ID cards: voluntary? Only if you’ve never been on holiday

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Clauses in the draft Immigration and Citizenship Bill give state officials the power to make anyone who has ever entered the country, at any time, prove who they are without needing any suspicion of a potential crime.

Civil liberty groups warned that the catch-all clauses would effectively cover any British citizen who has ever left the UK, even for a holiday, because they will have “entered” the UK on their return.

Refusing to hand over the necessary documents would be a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of almost a year in prison and/or a hefty fine.

It’s probably the result of badly worded draft legislation, but if it isn’t fixed it’s all rather chilling.

Very quick example of video from the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000

As promised, here’s some quick footage from the Sanyo camcorder I was banging on about. The embedded version is standard definition, but you can view it in HD by clicking through to the Vimeo site.

Quick example of video from the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 from Gary Marshall on Vimeo.

Have your say on website accessibility

BSI British Standards has published a draft of the forthcoming BS 8878 standard on its website, and it’s keen to hear from interested parties. From the press release:

Julie Howell, Chair of the committee responsible for drafting DPC BS 8878, commented, “Once published, this standard will be a fantastic tool for organizations wishing to understand their responsibilities in enabling disabled people to use web content.  DPC BS 8878 encourages the enhancement of the overall user experience – a much more holistic approach than we have seen previously and one that I hope will yield exciting results.  Right now we want to encourage as many people as possible to read and comment on the draft standard to ensure it is as relevant as possible.”

I interviewed Julie last week, and she means it when she says she wants lots of input from interested parties – not just disabled Internet users, but anybody with an interest in accessibility. The consultation period ends on 31 January.

“If you’re on MySpace, you’re a cretin. And poor.”

Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Michael Wolff reckons MySpace could soon be worth absolutely nothing. Why? Because everybody on it is a “cretin”.

if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.

Freelancing, fatherhood and (not really) working from home

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but for reasons that will soon be apparent it’s taken a lot longer than I expected.

As regular readers will know, I became a dad for the first time in October 2007, and since then I’ve had the joy of watching Baby Bigmouth’s first thirteen months. To say it’s been a learning experience would be an understatement, so I thought I’d share what I’ve learnt for the benefit of any other homeworkers who are about to become proud fathers.

Most of this, incidentally, is stuff you already know. But you don’t really appreciate what any of it actually means until it happens.

Oh, and: I’m writing this for homeworking dads, so let’s take it as read that what we think is difficult is approximately a millionth of a per cent of what our partners had and have to go through.

The good stuff

In many respects, being a freelance is the best possible job to have when you become a father. You’re still working, sort of, but you’re not leaving the house at 6am and returning at 7pm or later. You’re there for the first smile, the first words, the first steps – and because you’re freelance, you can sleep when the baby does. That’s a luxury fathers with proper jobs don’t have, although it’s countered by the fact that you can’t pretend to work late and go to the pub when you really should be going home to help your wife.

All things considered, I’ve been exceptionally lucky to have a job that means I haven’t missed all the cool stuff. And that more than compensates for all the gnarly stuff. But there is a lot of gnarly stuff, and it’s worth thinking about while your beautiful baby is still a twinkle in your eye.

Don’t stop work until you absolutely have to

Baby Bigmouth was due on the 6th of October, so I took that month off in anticipation and told everybody I’d be back at work on the 1st of November. She didn’t turn up until the 23rd of October, and didn’t come home until a few days after that. Oops.

Money, money, money

Your partner’s income will dwindle and then eventually become nothing until/unless she goes back to work. And so will yours. You can pretty much forget doing anything for the first month, and unless you’re exceptionally lucky the next couple of months will be difficult too. It’s particularly bad if you have a creative job, because you will be tired all the time. If you do work, you’ll find even the simplest thing takes forever. I spent two days trying and failing to write a 20-word photo caption when Baby Bigmouth was a couple of months old.

Despite what you might have heard, though, babies aren’t that expensive and child benefit is pretty generous. What is expensive, though, is wine. During the first few months you’ll get through a lot of it.

If you’re the kind of freelance who only gets paid after (usually, long after) you invoice, the money will start drying up a couple of months after you become a parent. Let’s say your baby arrives in January; you’ll probably get paid for the work you did in January 30 to 60 days after that. So expect the money to dwindle from March or so. This is why sensible people save huge wads of cash before the baby arrives. As you know, I’m not very sensible.

Writer’s (or Web Designer’s) block

The combination of lack of sleep and being broke – plus, quite possibly, the constant noise of a yelling baby and/or friends’ yelling babies, and/or children’s CDs, which are only marginally better than Nickelback; moving your office to a fall-out shelter buried deep in the garden becomes very, very appealing – causes a vicious circle of writer’s block. It’s like having the world’s worst cold, a head so stuffed with cotton wool that while you know there’s a brain in there somewhere, you’ve no idea how to contact it, let alone get it to do anything. This can quickly become self-perpetuating, so if you have the opportunity to get out of the house (to work, to get a break, or to have a sneaky nap in a car park) then you really should take it.

Pitching for new work

You won’t. With two-day jobs taking two weeks, you won’t have the energy – and in the unlikely event of you finding any spare time whatsoever, you’ll be having a sneaky nap in a car park. This stage, thankfully, is relatively short.

Things do get better

With babies, everything is just a stage. Eventually things calm down, they sleep through the night, they become wee people rather than screaming balls of fury and sick, and you’ll recover your mojo. You’ll pitch for and win new contracts, you’ll create things you’re happy with, and clients will stop shouting at you. And then you’ll contract the Black Death.

The Black Death

You thought you had an iron constitution, didn’t you? After all, you haven’t been sick for a decade. You have good genes!

Good genes my arse. You haven’t been sick because you haven’t been exposed to anything – and the bad news is that every form of entertainment for toddlers, whether it’s a creche or a musical group or anything else, is a front operation for the chemical warfare labs at Porton Down. Within seconds of arrival, your child will be surrounded by – and infected by – children with diseases we thought we’d got rid of in the dark ages. And then your child will come home, and you will get it ten times worse.

It’s a very good idea to build in some Black Death Time when you’re taking on work. That way, when you get infected – and it’s definitely a case of when, not if – you’ll still be able to hit your deadlines.

But even the Black Death passes, and you’ll find a rhythm. You’ll have fun with your child, and fun doing your job, and you’ll only have to deal with the odd banging on the door when you’re interviewing a CEO. So when older, wiser parents talk about teething, the terrible twos, having more children, fitting in the school run and all the other things just around the corner, you’ll do what any sensible freelancer does. You’ll put your fingers in your ears, wait until they’ve gone, and pour yourself another very large glass of red wine.

(Any other freelancing parents with useful advice? I’m all ears…)

First impressions of the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 and CA-8 digital camcorders

I’ve been playing with two video cameras over the last couple of weeks, both by Sanyo and both from the Xacti range: the Xacti CA-8 waterproof camera, and the HD-1000 high definition one. This won’t be an in-depth review, but I think I’ve played with them enough to get a decent picture (sorry) of their pros and cons.

The CA-8 first. The gimmick is that it’s waterproof to 1.5m for 60 minutes, and it is – me and my colleagues at BBC Radio Scotland have been having a merry old time dumping it in fish tanks, in baths and in the River Clyde. That side of things is great, but it feels as if the waterproofing took the bulk of the budget. Image quality is poor, low light performance is dismal, it’s standard definition and I really didn’t like it. That said, if you’re a running, jumping, mountain biking extreme sports kind of person, it may be worth checking out: like most camcorders its picture quality is best in normal daylight, and the waterproofing could come in handy if you’re doing sporty things.

The HD-1000, on the other hand, is great. Which is just as well, because I spent my own money on it (well, vouchers and stuff I’d got for my birthday). There’s lots to like about it, although there are a few major cons too. Crucially it’s only about £100 more than the CA-8: shop around and you can get it for about £320.

Pros first. It does full HD (although for reasons of space and “that’s good enough” I’ve been using 720p instead of the full resolution), it takes SDHC cards, it’s got a 10x optical zoom and there’s built-in image stabilisation. And by god it needs it, because it’s a pistol grip camera. That’s fine in most circumstances, but it’s not as stable if, like me, you have RSI. The positioning of the zoom control doesn’t help either, because it’s where the hammer would be if it were a real gun – so moving it with your thumb destabilises the camera, causing some pretty dramatic shaking even when you’re not zooming in.

The f1.8 lens does a reasonable job in low light and there’s a shoe connector for an additional light, although I do wonder what that would do to the already precarious balance of the camera.

It’s a very camera-y camcorder in a lot of respects, which I like – although I suspect many people will hate it. Go into the menus and there’s lots of tweakery: ISO speeds, aperture settings, exposure compensation, changing from multi-spot metering and 9-point autofocus to centre weighting… it’s all stuff you’ll be familiar with if you’ve got a reasonably high-spec stills camera, and fiddling can make a big difference to the quality of the footage.

Other than the stability, there are a few other downsides. Autofocus can be slow and easily confused, although it’s better if you switch on Face Chaser. This attempts to identify faces and keep the focus on them, adjusting brightness and contrast to avoid the face-in-the-dark syndrome that can affect cameras when they’re confused about lighting conditions. Battery life is adequate rather than brilliant, and the manual doesn’t emphasise the need for fast SDHC cards enough: try shooting in full HD on a basic SD card and the results will be disastrous. Last but not least, the Full Auto button really bugs me. Press it and the camera reverts to the default settings, which is great if your fiddling has made a complete arse of things, but as far as I can see it goes to the factory defaults and I can’t find a way of overruling it with my own default settings.

Overall, though, I’m really quite taken with it. You don’t expect a £300-ish high definition camera to be perfect, and the HD-1000 isn’t. However, when you consider that many manufacturers are flogging standard definition SD card cameras for more than the Xacti currently sells at, it’s excellent value for money. I’ll post some video soon – I just need to go somewhere interesting so I can film it.