No Blog Post Is an Island [en]

[fr] Une des grandes difficultés dans l'art de bloguer: intégrer des liens à son texte. D'une part parce que les liens rajoutent une dimension au texte, perçant en quelque sorte des trous dans celui-ci par lesquels le lecteur est libre de s'échapper, à la façon des "livres dont vous êtes le héros" de notre adolescence, et d'autre part parce que la nature hypertexte du web donne à l'intertextualité une place capitale. Un article de blog n'est pas une île isolée, mais un fragment textuel nageant au milieu d'un océan d'autres fragments similaires, avec lequel il a des liens plus ou moins proches, que la bonne maîtrise de l'hyperlien permet d'expliciter. Ceci nécessite, outre une habileté avec les mots (pour pouvoir retourner sa phrase dans le sens qui permet un bon ancrage du lien), une certaine culture des autres textes entourant le sien. Sinon, comment faire des liens qui feront sens?

Fellow blogger Adam Tinworth points to a leaked memo from The Guardian encouraging internal linking. He shares his astonishment on Facebook “that this still isn’t standard practice at most places”. I am not that astonished, I have to say.

During my many years as blog editor-in-chief and teaching blogging to students, I have seen again and again that from a technical point of view, aside from managing to write in your own personal voice, the most difficult aspect of blogging to master is integrating hyperlinks into your writing.

Autour du chalet, colliers de perles

I think this is because writing well with hyperlinks requires one to write differently. It is not just about “writing and then adding links”.

Adding meaningful hyperlinks to your sentences is going to have an impact on the way you construct them. You need to be comfortable shuffling the words around, or looking for others, so that you end up with a phrase that provides you with adequate anchor text for the link you want to insert.

Most people’s training in writing is probably in standalone texts. Offline writing, the type that worked well on paper. Your reader starts at the top, and finishes at the bottom. You may have footnotes and references, but nothing as dramatic as a hyperlink, which literally pokes a hole in your text.

I like to think of hyperlinks as adding an extra dimension to a text. Normal text is 1D. Just follow it through. Hypertext is 2D at least — remember those books we must all have read as teenagers? If you go right, head to page 16, but if turn left, run off to page 67?

So, the first challenge in writing with links is finding a gracious way to anchor all those links into your words.

The second challenge is less obvious, but even more important: intertextuality.

“Intertextuality” is a rather vast topic, but it generally has to do with the fact that how you understand or read one text can be shaped by your knowledge of another. References or allusions, explicit or not, that connect different texts.

On the web, everything we write is swimming in a sea of other interconnected texts. It’s not called the World Wide Web for nothing, dammit. Everything that is published on the web is stitched together. The blog post you are writing now is not an island, it is swimming alongside all sorts of other pieces of writing. How you position your piece of writing amongst the others may be just as important as the writing itself.

Intertextuality in the world of hypertext is a crucial thing to be aware of.

What are you going to link to? What is there out there that complements your writing, or takes your reader further, or down a parallel path? What are the associations between parts of your writing and preexisting writing?

This requires, in addition to the will to connect one’s writing into this existing web, some degree of knowledge of what is out there. Culture. Or dexterity in the use of the search engine. Or both.

I agree with Adam: internal linking should be a no-brainer. I do it a lot on Climb to the Stars: whenever I’m writing a blog post, I’m wondering what else I have written in the past which is related to it. Am I building upon a previous post? Am I writing on a topic I’ve already touched upon? How can I work a link to this or that post into what I’m writing now?

I do it on Open Ears too. As editor-in-chief, I have read all the articles we publish. The difficulty is I often receive articles which are written as standalone pieces, so I have to either work with the blogger to incorporate a reference to another article, or do it myself as part of the editing process. But as I mentioned above, adding links changes the way you write and construct your text, so “adding a link” is rarely as straightforward as “just adding a link” — and in some cases can only difficultly be done if it wasn’t planned for from the start.

When I was discovering the web, one of the first sites I spent a lot of time reading was The Psychology of Cyberspace. It’s still online, and I encourage you to visit it: as the author explains, it is an online book, that is, written with hypertext in mind.

There is a table of contents, but in addition to that, inside the chapters, there are links to other chapters whenever there is a mention or a passing reference to something covered elsewhere. This frees the reader to wander around in the order they wish, and avoids redundancy — if you need to explain X again, just link to it. I think this was a very good learning example for me of how to build text online.

So now. How would you teach people the skills to do this, when it doesn’t seem to come naturally to them?

Quintus a eu beaucoup de chance [fr]

[en] Quintus is a very lucky cat indeed. He used up one of his nine lives the night before last. He almost certainly chocked on a piece of kibble. Luckily I was there. In panic, because I thought he was dying in front of my eyes, I stuck my fingers down his throat repeatedly (met kibble, got bitten, didn't solve the problem). At one point I thought he was dead, lying unresponsive on his side, blue tongue hanging out of his open mouth, not breathing but heart beating under my bloody fingers. That must have been when I shook him upside down in despair, what was there to lose? To cut a long story short, when I got the emergency vet on the phone, he was breathing, not well, but breathing, and he slowly resurfaced. I found a piece of kibble on the carpet the next day. No certainty, but it might be the culprit. I spent the rest of my night at the ER for my bite, which thankfully is not too serious.

Quintus a failli mourir durant la nuit de mercredi à jeudi. Je vous rassure tout de suite, il est en pleine forme maintenant.

Smilimg Quintus

2h du matin, je me couche tard (pas bien je sais) et pendant que je me prépare à aller au lit, Quintus, qui vient de rentrer, mange ses croquettes.

Je le vois débouler dans la chambre pour se cacher sous le lit, ce qu’il ne fait qu’en cas d’orage ou d’aspirateur. Il n’y a ni l’un ni l’autre. J’aperçois un filet de bave au passage, je plonge pour extirper le chat de sa cachette, il a la bouche ouverte et la langue dehors.

Ni une ni deux, je plonge mes doigts au fond de sa gorge, me disant qu’il doit y avoir quelque chose de coincé. Je rencontre des croquettes. Il m’échappe, toujours bouche ouverte, langue dehors, ne tousse pas et ne respire pas.

Mes souvenirs sont mélangés, parce que je suis sous le choc. Mais je sais que je l’ai attrapé plusieurs fois pour aller grailler au fond de sa gorge. Je sais que je me suis fait mordre. Je sais qu’il a sauté brutalement sur le lit pour y faire un bond, paniqué. Je sais qu’entre deux tentatives de l’attraper, j’ai réussi à enfiler un pantalon et un t-shirt, à prendre mon téléphone, à chercher le numéro du vétérinaire d’urgence. Je sais que je n’arrivais pas à trouver ce putain de numéro parce que mon doigt pissait tellement le sang que l’écran du téléphone ne répondait plus. Je sais que j’ai cru que Quintus était en train de mourir. Non, non, non, pas ça, pas ce soir, non. Je sais que j’ai réussi à essuyer assez de sang pour appeler le vétérinaire. Je sais qu’au retour de la salle de bain où j’étais allée essuyer le sang, je l’ai vu étendu sur le flanc, inerte, bouche ouverte, langue bleue, regarde vide, et j’ai pensé qu’il était mort. Je sais que j’ai mis la main sur sa poitrine et senti son coeur battre. Je sais que je l’ai saisi par le milieu (était-ce à ce moment? avant? je ne sais plus) et secoué la tête en bas, de désespoir, le tout pour le tout, je pensais que c’était fichu. Je sais qu’il était couvert de sang, mon sang, partout. Je sais que quand j’ai enfin eu l’assistante vétérinaire de garde au téléphone, Quintus était couché devant moi, inerte, mais respirant très vite et très superficiellement.

C’était mon cabinet qui était de garde. Ils connaissent Quintus, bien sûr. L’assistante m’a posé une série de questions sur l’état de Quintus, y répondre m’a calmée, je n’étais plus toute seule face à mon chat en train de mourir. Elle a appelé le vétérinaire, m’a rappelé droit derrière, Quintus respirait toujours, il a même levé la tête. Elle est restée en ligne avec moi pendant qu’il semblait respirer de mieux en mieux et reprendre ses esprits. Elle m’a rassurée que je pouvais le laisser une fois qu’il semblait reprendre pied pour aller soigner ma morsure.

Je n’osais pas y croire.

J’ai passé le reste de la nuit aux urgences du CHUV. Une morsure de chat, ça peut vite devenir mauvais, je le sais, et je sais qu’il ne faut pas attendre. J’ai pris mon mal en patience. Les morsures sont superficielles, heureusement. A mon retour, à six heures du matin, Quintus dormait paisiblement dans son panier, et il a ronronné quand je l’ai pris dans mes bras — comme d’habitude.

J’ai eu tellement peur. Je suis encore sous le choc, je crois. Tout l’épisode a un goût de mauvais rêve, le même goût que le cauchemar de la nuit dernière dans lequel un proche mourait. (N’allons pas chercher très loin…) J’ai cru qu’après Bagha, j’allais encore une fois devoir assister, impuissante, à la mort de mon chat. J’ai vraiment pensé qu’il était mort. Et je lui ai probablement sauvé la vie.

Après avoir passé mille et mille fois la scène dans ma tête, au point que je ne sais plus maintenant où sont les “vrais” souvenirs et où j’ai bouché les trous, je pense que la croquette est probablement sortie quand je l’ai secoué. Sa langue était vraiment bleue, ça j’en suis sûre. J’ai retrouvé en nettoyant une croquette sur le tapis, là où elle aurait pu tomber quand je l’ai mis la tête en bas. Certes, il y a souvent des croquettes qui trainent chez moi, mais la femme de ménage était passée la veille et je n’ai pas souvenir d’avoir lancé des croquettes dans le coin mercredi. Donc… probablement la croquette coupable.

On a quand même fait un petit saut chez le vétérinaire l’après-midi suivant, surtout pour me rassurer. Son examen confirme l’hypothèse de la croquette (on écarte définitivement l’épilepsie et les histoires cardiaques) et il m’a confirmé que c’était extrêmement rare, un chat qui fait une “fausse route” comme ça avec une croquette. J’essaie de me rassurer que ça n’a aucune raison d’arriver à nouveau, mais je ne peux pas m’empêcher de garder un oeil sur Quintus quand il mange. Je frémis de penser à ce qui aurait pu arriver si je n’avais pas été là…

The Friends Who Listen For Me [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

While I was writing “Never Mind, It’s Not Important“, I realised I have certain friends who do way more than just avoid brushing me off with a “never mind” when I am in a situation where I struggle to understand what is being said: they will repeat and summarise for me.

This happens especially in group situations where I haven’t managed to position myself optimally, or when the audio quality or acoustics aren’t good.

Having somebody “be my ears” and repeat to me what I need to know is really precious. We’re at the opposite of the “it’s not important” situation I wrote about recently: I am willingly giving up the power to decide what is important or not to somebody else. But the key word here is “willingly”. It is my choice.

Friends-Who-Listen-For-Me

This allows me to relax instead of having to strain, and it also means I won’t be asking the person speaking to the group to repeat stuff that everyone has understood but me.

So, group situations where somebody is giving information/instructions for everybody are a typical scenario — another is dinner parties at restaurant tables. It’s really nice when the person beside me repeats what a more distant person is trying to get across to me when I’m asking them to repeat for the third time. Easier!

I’m very grateful for these people who seem to be able to keep in mind that it’s more difficult for me than them to hear well in tricky situations. And it touches me that they care enough to take the trouble to make life a little bit easier for me.

Thank you.

Bad Cat Photos (And Links. Non-Cat Links.) [en]

[fr] Des liens. Surtout.

I still haven’t found the magic solution to grab interesting links on-the-fly and collect them for a future blog post. I easily share to facebook, G+ and Twitter from any device. Anything shared on Twitter ends up in delicious, and so does everything shared to facebook (albeit privately). I stuff things in Pocket when I don’t have time to read them and the tabs start piling up. I’ve started sticking things in Pocket that I have read but want to blog about. It’s going to be messy.

The Basket is a Little Tight

I hardly got through the first item in my notes with my last post. So, sorry for the somewhat stream-of-consciousness blogging. Welcome inside my head.

A facebook friend of mine asked us what we thought about couples who have shared email or facebook accounts. The reactions were mostly swift and strong: eeeeeeew! Mine was too.

Online, your account is your identity. Are you “one” with your significant other? Joint accounts, for me, point to symbiotic relationships, which I really don’t consider healthy. Are you nothing without your SO? Do you have no individuality or identity aside from “spouse of”?

This reminds me of how in certain communities the “second” of a couple (ie, not the primary member of the community) sometimes feels a bit like a satellite-person, using the “primary” as a proxy for interacting with the rest of the community. This bothers me.

It bothers me all the more that the “second” is (oh surprise) generally the woman of the couple. It’s a man’s world, isn’t it, and women just tag along. Enough said. A bit of reading. Not necessarily related. And in no particular order.

In “offline” news, I’ve been redoing some of the furniture in my living-room. (“Cheese sandwich”, here we come.) One part of trying to solve Tounsi’s indoor spraying problem is getting rid of the furniture he irremediably soiled, and that was the opportunity for some changes.

New Furniture

The picture is bad, but you see the idea. Huge cat tree on one side, and “cat ladder” created out of two LACK bookshelves from IKEA (don’t put all the shelves in). More for Tounsi than for Quintus, clearly, who is more comfy in the ground-level basket I brought back with him from England three years ago. His elbows aren’t what they used to be, so jumping down from anywhere is a bit of a pain.

Basket for Quintus

Yes, today comes with a lot of bad cat photos. Sorry.

Anyway, I had to remove all my books from my bookcase to move it over one metre, which gave me the opportunity to start sorting, now that I’ve gone all digital with my kindle. I’m finding it very liberating. All those kilogrammes of books I’ve been carrying with me for 20 years! I can now feel free to let go of all but the most meaningful or precious. My Calibre library only takes up space on my hard drive — and hardly any.

(The WordPress editor is doing horrible things to the formatting in this post. My apologies.)

Swiss Monsoon: Ashley Madison Leaks, Minimum Wage, And Healthcare [en]

[fr] Les fuites de comptes Ashley Madison et pourquoi je ne participe pas aux réjouissances concernant la mise à nu des infidèles. Mes petites théories perso sur le salaire minimum (fausse bonne idée) et le système de santé suisse (bon équilibre des pouvoirs).

After a tropical summer, the monsoon. It’s pouring all its worth outside. No, it’s not very pretty.

Swiss Monsoon

Ashley Madison leaks. Another opportunity to drag “nobodies” into the spotlight and shame them. Oh, the horror of the affair! I don’t have proper stats handy, but cheating is something roughly half of people do at some point, if my memory serves me right. If it’s not more. It’s a small crime. Yes, it’s ugly, it’s a betrayal, a breach of trust, and can even endanger your partner if you’re having unprotected sex. Lying is ugly (don’t I know it). But in the grand scheme of things, it’s a commonplace transgression. That usually has a story. Anyway, my purpose is not to discuss adultery in length or excuse it (go read Dan Savage again), but to invite those who may be perched there to descend from their moral high horses.

Does being on the Ashley Madison leaks list mean you should be outed to all those who know you as a cheater, maybe ruin your marriage beyond repair, and even damage your career? (And just sayin’ — not all those with Ashley Madison accounts are cheating scumbags.)

So, I will not gloat about these possibly lying and cheating people who are now outed to the world. Not because I think they have done no wrong, but because I do not think that the public square should be the one to judge their crimes. (Read my patchwork post from the chalet for some background.)

And then there is this:

Josh Duggar? I will allow myself some schadenfreude, given the guy has made a career shaming others for their sexual orientations, preferences, or even gender. He’s not a nobody. He’s a celebrity with a big PR machine. Different can of fish.

I didn’t just want to talk about Ashley Madison — I actually took notes of the various things I would blog about in my “next post, this week, oh next week, ouch another week has gone by”.

There’s a very interesting Planet Money episode on the birth of the minimum wage. It’s funny that for the US it is so obvious that there must be a minimum wage. Yeah, guys — it didn’t always exist. Here in Switzerland, there is no minimum wage. On the one hand I think it’s important to ensure people are paid fairly. But on the other hand it seems to me that setting a minimum wage makes us run two systemic dangers:

  1. The first is “tampering with the system” of offer and demand. This is not a very palatable point of view, and it’s certainly shaped by the fact Switzerland has a very low employment rate. I like to believe that if something is really underpaid, people will not take the job. But I know this is wishful thinking, to some extent. When you are desperate, you will even take a bad deal. But does artificially raising the bar for the price of labour solve the underlying issue, which might simply be that there is just not enough work for everybody anymore, which may call for much more radical solutions than a minimum wage?
  2. The second, way less far-fetched, is priming. When there is a minimum wage, this in a way sends a signal that if you’re paying that amount, you’re “OK”. What are you complaining about, you’re getting the minimum wage! I worry that if we do set a minimum wage, salaries which used to be just above might end up being “attracted” to that theoretical minimum. If everybody is paying minimum wage, you don’t have much choice but minimum wage. With no “reference point”, employers will probably be more free to compete to attract employees by varying how much they pay. I realise this is coming back to my first argument, and assuming a system in which there is “enough work”, so I’m not sure how things hold up when employees are competing for just any kind of employment.

Does anybody know of research around these questions? I’d definitely be interested in reading more on the topic.

This slightly “political” topic brings me to one of my little theories about the world. It has to do with healthcare. Healthcare has always been of a particular interest to me, probably because I use medical services quite a bit, and maybe also because I had heart surgery when I was a little girl and quite liked my hospital experience then.

I have people close to me in various countries, not the least my grandparents in the UK, and close friends in the US (and we hear enough horror stories about US healthcare, don’t we). I’ve lived in India (OK, extremes). I am in love with the Swiss healthcare system. And I have my little theory about why it is so good.

First, here’s how it works:

  • basic insurance (which actually covers a lot, determined by law) is compulsory; if you’re really too broke to pay for it (300-400 CHF/month roughly) your town will normally pitch in
  • when you go to the doctor, you pay the bill directly, then send it to your insurance which reimburses 90% of it; every year, you pay the first 300-2000CHF of your bills before getting reimbursed (you choose the “franchise” and your monthly insurance bill is reduced if you take a higher one)
  • for fancy stuff like alternate healthcare, private rooms in private clinics, etc, there are optional “complementary insurances”; they can refuse to take you on, but once you’re on, you’re on

So, it’s quite expensive, but the quality of care is really good. The reason I think it works well is that there is a balance between those parties who have a vested interest in costs being high (doctors etc.) and those who have a vested interest in keeping it low (insurance companies).

This means:

  • nobody can get dropped by their insurance because they get sick, or some “preexisting condition” BS
  • your insurance is not tied to your employer
  • “everybody” has insurance (quotes, because it’s probably not the case for a tiny marginalised fraction of the population)
  • you are free to see the doctor your want
  • no huge waiting lists for specialists, or hospitals, or doctors, or whatever
  • no quotas (your “GP” has more than 8 minutes to see you, and will just charge more if you end up needing a 45 minute consultation)
  • you get the bills, so you have an awareness how much your healthcare is costing
  • the quality of healthcare is high pretty much everywhere.

It’s not perfect. Ask Swiss people, they will complain about the healthcare system all day if you let them.

For me, the US is an example of a system where the people who have a vested interest in raising the costs have too much power. That’s how you end up with ghastly expensive bills for things like a drip, and insurances which have no incentive to defend your interests, as they can seemingly easily get rid of you if you become too expensive.

We see this in two areas here in Switzerland:

  • dental care
  • pet insurances.

Dental care insurances are not compulsory and not regulated. We are used to paying our dentists out-of-pocket. Having anybody in this country look at your teeth costs an arm and a leg, and insurances are commonly perceived as “not interesting” to have. Easier to drive to France (that’s what I do).

As for pets, we have seen insurances show up these last years. I got one for Tounsi as he was young enough, and it did serve me well as I ended up with thousands of francs of vet bills a couple of summers back. But the insurance has a clause for “chronic conditions” where they only pay for care during the three first months, and then they don’t cover it anymore. Sounds a lot like something one might find in human insurances on the other side of the pond?

As for the UK, it suffers from the opposite problem. As everything is state-run, and paid for by taxes, the parties looking to minimise the cost of healthcare end up having too much power. You end up with ridiculous quotas, sub-standard care, huge waiting lists. Sure, it costs less, but the quality of healthcare takes a dive.

What do you think of my “perfection in the balance of power” theory? Specially interested in your views if you’re an expat and have first-hand experience of different healthcare systems.

Never Mind, It’s Not Important [en]

As the founding editor of Phonak’s community blog “Open Ears” (now part of “Hearing Like Me“) I contributed a series of articles on hearing loss between 2014 and 2015. Here they are.

You’ve read articles about this, right? How we the hearing less don’t appreciate being told “never mind” or “it’s not important” when we’re asking for something we didn’t understand to be repeated.

Since I started wearing hearing aids, I’ve had a few years to reflect on the impact growing up hearing less, first undiagnosed, then underestimated. When I see what a hard time adults sometimes have adjusting their communication habits to my ears, and that I still sometimes fake it despite my fancy cutting-edge hearing aids, I can only imagine what an impact this had on my relationships and ability to socialise as a child.

Some years ago I met up with a few girls I was in kindergarten with. It was really fun to meet them as adults, and we got on great, although we weren’t all exactly friends when we were in school together. I saw them as the “popular” girls and they didn’t seem to be very interested in me. As I was mentioning that, one of them remarked that it wasn’t they didn’t like me, but that I didn’t really speak to them or answer when they spoke to me.

never-mind-it-s-not-important

Shyness? I was shy. But now, I’m thinking I probably didn’t even hear or understand them. And, as another said, “we were five years old”.

What I’m getting at is that when you don’t hear as well as most of the people around you, you are automatically left out to some extent. You don’t have access to the same sound information as everybody else. You miss things. You misunderstand things. And when you are a child or a teenager, you will be mostly dealing with human beings who are probably not very good at taking that into account.

For many years I blamed my social difficulties as a child on being “awkward”, or not socially skilled, or not likeable, or whatnot. So yes, maybe I was a smart nerdy awkward kid, but the more I think of it, the more I’m convinced that my hearing loss played some role in there.

I’m dragging you into my childhood because I think that for those of us who grew up with hearing loss, “never mind” and other “it’s not important” responses hit right upon this sore spot of being left out. For those who lost hearing later in life, it probably hits a slightly different button, the one about losing an ability you had in the past, and not being able to function socially as you used to anymore.

There is something dismissive and patronising in “never mind”. The words being said were words I was expected to hear and understand, that others around heard and understood. They were uttered and audible-to-normal-ears, and as such made available to the hearer for an executive decision about their importance. If it really weren’t important, you wouldn’t have said it, right? And, as I like to point out to people who dismiss social media as “useless chatter”, these seemingly random and unimportant exchanges are the very ones which draw people together and create relationships.

What “never mind” says is “it is not worth the effort to give you access to this information that other people have”. It is not worth including you. And yes, I get it. You might think it’s not worth the effort.

But to me, it means a lot to feel included, to feel that I am worth the effort. Even if it’s just to get confirmation that indeed, it was nothing important.

At least I get to make that call.

Ingress: apprendre à glypher et éviter la pénurie de résonateurs [fr]

[en] On the importance of learning to glyph correctly, and how to avoid running out of resonators (4, 5, 6) while keeping your stocks low, thus freeing space for more interesting items.

Je joue toujours à Ingress. L15 en vue, mais nécessité de lever un peu le pied pour cause de vilaine bursite à l’insertion du tendon d’Achille. (“Ça pourrait être un facteur déclenchant,” m’a dit mon médecin quand je lui ai dit combien je marchais.)

Bref. Je profite donc de faire un peu “d’Ingress canapé” (cf. les “armchair anthropologists” et consorts) pour vous régaler d’un ou deux conseils.

Premier conseil: glyphez. Je veux dire, apprenez à glypher (et pas avec cette saleté d’overlay glyphe-triche sur Android dont certains tentent de rationaliser l’utilisation; c’est de la triche, faites pas).

imperfect truth accept complex answerAlors je sais, c’est facile à dire, “apprenez à glypher,” mais concrètement? J’entends souvent “je glyphe pas parce que j’arrive pas.” Mais pour apprendre, il faut justement passer par cette phase où on essaie et on n’arrive pas. A force de s’entraîner, ça finit par rentrer, et on arrive même à faire “imperfect”!

Perso, je vous encourage à faire un peu confiance à votre cerveau et aux processus d’apprentissage naturels. Si vous commencez à jouer, mettez-vous-y tout de suite. Au début, vous allez regarder les glyphes se dessiner sur l’écran, et être incapable de reproduire quoi que ce soit. Ce n’est pas grave. Ce qui est important, c’est de bien regarder la correction et les noms de glyphes qui apparaissent.

Les glyphes ont un sens, et les phrases aussi, ce qui rend leur mémorisation à court terme facile, une fois qu’on connaît les noms des glyphes. Il y a des couples de glyphes complémentaires comme “create/destroy” ou “past/future” dont la forme graphique exprime le lien sémantique.

Si les phrases sont trop longues, tentez de retenir le premier glyphe — puis les deux premiers, etc.

Mais pourquoi se donner toute cette peine? Glypher apporte des bonus de matériel conséquents. Pas juste un ou deux items, mais carrément (si on glyphe sur des P8) l’équivalent de 3 ou 4 hacks. En moyenne, pendant une ferme, on arrive à 13 items par hack en glyphant. On voit tout de suite les implications… (Difficile de jouer sans matériel.)

Si on veut s’entrainer pour être en forme pour sa prochaine ferme, il y a des applications d’entrainement comme Glypher. La vitesse ne fait pas de grande différence au nombre d’items obtenus — il vaut donc mieux y aller lentement mais sûrement qu’essayer de battre des records et rater ses glyphes.

Savoir glypher est aussi important pour ne pas vous retrouver en pénurie de résonateurs. J’entends souvent des joueurs dire qu’ils n’ont plus assez de résonateurs de niveau 4 ou 6 (généralement ceux de niveau 5 ça va, vu qu’on hacke du 5 quand on joue seul).

Si on glyphe confortablement, non seulement on ne se retrouve quasi jamais à sec, mais en plus, on peut se permettre de tourner avec un stock minimal de résonateurs 4, 5 et 6 dans son inventaire, libérant ainsi de la place pour des items plus intéressants (comme des XMP, au hasard). Personnellement, je tourne avec entre 20 et 30 résonateurs 4 et 5, et un peu plus de 6 si je peux, 30-50, vu que je joue souvent solo. Mais je suis souvent à moins. Il est complètement inutile de se balader avec 100 résonateurs de niveau 5 dans son inventaire.

Comment je survis?

Déjà, il faut connaître le “truc” pour obtenir des résonateurs de niveau 4: déployer 8 7 6 6 5 5, puis hacker (en glyphant bien sûr). A ce stade du déploiement, le portail est de niveau 4, et on obtient donc des résonateurs 4. Qu’on peut ensuite déployer pour compléter le portail.

Le désavantage ici, c’est qu’on ne peut pas continuer à avancer, si on veut déployer proprement. Ça nous ralentit donc. Une alternative est de compléter le portail avec deux résonateurs de niveau 1, ce qui permet de continuer à marcher et de les upgrader une fois qu’on a fini de hacker le portail.

Pour les résonateurs de niveau 6, il faut être à l’affût des portails incomplets capturés par un autre joueur. Avec un 8 ou un 7 en place, on fait du 6. Quand je commence à être à court de résonateurs 6, il me suffit de croiser 3-4 portails ainsi que je peux “monter en 6” pour me refaire un peu mon stock.

De façon générale, je garde toujours un oeil sur mon stock de résonateurs quand je joue. S’il est haut, je n’ai pas besoin de glypher et je peux donc jouer plus “vite” si je le désire. S’il est bas, je glyphe soigneusement.

Stories to Listen to, Moderating Blog Comments, Teaching Blogging [en]

[fr] Deux ou trois épisodes de podcasts à écouter. Quelques réflexions sur les commentaires de blog (spam ou non?) et la difficulté d'apprendre à bloguer.

Listen to Greetings from Coney Island. I swear you won’t be disappointed. Just don’t make the same mistake I did, and be a bit distracted early on, not realising there are two parallel stories, told by two women with (to me) very similar voices. I actually reached the end of the story before realising I had missed the whole point, so I listened to it all again. It was worth it.

vue cham

Another episode of Love+Radio reminded me of a Moth story I heard quite a long time ago now. It’s about a volunteer at a suicide prevention hotline. That story made me understand something about suicide (which I am lucky not to know from the inside): it’s not about wanting to die, it’s about wanting the pain to stop. Like many Moth stories, it’s beautifully told and very moving. Well worth the small moment of your life you will spend listening to it.

I know, this blog is turning into a podcast review. But not only. See.

One of the challenges I face as editor-in-chief of Open Ears is approving comments. Not so much because we publish controversial articles that have people biting each other’s heads off in the comments (not at all, actually), but more because

  1. spambots are getting better and better at sounding human
  2. some humans are sounding more and more like spambots.

About the latter: people like me have been saying for years that a great way to get your website or blog known is to comment on other blogs. But that’s not quite the whole story. Aligning fluffy or self-promotional comments on other people’s blogs might get your “nofollowed” links out there, but isn’t really going to do what matters, which is encouraging people to actually know you and read your stuff because they’re interested. Clicks and visits only really mean anything if they come from the heart.

So what does work? Well, actually, being a valued member of the communities you are part of. At the time, during the Golden Age of Blogging, leaving meaningful comments on blogs you read and linked to was a way of being that. It’s not about the links, it’s about the place you respectfully take or are given willingly. Add value. Be helpful. Try and make friends. That’s the spirit of “leaving comments”.

Which brings me to an important piece of blogging advice I came up with while trying to teach my latest batch of students the basics of blogging (it was, to put it kindly, a mixed success): blog about stuff that’s in your head. Write about what you know. If you have to google around to factcheck this or that, find a link, or look up a detail, that’s fine. But if you find yourself doing research and reading up to gather the material for your blog post (and the post is not about your research), chances are you’re “doing it wrong”.

Blogging is this weird thing which as at the same time so easy (for “natural bloggers”) but so hard to learn or teach. I think that is because it touches upon “being” more than “doing”. It’s about daring a certain degree of authenticity that we are not encouraged to wear in our school or professional lives. And it’s definitely not how we learn to write. In a way, teaching blogging is a bit like trying to teach people to dare to be themselves in public. This makes you think of Brené Brown and vulnerability, does it not? Exactly. And that is why, I think, blogging is a powerful tool to connect people.

Back On The Heat Wave [en]

[fr] L'oeil qui voyait trouble? Pas un coup de soleil, mais un mini corps étranger métallique. Oui, ouille. J'en ai monstre marre de voir flou de mon oeil dominant, juste là.

It was much cooler up in the mountains. Here I am in Lausanne, with another heat wave hitting us. Or the same. I don’t know anymore, this summer has been endless days in survivor mode trying to keep my flat cool. The largest part of my flat faces southwest. As soon as it gets warmer outside than inside, I close everything. I close the blinds so the sun doesn’t heat my rooms through the windows. And late in the evening, when the temperature has dropped a few degrees, and the outside air is finally cooler than inside, I open everything wide.

heat wave 2015

No ceiling fans or AC here. Swiss buildings are designed to keep the cold out.

Remember the fuzzy vision I told you about a few days ago? Wednesday morning I headed over to Lausanne’s eye hospital. I spent most of the morning there. The fun bit is that I got to see two young doctors doing their internship. They were very friendly and relaxed, went through all the preliminary questions, examined my eye, tinkered with the devices in the room (they usually saw patients in another room, they explained, and weren’t familiar with this one), and then went to present my case to the doctor supervising them, who then saw me to close the case.

Turns out it wasn’t too much sun. Oh no. It was a speck of metal dust stuck in my eye, right in the middle. Tiny, a fifth of a millimetre or something. My first reaction was “OMG metal in my eye”, followed straight behind by “OMGOMG you’re going to have to remove it!” The doctor reassured me that this was something they did many times a day and was no big deal.

A few drops of anaesthetic in my eye, some deep breaths (well, I tried, at least) and clenched hands on the handles in front of me, staring straight ahead with my other eye, straight ahead, very important not to move, straight ahead… and that was it. He scraped out the nasty little thing from my eye. Oh, and a tiny layer of my cornea, too, he explained. (Luckily I’ve had enough feline eye adventures with Sir Quintus that this didn’t alarm me. But still.)

So, now I’m left with gooey antibiotic drops (we don’t want an infection there) and still-blurry vision. It’s really making reading (on-screen or off-screen) difficult and frustrating. The blurry eye is my dominant eye, otherwise it wouldn’t be so bad. It still hurts a bit at night, but hopefully the pain should go away in a few short days. I don’t know about the timeline for the blurry vision, and it’s starting to distress me. The nurse on the hotline suggested I give it the week-end and come around on Monday if it was still bad. At this stage what’s going through my mind is “I hope I get all my vision back at some point” and “I hope it doesn’t take too long, because it’s starting to impact my ability to work”.

Fuzzy Vision [en]

[fr] Encore du vrac!

Watch, if you haven’t watched it yet, the video on managing unconscious bias at Facebook.

And, just because I thought of it right now this second, this documentary on Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. He tells a very moving story of his religious journey, from the early days when he was “a pop star” to now. (Remember the “Salman Rushdie incident“? Not surprisingly, it’s not what you thought it was, just like the story of the lady suing McDonald’s for spilling hot coffee on her lap is not what you thought.)

“Note to Self” was formerly called “New Tech City“, and it’s a podcast on the human side of the digital world. Exactly what has been of interest to me these last fifteen years. I recently liked this episode about reading. There are two different types of reading skills we need to develop in today’s world:

  • slow reading: the type we learned at school and practiced before the internet. Reading a novel. Reading complex, complicated stuff we need to digest.
  • skim & skip reading: the type we do online, always interrupted, always jumping off to something new, going through large quantities of information quickly.

Both need training. But our brain adapts to the second type so well… we need to remember to practice the first type. It will come back. I still read books (Kindle…) and I’m going to make sure I set aside some regular phoneless reading time in future.

Hiking yesterday, I realised that there really is a technique to walking on a mountain trail. Specially going downhill. I don’t know how I learned this, if somebody taught me or if I figured it out alone. Shift weight gently, don’t just dump all your weight on the next foot as soon as it hits the ground. Do it in a way that you can backtrack if you start slipping. Remember your knees (and ankles) are there to absorb shock (too many concussions have taught me to be sensitive to this). So bend your knees. Don’t plonk your foot down with a locked knee.

Vue depuis le Chamossaire

And when it’s too steep, or there is a really big step to go down, and your back leg is not willing (or strong enough) to let you down gently? Squat first on both legs. Then take a step down from that squatting position. Easy!

Fuzzy eye? Articles need titles, don’t they. I seem to have managed to sunburn one of my eyes two days ago, and my vision out of it is still fuzzy. Probably nothing serious, but as it’s about an eye, I’ll do what my vet says and not mess around. Doctor today or tomorrow.