Monday 7 January 2013

A Hero Worship Article to Stephen Fry by an Admirer of his Work

I have recently finished reading Stephen Fry's [1] two biographies (yes, his life was interesting enough to allow for two not just one and it looks like there may be a third one) Moab is my washpot and The Fry Chronicle. To my own, very personal surprise, I found that it merits writing my thoughts down in one of those rather unremarkable articles of mine.

The books in itself were fantastic due to Fry's rather peculiar writing style balancing between rarely found excessive eloquence (as befitting one of those bloody Cambridge graduates who can only speak like twats... I jest of course, I am envious of the experience... probably not, I loved rough Glasgow and skanky Manchester a lot) and infrequent (and for that reason all the more shocking) vulgarity. Of the two books, I definitely favour The Fry Chronicle which describes his Cambridge years and his subsequent rise to fame (Moab is my washpot talks about his childhood and adolescence up to the point of his incarceration as a youth criminal for credit card fraud).

As a non-native English speaker who lived in Britain a decade, I wholly enjoyed reading Fry's writing for something that only Greg Graffin [2] of the popular punk band Bad Religion [3] (and another person whose life fascinates and interests me) achieved before him. I learnt new English vocabulary (regarding one of Bad Religion's song lyrics: I still keep forgetting what the word reprobate [4] means). It sounds weird, but I have become so accustomed to using English and using it also in academic context that I rarely encounter a text where I truly have to check words. With Stephen Fry's prose, this happens to me about every five pages. Some people find that annoying, I revelled in it as I felt for the first time in about three or four years that I actually improved my English (Since my departure from English shores, it actually feels that I am losing my edge a bit).

I was very surprised to read that Fry is a hobby computer enthusiast like me. Not just electronic gadgets but programming and all. But unlike me, he was there from the very first minute. I felt several pangs of envy when he talked about how he spent thousands and thousands of pounds on computer equipment (unfortunately on Apple Macintoshs, but youknow my view point on that [5]) - As a side note, I always want to call him Stephen, because the two books were so courageously revealing his most personal trials, tribulations and fears that I feel that I know the man already since 20 years. This is, however, not true, thus I shall stick with his full name or plainly with Fry.

His friendship with Douglas Adams [6] also left me a little bit envious as I have been a great fan of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy infour parts [7] since my adolscent days. One of the true literary masterpieces.

I have found several parallels to me (but also quite a lot of huge differences... and no, the parallel is not that I am also gay) that left me feel very sympathetic to him and makes me appreciate the works and contributions that I like so much even more than before (Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie).

I guess, as a conclusion to this rather pathetic hero worship article, I can only hope that Mr. Fry never reads this article after I read how critical he can be of other people's work (despite saying that he will never admit to having thought it). 

References


Sunday 6 January 2013

New Year's Resolutions 2013 – No More Facebook

Much has happened since my last post to this blog and this is, of course, in no little part due to my laziness. I just had “better” things to do or as a friend of mine put it once quite fittingly. “Having no time for one thing, just means that you would rather spend your time on something else.”

So for awhile, I simply “rather spend time on something else”. The reasons were different. The main one being the demise of my pet project. The music player (see various posts here [1]) for roleplaying. The player was built on the idea of tagging, but my approach of using an md5 hash was just not working right. It was slow and sluggish and it took about 10 seconds to start with about 5 songs and an eternity for about 1 GB worth of music and sound effects. I couldn't improve it for reasons I don't want to get into.

Once that fell through, I decided to improve using Udacity [2] and hone my skills (if one could call them that) by helping on the Mozilla Project [3] in the Automated Testing team (A*Team) [4]. This proved to be such an enjoyable experience that I have stuck with it since August of last year and spent most of my free-time on their IRC channel trying to learn more about it and the way they run their projects. By now, I have come to hate git [5] and only just about accepted mercurial [6] as version control software.

Anyhow, three paragraphs just to explain why I stopped blogging. Sheesh! Onto the real reason for this blog entry. It is the new year which I passed in lovely Vienna with my darling wife and a good friend from there. During that time, a certain resolution ripened with me. I want to opt out of this facebook harrassment (from now on referred to by its french joke name fessebouc; la fesse = buttock, le bouc = goat; Why I do that? Because I can). Everyone sees it as this fantastic tool, but over the course of last year, fessebouc has annoyed me greatly with some decisions they made.

It started off harmlessly enough with them wanting to change my user interface to this timeline idea [7] that they fancied so much. They first asked me if I wanted it, as in “Do you want to try our new and great timeline”, to which I said No. Several weeks after, the same request came, to which I said again No. Why change something that isn't broken, for crying out loud. And then shortly after, they just changed it. Just like that. All illusion of being able to decide it myself gone by virtue of their little display of power. I am sure they thought that “he won't mind anyway, the old chap.” ... Well, I did mind and it pissed me off so much that I wrote a complaint in which I said, that these sort of measures are more likely to drive me away than endear me to fessebouc. Of course, there was no answer. Not even a hint.

Well, that was me already annoyed by them. But then there followed a consistent stream of these things that were handled the same way. First a mail saying that if you don't want it, say so, with the subsequent change to it anyways. The more outrageous changes were, however, yet to come! Let's start with forcing anyone to use their real name [8, 9 for policy]. Why on earth?!? No conscious thought were given to those rather sensitive cases where someone may truly endanger himself by publically stating his opinion in countries where freedom of speech is not as existent as in the western world (as an example of the merits read this article [10]) or the much quoted teacher-pupil relationship problem. This is a very sensitive area as adolescents may unknowingly endanger the teacher's career by bringing him into a dicey situation. If they want to become "friends" with the teacher, is s/he supposed to block any attempt or is it no problem? Using an alias would be a good solution for a teacher in this case to avoid any such issues with accepting pupils as friends. "Friends" - Such a freely used term nowadays. When before it defined a close relationship with someone who is not the partner nor has familial ties to the person, now it can describe someone who is not even an acquaintance. But I'm getting diverted from the real issue here.

Now, looking at the above problem, one may think: “No problem, I just set my privacy setting so that people can't find me with a name search.” Well, the clever people from fessebouc thought of this, too, by getting rid of this possibility and making every profile available for all search engines [11,12 for German]. Again, why on earth?!? To me, this really was the final nail in the coffin.

Thus on New Year's, I came to the conclusion that I will stop using it. It was a nuisance and e-mail spam that I accepted for the greater good of keeping in touch with people who seem to only live in the world of fessebouc and are only reachable through it, but this is it. I have had enough. I am aware that it is here to stay and unlikely to go away. I am also aware that not only fessebouc adopts dubious policies regarding privacy in the digital space, but in this case, I can do something about it and I don't want to play any part in it anymore. I will also try to discourage people from posting pictures of me on it. If you, as a fessebouc user read this, please consider this a polite request to refrain from posting pictures with me in it on fessebouc (or any other media as a matter of fact without my explicit permission). Thus, my New Year's Resolution for 2013 is to leave fessebouc and be done with it. May it go its merry way, I hope it falls flat on its face (which it most likely won't) and that the people responsible for these decisions understand that the privacy of the individual should be respected even though the majority of people “doesn't seem to mind.”

References


[1] http://nebelhom.blogspot.be/search/label/Music%27N%27SFX
[2] http://www.udacity.com/
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
[4] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools
[5] http://git-scm.com/
[6] http://mercurial.selenic.com/
[7] http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline
[8] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/08/facebook_real_names/
[9] http://www.facebook.com/help/292517374180078/
[10] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/02/07/google-executive-wael-ghonim-admits-he-was-el-shaheed.html
[11] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/facebook-changes-privacy-settings-again/
[12] http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/namenssuche-bei-facebook-privatsphaere-einstellungen-werden-simpler-a-872932.html