn to be comfortable around some people in no time, whereas with others, it takes longer. Putting things like that make it look like it has something to do with the other person. But it’s more about my reactions when faced with certain situations, certain personalities, or certain attitudes. The bug is on my side.

Sometimes, I’m awkward in the middle of a whole room of people I don’t know, or maybe don’t know well enough. I’m a rather sociable person, but at times, I just seem to lose all that and not have anything to say to anybody. It helps to have a friend. It makes me feel less like a butterfly pined inside a box. Or wallpaper, to say it less poetically.

Other times, I look and listen at myself in the middle of a group of people, and bite my tongue after hearing myself behave a bit too much like the unpopular teenager I was, who wanted so much to be “in” with the cool kids.

One day, I’ll figure out where the “off” switch is. The switch which lets me turn the awkwardness off. Or maybe it’s really an “on” switch, which just allows me to turn my normal self back on when I get lost.

In the meantime, I’m sometimes awkward around people.

So, when you find me cold, unapproachable, silly, quiet, clumsy — don’t take it personally. That’s just me being a bit awkward.

Voter "oui" pour les bilatérales [fr]

[en] Swiss politics 🙂

300-250-frUne fois n’est pas coutume, je sors des sentiers battus ici sur Climb to the Stars pour parler politique.

Enfin, “parler politique”, c’est un bien grand mot. Ceux qui me connaissent savent que mon inculture en matiĂšre de politique n’a d’Ă©gal que mon incomprĂ©hension des mĂ©canismes qui rĂ©gissent notre Ă©conomie.

Je ne vais donc pas essayer de faire croire que je comprends tous les enjeux de fond en comble. J’avoue que quand on m’a demandĂ© de faire partie des 20 blogueurs officiels de l’opĂ©ration Bloguer pour les bilatĂ©rales, j’Ă©tais la premiĂšre surprise. Mais tant qu’Ă  faire, je me suis dit, allons-y: voter “oui” Ă  la reconduction de l’accord sur la libre circulation des personnes (avec extension) me semble ĂȘtre une Ă©vidence.

Je me souviens d’un fameux 7 6 dĂ©cembre, et a priori, ce qui va dans le sens de l’Europe me paraĂźt une bonne chose. Je penche Ă©galement plus du cĂŽtĂ© de l’ouverture des frontiĂšres que de leur fermeture, dans le monde d’aujourd’hui.

Voter “oui”, d’accord, mais pourquoi?

C’est la question que j’ai posĂ© aux personnes qui me suivent sur Twitter. Quels sont les enjeux, en moins de 140 caractĂšres? Pas vraiment de rĂ©ponses, du moins pas pour ce qui est du contenu de la votation. Est-ce trop complexe Ă  exprimer en 140 caractĂšres? Trop Ă©vident pour qu’on en fasse tout un fromage? Un “no-brainer”, comme diraient les anglo-saxons? En tous cas, pour une fois, Twitter n’aura pas vraiment Ă©clairĂ© ma lanterne.

Si vous cherchez un peu de substance, je vous suggĂšre d’aller faire un saut sur le bila-blog, et de lire ce qu’ont Ă  dire Ă  ce sujet mes compatriotes blogueurs politiques bien plus Ă©clairĂ©s que moi. En français, vous y retrouverez Lyonel Kaufmann de politis.ch ainsi que Christian van Singer. Christian nous raconte des histoires de guillotines et de corbeaux, et Lyonel prĂ©sente un argumentaire assez bien fichu.

Et si vous ĂȘtes comme moi, que la politique ne vous intĂ©resse que peu, que vous votez quand vous n’oubliez pas, (je ne m’en vante pas, mais il faut regarder les choses en face), que le “oui” vous paraĂźt tellement Ă©vident que ça ne vaut pas la peine de se faire du souci, ça passera — allez dĂ©terrer cette enveloppe grise qui traĂźne dans le panier Ă  courrier, mettez une croix dans la case “oui” de la votation fĂ©dĂ©rale, collez un timbre dessus et mettez-la Ă  la boĂźte aujourd’hui.

(Certains vont me trucider, mais si les autres objets de votation vous prennent la tĂȘte, que comme moi Ă©galement vous n’aimez pas mettre une croix quand vous n’ĂȘtes pas convaincu de votre choix& eh bien, on peut toujours laisser les cases vides. C’est mieux de renvoyer un bulletin de vote Ă  moitiĂ© rempli que de ne pas l’envoyer du tout.)

Novembre [fr]

[en] Novembre. Another year comes to a close.

Novembre. L’annĂ©e 2008 touche bientĂŽt Ă  sa fin. Comme chaque fin d’annĂ©e, je n’en reviens pas. Le printemps semble si proche. Je n’ai pas vu passer l’Ă©tĂ©. Inexorablement, les semaines et les mois dĂ©filent, l’hiver arrive, et les chiffres si familiers du calendrier changent Ă  tout jamais.

Jamais plus 2008. Une annĂ©e de l’histoire. Une annĂ©e de mon histoire. Une annĂ©e comme tant d’autres, unique mais justement banale par son unicitĂ©.

Quand bien d’autres annĂ©es semblables et diffĂ©rentes de ma vie auront passĂ©, je me souviendrai de 2008, des espoirs, des joies, des chagrins, du chat au chalet et de mon ordinateur rose.

Tomorrow (Sat.): WoWiPAD 3! (World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day) [en]

[fr] Demain, samedi, journée internationale de la paperasse et de l'administratif. On s'y met tous ensemble, chacun chez soi bien entendu, mais on se soutien moralement. Vous voulez vous joindre au mouvement? Il suffit de laisser un mot et d'annoncer publiquement que vous serez de la partie!

Still Needs to Go... Tomorrow, I need to deal with my taxes. So, no “working”, but paperwork. As I’ve done in the past, I’ve found a few other similar-spirited people, and we’ll all chug along at our respective paperwork tasks during the day, supporting each other through Twitter, Seesmic, and the knowledge that we’re not alone that day doing this kind of drudge work.

That’s WoWiPAD (3rd!), or as some prefer, the Administrivia Day. You do it at home or in the office (depending on where your long-suffering paperwork is), from roughly 9-6 in your timezone.

If you want to join me, Delphine, Pivwan, Peter, Baud and Richard leave a note or send a tweet, and I’ll add you to our roster of courageous WoWiPADers! All you need to do to be “in” is to publicly state that you will be 🙂

Actionable Cat

Tag: wowipad3 (for tweets, posts, photos, videos…)

Update: I just created a WoWiPAD livecommunity on six groups. Go sign up there, and use #wowipad/#wowipad3 in your tweets to have them appear there. I wrote a post on the Going Solo blog about how to use six groups, it’ll help get you started.