Archive for June, 2007
A thriving forum
I’d like to attempt to give my meagre audience a little advertisement or a good, non-profit cause. For a few months now I have been running a debate mailing list or traditionally (and corporately) a listserv (R). This technically means one sends messages to a single address and they are then distributed out to all participants. I wanted a venue for debate outside of school to get lots involved as we have some intelligent thinkers available. Although of course it started out just people I knew, and that it has dropped quiet on occasions (as things do; this is fine) we do now have a thriving forum of people, mainly from school but slowly expanding (a recent debate on love that is currently in progression that has moved to perception and the fallibility of science was started by someone who I suggested the list to on freenode).
Obviously this is a self-sustaining thing but I am glad that I decided to start it as it is providing many opportunities for discussion on complex issues that just don’t reach as much depth in fragile verbal transmissions. At the same time this brings some disadvantages but I think we’re getting some very high quality stuff. Obviously many of us remain naive and undeveloped but that will steadily change. I’m certainly learning a great deal, in more ways than one.
So, to the advertisment: come and join us! Click here to go the sign-up page. All you need is an e-mail account.
Secondly, the Dr Who series finale was incredible. The whole series has had some great individual episodes and more importantly the underlying plot traps that had been laid were fantastic. The writer really came into his own. I don’t want to release spoilers here, but that bit at the end with Jack… unbelievable.
Exams have finished
Well, that’s the end of exams for this year. Some minutes ago I completed my final exam, the second food paper, and so that’s it! I am proud of how I broke the mould with my final answer, turning a six mark, half a side answer into a two and a half side essay by going onto extra paper on “the implications of health and safety legislation for manufacturers and consumers”. Overall, my exams have gone well. The only ones where I’m more iffy about not getting an A* are English (lack of skill), History (lack of time) and Food (really hard to get it – high boundaries etc.). However I remain confident that it is quite possible to get the straight A*s I have been aiming for. It is strange now knowing that so much of what I have learnt I will never use again. I do not like the attitude of learning so much and then not putting it to use beyond these exams, but I have probably complained about it before on here at some point.
I now have the question of what to do with my long summer holiday. I have a number of things to do and I would actually like to complete some projects that really should be done. I suppose it is the last really free bit of time I will ever have until retirement with the career I have in mind, so we shall see. I would like to get a job for two, three or four days a week, because I would like the money for University (bah capitalist education systems are evil) and also it is experience and an alternative activity. However, at the same time I do want a number of days off for my online work and other things: I intend to do a lot for Wikimedia and freenode (see the last post for something that I will be developing and coaxing along, as it’s excellent it’s landed just before this break). The downside of this is that I have several hundred e-mails to read that I no longer have an excuse not to, but I will get to it. Hopefully I can do some really useful stuff in mediation, OTRS and ComProj as my usual work, perhaps with other things on the side.
Ringing is the other thing that I intend to push, as I have said in previous posts. I have moved on to ringing the “tenor behind”. This means ringing steadily at the end of other bells which are changing around in a odd-numbered method. There are two reasons for doing this, the first simply being that for odd-bell methods you generally need someone doing it in order to maintain a pleasant sound (and it’s easier to ring a method when learning with someone always at the end to lead off I believe) and as an exercise it helps to develop ropesight, which is very important for method ringing. This is a concept of being able to ’see’ all the ropes at once and being able to judge who is going to come down before you as you change speed is something that must be developed. I’m told some ringers never do get it very well and thus their ringing suffers, but I hope to not be in that group. If you were a perfect striker who could change speed etc. without following another bell it would be completely useless because you wouldn’t need to confirm you had your rhythm right, but it’s a pretty standard way of ringing. There is an alternative of doing it by numbers (using coursing order, a concept which I am struggling to understand) but this is not reliable on more complex methods.
Changes to #wikipedia
Well, today has been pretty harrowing. I’ve been addressed as “Premier Whitton” and asked to step down in various Wikipedia positions, but thus far I’m still alive. For it was today I initiated decisive action to solve a problem I have been aiming to solve for literally months (since I took on the role of IRC Group Contact for Wikimedia). Today, #wikipedia’s access list was cleared of all operators, and a new system has been put in place to try and improve things. Today, the blasted wasteland that was #wikipedia has started the road to recovery. Or so I hope.
A month or so ago I started talking to people about making changes to #wikipedia to make it better. It was prompted by a fellow freenode staffer telling me “you really really need to sort out #wikipedia” and this encouraged me to take some more proactive steps to improve things. Before, it was known as a burnt out wasteland by a lot of Wikimedia’s community, and was avoided. Since the channel is suppose to be helpful to the community, it really wasn’t desirable that there was such a rift between IRC users and those who stuck to other forms of communication. There wasn’t (and isn’t yet, but it’s coming) a sense of continuity between what happened on IRC and what happened on the projects etc.
So, myself and the other group contact, James Forrester, chatted about it. I was pretty out of idea as I recall as I didn’t want to do anything drastic. However, James suggested that we simply clear out the ops list and start again with a new channel leader figure and a deputy. The raional for this was that a previous attempt to establish new guidelines essentially failed because there was no coherent agreement among operators that they were something to be enforced. By removing them and then readding the vast majority (hopefully, if they ask to come back, as we want their skill at the job), we can reaffirm commitment to the same goals (I’d argue it’s more important they are the same than anything else). I had also at this point opened discussion on an internal Wikimedia mailing list that was somewhat calmer than the public ones. Some good feedback was gained. So we formulated a plan, wrote some new guidelines and published them, and as soon as everything was in place I made the changes.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone is happy. However, after fielding things for a bit, I employed a few other ops to keep an eye on things and dissapeared for tea followed by a cracking episode of Dr Who (I’m so proud – I guessed it was The Master five minutes before he said it 
). Coming back, I found the above calls and accusations in my away log. I opted to only look briefly and not read every word, thinking that it’d be pretty repetative. I hope I didn’t ignore too much because, don’t get me wrong here, I want as much input as possible into this process. It is a wiki-based organisation, after all, and therefore we can change things very easily. This brings me on to a criticism I have received, about not allowing much community input. The fact is that Mark, someone involved, posted a link to the draft guidelines a number of days before today (which have since changed very little) and no real comments were made. We therefore went ahead with no communtiy saying it was a bad idea. I’m not sure I could have done much better than this. Of course, the reason I particularly have been targetted for blame is because I was the one with his name on everything. We were aiming to act as a group, honest!
To conclude, I am happy with what is happening now. The channel is looking a lot better. freenode’s staff have been encouraging me on the situation and have said that it’s good to experience the position of being disliked because one can learn from it; I certainly have. But as they point out, as long as I am doing the right thing and am succeeding at it then there is nothing to fear. And, as I say above, all discussion is very much welcome. I may well write to this blog later with the status quo then.
Trip to Cambridge, on go the exams & first tower grab
During the holiday I was taken to Cambridge by my grandfather to take a look at the city. He has a big thing about it and its university (which takes up most of it, it seems) in thinking that they are dramatically different from every other place and by comparison with Oxford which he believes is just like any other city. I would like to go to Oxbridge if they’ll have me (it’s worth a try) and right now Cambridge sounds like a better choice than the other. Plus they have a lot of ringing going on there. It’ll also be a chance to debate lots (although Oxford is a bigger place for that from what I can tell) and also cross verbal blades with the so-called upper classes, a term which I ignore the presence of as often as I can. In these ways, it would be nice to go.
On the trip we did a lot of wandering around although we couldn’t go in a lot of the colleges as they were shut off for exams. The most impressive bits were those that could be contrasted with Sheffield, and I realise how backwater it has become up here, namely the Botanical Gardens, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the general atmosphere on the streets. The excellent bookshop (although libraries are better, they wouldn’t let us in the library proper) Heffers stocked the Guardian at a significantly reduced price, making it even more worthwhile to go.
The darker side is of course the elitism and the like, which is a considerable argument I seem to face regularly. However, it’s a challenge: let them come and fall at my sword. I’m not saying I’d automatically win but I’m not bad at debate in general, despite the fact they may well have practice from private schools. The other issue is the money. It’s huge and is only going to get bigger when the cap on tuition fees comes off. However, I do not believe that it is unreasonable to take advantage of upbringing and parents in this way because the good one can do with a better education from one of these universities outweighs the capitalist nature of modern higher education. Please do get in touch if you disagree here.
On return I got straight back into revision, which as of this week has got a lot easier because the exams are a lot lighter in the second of the two main weeks. After Friday I only have two others with about six days to revise for them, which is great. So far they have been going generally quite well, the only real issue being History and perhaps English as I’m not sure I planned my time that well. However, it’s great to know that Biology and English are over forever! On the flipside, I’m very dissapointed with Maths. For the first I was expecting a challenge and (yes, I’m sad, but that’s okay) was really excited the night before. However, it was as I put it insultingly easy. Rosie made the astute observation that the difference between A* and A is how many silly mistakes you make rather than the true mathematical skill which can usually be shown on the last few questions. I was told by Maths teachers and others that when the first paper is easy then the second is usually much more of a challenge, but again I was dissapointed today with only the odd question where I had to think with any depth, and even then it wasn’t anything very exciting.
I keep being asked when I intend to do with the very long summer holiday that I have stretching ahead of me now, and one thing that I aim to do is push ringing hard. This is because my bell handling needs a lot of work and if I can solve this with simply lots of ringing very regularly I can make better use of limited weekly practices back during term time. My mother says I’ll get bored of it but other ringers say it’s definately a good idea as learning at the Cathedral has the disadvantage of not getting many turns, with the advantage being that you have an advanced band of strong ringers to help you. By going to other places I aim to make better use of being at the Cathedral.
So, tonight I went to the tower I have planned for Monday (I have options for every night of the week, Cathedral and possibly Walkley on a Sunday and possibly weddings at the Cathedral on Saturday) which is Walkley, recently hung for ringing and with a lot of Cathedral ringers up there; I was introduced as “a[nother] Cathedral ringer” to the others that I didn’t know. It’s a nice downhill walk from Crookes but a bit of a slog back. This was my first tower grab or ringing visit, something integral to the ringing culture it seems. It went quite well but the bells had some major differences from the Cathedral. They were much deeper set which means to pull off requires a lot more strength than at the Cathedral. Indeed, when trying the 5th (I rung 4th 5th 2nd and treble in that order to simple call changes) I could barely pull it off at all :S
The other thing I did that wasn’t so great (I got used to the bells after a while) was ring the treble badly and therefore mess up leading (which I only learnt last week but which I can do reasonably well). At one point in those call changes all the bells were sounding at once which I think was at least partially my fault. Ah well.
The place itself is a nice enough church, and as I say I knew most of the people there. It’s a lot smaller and while at the Cathedral because there are twelve bells altogether ringing on six requires a virtual straight line whereas at Walkley you can very easily see everyone. I’m told it should be easier to ring on six because the Cathedral is tweaked and lined up etc. for twelve primarily, whereas Walkley will only ring on six (or possibly five). In terms of sound, it’s no where near as nice as the Cathedral. So, I will push my ringing this summer by going to lots of different towers.