I recently visited my parents and Dad fetched this book down from the loft and I confess to getting all sniffly at being reunited with it.

So here began my fascination with the past. I’m a bit unsure whether my main interest is archaeology or anthropology, but it’s possibly where the two intersect that’s of most interest to me. I’m particularly fascinated by the prehistoric, and the challenges to understand the motivations and needs that caused the great monuments to be created.

I therefore dragged the husband off to Peterborough to see Flag Fen, which seems to have a shiny new website since I last looked. A great improvement. I confess that the previous incarnation made my eyes bleed.

I deliberately timed our visit to coincide with the event to mark the end of National Archaeology Week, in order to take advantage of the additional activities, but it would have been an amazing visit even without these.

Anyway, I finally got to try my hand at flint-knapping, with the excellent Will Lord of Beyond2000bc.co.uk as an instructor. Needless to say, I was completely hopeless, but I think it takes more than an hour before you get to learn how the flint will fracture and where the right places are to strike. But I had tremendous fun and now need to procure more flint for experimentation with. Luckily, Berkshire is made of the stuff.

Flag Fen itself is amazing, and we were blessed with a beautiful day with infrequent rain showers, that made the visit an absolute joy. The joy was tempered with sadness though, when we were told how fast the archaeology is vanishing due to the drainage of the fens for agriculture.

Photos from our visit are in my Flag Fen Flickr set

I’ve joined Archaeology in Marlow and am starting a short course in Landscape Archaeology in October.

I have more RSS feeds in my feedreader than I have time to read, and I come across more every day that interest me. The Internet is absolutely fatal to anyone with wide-ranging interests: it’s so easy to overdo the information influx and become dazed and bewildered by it all. The thoughts of a billion brains is not meant to fit into one head, after all.

The trouble is, the Internet has become like a giant distributed brain with all its thoughts available to read whenever you choose. If you are interested in almost everything, then there’s so much to read, so much to think about, and it becomes really difficult to have any thought processes left to deal with everyday life.

We are so tremendously lucky to live in an age where we are getting closer and closer to having the sum of human knowledge a mouse-click away. No matter what the subject, you can find information about it. It becomes really easy to become a relentless consumer of information, retrieving snippets from all over the globe without moving from your chair. But I’m not sure that’s a healthy habit to get into. It’s very easy to become mentally exhausted just trying to absorb and process it all.

The sheer volume of information, thoughts, opinions, essays, comments etc that is out there is terrifying. I have many feeds in my RSS reader that I think I should read, either because they will help me become a better person, or will keep me up to date with technology, or just keep me posted about what’s happening in web development. I’ll confess right now - I hardly touch those feeds. I just can’t take it all in. 

 I don’t really know what the answer is - as a nerd I do have a need to attempt to keep up with what all the other nerds are up to, but at the same time, there are just too many of them, and they are all talking at once.. 

But I’m realising that just isn’t the case. I’ve just had a long conversation with my younger brother, who, admittedly is smarter than me and has a maths degree from a good university, but, is fundamentally lazy. He is proud of this, so it’s not an insult to recognise it. He acknowledges that he doesn’t have to work particularly hard, and when he goes home, work ends.

Okay, so he does a job I probably wouldn’t do, working for a company I probably wouldn’t work for, on principle. But he is appreciated and paid handsomely for his contribution, such as it is. He doesn’t work in IT.

I’m doing something wrong somewhere, and I’m not sure I like the suspicion that is dawning on me. IT is complicated, right? Thats why you have to be quite smart to do it, right? Except not. Because those that manage IT mostly have a fear of it, just like the users. In fact, at my previous employer, the IT manager is probably much less IT-literate that the majority of the users. It made me sad.

When you don’t have the ability to measure the worth of the tasks that you are asking someone to perform, how do you know what to pay them for doing it? And how do you know when they’ve done it right? It’s a difficult position to be in.

I’ve lumbered myself with a project that would be, in the words of a contractor reviewing my initial design, ‘a job for a team of 20 with a budget of £1 million’. And that was only the first draft; each iteration gets more detailed and more complex as more problems are brought to me. The husband keeps asking me why I took it on. Because I could see they needed it. Because it’s my job. And because I want to make things better. Because I believe there’s a better way. Because I’ll never have an opportunity to do so much good again. If I can only make it to the end, it will make so many things possible.

There’s so much code to write that I’ve got my husband helping me three days a week, and still it’s daunting.

But when I look at what other people do for a similar salary, I can’t helping wondering if I’m just a bit crazy. If money per difficulty of job is a way of keeping score, I lose big-time. And to my baby brother! Damn, that smarts.

I will use what version and what browser I choose, to consume your content. If I choose to have the text chiselled out onto the back of a passing badger, that is *my* choice.

At the moment I’m suffering my way through an enormous web application, targetted at IE7 only (as it’s an intranet application and we are currently using IE7), but I would not dream of testing only in IE7, as I realise that time progresses (shocking, I know), and as IE crawls more and more towards standards compliance, I’m hoping that one day the playing field will be level enough for me not to have to test in n+1 browsers. Things looked fine in IE7 that looked skewiff in Safari3, which told me I’d got something wrong. I don’t want to be lied to by a browser, so being tied to IE7 forever sounds like my idea of hell.

It wouldn’t be quite so bad if IE8 went for ‘latest-version’ by default. That way, things can progress naturally. I *can* see the appeal of being able to specify IE7 mode if you have to (if you’ve hacked together something terrible in a hurry and can’t fix it before they rush out IE8 asap) to buy you a little more breathing time if it looks like trolls toenails in IE8. But we don’t want to get stuck in 2006, do we?

What saddens me most is the fact that it seems to be tearing the webdev community apart. There are some quite personal attacks going on and it’s sad to see WaSP eating itself. I’m sure it will sort itself out, we’re all adults.

I think the real problem is not necessarily the browser developers, it’s the web developers themselves. WaSP and co. are more or less a tiny minority of idealists (I’m not knocking idealism, I suffer terribly myself). Most web developers are cowboys. Yes, sweeping generalisation, but if you look at the majority of sites you get a good idea of the level of standards-awareness that there is out there. And yet, that’s not necessarily the fault of the developers either. I was consulted on a web project and mentioned accessibility. I got the response of ‘but who enforces that, do we have to do it?’ from the person commissioning the site. With attitudes like that, there is no real incentive to push for standards compliance in projects. It’s always quicker to cut corners and knock something together that displays and behaves okay in IE6 and doesn’t suck too much in IE7. Gets the job done, doesn’t it?

Have depressed myself with that, I always find it delightful to discover that some people *do* actually care about doing things properly and cleanly. I evangelise about nice clean code, use of CSS, maintainability, accessibility and basic sanity, but sometimes I feel like Scary Bag-lady haranguing passers-by.

What the web standards community *really* needs to do is to reach out a bit more, beyond the elite crowd, to the bums-on-seats level of web developer. Enthuse and fire these people with your message, get corporate penetration with the benefits of standards compliance - make it a *standard* approach to web development.

Only then, can we win the browser war.

Mac Mini and TV,
originally uploaded by Purplekitten.

My Optio T20 went sadly blind (camera functional but all it could see was black) so after an attempt to use my Optio s4 again, I wanted something with a bigger LCD. Spoilt? Moi? So I bought a Panasonic DMC-TZ3. The first picture I took was of our television setup (just because I find it amusing).
The television is an aging Sony Trinitron thing that belonged to my late grandmother. The Mac Mini is shiny and new. The magic is the EyeTV DTT stick thing which allows the Mac Mini to do wondrous things and record all the TV I never remember to watch.

Thinking about it, I guess it dates from my time as a home carer. I used to look after a variety of elderly and confused people, as well as a blind lady with cerebral palsy. I instinctively updated her every few moments about what I was doing and where I was, so she would feel involved in her care and not be worrying about where I was. It wasn’t something I consciously thought about doing, it just seemed appropriate.

Now, I have a twitter account, and my updates are merely vanity, as no-one really has a need to know what I’m doing, but I find it as natural and instinctive as my carer techniques. Sorry, world.

GoGoGadgetLemon,
originally uploaded by Purplekitten.

It’s been a while, and we’re probably the only people who care about them, but it’s time for an update on the lemon-children..

Sadly we lost two of them over the summer, to ravening hordes of something-or-other. Leaves vanished and eventually the poor trees died. Still not sure why. The losses were Spindly Lemon and Sturdy Lemon (turned out to be a bad name, really!)

So we got a replacement from a bona fide garden centre thing, and it seems to be happy enough. Not sure how old it is, so at the moment we have no expectations of fruit.

GoGoGadgetLemon is growing yet another strange robot arm thing, despite our best effort at attempting to persuade it into a nice tree shape. It has also grown the largest leaves I’ve ever seen on a lemon plant: large shiny, luxurious and deliciously scented. It seems ridiculously happy, for a tree.

BifurcatedLemon is still plodding onwards. Has a lovely shape but is clearly unwell. There are strange brown things on the leaves so I need to take it outside and give it a good scrub with soapy water and it’ll be fine.

PointlesslyTallLemon has been brutally truncated in the trunk department (it was either that or a ceiling extension to the house..) so is now not so pointlessly tall. It also nearly succumbed to whatever took its brothers, and is left with only 3 leaves. These remaining leaves do look happy and glossy, so I think we’ve rescued it in time. I hope.

Finally we have - a new addition to the family. A Christmas present from my mother-in-law and presented early in case anything happened to it at her house! We’ve decided to use it as a Christmas tree, as it has ready-made baubles of a lovely lemon hue. Delicious.

No-one actually enjoys the daily grind of their job, all the piddly little repetitive actions they must complete in between the bits that keep them turning up to work each day. As a so-called systems developer, I’m in the lucky position to be able to smooth out process-wrinkles, replacing tedious manual tasks with things that the Computer can do for them. A large part of what I do is listen to users complain about their job and the tools they have to do it with. I sort the complaints out into Things I Can Help With, and Personality Issues.

I genuinely care about the user who has to wait 37 seconds for a badly-designed screen to load - I can *feel* how annoying and unproductive that is for the user. I can *understand* how much happier they would be doing their dull repetitive job if they didn’t have that extra annoyance to contend with. So I fix it.

I’m not, and never will be, a fantastic programmer. I don’t actually *want* to be, truth be told. It’s a job I’ve blundered into and feel a constant fraud as I know *genuinely* fantastic programmers. I’m too squeamish to be a doctor or similar - there are certain words I can’t even *hear*, never mind look at. So I play doctor to computer systems. That involves a certain amount of basic programming, and while I’ll never be a luminary, I get by.

I find it difficult to harden my heart against users when they complain about something that ought to be fixable. My view of IT is that we provide the means for other people to do their jobs, and where there are problems, we are the wizards that make the problems go away. We don’t provide direct financial benefits to the company - we don’t sell things and make money. Our worth lies in our ability to make the rest of the business more profitable, and part of that is keeping users happy.

Common sense, and several surveys, have shown that happy users are more productive. I’m generally happier when my computer doesn’t crash several times a day. Even if the problem is more low-grade than that e.g. an application freezing a few times a day and having to be restarted, it still has an impact on how a user feels about doing their job. Yes, it’s easy to restart an application, or reboot the computer, or remember that the printer can only print one copy of a document so you need to click print as many times as you want documents. Individually incidents like these are small and the symptoms are easily treated, but while the underlying cause isn’t addressed, the user feels like they are never going to get better.

I appreciate that IT problems are complicated and may involve a fair amount of trial and error to resolve them, and it may be that the solution to one problem is the cause of another. But that’s why they pay us more than the man who puts the paper in the photocopier - we are paid for our knowledge and experience at solving these problems. Otherwise, it could just as well be an office junior answering the phone and saying ‘just log off and log back on again’. Same result, but much cheaper.

At the end of the day, the IT infrastructure exists to allow the users to make money for the business. Therefore if user experience doesn’t matter to you, you shouldn’t work in IT. Go do something else instead and content yourself with reading BOFH.