Social Media or Social Faux Pah?

Although I tend to blog stuff that just occurs to me, thus the sporadic nature of my posts, this time it's slightly different.

Last night I watched an episode of The Secrets of SIlicon Valley on the BBC and found the subject interesting. For those not having seen it, and I would recommend you do if it is available in your jurisdiction, it was effectively suggesting that recent political phenomena like the election of Donald Trump, were heavily influenced by Social Media platforms.

Now that's not necessarily 'news' to IT people, but what was particularly interesting was how the programme makers took a gently critical, almost mocking, view of the altruistic, slightly hippy style world view of the people behind the technologies in Silicon Valley.

Taking my own opinions on global connectivity into focus, where I used to believe that global connectivity would lift millions out of overarching state control and into the fold of being free to make your own choices, I'm now not so sure.

Giving unaccountable corporations massive amounts of data that they are allowed to use to profile us to an ever improving degree, doesn't just show us more highly targeted adverts it can be used to influence us in ways that perhaps we are no longer conscious of or actually are concerned about.

Sometimes, tools can be used in more than one way. This is a case where the outcome is not as the designers expected. Is it a case now that the genie is out of the bottle and we have to live with the consequences or is there anything that can be done about it.

I'll let you make your own decision about that!

Modern cars & The Modern Driver

Being a bit of a petrolhead, I've been keeping up to date with all the developments in 'driver assistance' aids and self driving cars as you would expect but the weather yesterday got me thinking.

The current state of the art for mass market cars have things like ABS brakes, cruise control, traction control, auto wipers and auto lights all fitted but yesterday was foggy. My own car has all of the above but it does not have enough intelligence to identify fog and react accordingly so I manually turned on my fog lights. Driving along on my way to work, I was taken by how many cars had nothing more than running lights illuminated.

Clearly, I can't vouch for all the vehicles that I drove past but. I'd wager a fair number of them had auto light systems like mine and the owners hadn't thought to check their dashboard to see if their headlights or fog lights had come on.

My worry is that could this be a symptom where drivers are no longer questioning automated systems and as such what will the next systems be that might need our attention. I'd hate to think of the progress towards running vehicles packed closely together for efficiency being littered with hard won lessons.

I for one will keep the automated systems in my vehicles monitored closely,

Fateful or what?

Obviously my last blog post was before the now infamous Sepang incident and I, like a lot of MotoGP supporters are in limbo. 

No matter if you support Marc Marquez, Valentino Rossi or even Jorge Lorenzo, your support is now tainted with the realisation that they have a thinly concealed dark side. Ruthlessness is too polite a word for it.

Valentino Rossi battling with Marc Marquez

I suppose that I will still watch the season finale in Valencia but probably more to hopefully see Danny Kent become the first World Champion from Britain since Barry Sheene all those years ago and to see the final standings in the main MotoGP category.

Next season I won't change my allegiance to Yamaha but I will see the riders in a different light.

If you want to see a well written and thoughtful analysis of the Sepang incident I'd suggest reading David Emmett's article here

Divided loyalty

As my profile description mentions, I am an avid sofa based follower of the sport that is MotoGP. What is perhaps not clear is that I am fairly partisan in terms of who I support. Due to my history of owning motorcycles made by Yamaha, I have gravitated to following the exploits of the various teams within the championship supplied or run by the company.

Now you might be thinking what's all this got to do with divided loyalty so I'd better give you some background.

In most of the recent years, it has been easy to follow the manufacturer and end up supporting one rider but this year, and more specifically in the latter part of the season, it has become mathematically impossible for anyone other than a Yamaha rider to win the Riders Championship - the one most of the headlines are based on.

So who do I choose to support? Is it Valentino Rossi, currently the oldest and most successful rider on the grid or Jorge Lorenzo his younger team mate? A dilemma indeed.

Valentino Rossi (46) chases Jorge Lorenzo (99) at Philip Island, Australia

Of course, Vale (Rossi) is perhaps rightfully known not only as 'The Doctor' but as the G.O.A.T (Greatest Of All Time) because his exploits in terms of the sheer number of races and titles won are second to very few and nobody in the current era. Add in the fact that his character, passion and showmanship have endeared him to vast crowds around the world and it's easy to get on board and make him your favourite. You can't help but admire his determination to win a 10th title at the ripe old, in racing terms, age of 36 nor his infectious passion for the sport and the battle with the younger riders.

On the other side of the Yamaha garage is a man more difficult to like. Someone who shows his passion in other ways, who perhaps rubs some people up the wrong way, had a reputation for being a bit susceptible to failing under pressure but on a race track in wet or dry conditions has an almost unbelievable level of concentration and focus allowing him to lap time after time at a faster pace than almost any of the other previous championship contenders.

As a true Brit I'm tempted to go with the underdog in this, which at the time of writing is Jorge due to his points deficit, but I almost feel disloyal to Vale by doing so.

I can't make my mind up but I know I will enjoy the battle especially if it goes down to the wire in the last race of the season.

Who would you choose?

Am I politically engaged or not?

With the upcoming election being looked at from every angle in the news media and starting to crop up in conversations, I am hearing more and more about the feeling that the electorate are in the majority disengaged from politics. This supposition got me thinking about my own position and I'm not sure if the question is actually relevant.

How about asking the question 'what do you believe a change in government would change in your life financially?' What might the reaction be to that?

I bet you'd hear all sorts of off the cuff remarks about the cost of whichever party they wanted to talk about but if you followed that up with 'what increase in cost to you would there need to be before you felt compelled to vote to object?' you'd get them thinking harder.

Similar questions focussed on quality of life issues like the Health Service, employment, care & support and immigration could be raised too.

Perhaps the reason people aren't considered to be engaged is because the value of any prospective change isn't sufficiently extreme to warrant them doing something about it. You could argue that the various political parties are pretty much offering various shades of grey policies.

Consider the Scottish independence vote where everyone says the electorate were engaged and remain so. The choices there are so far away from the middle ground that there is more motivation on both sides of the debate.

Have we got to the situation where because everyone now occupies the middle ground the choices are less stark and motivating?

If you accept that theory, then are people actually engaged but see little benefit in making a choice?

Je suis Charlie and the threat to free speech

Now that some of the furore surrounding the appalling events in Paris has died down, I've become concerned that Free Speech is not under threat from just those purporting to represent the Islamic Religion. Perhaps the biggest threat is the potential increase in power being recommended by sections of our elected representatives.

It seems that the Conservative Party are becoming more and more the party of the knee jerk reaction desperate by any means to garner votes without considering some of the implications of their latest policy shift.

Almost inevitably, Cameron and co are calling for increased surveillance of our actions online and allegedly wish to mandate that encryption on communication be banned. The tired old mantra of if you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear is trotted out once again as some kind of justification for this violation of privacy.

To some no doubt the call rings true but if you think about the latter new policy on encryption it reminds me of King Canute. You can't uninvent encryption. You probably use it every day in your online dealings with your bank or doing your shopping. Attempting to ban it would have almost zero effect other than to allow snooping on people who should never be targets for it. The bad guys would continue to use it, GCHQ, MI5 and any other security service you care to mention would still struggle to break it and as such we would be no further forward with pre empting the disgusting actions of the few looking to destabilise the world for their own ends.

Cameron's assertion that we have the best record in the world on safe guarding privacy is laughable. It's obvious from the sheer volume of RIPA requests processed by some of the 'delegated authorities' that the original purpose of RIPA has been extended to include snooping on householders for dustbin transgressions and car parking issues. You can bet that once they start collecting more data, the sheer volume held would be too tempting for them to not use it.

Now I'm not suggesting that the problems faced by our security services aren't huge when they are dealing with terror threats and the evolving nature of these. There's no denying that they face an impossible task. Nor am I able to provide a solution. I merely think that policy makers are not concerned with the facts of the matter, all they're interested in is the votes and that's dangerous.

Merry Christmas

I know, I know! I have been somewhat remiss in keeping a steady stream of updates being published on here. I do have a life in the real world you know!

Anyway, as I sit here listening to the snoring of my parents as they sleep off Christmas lunch, my mind naturally wanders to anyone else out their suffering the same fate.

Has the festive period changed or have we? I remember the time when on the actual Christmas Day the thought of doing some shopping was way off anybody's radar yet I've already been online and placed an order for some toner for one of my printers.

I also seem to think that the roads on Christmas Day contained less traffic. I'm not sure you could go out on a fine, dry but cold, Christmas Day on your motorcycle and head for a decent stretch of highway to see just how fast it will go. Not that I ever did 163mph on such an occasion, I;m merely speculating for a friend!

Irrespective of what's changed, it's still over so Merry Christmas to you all. Get those livers ready for New Year's Eve because it'll be 2015 before you know it.

Pointless Privacy - You Are The Product!

How fortunate is it to have a blog that very few people actually follow.

I'm on Facebook! There, I've said it and admitted the heinous crime but what is getting my goat today is that some people, and people I consider to be intelligent, are reposting across my timeline a pointless bit of legalese that they feel protects them from Facebook reusing their content.

Clearly they appreciate that Facebook is using their postings to some extent for their own purposes but surely they must realise that when they signed up they agreed to Facebook's terms and conditions. These basically give Mark Zuckerberg and his minions the right to do pretty much whatever they want with anything you tell them? That's why my account is not in my name and some of the stuff I've told them is not true. I like to make them work a little to make money using my data!

I'd love to point this out to these Facebook friends but by doing so I'd come across as some kind of spoilsport or more likely be viewed as an arse. At least I can do that on here and none of them will see it!

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsAp and pretty much all of the other free to use systems that people post randomly on are selling your data to somebody. How else do they make the money they need to run the service? Computer systems cost money you know unless I've been naive by buying my own all these years.

Online, you are the product when you use a free service. And there's nothing you can do to stop it unless you stop using the service!

Rant over.

EBay and the fun of online auctions

Don't you just love it. You see something on Ebay, mentally desire it and decide you must at least try to bag the object of your desires. It can be addictive but you need to be rational at some point so my rules are to sit back and decide how much you are prepared to pay and set that limit in stone in your head, particularly after you've done your research by taking a look at the recently completed auctions of the same things. At no point rush in.

By all means take a first punt by offering slightly more than the current bid and see what happens. If your bid is immediately superceded and it's not near the end of the auction, bide your time and keep a watching brief.

Closer to the end of the auction, probably with 10-15 minutes to go, take another look at where the price has got to and if it is still within your limits, keep watching. If it's already exceeded your maximum price just walk away and look for another auction of the same thing.

If you are still within your limit, perhaps make a revised bid with 5 minutes to go, again just above the current one and see what happens. If you are gazumped, keep edging it up as the auction moves closer to ending until you are either at your limit or are winning. Keep watching until the end because there are 'sniping' tools out there that will still bid in the last minute.

One small trick, particularly when the auction is nearing its end is to edge the bids up with 'strange amounts.' Most people think in terms of whole pounds, some now have cottoned on to this and now bid with 50p but be more obscure, perhaps place a bid with 79p on the end so it blows away anyone working in pounds or 50p increments and also covers those working in 25p ones too.

That's my strategy if I'm around when the auction is ending which is when the fun happens. If I'm not around when it is ending and have to rely on the automated tools, it takes some of the excitement away but sometimes that can't be avoided.

Have fun with it but don't end up bidding against me or things might get really weird.

Top Gear & getting paid for looning about.

I remember the days when Top Gear was part of the minority programming on BBC2 presented in a fairly dull monotone by William Woollard and Quentin Wilson amongst other worthies.

Since Jezza, Hamster and Captain Slow (and it must be said Andy Willman the director) took over, they've changed it into something that has a connection to cars but is more entertaining because they injected personality into it.

There's something both childlike and also knowing about it that grabs my attention and I can be found at transmission time sat there waiting to see just what they'll get up to next.

It's obvious that they're having a blast and getting off on their own celebrity yet I don't find the latter infuriating like I do someone like Simon Cowell. We need more programmes made with passion and presented with gusto like that not the forced bonhomie of things like Springwatch.

Sunday's show with the test of the Maclaren P1 (below) was excellent with Jezza spouting effusively about the car and what it was capable of.

 

But perhaps the best bit was 'the challenge' with Hamster in the Alfa 4C versus the multi mode quad bike. The sight of Clarkson blasting across the water in a white shirt and jeans just had me roaring with laughter knowing how much he abhors health & safety. The icing on the cake was the mick take about the warning sticker from the quad and intimate bodily parts.

If it was me doing that programme, I wouldn't want paying. Just cover the cost of getting to where I need to be and I'd do it for free. The fact that they own the rights and thus get paid every time it's shown on BBC, Dave and god knows how many other channels, is pure genius.

More power to their elbow is all I can say.

How did that happen?

It seems like I have followers in the United States and Austria!  All I can say is thank you for dropping by and I hope that you like what you have read. Feel free to drop by anytime you want. The virtual kettle is always on.

Making progress

For a long time I have been a regular attendee at a local jam session/open mic night and loved every minute of it. When the pub changed hands the people that had run the night for over 15 years decided that they wanted a break from having to be there every night and as there was some concern about what might happen to the pub the musicians voted me as the next leader.

To say I was shocked was an understatement but I did feel honoured too that they thought enough about me that they were confident enough to trust me to take it forward.

Since then things at the pub have been up and down with rumours of what was going to happen, changes in the temporary management every few weeks and other stuff so it has been a challenge keeping it together whilst at the same time working on an inclusive strategy to move it forward.

I can now say that the work is beginning to pay off in that the 'branding' of the night as opposed to the venue has meant that we have now secured a new place to play and with some simple changes to the web site and Faceberk group we can move straight to the new place and all the promotional stuff can stay as it is.

Although all of that is good my next challenge is to check through the gear at the new place, find out how it's wired and get it all up and running so wish me luck with that. There's a lot more stuff there than I've been used to before so it's going to be fun learning how it all works and hopefully making it sound good. That's also before I take a look at the lighting rig too!

Anyhow, I'm still grateful for the support of the chaps and chapesses at the jam. Here's a picture of just a few of them from the last night at the old place.

Blogs, blogging, bloggers

After reading a post on the excellent Over The Ages Wisdom blog where the question was raised about why commenting wasn't so popular, I decided to comment with my take on the phenomenon. However, having done so it actually made me think more deeply about why I create this stuff and why others might too.

To be honest, it was the starting of the above blog that got me thinking why didn't I do it? I had done some writing previously but mostly as a sort of therapy when I was hacked off with something. It was created on a blogging site but I never promoted it.

So what changed and why start again now?

I guess that a certain amount of vanity was involved in that I felt I could still write creatively and also there were things rattling around in my head that I perhaps wanted to get off my chest.

Seeing Carol's blog take shape, I realised that if I did do something, it wouldn't follow as disciplined an approach of trying to create something each day. I preferred to only create a post when I felt the need to do so.

Taking that as read, I accepted that even if my posts were sporadic, they might cause some debate and I feel that is always good.

Bloggers?

As I've explained, there is probably a certain amount of vanity involved in why bloggers do what they do, a feeling that they have something worthwhile to say along with an arrogance that other people should know what they think.

In addition though, there is a perverse pleasure in seeing if what you write gets a reaction. This might explain why a lack of comments becomes a little frustrating. For me though the proof of the pudding is not the comments but the page view statistics that I believe most of the blogging sites happily provide you with. Not having created that much so far I can't claim success in the last measure but you never know.

What do you think?

As you can imagine, I don't expect much in the way of feedback from this article even if there is a comments button, but hopefully it will get fellow bloggers thinking.

Well what do you know

I've managed to recover my old blog so if you are interested, you can find it at The Loneliness of The Long Distance Drummer and see if my writing style has changed from the time between 2007 and 2011 when I created it and what I'm waffling about now.

The title of the blog will definitely surprise Carol.

Guilty pleasures

Musical snobbery is everywhere but someone once said to me that there are only three kinds of music, music that you like, music that you don't like and music that you haven't heard yet. As a result I try not to be dismissive of what other people like but I have been guilty in the past of not owning up to some of my guilty pleasures. So for now here's the first of mine.

It's a classic song not done by the original artist, which was Marc Bolan and T Rex, in case you had forgotten, but it is by The Power Station.

The Power Station were perhaps a typical 'supergroup' but then again perhaps not in that they consisted of two members of Duran Duran in Andy & John Taylor, with Robert Palmer and in my view the undisputed star of the outfit, Tony Thompson from Chic. Who would have thought that a drummer from a disco band could play with such power and aggression and also to have such a drum sound. I would love to be able to groove with the same quality, tone and feel. Simply awesome.

Enjoy the video

Stargazing Live

I have a certain fascination with space and astronomy so it was with some anticipation that I started watching the BBC programmes this week. I'm really glad I did. The series, short though it was, contained plenty of interesting learning and no small measure of entertainment.

The combination of Dara O'Brien and Professor Brian Cox make the show what it is with their combination of informed humour and passion for the subject but the highlight for me was one of their guests. Carolyn Porco was passionate, informative and humourous all at the same time and it was infectious. She made you feel passionate too and that set me thinking about what makes a good teacher so watch out for a blog post about that because it has a resonance with what I'm involved with at work.

If you have the slightest interest in anything space related, if you didn't see it and can find it on iPlayer, I'd recommend watching it.

So why this name for the blog?

It's quite simple really if I think about it!

I like loud, often bizarrely shaped electric guitars played through large amplifiers. I play normal acoustic drums which can easily drown out guitarists with small, underpowered amps and where would bike racing be without the screaming noises coming from the bike engines.

None of the above require much effort to be loud and proud so that accounts for the effortless bit and to an extent the noise too but sadly the version with the correct spelling was already taken on Blogger so I needed to change it.

With it all being just typed randomly from my brain it's effortless in that regard too.

In the words of Alexander Orloff from CompareTheMeerkat 'Simples!'

World Wide Waffle

Well, here it is, the collective wit and wisdom of a chap of a 'certain age' who has a passion for noise, power and general excess. I can't promise much by way of an overarching theme, that's why I've called this first post 'World Wide Waffle' because it perhaps illustrates the likely meandering nature of what you might find here.

For my sins, and as I have alluded to already, I have a passion for guitars and drums as well as most forms of road based two wheeled motorsport so there will no doubt be content along those themes as well as no doubt other random subjects that pique my interest.

I'm going to try to update this thing but make no promises of a regular schedule because there are other things in life that float my boat more.

Hope that you enjoy it.