Gamekeeper turned poacher

I reckon that these days, about three-quarters of the work I do involves writing tutorials. It’s not the most glamorous kind of journalism, for sure, and writers who don’t do it often look down on those of us who do – but I really like doing it,  and in the case of Windows Vista magazine, I get a kick out of seeing readers’ responses when they say “thanks” after a tutorial. That’s partly because it’s unusual – most hacks’ inboxes, mine included, can be pretty abusive – but more because for every person who knows this kind of stuff inside out, there’s a whole bunch of people tearing their hair out in frustration. I enjoy doing my weekly tech babble on Radio Scotland for exactly the same reason.

That said, you can become jaded and forget about the very real frustration that technology can cause – until you end up in a situation where the shoe’s on the other foot and you’re not the person writing the tutorials, but the person who really needs them.

Can I give an example? Of course I can. I’ve just upgraded my camera to a proper, grown-up SLR, and after the initial enthusiasm – “Yippee! Shiny tech toy that I probably shouldn’t have bought!” – waned, I realised something pretty quickly: I’m hopelessly out of my depth.

If you’re not a camera expert, moving from point and shoot to DSLR is a big, big step. All of the options that make DSLRs so clever can be really intimidating if, like me, it’s largely new to you. I wasn’t worried, though, because all technology can be tamed through a combination of fiddling and, when you’re really stuck, reading the manual. Not in this case, though. One simple thing – trying to suss out how to change the flash brightness, because even simple pictures were way, way too dark – has had me baffled for days, and the more I fiddled and the more I consulted the manual, the more confused and frustrated I got. That one issue became a bigger problem: I mean, if you can’t work the bloody flash, what chance have you got of unravelling the mysteries of depth of field, ISO speeds, multi-segment metering and the like?

In the space of a few days I went from being excited at the possibilities of my great new gadget to being angry and pissed off at my own inability to understand even the simple things. My camera’s myriad options – the things that made me buy it – had become a minefield, and I was seriously considering taking advantage of the shop’s 30-day no quibble returns policy. Good camera, yes, I’d say. Too thick to use it, though.

So I did two things. One, I called David, who knows a lot more about cameras than I do. And I bought a digital photography magazine (a Future one, of course. I’m a loyal chap). David very patiently answered my very dumb questions, and I finally sussed out what I needed to do to get the flash working the way I wanted it to.

Next up, the magazine. When you do what I do for a living, you tend to skim magazines about the subjects you cover. “Yeah, the Google thing”, “Oh aye, search engine optimisation”, “God no, that image is ‘shopped, it’s not a leaked product photo” and so on. So it’s interesting to pick up a magazine from the same stable as the titles you write for but whose content is completely new to you. The gamekeeper becomes the poacher: when you’re reading a digital camera magazine because you’re increasingly convinced that you’ve bought something that’s too complicated for you then of course you’re coming from a completely different direction than when the content covers stuff that’s very familiar to you.

And you know what? The magazine was brilliant – bar one ad featuring a stunning photo taken at the top of the Chrysler tower, which made my vertigo kick in so badly that I had to go for a cigarette while thinking about things that aren’t tall in any way whatsoever. I didn’t feel patronised but neither did I feel hopelessly out of my depth, and even the featured photos – something which would normally make me want to chuck myself off a bridge in the realisation that I’ll never, ever be that talented – were inspiring thanks to one-para explanations of what the snappers did and what they used.

Inspiring is the best way to put it, I think. David’s advice started the ball rolling, of course, but reading the magazine did two things: it made me go “aaah, so that’s how you do it” or “right, I understand that”, and it made me want to grab the camera and go on a photo frenzy.

I’m not convinced I’m ready to don camouflage gear and spend days trying to get a really good shot of a badger, mind you.

ID cards – it’s about curtains

This is not my idea – I saw it on a site, possibly Fark, today – and the original was worded much better than this half-remembered paraphrase, but hopefully it’ll survive my mangling: Not wanting ID cards or over-the-top state surveillance isn’t because you’re up to no good; it’s about privacy, the same way you put curtains on your windows. You don’t have curtains because you’re up to no good; you have them because having people staring into your house is annoying and occasionally creepy.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

You can just hear the windmilling chords, can’t you?

Anyway. Mark Mulligan at Jupiter Research has posted something interesting this morning about Lily Allen’s iTunes experience.

She said that iTunes was:

“bullying people into corners by making sure they have extra, you know, extra songs so they can put them on the front page. And they won’t [advertise] your album unless you kind of give them extra material and so on.”

…And the world looks just the same! Der der der! And history ain’t changed! Der der der!

/ wanders off, throwing guitar hero shapes

This isn’t about health. It’s hysteria

The good people of Belmont in California want to expand the city’s smoking ban to the point where the only place it will be legal to smoke is in your own home – provided that home is completely detached (such homes, apparently, cost around nine hundred thousand dollars). Smoking in your own car, by yourself: illegal. Smoking in the street: illegal. Smoking in parks: illegal. And so on.

What’s interesting about this isn’t the ban as much as the internet debates about it. Inevitably it’s brought out the pro-smoking “you can take my cigarettes when you prise them from my cold dead fingers… my grandad smoked all his life and the fact he died horribly aged 24 is not connected in any way” yahoos who give considerate smokers a bad name, but more interestingly it’s brought out the anti-smoking puritans. And they’re the ones who scare me.

The problem with the puritans is they talk about health, but they mean annoyance. So – and this is a real example by an anti-smoker – you’re in your car at a red light, and the guy in the car in front is smoking a cigarette, and you can smell it. He is, clearly, trying to kill you.

There are lots of examples like that one, and while some people are perfectly honest – they hate smoking because they hate the smell – others are nuts. The dangers of second hand smoke aren’t as clear-cut as anti-smoking groups would have you believe – it’s certainly a risk factor if you’re constantly exposed to lots of it, and only the most deluded pro-smoking advocate would attempt to argue otherwise, but there’s this hysterical interpretation that essentially goes like this: second hand smoke can be a health risk. If I inhale a single molecule, I’m going to die. Therefore anybody who smokes is murdering me. Smoking must therefore be banned everywhere, and smokers punished.

This is a real post, from Fark.com:

Smokers think like NAMBLA.

NAMBLA is the American group whose members want to fiddle with kids.

Smokers argue that people have been smoking for millenia; NAMBLA would argue that people have been engaging in pre-adolescent sexual behavior for millenia. But it’s still disgusting and hurtful… Smokers argue that they have civil rights, freedom to do whatever feels good to them, tossing in as an aside “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else”…and then descrying talk of second-hand smoke damage as non-conclusive. NAMBLA argues about freedom too; somehow discussion of emotional and physical damage to the young boys doesn’t ever resolve itself to a positive conclusion.

…there is no moderate level of carcinogenic gas.

What’s fascinating about that post isn’t the level of lunacy it’s exhibiting – NAMBLA? Carcinogenic gas? Jesus – but the complete lack of response to it. It’s actually quite a common viewpoint on US sites.

Now, smokers aren’t the most sympathetic of groups. It’s a bloody stupid thing to do, cigarette smoke annoys people who don’t smoke, some smokers give the rest of us a bad name by being inconsiderate twats and the smokers who are currently emailing anonymous death threats to Belmont’s mayor are utter arseholes. But there seems to be an attitude shift happening here: in the discussions on US internet sites, the *extreme* anti-smoking position seems to me as if it’s becoming the *mainstream* anti-smoking position. And of course, where California leads the UK eventually follows. We’ve already started with the “hospitals ban smoking in their grounds because they can’t be seen to condone smoking” nonsense, so the other stuff will follow.

So what we have here are two really scary, really popular viewpoints:

* I don’t like smoking, so the state must make sure that I never, ever encounter it.

And:

* I believe that if something is believed to be a health risk in certain circumstances, if it exists in the world at all then I am a murder victim who just hasn’t died yet. The state must eradicate every molecule of it.

Position number one, then, is a variation of the “I must never encounter anything of which I do not approve, and my view is all that matters” argument; position number two is the “despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, I believe that electricity/paint/radio/the phone/flouride is EATING MY BRAIN and my feelings are more important than evidence. Yes, I am a hysterical nutcase but I PAY MY TAXES GODDAMMIT” argument. And increasingly, those are the mainstream opinions.

Am I the only person who thinks that’s utterly terrifying?

Making music: an itch you can’t quite scratch

I don’t usually hang around message boards – when you spend all day on the internet the last thing you want to do when you finish work is spend all night on the internet – but I’ve been intrigued by a conversation on jockrock.org about music. In a rare, non-sweary thread people are talking about what motivates them to create music and how your attitudes change as you become Too Old To Rock*.

I have a vested interest in the subject because from my teens to my early thirties I played in bands, and a few years back I gave it up altogether – other than the odd drunken noise-fest when David’s visiting, I haven’t played guitar for two or more years. That’s a big change for someone who was always making a racket, and who tended to see everything that wasn’t about music as either fuel for songs or finance for being in a band.

I knocked it on the head for a number of reasons. Many – most? – musicians thrive on performing live, but shyness/stage fright meant I never, ever enjoyed that side of it. I preferred what’s best described as “dicking about” – working on stuff via computer music programs, or in studios. The people I played in a band with moved away, some geographically and others mentally (despite repeated efforts, I haven’t seen our former drummer Calum for three or four years. That’s a shame personally – he’s a nice guy – and a shame musically, because I don’t think I’ve seen or heard a drummer since who comes close to his raw talent). And other things got in the way of my obsession with making music. I joke that meeting Miss Right is creative death, but I’m only half joking: being happy isn’t good for writing “woke up this morning, Christ I’m depressed, ooh ooh ooh loook at me I’m so tortured” bollocks; better to have a good life than a crap life that makes good songs, and all that. And if you’re routinely working silly hours, finding the time – let alone the enthusiasm – to batter away on a guitar, a keyboard, a computer program is difficult.

Another issue is that as you get older, you stop being naive – and much of the music business, particularly in the lower echelons, is based on exploiting naivety. You’ll routinely put up with idiots, with mistreatment, with false promises when you’re sixteen; when you’ve got a bit of experience and a bit of sense you finally develop a bullshit detector and enough savvy to realise that “take three days off work, hire a van, travel to london and play in front of three drunks and a murderer” is not an offer worth accepting.

More superficially, clambering onto a stage and realising that you’re old enough to be the other bands’ dad (and if you’d spent your teenage years talking to girls instead of writing songs about wishing you could talk to girls, you might well *be* their dad) makes you feel like a dick.

Above all else, though, the main reason I stopped making a racket was frustration. I could never quite turn what I heard in my head into something others could hear, and it was driving me daft. I’d hear stuff by other people and know I could do it better, but I couldn’t express *how* I would make it better. My head was an amazing musician, but when I tried to translate it into something in the real world I was hamstrung by my own limited abilities – both in terms of my ability to play instruments (rudimentary at best) and my ability to explain to other, more talented musicians what I was trying to get across. It’s very frustrating, like trying to play a piano while wearing boxing gloves.

Rationally, giving up music was a sensible move. But it’s an itch that you can never quite scratch, and no matter what’s going on in your life the itch is still there. My dad gave up smoking a few decades ago and says that to this day, he feels there’s something missing: a taste you can’t quite taste, an itch you can’t quite scratch, a gap you can’t quite fill. And music’s exactly like that: sooner or later its absence starts nagging at you.

There’s a cliche that music is a drug, but I think that while the idea is hackneyed it’s also true. Making music delivers some amazing highs – pulling a tune out of thin air, suggesting *this* note instead of *that* note and hearing something amazing, overcoming your stage fright and playing a blinder, losing yourself for hours in a single guitar riff… everyone’s different and as a result the highs they get from music will come from different aspects, but the one thing everyone has in common is that the high you get from music is powerful – and short. In many respects it’s the ultimate drug because while the buzz is short it’s unlike anything you get from anything else in your life (I’m excluding parenthood here because while I suspect it may well offer something similarly amazing, I haven’t experienced it and therefore don’t have a clue) – and once you’ve experienced it, even if you’ve only experienced it for a tiny period of time a long time ago, part of you wants to experience it all over again.

Which, I guess, is a long way of saying that despite my perfectly rational and logical reasons for staying the hell out of making music, I’m writing stuff in my head again. Mrs Bigmouth has very kindly bought me a bass guitar, I’m getting the telecaster out of storage, I’m going to try and locate the effects pedals I loaned out for one night only and never saw again, I’m going to upgrade the Mac so it’s up to the job of recording music, and I’m really into the idea of making a noise again. Not because I want to be a pop star – I’m too old, too ugly and too ornery for that – but because making a god-awful noise is pretty much the most fun you can have without getting arrested.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

* In the jockrock discussion I’ve mentioned, Tony K made an excellent point about the Too Old To Rock thing: our generation is still defining the terms, because for the first time the cool list is growing old and continuing to make music which, in many cases, kicks the arse of the stuff made by younger acts.

Quick album review: Idlewild, Make Another World

Patchy as hell and really derivative in places (REM’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi is an obvious touchstone) but my god, when Idlewild get it right… the title track and the final two tracks, Once In Your Life and Finished It Remains, are mighty. Finished… in particular is utter, utter genius.

Be careful where you put your penis

Good advice at the best of times, I think, but particularly relevant in the case of this poor chap’s poor chap: according to the Daily Record, Robert McLenahan’s “romp” with his wife ended in tears when he misjudged his aim and broke his penis. Apparently “everyone knows about it”, and if they didn’t before then thanks to the newspapers they do now.

Scoopt scooped up by Getty

Occasionally good things happen to good people: fellow Scots tech hack Kyle MacRae’s photojournalism agency, Scoopt, has been snapped up by Getty Images. It’s very unlikely that Kyle’s currently rolling around in a bin bag full of tenners, but it’s bound to be a big relief: he’s made a lot of sacrifices to get Scoopt started and to keep it running, and being part of an industry giant is good for Kyle – maybe he’ll be able to have something more interesting than Tesco Value baked beans for dinner now – and of course, good news for the people submitting their stuff to Scoopt.

Man who robbed lingerie shop while believing he was a female space elf may have “blurred reality and fantasy”

Oh, really?

A man accused of robbing a Belfast lingerie shop at knifepoint has fallen back on a time honoured defence – namely, his claim that he believed he was a female elf at the time.

…While Boyd maintains that he is innocent of the crime, he admits that he can’t be sure that the metahuman Beho did not plan to rob the store.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

[Via Digg]

Smoking, stalking and unintended consequences

One of the dangers of knee-jerk legislation is that it sometimes has unintended consequences, so what is generally a good idea can have its downsides. Anti-harassment legislation is a good example of that – as this morning’s Guardian notes, its vagueness means it’s a handy tool for firms to stop people protesting about them – and as Mr Eugenides points out today, it applies to anti-smoking legislation too.

The quick summary: banning smoking in public places is good news for health, but too draconian a ban and it’s possible that you can actually end up doing more harm than good.

Mr E links to a Scotsman story, which mentions research that’s actually been kicking around for a while.

The researchers studied data from the US, where bans have been up and running in California and New York for a number of years. The presence of the nicotine by-product cotinine was recorded to see the effects of such bans.

The results found that bans on buses, in shopping malls and in schools had the desired effect of reducing the levels of tobacco inhaled by non-smokers. But once bans were imposed in recreational places such as pubs, the results shifted markedly.

The researchers said: “We find that bans in recreational public places can perversely increase tobacco exposure of non-smokers by displacing smokers to private places where they contaminate non-smokers.”

Smoking’s less prevalent among well-off people than poorer people, so such displacement is likely to adversely affect poorer kids. As Mr E. says:

Adda and Cornaglia suggest that this may be because the prevalence of smoking is higher in poorer households; as a non-smoker, you are more likely to share your home with a smoker if you are poor. Displacing smoking from the pub to the home will therefore affect the poorest section of society disproportionately hard.

I don’t think this is particularly surprising or controversial, and it’s something that may well disappear in the long term. However, the boss of anti-smoking pressure group ASH Scotland simply discounts it and implies – libellously? – that the researchers are in the pocket of Big Tobacco. Mr E, again:

The study quite clearly supports higher taxes on cigarettes as an effective way to reduce exposure to smoke, and also supports a workplace ban. The authors were sponsored by the ESRC and there is no evidence whatever of any support from the tobacco industry.

…The researchers concluded: “Governments in many countries are under pressure to limit passive smoking. Some pressure groups can be very vocal about these issues and suggest bold and radical reform. Often, their point of view is laudable but too simplistic in the sense that they do not take into account how public policies can generate perverse incentives and effects.”

I don’t have a particular axe to grind here – as I’ve said endlessly, I’m in favour of the ban but appalled by the some of the loons behind it – but I do think it demonstrates the problems of swallowing any pressure group’s agenda wholesale – whether they’re pro or anti-smoking, pro or anti-capitalist, pro-business or pro-environment or anything else. By their very nature, single-issue pressure groups have tunnel vision and a belief in the pure, simple truth – but as Wilde wrote, the truth is rarely pure and never simple.