All Stars

May 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

My new Chucks arrived in the post this weekend, marking, for me at least, the official beginning of the summer.

I’ve spent the summer months wearing the same style of sneakers – unimaginatively paired with skinny jeans and a t-shirt – for upwards of two decades now, but it’s only relatively recently that I started treating myself to a new pair every year. This isn’t because they’re wearing out any quicker – in fact I’m sure the build quality has improved since they started making them in China – but rather due to an age-related decline in my willingness to walk around in beat-up old shoes. Shiny new ones don’t look too cool either though, so I guess I’ll have to spend the next few days splashing through mud to obtain just the right degree of shabbiness.

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Austerity check

May 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

This could turn out to be an interesting week in European politics, with local elections today here in the UK, and Presidential and Parliamentary polls in France and Greece respectively on Sunday.

In all three cases it’s looking likely that candidates opposing (to a greater or lesser degree) the programmes of austerity imposed by the incumbents will do well.

This probably won’t have much effect in the UK, since the Conservatives will still be in power on a national level, though a heavy defeat might add to the general air of crisis surrounding the Government, and prompt them to at least partially reverse some of their more unpopular cuts.

The result in France could be much more significant; a victory for Francois Hollande will not only lead to a change in domestic economic policy, but will also deprive Angela Merkel of her principal conservative ally in the EU, making it much harder for the Germans to wave the big stick of fiscal discipline at the struggling governments of Southern Europe.

Which brings us to Greece. Theoretically the incoming government, of whatever political persuasion, is already committed to honouring the terms of the EU bailout, but it’s hard to see how that will be democratically sustainable if the popular vote favours parties opposed to that deal.

In the short term I think we’ll have another period of crisis in the Eurozone, the long term impact of which is difficult to predict. There are signs that popular discontent with austerity is fuelling a resurgence on the left, but the far right is on the rise too. Interesting times indeed.

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Wasted Youth

April 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

Today (or actually yesterday, since, in true slacker fashion, I haven’t got round to posting this until after midnight), was the 30th anniversary of the launch of the ZX Spectrum. Unsurprisingly, the internet has been awash with articles by 40-something guys fondly recalling long hours spent honing their programming skills on the iconic machine, and pitying later generations, who may have iPads and Twitter and what have you, but missed out on the character-building experience of wrestling with a rubber keyboard to produce the 8-bit classics that founded the video-game industry.

I have to admit that I was one of those sad cases who spent too much time alone in my bedroom typing code, when I should have been out engaging in healthier youthful pursuits, like smoking, drinking, or committing acts of petty vandalism. It doesn’t seem to have done me any harm in the long term though, as long as you don’t count my ongoing tendency to stay up all night blogging about obsolete computers.

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I’d work very hard, but I’m lazy

April 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

I like my job well enough, most of the time, but trekking into the office every morning is a bit of a drag, so I’m always on the lookout for new developments in the field of telepsychiatry, in the hope that one day I’ll be able to practice from the comfort of my couch.

Back when I first got into Second Life I fondly imagined that a virtual world would provide the perfect location for remote consultation, but my actual experience of the grid quickly disabused me of that notion; for all its digital verisimilitude SL isn’t anything like face-to-face interaction. Of course it can be argued that this is actually an advantage, that freed from their corporeal baggage people can access aspects of their personalities that would otherwise remain obscured, thus deepening their self-knowledge. There is something in this, but such information would only be one part of the puzzle, and would have to be interpreted in the context of the whole of a client’s life. In general, people who seek therapy are struggling with concrete problems of everyday existence, and a therapist has to engage with them on that level, which means sitting down, looking them in the eye, and talking to them.

Even if one could find a way around this, there are a multitude of other, practical, problems with e-therapy; things like verifying identity and credentials, licensing and jurisdictional issues, difficulties with record-keeping and confidentiality, and crisis response. These can be overcome, but only if the client physically shows up at the office every so often. Virtual consultation can be a valuable part of a treatment package, but not the whole of it.

That’s been my settled opinion for years now, but I do keep reading the literature on the off-chance I’ll be proved wrong some day.

Anyway, I mention this because this week a press release from Massachusetts General Hospital (picked up on a few SL blogs), featured an interesting-sounding study by Hoch et al, The Feasibility and Impact of Delivering a Mind-Body Intervention in a Virtual World. As is often the case though, the substance was less exciting than the title.

Clinicians routinely grumble that researchers are overly picky when recruiting subjects, which is usually unfair, because, you know, research is hard enough without having to deal with actual sick people. This study’s exclusion criteria seem particularly egregious though; participants not only had to be young and healthy, they had to be familiar with Second Life too. It’s hard to imagine a group less similar to the typical clinic population. Even with this promising start the intervention still managed to fail to show a significant improvement on three out of four of their outcome measures, and a clinically negligible change on the fourth one. In any case there was no control group, so it’s hard to credit the effects, or lack of them, to the treatment.

I’ve read enough of these reports, that sound promising but are ultimately underwhelming, that I should be immune to them by now, but I can’t help feeling disappointed. I guess I’ll be waking up and getting up for the foreseeable future.

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Planned obsolescence

March 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with cutting-edge technology; in theory I am in favour of keeping bang up to date, but in practice I find myself hanging on to old gadgets long after they should have been consigned to the recycling bin.

It’s only fairly recently that I got an LCD TV, after spending years squinting at a vintage 14-inch Sony Trinitron, latterly augmented with a digital tuning box (and an RF-modulator, since it didn’t have a SCART socket) when they turned off the analogue signal. I would still have it today, but it stopped working, and I couldn’t find anyone willing to even look at it, never mind fix it, though it was probably a simple enough job.

This state of affairs is mostly due to a combination of laziness and stinginess – I’m driving around right now in a car with two broken mirrors and a busted heater, because I resent paying the inflated fee the mechanic would charge me for swapping a couple of parts, but I can’t be bothered going down to the scrapyard to get the bits myself – along with a high tolerance for imperfection; if something isn’t actually going to kill me I can usually put up with it. That’s not the whole story though; despite being avowedly anti-conservative there is a large part of me that is resistant to change. Jobs, cities, relationships; I’ve stayed in them all long after it would have been sensible to leave. This is probably down to a subconscious fear of death or something; I should perhaps try to work through it in therapy, but I guess it has saved me a lot of money over the years.

All this is a roundabout way of explaining why there hasn’t been much in the way of Second Life content in this blog recently. When I last downloaded an updated version of the viewer (which was a while ago, so it’s not even the latest one), it had the not entirely unpredictable effect of slowing my venerable desktop box to a crawl, making my SL experience even more tiresome than usual. I suppose that I should try using some nimble third-party viewer, but the task of identifying one that is both reliable and linux-friendly seems like too much of a drag right now, and anyway the Lindens seem to be freezing out the TPV developers, so it would probably only be a temporary fix.

Thus I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that my trusty 12 year-old 1.6 GHz P4 has reached the end of the line, and that I need a new computer. The simplest solution would be to buy a ready-built machine, but I want to reuse as many components as possible, and the case, keyboard, mouse, monitor, hard drives and optical drive are all perfectly serviceable, so I think I’ll go down the DIY route.

I’ll need a new motherboard, processor, RAM, and a graphics card (I’d keep my not-too-ancient nVidia Ge Force 7-series, but it’s got an AGP plug). I’d really like an Intel I-7, but they are rather expensive, so I’ll probably settle for an I-5, which should do me for a few years; processor/motherboard/memory bundles can be had for between £200 and £300. Add in a GeForce 500 card at about a ton, and that’s a fairly nifty system for under £400.

On the other hand, who uses a desktop computer these days? I could take the money and buy a new iPad, which would do for 90% of my computing needs, pretty much everything except Second Life in fact. I do like to have a big hard drive to keep my data on, since I’m far too paranoid to trust the cloud, but I don’t need a fancy new processor or graphics card for that.

Still, I guess my inertia will keep me from wholeheartedly embracing the new paradigm of mobile computing, and I probably will end up trying to rejuvenate my old desktop. I doubt I’ll get round to it much before the summer though, so this blog will remain misleadingly named until then at least.

 

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Boring Tuesday

March 8, 2012 by Leave a comment

Back in the spring of 2008 I was closely following the Obama/Clinton contest, and to a lesser extent the Republican nomination process, because it seemed like something important was at stake, that the future of the world hung on the decision of the voters. That the Obama administration has turned out to be a major disappointment is at least in part due to all the excitement generated by the debate in the primaries.

This time round though I’m struggling to maintain my interest, since the only thing in question in the GOP race is which objectionable conservative white guy will earn the right to become a footnote in history by failing to prevent Obama from winning a second term.

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Davy Jones R.I.P.

March 1, 2012 by Leave a comment

I’m too young to have experienced The Monkees first time around, but the show was a staple of after-school TV when I was growing up in the 70s, and their movie Head became one of our late-night favourites in my student days, so I was sad to hear that Davy Jones had passed away. Another sign that time is moving on I guess.

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Leap of imagination

February 29, 2012 by Leave a comment

When I was at school there was a boy in my class whose birthday was on the 29th of February. I was always a bit jealous of this, because it seemed like some sort of magic date, upon which special things would happen.

I’m much older and more rational now of course, but I still get the feeling that the extra day is a bonus, one which postpones my fated demise by 24 hours, and that I mustn’t waste it on dull everyday life, but instead do something out of the ordinary.

But, with my characteristic lack of foresight, I failed to take time off work, so today has been just like any other day. I’ll have to get it together for 2016…

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Livin’ on a Prayer

February 16, 2012 by Leave a comment

While I’ve been patronising our American readers by loftily disparaging the US Presidential candidates, over here in Europe our vastly superior political elite have been making a fine job of solving the Eurozone debt crisis.

So far the plan has involved imposing austerity so harsh that large swathes of the Greek population have been reduced to a state of severe poverty, thus undermining the very fabric of civilised society, with more of the same to come for Italy, Portugal, Spain, and who knows where else. This might suggest that our leaders have no idea what they are doing, but perhaps there is some underlying strategy whose wisdom will only become clear with time. Right now though it all makes Rick Perry’s Texas drought-relief scheme look positively rational.

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You Can’t Always Get What You Want

February 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

Just when I was beginning to think that I had some sort of handle on the dynamics of right-wing US politics, something like Rick Santorum’s unlikely resurgence happens, and confuses me all over again.

I can just about rationalise Santorum’s sweep of Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri by imagining that the GOP base were voting tactically, in an effort to pull Mitt Romney further to the right before he is confirmed as the candidate. There are some indications that this has been happening at the big-money level, as backers of Newt Gingrich, Romney’s other would-be conservative nemesis, have indicated that they will swing behind Mitt now he has embraced their pet policies, like bombing Iran.

But this theory only works if one believes that Romney’s main problem in the general election will be that he is not conservative enough, a view which is completely divorced from reality. Romney has to win over independents and disaffected Democrats, a trick which he might be able to pull off if he spins his fiscal conservatism as sound technocratic business sense, but which will surely be impossible if he is weighed down by the wingnut social conservatism championed by the likes of Santorum.

I think that I can understand the psychology of the Republican right on one level – as a life-long leftist I have supported more than a few hopeless causes in my time, and I do have some sympathy with the idea that one should stick to one’s principles rather than pander to electoral considerations. It is usually better to vote for what you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don’t want and get it. But there has to be some room for compromise, and when you have a candidate who has a half-decent shot at winning, and who is going to support 90% of your programme, it is perverse to withhold your endorsement because he is soft on the other 10%.

So what’s my advice to Republican voters? Back Romney, and you might get what you need. Let’s hope they ignore me.

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