Slugs! Slugs!

Houses are much superior to apartments and I’ve recently made the smart move of getting into one. After four years of apartment living it’s a pleasant change to have things like a ‘garden’ and ‘space to move’, things I’d heard about but hadn’t encountered in quite some time.

With gardens, however, come other things. Like slugs.

We’ve got a nasty infestation of them — they literally swarm the back garden at dusk and after rainfall — and I’ve yet to put my genocidal plans into action.

In the meantime, when you’re waiting for the oven timer to ding, you might look out the window and see a particularly brave specimen shlorping over the deck and munching on some dandelion leaves. You can’t really be mad at a fellow in that situation; you’ve got a few minutes to spare; you might decide to take out the camera and see how he operates.

I’ll kill you next time buddy. But for today, enjoy the meal.

Book Review: ‘Quiet’ by Susan Cain

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I’m an introverted sort. It sounds vaguely wanky to describe myself as such, but I guess it’s true. I prefer solitary pursuits. I spent my childhood in books. I have never willingly played a team sport.

So this book, Quiet by Susan Cain, has been on my radar for some time. On the surface, it’s a good rub on the head for people like me. It tells us that it’s okay to be quiet, and bookish, and anxious in new social situations. It sounds like a good old-fashioned ‘You’re perfect just the way you are.’ The thing is, I’m only a few pages in when I realise I’m not really the target audience.

Quiet does celebrate introversion. It is a banner for quiet people to hide behind and it does challenge the rah rah rah go-get-’em society we live in.

Except it was written in America, a society much higher on the Rah Rah Rah Scale than Ireland. And not just Ireland. The ‘extrovert ideal’ that Cain challenges is also viewed with scepticism by most Europeans I’ve known. It’s the American stereotype that we old-worlders sneer at over the rims of our espresso cups during siesta. And without such a highly aggressive society to rail against, parts of Quiet feel like a manufactured outrage.

That’s not to say the book is boring, or irrelevant. Cain looks at some interesting topics, from the scientific studies to in-the-trenches parenting to surviving the working world as an introvert. You’ll find yourself thinking ‘Yes! This is me! Why can’t the world realise what makes me comfortable!’ But it’s also a little unfocused. The shift between topics can be a little jarring: from cultish Tony Robbins seminars to the bookish Asian-Americans, from Harvard Business School to introversion camps (well, that’s what I think of them as).

Despite the interest, I kept returning to the central rallying cry. I couldn’t get over my scepticism. I’m not the target audience, because I don’t inhabit a world quite so … outspoken … as American society.

That said, a colleague once told me about a sales job he held in the US. With horror, he described the daily morning meeting: the team formed a circle and took turns running around the circle, high-fiving each other and chanting ‘JUICE! JUICE! JUICE!’

‘JUICE’, he explained, ‘means Join Us In Creating Energy.’

In a country where that sort of working practice is not only legal but encouraged, a book like Quiet is violently necessary. But in Ireland, it’s more of a ‘God help those bastards’ curiosity. Misery lit, if you will.

Book Porn

I’m a Kindle-owner. I love the damn thing. It’s just so absolutely, brain-tinglingly good for reading.

Opponents cry ‘But the smell! But the feeling! But the questionable typography!’ and they’re absolutely right. A well-produced book is a much more beautiful object. The thing is, not many books are well-produced. Paperbacks are pretty forgettable most of the time (these covers for Cormac McCarthy aside) and even hardbacks are generally plain bindings beneath boring dustjackets. But not all of them.

Before Christmas, I was wandering Chapters when I saw the beautiful hardcovers from the Barnes and Noble Leatherbound Classic series. The rough photo below does not do them justice: check the link to see the full range. These are the books I will buy. These are what I want on my shelf. I’ve read them — I may read them again — but these volumes deserve admiration not just as vessels for worlds and ideas, but as Things in their own right.

Some books from the Barnes and Noble Leatherbound Classics series
Some books from the Barnes and Noble Leatherbound Classics series

That thought has occupied my skull for a few years, but it’s been particularly energetic since last weekend’s visit to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle.

This guy knew about books as objects.

Some of the pieces in the collection are genuinely astounding. Take the pieces from Imperial China: an entire book whose pages are delicately carved sheets of jade. (You can always rely on a Chinese Emperor to outdo a rapper for ostentation.)

Or the three square foot monstrous tome (no other word suffices). I’m comfortable presuming that it wasn’t 101 Tales for Good Christian Children. It may have been the Malleus Maleficarum; it was certainly big enough to hammer with.

The exhibition progresses from the delicacies of East Asia to the enlightenment of Islamic scholars. The examples of illustration and decoration on these shelves is just phenomenal. It’s one thing to know — on a theoretical level — that while Europeans were hacking each other to bits, the Arabs were taking maths and science on all sorts of nice dates. It’s another to actually see the books describing this knowledge. The sheer artistry with which it is presented is humbling.

If you enjoy a good book, and it’s a rainy afternoon, you could do much worse than seeing the Chester Beatty Library. It is a stone-cold, borderline-disgusting display of book porn. Check it out.

There’s a Robot on Mars

I had a little moment while scrolling through Twitter a couple of nights ago. I was swiping my way to the top of the feed when something stopped, kicked me between the eyes, and astounded me.

It wasn’t the tweet wot done it (though it was fairly significant). It was the account.

The tweet was sent by @MarsCuriosity. If you’re unaware of Curiosity, let me fill you in:

Curiosity is a robot. It’s run by NASA. And it’s exploring fucking Mars.

It’s easy to overlook what this means. We live in a world where a a huge percentage of the human population is intangibly connected at all times. Where most of us in ‘civilised’ society would die very, very quickly, if we were exposed to nature without the buffer of technology. We live in a world where people squirm at the thought of killing animals but love clean, sterile steaks from transparent plastic packs.

We don’t think about how crazy this is.

It’s a defence mechanism, of course. If you stopped to marvel, you’d get nothing done. But every once in a while, something breaks through those protective blinkers and assaults your eyeballs with the light of Science.

There’s a Canadian on the ISS tweeting pictures of Earth from orbit.

There’s a drone heading past the edge of our solar system. It’s been flying for 35 years.

There’s a robot on Mars. And every day, it sends a message to everyone in the world.

That light can be blinding, but it’s fascinating to watch.

Lapping the Lake

View through the valley from the western end of Glendalough Upper Lake
View of the valley from the west

Another hill walk this weekend; this time to Glendalough to do a new trail. Up the Spinc, around the western end of the Upper Lake, and a nice stroll back through the old miner’s village on the northern shore of the lake.

Stopping for lunch on a hike around Glendalough Upper Lake
Picnic time

We stopped in the ruins of the old mine (possibly?) for sandwiches, crisps, and the distinctive flavour of flask-tea. (It tastes like family picnics and the 1980s.)

A wooden bridge over the river near Glendalough Upper Lake
The old miners’ bridge

Running Into Walls

Coyote Concussion

Things have changed since I last posted about Codecademy. I’ve stopped using it. Not for any bad reason; I’ve just outgrown it.

Here’s what happened: I finished the JavaScript/jQuery streams and moved into the exciting module of ‘Projects’.

Okay, maybe they’re not that exciting. Simple challenges to validate forms and draw charts aren’t gonna set the world on fire. But they were Projects. No guidance, no step-by-step, just one instruction: Make this.

At the same time, I moved from the Codecademy editor to a ‘proper’ environment (Aptana, in case you’re wondering). After all, I was all set to build the next Twitter. I booted up Aptana, banged out some HTML, threw a bit of styling in there, and started cracking into the JavaScript. Nothing too fancy — just stretching my legs, as it were — but enough to put my skills to use.

I wrote my scripts, loaded up Chrome, and immediately hit a wall.

Shit.

Okay, bug-fixing time. I googled a bit. Reviewed old Codecademy lessons. Scrutinised the code line by line, character by character, and checked the official documentation. Everything seemed correct. Everything I’d written corresponded to old Codecademy lessons. But it didn’t work.

All my hard work, all my careful confidence-building… torn apart on my first exposure to The Whole Thing.

Luckily, the agency I work for has a Lynda subscription. I looked at the JavaScript Essentials course, found a likely-looking chapter, and within half an hour had fixed my problem. I’d also learned a whole heap that I’d not learned from Codecademy.

First, Understand Why

I’ve said before that Codecademy’s weakness is a lack of theory, and that’s exactly where this problem came from. I knew programming concepts, understood loops and functions and the basics of recursion and OOP, but I’d little idea how to put a coherent whole together from scratch.

The issue was embarrassingly simple: putting script tags in the appropriate part of the DOM. I was trying to manipulate the DOM before it had even loaded. Schoolboy stuff, but it had never been explained to me.

After fixing it, I went back to Lynda and watched the entire JavaScript Essentials course from scratch. There were many moments of revelation — a lot more than I’d have liked. To be clear: I still think Codecademy is a great introductory tool. It gave me a good hand-holding in my first steps and it introduces practical concepts quite well. But the lack of theory left fundamental gaps in my knowledge. They might not be part of JavaScript as such, but they tear you down nonetheless.

It’s a shame that I had to move elsewhere to fill those gaps. And it’s possible that the new JavaScript track has fixed that problem (I can confirm that the new jQuery track is much better than the old one). I don’t feel bad about my experience. I hit the walls and moved beyond it. If that’s not a sign that I’m progressing, what is?

Right now, I’m going back to square one and getting my foundations in place. I’m taking MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science 6.00x course on EdX. It’s tough, but I’d like to avoid schoolboy mistakes in future. I also plan to do all my coding in real environments, where I know exactly what’s running and what needs to be in place.

So. Slán anois Codecademy, but cheers all the same. You were sometimes frustrating, sometimes fun, but you got me coding.

Job done.

Vine and Voyeurism

Vine Logo

I’m slightly obsessed with Vine, and I haven’t even used it yet. The Android app is still in the works.

Even if it was available, I’m not sure I’d use it very often. My obsession is expressed through Vinepeek. It’s a simple site that scrapes the most recent Vine posts (vines?) from Twitter and plays them.

As with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — or anything, really — 90% of it is rubbish. But as a whole, Vine is a snapshot of what the world is doing. There’s a strange magnetism to it. And after 10 rubbish clips of food, cats, and offices, you’ll catch a beautifully-cut montage that makes the whole thing sparkle.

It’s ephemeral. It’s useless. And it’s addictive.

Check it out.

A trip to Pitchify

Pitchify logo

As with every other big city in the world, Dublin’s tech scene is booming. There are lots of start-ups, lots of energy, and lots of networking events.

I’ve been curiously peering in from the edges for a while, seeing what these brave souls are up to. On Wednesday, I dipped my toes in by heading to Pitchify.

Pitchify was founded by Brian Daly around the middle of 2012, following an unsuccessful attempt at Niall Harbison’s Win €10,000 for an Irish Start-Up competition. Looking for more practice, Brian organised the first Pitchify shortly after. The first event attracted 20 people. This one brought hundreds.

The pitches themselves were short and snappy. Each start-up had three minutes, which was perfect — long enough to explain the idea and short enough to keep things moving. Some presenters ventured too far toward the technical side, but most kept it high-level and concept-based. With hundreds of people in close proximity to a bar, that seemed a smarter approach.

So who stood out in the pitch?

Birbl sounds impossibly simple: a discount system that reduces the price of group activities as more people sign-up. They claim to have solved the problems of the Groupon model. It’ll be interesting to see if they’re correct.

Conker applies a web analytics model to online games. It’s another ‘Of course!’ idea that has a lot of potential. Micro-transactional games are a huge industry, and an SaaS tracking platform sounds like a godsend for anyone moving in that space.

But the most impressive pitch, in my eyes, was from Trustev.

It’s an e-commerce fraud protection platform that uses social media to verify your identity. I can see it antagonising digital liberties advocates, but from the vendor’s perspective it’s an interesting tool.

Trustev struck me as the most interestingly different product. There are plenty of questions to be asked about how it works and how accurate it is, but it’s taking a really fresh approach to a fairly static sector. Fraud detection doesn’t interest me, but I would be interested to see how these guys get on.

The Motor Tax Office

279 isn’t such a bad number. It’s questionable whether there even is such as thing as a ‘bad number’. They’re abstract. It’s the things they’re applied to that gives them consequence.

So‚ 279 isn’t such a bad number on its own. But applied to a slip of thermoprinted paper in the Motor Tax Office at lunchtime, it’s not a great number either.

Governmental offices seem constructed to break down your defences. The tone is quickly established at the ticket machine: press the button and it gives you a number, spitting the ticket on the ground and gloating when you bend to retrieve it.

‘You absolute tosser,’ it leers, ‘Take your fucking number and queue.’

There’s no alternative. And with fifty-three people ahead of you and only 40 minutes before lunch ends, you’re already damned. So you sit. You wait. You look at the collected loons, drones, and wastrels, wondering which label applies to you. To avoid uncomfortable truths, you start to read the signage.

There’s plenty of it: prices, rules, requirements. The toolkit of State Bureaucracy, with every situation covered and every division clearly labelled. Paranoia kicks in. You start to doubt yourself.

Do I really have the right form?

Am I sure I’ve got all the supporting documentation?

Is that price increase actually fucking serious?

Eventually, the ding-dong dings for you. You present yourself at the counter with a fighter’s grit, ready for conflict and determined to cede no ground. The lady greets you nicely. She stamps your forms. Takes your money. And hands over the yellow slip of victory.

It’s a disarming, but effective, tactic.

The truth is, despite endless hearsay, I’ve never had a bad experience in a government office. I’ve never had a bad experience with Ryanair either. But I’m still struck by unease when I’m forced to confront either organisation. There’s an unshakeable, inexplicable worry that I’m about to be caught out in something.

The best simile I can find — a perfect one, in fact — is that it’s just like Catholic guilt.