Amy added 40 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Food, fireworks, and inside M Mall (Times Square)
Week in review: 26 Dec - 1 Jan
Finished improving my LDN endpoint so notifications actually go into my triplestore with everything else, albeit into a different graph.
Contributed a bit to the LDN test suite.
Updated sloph to display Add activities where the objects are many images and the target is a photo album.. and ported all of my recent travel pics to this format.
Finally fixed my Acquire posts so they display photos.
Made type-based post collections.
Made progress on between-date summary aggregates (so I can use this for a year in review).
Started yoga classes at Wholey Wonder.
Joined a drive to Penang Airport in Bayan Lepas, and back.
I'm sitting on the balcony as waves of rain wash by. It started just before sunset; I noticed a change in the lighting which turned out to be caused by a dense downpour. First the mountains in the distance are consumed, then some of the tower blocks. As I watch, a dark black cloud rolls overhead, distinct against the grey-blue dusk behind. It brings with it bigger droplets, surging straight downwards instead of smattering at angles. The dramatic contrast between the clouds is lost as the sunlight disappears. It's replaced by flashes of yellow, blue, white, even pink, lighting up the inky black night. The flashes are quickly followed by ear-splitting roars, one every few minutes. The rain drowns out the sound of traffic, of anything.
The balcony is set into the building, so I'm well-sheltered, but still the occasional spit of water reaches me. Before the darkness sets in completely, I see birds stumbling through the rain. I don't know how they're holding up under the force of the water.
Gradually the torrent of water lessens, and the sounds of engines re-emerge. The lightning persists, though. And the mosquitoes are waking up. Time to go back inside.
My year in review is delayed because part of it includes a summary of everything I spent. I used six different currencies this year, and juggling them all into one so I can add them up (and then total per category, etc) is proving to be a pain. All APIs which have enough different currencies available are rate limited for their free tier, and I'm exceeding them very quickly. I need a new plan.
Sneak preview though: I spent more than expected, and more than I should have :(
Pancake night for me and MM! Potato pancakes (with chilli and bok choi) followed by banana pancakes (with coconut). Bot made with soy milk and regular white wheat flour, dry fried.
There's a gecko in the bathroom. Everywhere I go there's a gecko in the bathroom. Tenth floor condo, still a gecko in the bathroom. Her name is Petunia.
Smoothie: papaya, dragonfruit, orange juice, soy milk. Noodles: mee with daikon, seitan, chillis, cabbage and bok choi. Fried in coconut oil with a little soy sauce and curry powder.
Chips (deep fried in coconut oil) and baked beans (from a can) in a toasted sandwich. I've said it once, and I'll say it a thousand times: I'm not vegan for my health.
Amy added 4 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Dinner at Wholey Wonder with MM and a quick wander around a WWA art display in Hin Bus Depot next door
I've been shipping Janeway and Chakotay for the last four seasons, but Chakotay and Seven... oh. my. god. They're adorable. They're all awkward and excited. They're doing the little thing where they pretend to be professional, calling each other "sir" etc, but with little smirks. I'm melting.
In related news, this last episode is an emotional rollarcoaster and I didn't realise I was at the last one and I'm not ready :'o
Update: Wow, seriously. They got back to the alpha quadrant, destroyed the Borg, Seven and Chakotay got together and broke up and got back together, Harry saved the day, Tuvok was flawlessly selfless, B'Lanna had a baby whilst Tom flew Voyager through a transwarp conduit being fired on by the last Borg ship, and there were two Janeways. That was fucking awesome.
I will watch these again someday.
But next up.. Deep Space Nine! Stay tuned for more in the exciting adventures of rhiario binges Star Trek.
Wholey Wonder is innundated with almond meal, so I made cookies. Unmeasured quantities of almond meal, brown sugar, grapeseed oil, and baking soda; drizzle of vanilla extract. I thought my ratio of sugar to flour would make them crunchy, but almond meal is not flour... so they took much longer to cook than expected (over 30 minutes) and were pretty fally-aparty. A little better once cool. Taste good, because... how can you go wrong with almond?
Week in review: 2nd - 8th Jan
Made some progress on /summary, but stuck on silly bugs.
Fixed /where to return my latest checkin, and updated botbot to read it properly.
I've been tracking everything I've acquired all year, and how much it cost. I even built a wee budgeting app on top of this feed last summer. This all worked fine until I was travelling a lot, and logging purchases in the local currency. I ignored it for a while, and could only budget for things I was buying in USD, however when it came to summarising all of this for the year-in-review I had to deal with it.
I searched for currency conversion APIs, and found fixer.io which is not rate-limited and takes a date parameter for historical exchange rates. However, it only contains about 20 currencies, and didn't include Qatari Rial, which I need from my trip to Doha in March. There are various APIs which contain more currencies, but all the ones I found are rate limited and required API keys. They usually have other restrictions on the free tier, as well.
Initially I wrote a script that cycled through every single acquire post and fetched the exchange rate for that currency from currencylayer, one by one. I immediately exceeded 1000 request (per month!) rate limit, fetching all exchange rates for all individual purchases in a year.
So then I wrote a script that cycled through all of my posts and aggregated the currencies I used for each day, by date. I then grabbed the exchange rates for these from fixr.io in one request per day (rather than per post). Fixer.io is not rate limited, and this cut the number of requests down to about one third or less. Then only for rates that were missing from the fixer.io response, I called rate-limted currencylayer to retrieve those, again in one request per day. This worked in bringing the number of requests down, but for anything more than a couple of months was still a request per day in the time period to the API, and took a while. Also, while I thought I wouldn't exceed the currencylayer rate limit given I have a finite amount of posts with currencies missing from fixer.io (in this case ten days of QAR) in the whole year, this is not sustainable in the long term, as I don't know what other currencies I'll be spending over time. But the main problem is that it was really slow.
So, new plan. I moved all my code into a standalone script, which cycles through acquire posts between two dates and retrieves the currency codes used per day, then fetches the relevant exchange rates. Then dumps this to a JSON file. So, I ran that once.
Now my /summary code just consults this static JSON file. Since historical exchange rates don't change... this is all I need. For some reason, I'd like it to be more dynamic. I don't want to be storing random data about the world on my own server if I can fetch it from somewhere else. Oh well.
It still takes ages to run for a whole year, but at least I only have to do it once now.
If you have your own feed of posts with currencies, you can just modify `posts_between` to fetch them from your own system, and `get_rates` to read the cost from the post. I'll add that I have a couple of functions to wrangle official 3 digit currency codes from the messy inconsistent values of cost I have for my posts, including a local cache of all currency codes.
Next is to update my publishing endpoint to trigger fetching and storing the exchange rates for a new day when the first acquire post of that day/currency combination is made.
I went for a walk around my neighbourhood today. As ever, in search of the nearest sand and sea. This time I headed in a straight line towards the nearest coast. It's consistently inaccessible, but there's a seafront seafood restaurant called Ocean Green and their driveway leads to a small tranquil beach. Barely a sliver of sand, but just enough to walk along or sit around for a while and listen to the rhythm of the ocean. And the caw of crows, which makes a change from seagulls. There's trash and boats making the water grimy, and the beach less than idyllic, but there are also no tourists. One or two locals working on boats or digging things from the sand.
I made my way north, until I couldn't walk any further along the beach. I got as far as I got when I was coming from the other direction on my walk home from Gurney Drive a couple of weeks ago. I backed up, and entered Northam Beach Cafe, an open seating area outlined by hawker stands. It was just before 16.30, so they weren't quite open and the staff were just stirring. I took a seat in one of the blue plastic chairs, which had the KL Tower embossed in the back, and watched the sea. I could see distant mountains on the mainland straight ahead; construction and cranes off Gurney Drive to the north; and heavy equipment of George Town jetty to the south.
It wasn't long before one of the guys wiping the tables asked me what I want to drink, so I ordered a small apple juice, no ice: 5myr. Steep, I think, but it came in a pint glass. He was also able to furnish me with the wifi password (northambeach123). Suddenly this becomes a viable place to work.
At hawker areas like this, you order food at the individual stalls, but give your drink order to someone who comes to your table. In both cases, you pay when your item is brought over to you.
It doesn't look like there's much in the way of veggie food. I saw signs for fruit rojak, beancurd, and grass jelly though, so maybe I could hang around for a while without starving to death completely. I also saw popiah... I wonder if they'll make it without meat and egg.
It's a shame this place is only open in the evenings. On the other hand, it doesn't have walls, and I have the wifi password now, so I'll see if I can get away with sitting around in the morning sometime.
Northam Beach Cafe started to get busy around 18.30, though not all of the stalls were open yet, including the potentially veggie looking ones. As I got up to leave, my table was immediately jumped on by two guys who had been about to sit down nearby. I looked around, and realised every other seaview seat was taken, though most of the rest of the place was empty. People were gravitating to the outer wall.
Five minutes later, I'm in JanXDen Greenlife. A weird name for a restaurant, but an incredible menu. All vegetarian, with eggs and milk labelled. I'd read somewhere they had a lot of vegan desserts, but was disappointed to see a massive selection of eggless cheesecakes containing milk, and dairy-free waffles made with egg. They have some unfamiliar jelly things and tofu things though. Just nothing that'll hit the cake spot.
I ordered pasembur and black sesame doufu hua. The pasembar is similar to rojak; the same spicy peanut sauce. Shredded veggies and cucumber, but this time with boiled potatoes and vegetable fritters, and pappadom pieces on the side. The doufu hua is savoury and nutty from the sesame, but a little sweet from the tofu, served in a teacup (but far to thick to drink). Perfect for washing down the spicy salad. There's also a chocolate flavour, which I see a future with..
They have some great looking pasta dishes and savoury porridges I want to try, as well as nasi lemak. Plus a breadcrumbed/fried Mexican spice plate. I would eat more now (because eating is fun, not because this meal wasn't satisfying) but I shouldn't...
There are four kids here being very loud, and nobody else. They're playing board games and drawing and flailing and yelling at each other, and their surroundings in general, in a seamless mix of Chinese and American-accented English.
I tried to make pancakes with only almond meal (and soy and coconut milk). They tasted great, but totally fell apart. Threw in just a little bit of wheat flour, and they held together.
You can export Firefox bookmarks as HTML, but if you choose 'backup' instead of export, you get JSON. So this is just a couple of PHP functions which parse that JSON, pull out the useful information, and shuffle it into AS2 objects.
It turns each bookmark URL into an as:Article with a name. These Articles are the object of an as:Add Activity. The target of the Add you can configure yourself to be the URL of your bookmarks collection. The date from the Firefox data I use as the published date in the Add, and I also auto-generate a summary. The script generates a unique new URL for every Add using the pattern /yyyy/mm/unique-id. You can of course configure this to match your Activity URLs template. This is what one looks like:
The truth is, until yesterday most of my Firefox bookmarks are accidents; side effects of me accidentally clicking bookmark or mashing keyboard shortcuts. Then csarven shared his bookmarks export with me so I needed to do something to get a handle on all this data.
The script includes a form which lists all of the bookmarks with checkboxes beside them once it has parsed the Firefox data. This lets you choose which ones to include in the final output. When you confirm your selection, it generates a JSON list with all of the Adds inside. This lets me filter out all of the crap from accidental bookmarks... so I saved the JSON, converted it to Turtle, and dumped it in my triplestore. Voila, quadrupled the size of my bookmarks on my site.
I made bee hoon (vermicelli) salad with cucumber, carrot, chilli and tofu for Malaysian Mum. She provided peanut Chinese New Year cookies, I made the almond ones, and the granola bars are Wholey Wonder castoffs.
Today I made date syrup and almond milk. The ingredients were dates and water, and almonds and water, respectively.
In the first case, I soaked the dates in hot water for five minutes, then applied a blender; this took far longer than expected, but was well worth it. Actually I think the main ingredient is patience. Two parts dates, one part water.
In the second case, the almonds had already been soaked overnight and drained. I applied a juicer. Two parts almonds, two and a half parts water.
Both suuuuuper good. I might use date syrup for anything that requires any kind of sweetening in future.
I thought about writing some of my thesis this evening, but I made pizza from scratch instead. But growing up, I was always told it's the thought that counts, so that's progress right?
Amy added 2 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Photos by Rohan Chowdhary at the CS Penang meetup
Last night I joined the CouchSurfing Penang meetup at coffeeshop/bar Behind 50 on Love Lane. They're a really lively and enthusiastic bunch, locals and travellers alike. They meet every Friday, and frequently arrange adventures.
After a couple of hours and a group photo, they broke into two groups: beer and food. I joined the food party, and we got curry from a 24 hour place in Little India: a huge plate of cabbage, rice and dahl for 3.50myr (about 64p). Rohan, the main organiser, was kind enough to give me a ride home after that, since it was about midnight by then.
They're going on a motorbike trip to the mainland this weekend, to see a ton of attractions and camp overnight. I'd seen the post about it on their CS group a week or so ago, but it read like it was for people who could ride motorbikes... it didn't occur to me to ask if anyone was going in a car with a spare seat. Turns out a few of them are, but now I have other committments this weekend. But I'll certainly be joining their next adventure!
Amy added 3 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Cicu and other fruit. Wander through George Town to Chew Jetty and Occupy Beach St market
Week in review: 9 - 15 Jan
Got some of a report done on a year of using sloph as a personal datastore and 'personal web observatory', for submission to WOW2017, and inclusion in my thesis.
Started on implementation report aggregation and viewer for LDN Test results (from the reports which are sent as LDNs to the test suite inbox).
Wandered around some more parts of George Town, including Northam Beach, to the library, and accidentally to Chew Jetty while looking for the Beach Street market.
So I knew there was a volunteer-run, pay-what-you-want vegetarian Indian restaurant somewhere in George Town, but somehow neglected to find it and save it on a map with the rest. And today I discovered... It's around the corner from where I live. So it's probably a good job I didn't find it sooner as I'd have neglected all of the other restaurants, but really. The food is so good, and the ambience is beautiful. It's part of a temple; roof but no walls, surrounded by trees and plants and bamboo, with tranquil music playing. While I was there, the sky opened and the downpour clattering on the sheet metal roof added to the peaceful atmosphere. To top it all off, one of the staff gave me a ride home as it was still raining heavily when they were closing up. Absolutely <3
I'm super disappointed with how sleazy Dr. Bashir is. He's clearly supposed to come across as the poor geek who just has no luck with women and we're supposed to feel sorry for him. But the way he is hitting on Dax every episode when she's clearly not interested is awful. No amount of boyish charm, cheesey jokes and British accent can make up for his blatant disregard for her wishes and... is just entitled and intolerable.
And he's so arrogant. All the time. I hope his character grows.
The way Dax reacts with kind of light amusement and appreciation of the attention is kind of sad, too. She should have smacked him in the face four episodes ago.
There are a whole bunch of big Buddhist temples not far from my apartment. I went to see them today. They include many shiny things, giant domes, belltowers, and a sleeping ('reclining') buddha.
This is a short report on iteratively developing and using a Personal Web Observatory for one year. Herein are described the architecture of the technical system and, subjectively, the social and personal impact of daily use. The goal is to provoke further conversation about what it means to 'observe' individuals, and the benefits and drawbacks of this on a personal scale. We also discuss how peoples' attitudes towards social media and personal publishing may impact the quality of data collected by Web Observatories.
Introduction
Studying communities through passive and active digital traces, as Web Observatories are designed to do [9, 26], brings with it a host of privacy, ethical, and methodological concerns. Attempts to address online privacy issues in general are being made with a push towards re-decentralising the Web [8], in part through open Web standards and work on promoting personal data stores as alternatives to centralised or third-party services. Using this momentum can benefit the Web Science community as well as their observees (though it brings with it its own set of challenges). Decentralisation is applied to Web Observatories in particular through the idea of a Personal Web Observatory [11] as a user-controlled (as opposed to third-party imposed) means of collecting and tracking data.
I believe that the perspectives of both subject and experimenter are valuable when it comes to studying people in new ways. Taking inspiration from the reflective practices of the Quantified Self community, I progressively built features into my own personal website which allow monitoring and visualisation of day-to-day aspects of my life, and used it continuously for the period of one year. Immersion in the ongoing effects of self-tracking in a decentralised manner led to greater insight in working towards Personal Web Observatories than either developing a personal data store or engaging in self-tracking through third-party services could do alone.
This article begins by outlining related work on Web Observatories, Quantified Self, and the decentralised Social Web. It includes a summary of the architecture of the personal data store being studied, and the types of data collected. I discuss the results in terms of psychological impact of the experiment, evolving motivations, and expected and unexpected consequences. In conclusion I relate these results to new and existing challenges for Web Observatories and Web Scienctists who want to study data generated by Personal Web Observatories or similarly decentralised systems.
Background
Personal Web Observatories
Web Observatories concern the use of peoples' digital footprints as the subject of academic inquiry [9, 26]. Such data encompasses all manner of online and offline activities, and it may be collected passively by systems with which individuals interact, or actively logged, or some combination of the two. In order to address negative privacy implications of collecting and analysing this data, [11] introduces the idea of a Personal Web Observatory. Personal data stores are presented as an architecture for a decentralised Web Observatory, to allow individuals to maintain control over their data whilst still participating in scientific studies or otherwise releasing their data for use by third parties.
A Personal Web Observatory relies on individuals opting in to self-tracking activities; connecting their personal data store to sensors or user interfaces.
Self-tracking and Quantified Self
There have been a small number of high profile instances of individuals collecting a large volume of data about themselves, then offering it up for auction [5, 20]. Even more common are those who track data about themselves in order to: orchestrate behavioural changes; monitor bodily functions; learn new things about themselves; discern cause-and-effect relations; aid memory; manage information and life events; make better decisions; or just for the fun of it (for surveys of self-tracking motivations and tools, see [12, 2, 7, 23]). This personal self-tracking is disruptive to traditional notions of big data and data science [23].
The Quantified Self (QS) community is large, global, and growing. In-person conferences and meetups are held regularly [14, 15]. Whilst they use a wide range and combination of DIY and off-the-shelf devices for self-tracking [15, 21], what is particularly interesting are their reflective practices.
QS practitioners engage in creative ways to collect, visualise, and understand data about themselves. At meetups, talks are focussed around deep personal insights, optimisation and improvement, and active self-awareness, rather than technology or tools [2, 21, 15].
However, the psychological impact of quantifying day-to-day activities is more complex than detecting trends and setting goals. Self-tracking may work against our best interests as interpretation of data is both subjective, and prone to re-interpretation at each viewing. There is also evidence that attempting to enforce a particular behaviour can have the opposite effect. Peoples' memories and impressions are easily influenced by external and internal factors [3]. A participant in [12] expressed concern about becoming "compulsive" about data collection, and [12] also describes how many off-the-shelf self-tracking services do not provide adequate means to aid user reflection.
Another negative effect of QS tracking is poor security of sensor software and third-party storage which can compromise individuals' data [1]. Plus, using third-party software typically comes with terms of service which are problematic from a privacy perspective.
Quantified self tracking is gamification of non-play activities, and [28] describes gamification as having surveillance at its root. [28] emphasises that quantification is a tool for governance and control and [15] concurs that statistics are historically used to manage populations, and this form of control is internalised by individuals for management of self. Prevalence of QS devices and habits can serve to normalise surveillance. Further, QS tracking in the workplace is being introduced in ways that are becoming increasingly difficult to opt-out of, and raises unrealistic expectations of workers "fostered by a quantified, machine-like image of human productivity" [13].
Nonetheless, [15] describes QS participants who pushing back against the expectations and categories of the companies whose devices they use with their own interpretations of their data, "calling into question who gets to do the aggregation and how".
Social Publishing
Though most bloggers and social media users do not explicitly set out to log small events in their lives, other kinds of social publishing can also be considered a form of self-tracking. Indeed, it is these types of data which Web Observatories today are most commonly consuming and analysing. Blogs have been around since the early days of the Web, initially for collecting links and then for documenting ideas and experiences. More recently, such expressions are commonly published to centralised social networking site, and many systems facilitate deeper data logging than just prose content. For example, the Facebook 'status update' input presents preset options for mood, location, films, books, friends, and other activities. These are easily attached to a text post through a seamless user interface, where the intent feels quite different to services and devices specifically marketed for self-tracking, but the end result in terms of data collected is largely the same.
While there are various efforts to address decentralisation of the Social Web [8], of particular note are ongoing formal standardisation efforts at the W3C. The W3C Social Web and Web Annotations Working Groups are developing standards for not only publishing content, but interacting with content in the same manner as one would through centralised social networking sites. Unlike centralised systems, instead of coordination between common technology stacks or shared access to databases, they use mutually implemented communication protocols. The ActivityStreams 2.0 (AS2) [19] specification provides a syntax and vocabulary for types of data commonly found on the Social Web, as well as an extension mechanism for adding new types of activities and objects. ActivityPub [24], Micropub [16] and the Web Annotations Protocol [18] define protocols for publishing which facilitate decentralision by decoupling clients from the servers which store the data. Linked Data Notifications (LDN) [4], Webmention [17], and WebSub [6] provide mechanisms for propagating social interactions and other data between otherwise unrelated servers.
Building a Personal Web Observatory
In this section I describe my Personal Web Observatory setup. One notable constraint from the outset was that in order to minimise maintenance requirements the system needed to be no more complicated to run than a personal website. As such it is implemented in PHP and runs on standard shared Web hosting, with a MySQL backend.
Architecture
The system (which is named sloph) constitutes a central database which is an RDF quadstore (layered on top of a MySQL database by the ARC2 PHP library). Using a graph data model facilitates the addition of new data without the overhead of updating schema or models in the core code.
For incoming data, it uses two endpoints: publication and notification, which implement the server portions of ActivityPub and LDN respectively. To compensate for overlapping standards, the publication endpoint additionally includes bridging code which converts Micropub requests in ActivityPub requests before proceeding, and the notification endpoint converts Webmentions into LDN. Data is processed to examine its validity, and stored as-is in the quad store. Publication data all uses the AS2 syntax and vocabulary (or extensions thereof), and notification data is stored using whatever vocabulary is sent by the notifying party. Data from each endpoint are stored in different graphs in the quad store to manage provenance.
The notifications endpoint can receive unsolicted messages from any LDN Sender, which may be somebody else's personal data store, or a clientside tool. In addition, some third-party services have been configured to send notifications to the notification endpoint. Webmention.io and GitHub have webhook settings, which are set to the notifications endpoint. They forward JSON data, which is easily convertible into JSON-LD, used by the LDN standard. Brid.gy is a service which runs in the background and monitors my social media profiles for replies to my posts, then sends these as Webmention notifications. Upon certain new incoming notifications, the endpoint sends a request to the PushOver API, which sends a push notification to my Android phone.
Data may be retrieved as individual items (AS2 Objects or Activities), or in sets (AS2 Collections); all are identified by URLs. Content negotiation is employed so that requesting clients may access the data in any desired RDF syntax, or HTML. For HTML display, simple templates are created for each 'type' (or shared between a set of similar types) of data item. It is expected that most requests come from Web browsers, so the HTML content is delivered most often. However, other applications or services may consume the data, including readers (which may mix together multiple streams of data for the user), aggregators (which read the data and perform some manipulation or calculation over it to display the results) or publishing clients (which offer editing or combining of existing data). All data is public; I did not implement access control.
The publication endpoint performs additional functions for data enhancement and distribution. It automatically adds missing metadata to posts if necessary (for example, published date and author), as well as storing new relations between posts and relevant collections such as tags, as well as the specific collections required by ActivityPub. The publication endpoint forwards text posts to Twitter, if necessary truncating them and adding a link back to the original, which helps with reach of content (since I don't yet have a subscription mechanism implemented). The publication endpoint also scans the content and certain attributes of incoming data for URLs, and behaves as an LDN and Webmention Sender to deliver notifications to others, if possible.
The high level architecture for my Personal Web Observatory. Parts in black are the core, and parts in grey are external or third-party services which interact or interoperate.
Data
[11] suggests that the first feature of a PWO should be to allow individuals to consolidate data collected by third parties into one repository under their control. Rather than attempting to aggregate - or even find - all data about myself spread across the Web, I chose a handful of services which have particular value to me, that I have been using to actively log particular things. I exported data from Lastfm (over ten years of music listening history), Twitter (7 years of short notes), Runkeeper (1 year of runs, walks and hikes with GPS traces), and Github and Bitbucket (5 years of code commit history), and Firefox bookmarks (2 years). I also exported data from 750words.com (almost 7 years of intermittent use) but did not import this into my store due to private content and no reliable access control built in.
On top of these data dumps I created the following templates:
* All posts contain tags and a published date, and may contain a last modified date.
Articles (blog posts)
name, content
Short notes (like Tweets)
content
Meals logged
description, restaurant if applicable
Travel plans
start and end location (map), date and time, means of transport, cost
Checkins to specific places
location (map)
Checkins to categories of place, aka 'vague' checkins (eg. 'home', 'office')
location, duration of time there, associated colour
Likes
URL of thing liked
Bookmarks
URL of bookmark, name of bookmark, optional comment or quote
Reposts (aka shares aka retweets aka reblogs)
URL of post, optional comment
Acquisitions (purchases and free stuff)
description, source, cost, photo
Additions to photo albums
photos and URL of album
Events and RSVPs
location, date and time, name, description, event website
Subscriptons / follows
URL of profile followed
Sleep times
start and end date and time, optional comment
Templates were created not all at once, but as I decided to start tracking something new and wanted to visualise it. Templates were continually modified and improved over the course of the year.
At the time of writing, I display posts in three different formats on my homepage (figure 2): a feed of the most recent eight article and note posts displayed in full; a list of the most recent of each type of post, displayed as a sentence (eg. "the last thing I ate was toast with peanut butter, 25 minutes ago"); and the last 1600 posts of all kinds, visualised as a string of small coloured boxes with icons. The colours represent where I was at the time of making the post (according to the most recent prior 'vague' checkin) and the icons indicate the type of post. Clicking on any of these boxes takes you to the post itself. In addition, the background colour of the homepage changes according to where I am at the present time. I also show my top 128 tags, and the number of posts for each.
Another type of output is a /summary page, which aggregates data between any two dates, defaulting to the past seven days. This is useful for producing a year- and week-in-review, and includes total amount of money spent, top foods eaten, number of words written, and various averages.
A screenshot of my homepage at the time of writing. The purple background shows I was at home. Note: I do not profess to be a designer.
One year of using a Personal Web Observatory
Recording data
All data is actively recorded; that is, I enter all of the data and no posts are triggered by some other process or sensor. Unfortunately, for the sources of data exported from other services mentioned previously, I did not (yet) implement a connection to their various APIs to post subsequent data directly to my site.
As I decided to log a new kind of data, I either created or sought out a suitable client. As an intermediary measure (eg. while a client was in development), I could insert data into the quadstore directly using my SPARQL endpoint, which turns out to be a pretty useful bootstrapping measure. Clients I developed myself are simple web forms, which post AS2 data as JSON-LD to my publication endpoint.
I typically logged data at the time of its occurrence if possible. If I didn't have an internet connection (a frequent occurrence whilst traveling) I used a local 'timestamp' Android app to record the time and note crucial details, then back-dated posts at the earliest opportunity.
Practical uses for small data
[11] proposes that "small data analytics, while sparse, could be made statistically viable when gathered longitudinally over time." Whilst I haven't done any complex statistical analysis on my data, certainly aggregated results, counts, and some calculations of means have been personally insightful. To take some trivial examples: that I drank on average 0.8 cups of coffee per day in 2016 was lower than I expected; that I spent an average of $28.71 per day was higher than I expected; and that I spent 1 month, 15 days, 6 hours, 41 minutes, and 15 seconds travelling between places is just kind of interesting (and something I particularly wanted to find out when I started recording 'vague' checkins). I don't expect these statistics to be remotely captivating for anyone else; such is the value of personal "small data."
Such aggregations were able to be put to more focused uses. Logging all of my purchases did not raise my internal awareness of how much I was spending on a weekly or monthly basis, but when I realised I wasn't saving money after about six months it was trival to write a small web app which consumed my data stream, aggregated the total cost by certain categories, and displayed the amount I spent in any given month or week. Adding a setting for a monthly budget goal let the app send me notifications to stop spending when it noticed I was on track to exceed this in the current week. The app is not coupled to my personal site or data, so it can be used by anyone who publishes a stream of their purchases using AS2.
An initial motivation of recording 'vague' checkins was so people could check my site to see whether I was on my way if we were planning to meet, or if I shouldn't be disturbed (eg. if I was in a meeting). Industrious computer science friends created an IRC bot that consumed my /where endpoint and responded when asked $whereis rhiaro. Other users of the same IRC channel added their own location reporting endpoints for the bot to read, some down to GPS accuracy with a map, shortly thereafter. Other unanticipated uses of data I was recording include launching a travel blog which filtered travel-related posts and photos from my main feed, and a food blog which includes my food logs, food-related photos, and any posts or bookmarks about recipes or restaurant reviews.
If my website is down, I do not exist
Having visible output for each log on my website motivated me to keep logging. I am missing lots of checkins to specific cities because I had trouble with a maps API and didn't complete the template to display them. Similarly I never got around to creating a compelling view of sleep records, so logs for those are few and far between.
I felt an internal pressure to ensure my data stream was complete. If I was offline or out of battery for a length of time, I would keep logs on paper to back-date later. This was due both to wanting to ensure aggregate data was accurate, and fear of 'losing' associated memories. Relatedly, I looked (and in fact still do) through historical logs with surprising frequency, and found memories of events, people and places were triggered by descriptions of meals or photos of purchases that I might otherwise have forgotten. I worry that this is unhealthy, boarding on obsessive behaviour though. At times, particularly before I had a streamlined offline-logging plan in place, or if it was socially inappropriate to be writing or typing logs, I felt anxious that I would neglect to log something.
When my webhost experienced outages, leaving me unable to record data, I both noticed far more quickly and felt a far stronger personal impact than I previously would have when my site was mostly static and for infrequent blogging. I complained to my hosting provider more frequently, and projected a sense of urgency that was probably disproportionate. I was left with a feeling of if my website is down, I do not exist, and I found myself wondering if sysadmins in a data center the other side of the world could possibly know or care about the anxiety they were causing me.
Other, predicted, psychological impact was that publicly logging photos of all of my purchases made me more conscious about what I bought. Even though I didn't actually think anyone looked at my feed, I found being aware that someone could see it helped me to, for example, resist buying junk food at the supermarket.
Discussion
In this section I expand on some of the topics raised by the results of my creation and use of a PWO, and in particular the implications for Web Observatories, and Web Science as a whole. I think these results highlight many open questions and future research challenges.
PWOs are at the intersection of Web Observatories and Personal Data Stores. Research on the former is concerned with passively collecting and analysing how individuals and communities already use the Web, in order to learn about society. Research on the latter is concerned with improving and often actively influencing the lives of individuals. When we think about integrating individual data stores into an architecture for mass observation, we need to find a way to account for the conflicts that arise.
Personal and social impact
Good user interfaces for visualising data from logs and perhaps making recommendations for improvements to a particular aspect of someone's life can be a strong way to encourage people to engage in self-tracking. However given the potential for compulsive behaviour around self-tracking, we also need to enable people to be 'off the grid' without affecting their overall aggregates or statistics. The motivational write-every-day site 750words.com has a 'vacation' setting, by which you can tell the system when you'll be away so that it doesn't penalise you for 0-word days during this time. If self-tracking is going to become the norm (as implicit self-tracking via social media already is in certain parts of the world, and as would be beneficial for Web Observatories) then taking breaks from tracking should be part of that norm. The benefits of continuous self-tracking can be acknowledged, but disconnecting can also be accepted as a healthy practice. Building this in from the outset can perhaps help to mitigate against internalised normalisation of surveillence, too.
Relatedly, the effects of missing data or inaccurate logs for any reason may have a damaging psychological effect on people. I posit that an important part (and in fact an ethical responsibility) of Web Science research would be to examine these effects with at least as much priority as working on the best gamification techniques for encouraging people to self-track.
It is critical that interfaces for visualising data logs are effective in helping the subject of the data to interpret its meaning. On the one hand, simply displaying correlations may incline people towards inferring spurious cause-effect relationships; on the other hand, as members of the QS community have shown, individuals may be far more effective at interpreting their own data than a third party service - which is perhaps missing other relevant information - could be. A challenge for PWOs would be to offer data visualisation interfaces which not only take into account all available data, but account for what is (or might be) missing as well.
Furthermore, there is no one-size-fits-all for causing positive behavioural change based on self-tracking. How we can use personal data logs to improve the lives of individuals might vary by personality as well as the social and cultural context in which the tracking takes place. Ways of tailoring PWOs may be extremely important when it comes to actually benefitting their users.
From a traditional social media Web Observatories perspective, subjects are not aware necessarily that their data is being observed and analysed by academics. People use social media for different reasons, and I suspect that enabling social scientists to understand the world is pretty far down the list. Especially given the assumption that users of PWOs are actively opting in to being observed, and perhaps have fine grained control over what can and cannot be used for the purposes of research, is going to impact how they engage in self-tracking. As people shape and are shaped by social media use, people will shape and be shaped by their use of PWOs. What are the tradeoffs when it comes to benefits to individuals, and benefits to academic research? How can we take this into account when drawing conclusions from collected data?
Technical considerations
People are likely to be discouraged from using a PWO if it comes with a high burden of maintenance or cost of running [11]. I was able to minimise the impact of this on myself by integrating it into a system I was already maintaining (my personal website). Doing this had a significant impact on the technologies I was able to use, which was in some ways restricting, but beneficial in the long term. Shared Web hosting, PHP and MySQL are widespread and well-supported; this demonstrates that a PWO need not be architected around specialist or niche technologies, and need not be difficult or burdensome to set up and use. Certainly lowering the barrier to entry to people who already run their own websites could help to springboard adoption.
Centralised services are frequently bought out, shut down, or change focus or terms of service. Whilst the technical burden of maintaining ones own personal data store may be higher than delegating this to a third-party comes with different, but not insubstantial, risks.
Serious review of common practices and formal Web standards can smooth the path to interoperability between different instances of WOs and PWOs. Though the standards discussed in this article were designed from a decentralised Social Web perspective rather than a Web Observatories one, the overlap is clear. Implicit self-tracking that makes up a part of ordinary social media use can be supported in the move towards decentralisation, and privacy-preserving PWOs may start to exist as a side-effect. In my implementation, I did not address the use case from [11] of aggregation of data from a crowd to produce net benefit. This is also something that shared use of open standards, in particular for data representation, subscription and notification, could facilitate.
Anticipation of future needs is raised as a challenge by [11]. With regard to my changing motivations and day-to-day requirements, I did not set out with a specific list of things I wanted to record and design the system around that. Instead, I used a flexible schemaless architecture which meant that for any new type of data I decided to log I had a minimum of new engineering to do: build a client (or potentially hook up a sensor) to generate the data; and (optionally) create a template to view it.
Working with open standards for creating, updating and deleting data helped here too, as I had the option to look for pre-existing standards compliant clients to post to my data store. Conversely, others whose data stores use the server portion of the publishing protocols can use my clients with their own storage.
Discussion of Personal Data Store architectures tends to revolve around reducing fragmentation and prioritises gathering together all kinds of data in one place [25]. This results in generalised tools and interfaces, which try to make it possible to do a variety of things in one place. I argue that more effective and appealing applications are specialised: particularly good at doing one thing. Whilst the data store itself is generic, standards for decentralisation permit the decoupling of clients - both for creating and displaying data - which is perhaps the best of both worlds.
Data context and integrity
Web Observatories which collect data from centralised social networking sites may be vulnerable to ingesting misinformation, ranging from subconscious selective disclosure to deliberate acts of protest against privacy infringement [10]. It is difficult to say whether proliferation of personal WOs would mitigate this, but it becomes increasingly important to find ways to capture contextual information when data is recorded.
If Web Observatories begin to collect data from both decentralised and centralised services, it is natural to want to align the data so it can be combined into the same data set. However the source of the data cannot simply be discarded. The same type of data from different types of sources is not necessarily equivalent or directly comparable. Just as different centralised social media sites (and the communities and subcommunities within) have their own cultural norms and expectations, as well as technical constraints or affordances, individual personal data stores come with their own unique contextual information as well. In the decentralised case, the context for data logs may be more difficult to discern, as well as capture.
To take a concrete example: for researchers to find more meaning in the logs in my PWO they need to look at in the context of all of the systems I interact with. My system forwards text notes and longer articles to Twitter, which in term drives traffic back to my site where all my other kinds of logs can be seen. Researchers studying my data would need to consider how my awareness of my Twitter audience (directly through known followers and extended through their audiences in the case of retweets) impacts all of the content I post. This might be different for someone who shares their PWO content with a different social network, or not at all.
The interface used to log the data can also have an impact. Whilst I use a Web form based user interface to check in to a place, someone else might generate exactly the same data automatically by the GPS on their phone, making less of a conscious effort to record their movements. Researchers studying how people use, for example, Swarm, have the advantage of knowing that the interface used by everyone is consistent as well as being able to directly explore it themselves. I anticipate that PWOs will be far more diverse, personalised to fit into their users' day-to-day lives, and possibly inaccessible to researchers.
Limitations
Using data from QS activities for scientific research comes under fire for a number of reasons: self-reported data may be unreliable or biased; context is often lost when quantifying qualitative data; and data collection is limited to individuals who are inclined to record details about their lives [2]. Though I am not using the contents of my data logs in this report, the same issues apply to my recall of the effects of logging.
Perhaps most importantly, though the length of the study is significant, my sample size is 1. As such, I make no claims about generalisability or conclusivity of the results. I am documenting these experiences as a starting point, to begin to explore Personal Web Observatories in depth, and to highlight areas for focus in the future; this is similar to [25], in which the authors conducted their research on MyLifeBits with large amount of a single person's data as well.
I invested a considerable amount of time in building new features, fixing bugs, and making small improvements and adjustments to my PWO. As the only user and only developer, I was first to notice if something wasn't working properly, and unhindered by conflicting interests or opinions when it came to making changes. This has advantages for rapid prototyping of a somewhat novel system, as well as commitment to the ideology of dogfooding: if I don't want to use a system I've built, why should anybody else? It similarly meant that features I lost interest in fell by the wayside, whilst features I used regularly were well-maintained, so I didn't invest time in developing unnecessary functionality as I might have done had I been designing this for others. Whilst use cases and UI improvements were constrained strictly to my personal needs, and discussion of features was limited to a handful of like-minded developers, this approach was nonetheless appropriate for the purposes of this analysis.
Conclusions
This article documents a year of developing and using a PWO. By taking the role of subject, not only developer, I have come to a better understanding of the day-to-day impact of PWO technology on an individual. 'Small data' is of interest to the academic community in terms of understanding how individuals engage with their own self-tracking activities and outputs, as well as to highlight the diversity of contexts in which data is logged and how this can impact analysis of an aggregation.
I believe that Personal Web Observatories are more useful when intimately personalised for the individual user. Small scale, pluggable components may help to enable this, and using open standards to integrate components can help with designing specialised logging clients or data interpretation interfaces. This gives users more choice to pick and choose the tools they use with their personal data store, as well as making it easier to add and remove components as desired.
This does not mark the end of my self-tracking experiment, but the beginning of the next phase. Over the next twelve months, I expect to add to my repository: data about mood and health (specifically headaches); the people I spend time with offline, and amount of time spent chatting online; and to add more detail about exercise, and to re-start tracking sleep. I will continue to self-track publicly, but experiment with different views over my data for others, so that vistors to my site from different contexts (eg. professional) are not overwhelmed with data, nor left with an impression of inappropriate oversharing.
Finally, I want to reiterate that providers of PWOs have a great responsibility to the individuals whose data they host. For people who engage in frequent self-tracking, a disruption in service can provoke a minor existential crisis... so such an arrangement should not be entered into lightly.
References
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to csarven for proof reading and vastly improving the semantic markup in this article, and of course for pushing me to publish according to the Linked Research agenda.
Pee on it: Penang Hill, Batu Ferringhi, and a close encounter with a jellyfish
I had a vague plan of hiking from the Botanical Gardens to Batu Ferringhi. I found a trail from Batu Ferringhi which claimed to connect to a road to the Botanical Gardens, so I figured how hard could it it to be to reverse engineer it? So I met a bunch of my new energetic vegan yogi friends in the Botanical Gardens at 8am, and we wandered around a bit before embarking up Penang Hill, which all trails seem to lead to.
About half way up Penang Hill we saw this dilapidated and entirely unreliable sign to Batu Ferringhi. We decided not to follow it, and instead carried on to the top of Penang Hill, as nobody else I was with had been up before.
We had been following the jeep track, but diverged onto a muddy trail when we found one. This was the route I took last time, when I started at the Moon Gate. Starting by the jeep track is much faster, though far less interesting in terms of terrain. At the top I had cendol (twice the price of at the bottom..) and the far more experienced yogis than I piled up a bit, for a fascinated audience of tourists and locals alike.
The beach was calling, so we decided to charge back to the Botanical Gardens as fast as we could, pick up T's car, and drive to Batu Ferringhi. Close enough, right? About one quarter of the way down the hill an unsmiling chap offered us a ride in the back of his truck. We accepted, enjoyed the bouncing rollarcoaster ride, and cut about 45 minutes of our journey.
We drove to Batu Ferringhi, and chilled on the beach opposite the Tropical Spice Garden. It had been overcast for most of the hike (good) but the sun was emerging while we were at the beach. It was hot, anyway. I lounged around in the sun for a while, then relocated to lounging around in the shallows of the sea. Lying on the sand, letting the waves wash over me was thoroughly tranquil. The sand at this beach was great, too. Big grains, so they weren't annoying and sticky like normal sand. As it moved around underneath me due to the waves, it felt like a body-scrub massage.
I went in deeper to float a bit for a while. It wasn't long before stabbing pains in my leg propelled me back to shore. Jellyfish alert! "Pee on it" said everyone. T went to warn an elderly man who was playing in the sea with his young grandaughters. "Pee on it!" they said in Mandarin. Another passer by stopped to see what the fuss was about. He also said "pee on it" in Mandarin. I didn't retain how to say "pee on it" in Mandarin, but I should ask T and add that to my repertoire of useful foreign phrases.
My leg went red and bubbled up in a couple of places. It felt like it was burning. It wasn't unbearable pain, but coupled with a probably-sun-induced headache I had I felt pretty crap. My understanding friends got dressed and we all piled back into the car to find a pharmacy. My headache worsened and the car ride escalated everything. By the time I was home I was in full migraine mode and had thrown up a couple of times. On the way, C helped me buy rehydration sachets and Tiger Balm, so when I got in drank loads of water and then slept for 14 hours. I was skeptical about the medicinal properties of Tiger Balm, but I applied to to my head, shoulders (hiking/backpack aches), and jellyfish wounds and everything seems to be magically better.
I'm disappointed that this day didn't end with us all checking out a new vegan restaurant, but I'm grateful to have met wonderful people who looked after me. Better luck next time.
Today I made loooads of exciting things. Banana almond muffins (destined for the homeless of George Town's KOMTAR bus station), marmalade, a gooey chocolate orange cake (containing the marmalade), and vegan nacho cheese.
Amy added 39 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-01-langkawi/
Ferry from Penang to Langkawi, arriving in Kuah, evening at Tengah beach and Cenang beach
When is this all going to be over so I can go back to being sad and stressed about my own stupid problems like php errors, finishing my thesis, and who I'm not allowed to be in love with; instead of this descent into fascism bullshit.
After a totally boring three hour ferry ride in a tiny little boat where I couldn't even see out of the windows, I arrived in Kuah. It was immediately more welcoming than the jetty in George Town. I wandered around Eagle Square which I spotted from the jetty exit, and then towards the town center. Most of this walk was through a seafront park, with a little beach and lots of places to relax. It was very tranquil, and the temperature was pleasantly cooler than I have got used to.
I stopped for some juice and tofu, before getting a taxi to Pantai Tengah, just south of Pantai Cenang. There's no public transport on Langkawi. It was 30 minutes and 30 ringgitts (5 less than if I'd got it directly from the jetty). I booked a hostel last minute; my CS host went AWOL before arranging to meet, and though I had others I could call on I realised I need some alone time.
The hostel is super chill as well, complete with Bob Marley posters and hammocks. It's a five minute walk from the beach, where I went just as the sun was setting. I walked the length of Tengah beach in the lap of the waves, and then along the road to Cenang. This feels like a place people come on holiday, whereas George Town feels like a real place where people live. There are pros and cons for both, but right now the vibe here is exactly what I have been looking for.
The road to Cenang is lined with market stalls and cafes, and bustling with people in sarongs and swimsuits; yet still relaxed. I picked up a coconut, and walked back to Tengah along Cenang beach itself. This, more touristy, beach is lined with little beach bars (coffee, cocktails, shisha), and people in huddles around candles or guitars.
This morning I chilled out in hostel hammocks for a little while before heading to the closest beach. I brought my laptop, but used my backpack to rest my head, and alternated napping and feeling rubbish about the state of the world. I sat in the sea a bit before heading back to the road. I found a cafe, but I think I'll go look for somewhere with a beach view now, then try to do something useful.
After a full day, the Langkawi party vibe is wearing thin. It's more expensive than Penang all round, and the food is catered for tourists. Veggie stuff is few and far between (thank goodness for Indian). The beach the hour around sunset is gorgeous though. Staff at bars are friendly but exasperated. Tourists are... tourists. But that's just Pantai Cenang. Tomorrow brings a new adventure.
My hostel is still so fucking chill though. Even though I'm sleeping in what is basically a cupboard with four beds in, and share a single shower/toilet (one room) with at least eight other people, I still love it. It's probably the hammocks.
Anyway this morning I napped on the beach for a while, continuing to despair about the state of the world. Dipped in the sea, sat on rocks, got covered in ants. Then I tried:
Yam Yam - a normal cafe between Pantai Tengah and Pantai Cenang; with working wifi, but it closed at 3pm. Decent long black, reasonable homemade giant hash brown.
Yellow Beach Cafe - a beachfront cafe with no less than three wifi networks, none of which worked. Dismal homemade sorbet. Nice view.
Kelut - a beachfront cafe/bar with working wifi, beanbags on the sand, beach umbrellas, cheerful staff and a gorgeous view. Acceptable lime juice (customised to elevate sourness).
Between the three of them, I got past the napping / beach bum phase, and conjured some thesis thoughts.
Now I'm in an Indian restaurant (Indian Palace) on the way back to Pantai Tengah. I ate a spicy vegetable curry and roti. Pretty good, nothing magical. Wifi. More expensive than ideal. I'll go back to the hostel and make tea and see if I can squeeze another hour or so of typing out.
In the long run, I think the superior food of Penang is actually more important for my happiness than beach paradise.
Amy added 46 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-01-langkawi/
Seven Wells waterfalls, various beaches and night market
Langkawi 3: islands and waterfalls
I was picked up just after 9 from the hostel and joined a mixed group of tourists on a boat for an 'island hopping' tour. I had no idea what this involved , and our boat captain was particularly uncommunicative.
We were first dropped for an hour at Beras Basak Island beach. Everyone dived into the same bit of ocean. I went for a wander and a paddle and chatted to some of the other passengers. Next we stopped in a bay between islands to watch eagles soaring and diving to catch fish from the water.
After that we went to Dayang Bunting Marble geoforest park. 6rm entry and a five minute walk down winding steps to the lake of the pregnant maiden, so called because of the shape of the surrounding hills. The lake is packed with people swimming (in a small roped area) or pedal boats. Life jackets are required for swimming and can be rented for 5rm. We had an hour here. I dangled my feet over the edge and enjoyed feeling them being bumped by catfish.
There's an overpriced touristic food court by the entrance, and the return of boats (numbered) are announced over a tannoy. There are groups from dozens of boats, so the place is always busy.
The boat returned us to a jetty different from Pantai Tengah where we departed from; a minibus was there to meet us. The whole thing took about 3.5 hours.
Since it's cheap I'd say it's worth doing to get a feel for the nearby islands, but hundreds of other people are also doing it via dozens of tour operators, and the boats follow the same route at roughly the same times of day; so it's crowded.
I got lunch on my way back to the hostel, then read for a bit in a hammock before heading to Cenang to meet my CS host for the next two nights.
My host, J, picked me and another, Ira, up from the same spot. He drove us to his place in Kampung Yoi and we hung out while he prayed and waited for his wife to get home from work. J and his wife are Malay, and have lived on Langkawi for four years, having moved for work reasons. They like it.
The four of us drove to Seven Wells waterfalls, and swam in the pools at the midpoint. We didn't have time to hike to the very top before dark, but did get in plenty of scrambling over rocks. There were a few people there, but it wasn't super crowded.
Next we went to a lesser known point to watch the sunset, with a lighthouse. Then, the night market. I ate everything I laid eyes one: laici juice, peanut and corn pancakes, vegetables and rice. J dropped Ira back at her hotel in Cenang and we went back to his place.
The power was out from when we got in until just after midnight. Good time to chat. They live in a small, two storey concrete house with two bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen/dining room and bathroom downstairs. Kampung Yoi is small and near the center of the island, not far from the airport where J works as an engineer.
Amy added 36 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-01-langkawi/
Gunung Raya (highest point in Langkawi), Tanjung Rhu (beach) and Air Terjung Temerun (waterfall)
Langkawi 4: high places
J and I met Ira in Cenang, then we drove to the base of the Cable Car. J had been up before and the cheapest ticket is 55rm, so he went off to do his own thing while Ira and I touristed.
We were there before ten and it was bustling. Though we were able to buy our tickets after queuing for about ten minutes and get into a cable car straight away. This is the steepest cable car in the world, and leads to not the highest point in Langkawi. At the top, you can walk to the SkyBridge down (and up again) steep winding steps for 5rm, or take a small tram for 15. Ira and I walked. The bridge felt pretty full but not packed; I'm glad I didn't go at peak times. We spent about 2 hours up there, ambling around and taking in the views. Looking out across 150 million year old mountain formations lent a moment of perspective.
The tram is called the SkyGlider, the cable car is the SkyCab, and everything else in the vicinity is prefixed with Sky as well. I was disappointed they didn't have a wifi network called SkyFi. Really missing a trick there.
We took the cable cars down again, and stopped for a snack in one of the terrible overpriced cafes in the complex. We didn't realise there's better, slightly cheaper, food as you get further from the ticket counters. When we got back down, the lines for tickets stretched to the carpark and they were giving out times rather than sending people straight to the cable cars. Glad we went early. The ticket (we got the basic package) included a subset of random shit in the complex at the bottom, so we went to check that out as well. The 3D art museum was silly, and I entertained myself as usual by taking pictures of other people posing with the displays from the wrong perspectives. There were many examples of irresponsible parenting.
We saw the SkyDome, which is a screen covering one half of the inside of a sphere which you sit beneath; they played a series of short films, including an underwater scene and a space rollarcoaster. We skipped the SkyRex (I think it's some kind of animatronic dinosaur ride?) and sat with bunnies until J was back to pick us up.
We went to Tomato Nasi Kandar in Pantai Cenang for lunch. Lots of veggie options on the buffet, as well as the usual a la carte menu. I just dived into the buffet because I'm more convinced by food immediately in front of me than words on a page. I can understand why lots of people prefer to order from the menu in nasi kandar places. This buffet food had been sitting around in what is basically open air all day. But whatever. I loaded the plate up with tomato rice, cabbage, dahl and tempeh, and drank watermelon juice. I also tried a yam jelly. I don't know exactly how much this cost but Ira and I split the bill for three people between the two of us and it was 26rm in total.
Our next stop was Gunung Raya, the highest point in Langkawi. We drove up, parked, and paid 10rm to climb the tower. Views were good, and at the top of the tower was seating and free cardamom tea. We spent longer than expected at the top as it was very peaceful. We heard and then saw a hornbill.
Next J took us to a craft center. This was a huge complex with everything from batik teextiles to glass blowing. It was an enormous shop with different sections, plus workshop areas where if you go at the right times (we didn't) you can see things being made. I bought a postcard from Gram and a shell turtle for my hair.
Next stop was Tanjung Rhu beach to watch the sunset. This is widely agreed to be the best beach on Langkawi. Nearby are only expensive resorts. It was pretty much deserted while we were there. Its shape is such that you can see both sunrise and sunset from the same place. It's kind of a large spit.
We at dinner at a Thai place (I had vegetable fried rice) and went home to crash.
The following morning J took me to the jeti and even bought my roti canai and coffee for breakfast. I'm grateful for generous people in the world with the sharing, caring, couchsurfing spirit. I try to pay it forward wherever I can.
Amy added 46 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-01-langkawi/
Short scramble through the jungle to the next beach where I met Won from KL, who took me on his scooter to visit some other parts of Tuba for a couple of hours
Langkawi 5: escape from Langkawi
I spent the afternoon at Pasir Panjang, and now I'm spending the night. It was hard to get here, but worth it in the end. Partly due to me assuming locals knew what they were talking about and not triple checking the instructions sent by the accommodation. There are (at least) two jettyes from which boats leave for Pulau Tuba, but from one of them - Paken Rabu - they don't or won't stop at Pasir Panjang. This was the one I ended up at first, just north of Chopm Park. I asked after boats and was told to wait around (by a lady selling snacks and cakes). I got the same information from a random guy with a van. The only authoritative place I found was a tour desk in side a desolate mall-like building, and the guy there essentially told me to go ask random people outside. So having been given time estimates of between one and two hours, I wandered back through Chopm Park to see the Langkawi Legends statues (photos).
I had never been anticipating getting on a boat immediately; just went to find out times. I needed to find an ATM and pick up some supplies. I did this in the main Kuah Jetty, which took a while due to crowds and queues, and then I walked back to Paken Rabu. I was told to wait some more... then as the boat arrived, they told me they couldn't drop me at Pasir Panjang after all. And pointed vaguely back to the main jetty. It would have been nice if they'd told me that two hours prior. I wandered around the main jetty asking after boats to Pulau Tuba for ages, with people pointing vaguely in different directions... all seemed pretty confident there were boats, just not very specific with information about where to find them. I eventually went far enough around the side to find an opening which looked like it led to boats. Some teenagers led me through a gate to a cafe attached to a small jetty, where they confirmed I could go to Pasir Panjang. This is Marble Beach jetty; and if I'd continued along the road I would been able to enter through a gate with a sign that said as much. I had to wait until there were more people unless I wanted to charter a boat for 50rm. I bought some juice and waited. Just as I was starting to think about giving up, about 50 minutes later, I was summoned to join a couple, an old man, and a young boy with a cake box. I paid 10rm for the 10 minute journey, and they dropped me on the beach at Pasir Panjang.
This is an 800m beach accessible only by boat or a crawl through the jungle around the edge of a cliff to the next beach (which is connected by road to the rest of the island). It's owned by scrawny, beardy, 72 year old Gus; the cabins were built by workaway volunteers. Everything is palm trees, coconuts, natural wood and corrugated steel. There's everything you need, but nothing more. Koi from Thailand runs the kitchen, cooking up local and Thai dishes for far more than they cost on the main island; but that's okay, there's no shop or supplies on Tuba, so stock has to come by boat. The food is delicious though, and taking (off-menu) veggie options reduces the price considerably.
I'm writing this in dimming light as I sit around the table with Koi, Gus, and other guests. Everyone comes here looking to get away. We just ate dinner (kangkong and rice for me) and now we are variously nibbling at chocolate, coconut, beer, wine. As they drink more and relax, the conversation gets political and strongly opinionated and the rest of the world starts to feel closer again.
This afternoon I made the aforementioned crawl through the jungle to the next beach, then started following the road that leads to the homestay there. After a few minutes walking, I met Won, who took me on the back of his scooter to see the brdige across to the next island (or is it still Tuba?), a small waterfall, and a couple of villages before dropping me back where he found me. Pulau Tuba is the only other inhabited island of Langkawi's 99, beside the main one. Won was visiting Langkawi from KL, and took a day to see Tuba. This was a stroke of good luck, as I wasn't expecting to see much beyond Pasir Panjang. We were out for about two hours, and covered about half of the roads on the island.
Back, I swam in the sea and set up my hammock. Finally! I've been carrying this thing around for years and this is the first time I've actually managed to string it up between palm trees.
Most of the other guests were leaving the next day, and whilst I didn't want to have to charter my own boat to return to the main island if I didn't have to, I also didn't want to depart before noon. I decided to stay longer, meaning I'd ask for my own boat in the evening, but Gus and Koi took this to mean I'd stay an extra night. So... what the hell. I stay.
The accommodation options are private cabins, one of two double rooms in a shared cabin, or a bed in the dorm. I chose the latter of course. The dorm is open to the world, and beds are thin mattresses under mosquito nets. There's no wifi here, but the dorm has one power outlet. I'm the only person sleeping in the dorm.
I recall seeing Wild Pasir Panjang on workaway.com. I'm not staying long enough this time to qualify, but there's potential for the future... I'm going to look for a hostel workaway in Bali I think; if I can trade a few hours of cleaning/admin for free accommodation, I'll do it.
I slept great. Falling asleep and waking up to the sound of the ocean so close on one side, and the trills of the jungle on the other... of course there's no aircon or even a fan in the dorm, but there are also no walls, and a pleasant breeze. The temperature was pefect.
I awoke with the sunrise. An infalliable way to get me out of bed in the morning is to put me literally on the beach. The allure of the two steps to sand and sea is greater than a mattress.
The tide was out, revealing mud flats and coral. After breakfast (bread, jam, beans, orange juice), I waded through the mud for a while.
Now I'm back in the hammock. The tide has come almost all the way back in, and the other guests bar two have left. I'll leave with them tomorrow morning; no one else is due to arrive today. My original plan had been to couchsurf tonight and tomorrow. One of the guests lent me his data connection just long enough to change the plans with my host (but not long enough to find out what's going on in the world).
It's warm and pefectly breezey. A little overcast, so no overpowering sun. I'm going to grab the litter picker and pick up trash from the beach. I had an urge to each time I walked down, and since the beach is of finite size I think it will be satisfying.
I filled two bags and a bucket picking up rubbish, and made it half the length of the beach before I stopped for a nap in a tree. Then there were loads of ants on the branches, so I switched to napping on the sand. There were ants there too.
I swam the length of the beach, and rested on a floating jetty for.. I dunno, half an hour or more. There was a little water-walking insect I'd never seen the like of before; I watched it flit around. I swam back.
I showered in the outdoor shower, and washed my hair with soap, which I hadn't done for a while.
Didn't you want a blow-by-blow account of my day? There's not a lot to do here but chill out and then write about it :)
After a leisurely breakfast yesterday I shared a boat back to Kuah late morning. I waited around the jeti for Lucas, my next CS host. He gave me a ride on the back of his scooter to his place, just outside Kuah. There I met his other guests, P and V from Russia, and GJ from the Netherlands.
Together we headed out, attempting to hitchike as five to Durian Perangin waterfall. It took about 20 minutes for us to be picked up in a car big enough to seat us all comfortably, which took us about 1/4 of the way there. Very soon after we managed to fit five of us in the back of a normal sized car... The three guys took the seats, and us two girls sat on top of them. They took us the rest of the way there (even though it was a diversion from where they were going!). We climbed to the top of the waterfall and swam and relaxed in the sun.
We wandered back, stopping on the way at a black bee farm where I stood in the swarm (they're stingless) but declined to suck honey from a hive with a straw. Then we hitched in the back of a pickup to Kuah town. We wandered through Chopm Park, got a snack from the Jetty, and Lucas, GJ and I went to eat nasi kandar (hitched again, even though it wasn't far) while V and P went to Eagle Square to busk.
We hitched back to Lucas's place, actually picked up by a passing friend of Lucas.
Later that evening GJ and I wandered through the restaurants of the local area, discussed vegan food, and ate laici kang and rojak. We got a mango salad too, but OF COURSE mango salad is filled with teeny tiny staring anchovy heads. Who didn't know that? We left it in the fridge for Lucas.
This morning I got up early and went for roti canai near Lucas's place. This might have been my favourite roti canai so far. Then GJ and I hitched to the jeti; we were picked up after about two minutes by a couple. I had budgeted a lot for taxis around Langkawi, but only took one on the first day. Bargain!
GJ tried to to get a ticket to Penang on the same ferry as me, but it was already full. So he left to look for bus/train options, and I got iced lime tea from the jeti food court and checked in for the ferry. Now I'm aboard, and waiting for it to leave.
Amy added 27 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Balloon Festival and Chinese New Year finale show and fireworks
I was going to hermit and work really hard on my thesis (and related and semi-related things) when I got back to Penang, but I met loads of cool people in Langkawi who are now in Penang and want to hang out, plus there's still tons of Chinese NY stuff going on sooo... working might have to wait a couple more days.
Amy added 38 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Jade Emperor Temple (it was his birthday) early evening, and Kek Lok Si lit up at night
Week in review: 30 Jan - 5 Feb
Made some improvements to paging for sloph.
Explored Langkawi at length, met lots of new people. CouchSurfed, stayed in a hut on the beach, swam a lot in the sea and waterfalls, hitchiked, climbed, hiked, sat in boats, slept, ate (mostly fried rice and roti canai), and got eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes.
Watched Chinese NY celebrations in George Town.
Went to Jade Emperor temple and Kek Lok Si temple to see the lights.
YES I know blog posts and logs are missing, getting on it.
For some time now I've been wanting to hike from Air Itam to Balik Pulau (which literally translates as 'the other side of the island'). We finally got around to it on Monday: GJ and H, and Tammy and Jon from Wholey Wonder.
We started our journey at Purple Stone Vegetarian Food Center in Air Itam, around 8am. We ate loads of delicious and extremely cheap things to set us up for the day. A selection of bao to share, some people at the buffet, and I had won ton mee. I was delighted to be able to get a nasi lemak parcel. They sell the normal versions everywhere on street corners for between 0.50 and 1.50 rm, but they contain anchovies and egg. The little triangular parcels are so enticing, so I was happy to get a veggie one (containing peanuts, veggie sambal and a little mock meat) for the road.
Tammy and Jon moved their car (with us in it) to the top of Kek Lok Si where there's cheap parking. We walked down a bit to find the start of the hiking route. It was blocked by a police barricade, and we were told there was a landslide and no way through to the Dam.
Not the type of people to let a little landslide derail our plans, we walked to the road that goes around to the other side of the Dam to see if we'd have better luck there. It wasn't long before we were distracted by a trail into the jungle, and we left the road. This trail rapidly deteriorated until we found ourselves fairly stuck on a hillside. After a few false scrambles, Tammy noticed a trail of paper triangles stapled to various leaves and trees, so... we followed it. And followed it. And followed it. We climbed, sliding through the mud, clinging to trees, clawing at roots. Some of the trees have spikes growing out of their trunks; I grabbed them once or twice. We chatted about snakes and monsters. It was tenuous at times, but finally whoever laid the trail of paper triangles came through, and we made it back to the road. But not the road we started from... the road we had been blocked from heading down originally. We continued along it and ran into no more problems, which I suppose means we managed to clamber around the landslide somehow.
The next landmark was the Air Itam Dam and reservoir. We walked clockwise around, stopping at a couple of Chinese temples on the way, until we reached a fork. We took the left track, and proceeded west. After this point it was mostly a gentle downhill slope. We proceeded through plantations of herbs and fruit (spotting bananas, papaya, and jackfruit, amongst others), and got some amazing views over parts of the island I haven't seen before.
It took us about two and a half hours to reach the start of Balik Pulau. We walked for another hour, seeking Chin Choo vegetarian, which I had on my map. Alas, it wasn't there. At least we tried. There's a little history in Balik Pulau, but it's a very small town so not a lot to see. We decided the beach was too far to continue walking to, as the others wanted to do other things with the rest of their day.
We took the bus back to Air Itam, and then drove to Janxden near Gelugor for a late lunch.
Amy added 10 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
CS meetup, downpour, and surprise Thaipusam final day
Penang Festivities
So much for recovering from Langkawi, it's the peak of festival season across the various different cultures and communities in Penang.
Balloon festival (4 Feb)
After the ferry from Langkawi returned me to George Town, Malaysian Mum picked me up from the jetty without my asking, because she's nice like that, and delightedly exclaimed that my skin is now darker than hers.
It wasn't long after I got home before I was heading out again. GJ had made it to George Town too, Ira was staying in a room in my apartment, and GJ had met H, another aspiring vegan, on his ferry. When I meet aspiring vegans I feel obligated to share my knowledge and food discoveries, especially when they're as excited about food as I am.
So I took GJ to Ee Beng first, and we ate quite a lot. Then we met H on Love Lane, and walked through town to Little India. IN NR Thali Sweets they ate curries and I bought some of all of the vegan sweets to share. We stuck around until Ira could join us. We walked to the jetty and picked up a free shuttle to the Polo field, where a balloon festival was happening. There were loads of food options here too. We walked around then chilled on the grass and waited for the hot air balloon and fireworks show to start.
Chinese New Year (4 Feb)
We took the bus back to Chew Jetty then watched the Chinese New Year dancers, fireworks, and wandered around. Bumped into some others from the Penang CouchSurfing community.
Walking back after midnight, in every direction were fireworks and on every street sudden firecrackers. Lots of people, lots of scared stray dogs. I've had a quite enough of the Chinese fixation with fire and loud noises. Pulau Penang is the best place in Malaysia to watch CNY celebrations, anyway, because of its about 70% Hokkien Chinese population.
Ira and I got back to the apartment around 1, and jumped in the pool. My feet and legs were still on fire from mosquitoes and ants, plus the jellyfish stings from almost two weeks ago started scarring and itching.
Temples (5 Feb)
The next afternoon I met them again at Wholey Wonder. After lunch and yoga, we headed to Air Itam to see the Temple of the Jade Emperor and Kek Lok Si. There wasn't much going on at the former; the Jade Emperor's birthday was the night before, when it had been very crowded. We waited around at Kek Lok Si until it was dusk, when all of the lights came on.
This morning I met up with some people from the Penang CouchSurfing group at Times Square. The Thaipusam chariot is being hauled from Little India to the Waterfall Temple, about 15km, today. As it goes, very slowly, people smash coconuts into the ground in front of it. The coconuts are hastily cleared up by small diggers and men with large brushes, to allow the chariot to proceed. There is free vegetarian Indian food everywhere, which is awesome. And a general party atmosphere. Lots of bright colours and music. While we waited for the chariot and coconuts, we also wandered around a couple of the nearby temples.
I threw a coconut but I'm pathetic so it bounced instead of smashed. My wish isn't coming true. I did get pretty well covered in water and bits from other peoples' coconuts though.
In the evening I walked along Jalan Utama, the road which leads to the Botanical Gardens. It was lined on both sides with stalls, refreshment stands, and people handing out free vegetarian food. People were dancing, sitting around, and the atmosphere was incredible. I stuffed my face with chapati and dahl and followed the road. Lots of people were heading towards the Gardens, and turning off to climb the steps to the Waterfall Temple. I followed the crowd; it's 500-and-something steps up. Lots of people were carrying pots of offerings.
As we neared the top, I started to feel conspicuous; I was pretty much the only non-Indian (there were one or two Chinese people by this point, but most Western tourists had remained at the bottom) and was starting to worry that there was some ritual happening inside the Temple I'd have no idea how to take part in. The line became single file, and segregated into three sections. One was obvious: the people with pots hanging from hooks in their skin. I'm not sure what the difference between the other two were. I was also a little worried as my shoulders and knees weren't completely covered. But it didn't matter. Aside from having to leave my shoes (which I'd been carrying) outside, I made it into the Temple and simply wandered through. The people with pots had them emptied into.. I dunno, a bigger pot, on the way in. The pots contained some kind of white milky substance.
I wandered around the Temple a bit. Behind it was more free food and seating. People were milling around everywhere, just hanging out. The views of George Town from the top and the way up/down are amazing. My shoes went AWOL, but then I found them again, and headed back down.
On my return along Jalan Utama I picked up a stack of food to take home. Most of the stalls giving out refreshments were interestingly by electronics companies. Pretty much everyone I know in Penang was there, but I didn't find anyone because the crowd was so huge.
I got up early and went to the stadium to watch men having dozens of hooks with things hanging from them poked into their skin. Some men had little swords through their lips, and some have big hooks in their backs from which they will pull chariots later.
This evening on the way back from the Penang CS meetup I got caught in a torrential downpour (as usual). But when I made it to my road, I was handed a carton of soya milk. A bit further down, some noodles. Voila! Thaipusam is outside my front door tonight! So from my balcony I watched more coconut smashing, and eventually the golden chariot was pulled past. Pretty neat.
So I am still somewhat in Langkawi vacation mode thanks to festivities and new friends... and there are still things going on until at least the weekend. But, I will get back to work.
I made oat milk this morning. It... could be nicer.
The texture is really good, but it tastes weird. Maybe I'll add more coconut sugar, I just used a sprinkle. It could also be the water isn't great; maybe it'll be nicer chilled.
There are many reasons to homemake crisps. Maybe you like making everything from scratch. Maybe the ones in the supermarket are just so full of crap and all you really want to eat is potatoes and salt. Maybe you just have a lot of potatoes around.
Those reasons are great. Me? My main reason is that I'm too lazy and antisocial to go outside.
I marinated firm tofu in lime juice, soy sauce, and chilli flakes for about an hour, then dry fried it on the Wholey Wonder grill pan. It was amazing.. consistency of halloumi; a little salty for some people, but definitely hit a spot that used to be hit by cheese for me.
We ate it with a bunch of stir fried veggies and lentils.
Amy added 11 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Lunch at Brown Poodle with Malaysian Mum. The food was good, but we were left really thirsty afterwards so I think they use lots of MSG. The best part was Poppy the puppy.
I stepped out today and thought it's pleasantly cool. It's 30°C.
I have acclimatised.
Those who knew me in the UK might recall I I struggled with a British summer and thought 18°C was more than plenty hot enough for anyone, thank you very much.
There are so many different angles to approach this from, and so many things that need to change in sync. We need:
to make research outputs digestable and learnable;
to connect ideas and people;
to chain things together - provenance, derivation, inspiration;
to connect people and make collaboration easy;
for people to not be afraid to publish work in progress, or share half-baked ideas;
ways to ascertain quality of scientific output - repeatability, verifiability, and qualifications of the researcher - to know if something is good;
to acknowledge people for their labour, particularly peer-review; to encourage quality reviews and ongoing conversations;
to give researchers control over their work;
to make research discoverable;
to aggregate relevant progjects and publications;
to congregate communities for discussion and development;
to preserve work for the future.
A puzzle that needs piecing together
There are many pieces to the puzzle. There are many people working on these pieces, or components which could be part of a piece. Maybe not even in the context of improving academic publishing.
Are you one of them? If you count yourself amongst the academic community and you're frustrated by the state of publishing - or working to change it - or just working on something that could be applied to improve it - there are some things you can do right now to help roll this ball...
Write about your experiences.
Write about your ideas for change.
Write about your action for change.
Then:show up in Portoroz, Slovenia, at the end of May and talk about it with other people who care.
The big picture is big
The big picture is big. We need lots of people with broad and niche expertise to address this properly. No one research group, project, or even discipline (and certainly not individual person) is going to be able to shift this alone.
The first workshop for enabling decentralised scholarly communication, is co-located with the 2017 Extended Semantic Web Conference (but by no means limited to SemWeb people, or even computer scientists).
We're eschewing the formal conference proceedings and encouraging you all to publish contributions online, at a domain of your choice (but ideally one you trust or control). Specifically, write about (any or all of):
Why you don't publish all of your work on the Web, open access, today (a few paragraphs, like a blog post).
What you're working on that might plug into a future ecosystem for academic publishing (even if you're not finished or not sure how it fits yet - that's what we'll discuss in person).
Challenges (or solutions!) specific to your discipline or field regarding open access or online publishing of research and results.
I spent all day at WW yesterday making this rainbow cheesecake. I was interrupted a lot, and took a break to make the snickers bar (also pictured) but I still want to rename it the 'forever cheesecake'. The base cheesecake cream is cashew, cocoa butter, and coconut milk. The pink/red layer is dragonfruit, the yellow is mango, the purple/blue is blueberry, and the green is spirulina.
Today bengo and I inadvertently hiked the Penang Hill Forest Challenge ('the longest trail in Penang'). I had pieced together two other hiking trails and filled a gap in the middle, but it turns out that if you do this from the other end, it has an official name. Here is the GPS trace.
Anyway, we started from home, and walked to the Botanical Gardens (about an hour). We took the 1500 steps route up Penang Hill, using Path A to reach the top (about 2.5 hours) where we relaxed with fruit and fruit juice for a while.
We walked along Summit Road to Western Hill. There's a trail on the left going down, after about 20 minutes. We first missed it and continued down the road, which quickly became signposted as private property. We backtracked; the actual trial is pretty well signposted.
From there there was lots of climbing - up and down - supported by a rope most of the way. Lots. Of. Climbing. And another hill. Then some more climbing. Oh look another hill. And a vertical slope. And some scrambling. And another hill. And so on. We encountered only 3 other groups of hikers on the way. There were a few points for nice views, but mostly trees. And hills. And another hill. But just because I was cursing every step doesn't mean I wasn't having fun.
4 hours later, the beautiful sight of local families splashing in pools nearby the Teluk Bahang Dam welcomed us. We dived in and sat in small waterfalls until our legs came back. The pools are in a nice park, which also houses the Forestry Museum. It was very peaceful.
Once we'd recovered, we walked up the road to see the Dam and reservoir. Then we backed up and followed the road to Teluk Bahang village. We stuck our thumbs out but nobody stopped.
We forged ahead to the beach, and immediately encountered Cat Beach - a cat shelter on a small, beautiful, secluded beach. Run by volunteers, in exchange for housing. I paddled, and hung out with the cats for a while. I think I see... my future.
We stopped for vegetable fried rice at a small stall, then caught the 101 bus home.
I decided to spend a day getting back to KL for my flight to Bali, instead of taking a direct route. Fairly haphazardly, I booked a late-night bus from Ipoh directly to KL Airport, and figured I'd let the Penang to Ipoh part of the journey take care of itself. It did: someone (K) posted on the CS Penang facebook group that he's driving to Ipoh this weekend, and he rearranged his time to Sunday evening so that I could join him. Dani tagged along, and he also offered us to stay in his Mum's house in Ipoh.
So K picked us both up on Sunday evening, and off we went. Ipoh should only be about a 1.5 hour drive... Unless you get a flat tire on the highway. We did. The car had a spare, but no jack. The highway rescue people showed up fairly promptly though, pulled a screw out of the spare tire and patched it up, and set us on our way. All part of the adventure.
We slept well in K's lovely family home, and the next day he showed us around his hometown. Three Hindu temples:
We stopped at Andersonians for tasty banana leaf, and really good chai.
A walk down Concubine Lane, which is a bustling little street full of cute shops and cafes. It houses the most famous Tau Fu Fah at Ding Feng. I tried ginger flavour, for just 1.60 MYR. It was delicious. Dani found durian cendol, her fave. (Anything with durian is Dani's fave). There were also some cool abandoned buildings, and a film crew of some famous travel vlogger seemed to show up wherever we were. There's lots of really nice street art, too.
We lounged around with coffee in Burps and Giggles, having super interesting in-depth discussions about diet and philosophy (actually this was all day). Burps and Giggles was a good place to chill for a couple of hours.
We took off and managed to get to Kek Look Tong with an hour before closing. This is a cave temple, with some nice gardens. The cave was pretty spectacular, with great rock formations. I was sad about the stalegmites that would never form because of the concrete on the ground, onto which stalegtites were dripping ferociously; we debated whether humans are interfering with nature, or just a different part of it. I suppose it wasn't really a debate because none of us are sure; just a discussion. There were lots of small intricate statues around as well.
K took Dani and I to Amanjaya bus station, which is inconveniently far from the city center. We ate curry at the food court, and Dani took a bus back to Penang. I've been sitting around for three hours, and have another two to go before my bus to KLIA. Until half an hour ago, the wifi was surprisingly functional and fast. But now it's gone. Alas. There's power here, too, and vegetarian curry and rice (and a samosa) was about 3 MYR.
Amy added 14 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-bali/
Day 1 in Canggu, Bali
Ketogenic veganism, and other dietary musings
I'm going to try to adjust my diet whilst in Bali. K, who I spent the day with in Ipoh on Monday, eats a ketogenic diet. This is high fat and protein, and low carb. He mostly eats meat, a few nuts and pulses, and not many vegetables. This seems pretty thoroughly at odds with veganism, and he, Dani (who is also vegan) and I had some very interesting discussions.
Mostly, as he was explaining the science as he understands it behind his diet, one or two things rang true to my experiences. Particularly how carbs, insulin, and glucose in the blood are related, and the physical effects of that. I get hungry a fairly predictable number of hours after I've last eaten, no matter how much I've eaten. And I get so hungry, I can't focus or really function until I've eaten. I make an effort because of this to keep meals small, because I know eating a lot now isn't going to reduce how much I want to eat later (and once I start eating I'm quickly satisfied). But that went a bit to shit in Penang because all the food was so great and I wanted to eat all of it, all the time. I also have been eating far more rice than usual, and a lot more greasy fried foods from Chinese economy rice places. I consistently eat a lot of bread. Anyway, I was reasonably convinced by K that a high dependency on carbs causes the hunger spikes thing.
I've also been increasingly lethargic over the past month or so. I have been attributing this to a combination of eating too much, having some pretty terrible meals, and not running, in combination with general thesis-depression.
Anyway, Penang is out of my hair, so it's time for a change. Basically I'm just going to try really hard to reduce carbs, and eat less overall while I'm in Bali. I will have to deal with being hungry for a few days or a week, but I don't think it will take me long to adapt back down to smaller or fewer meals. I observed this when going from the US (where I got used to large portion sizes) to Japan (much smaller) and back to the US again (after a month in Japan I could no longer eat even a full main at Veggie Galaxy; previously I'd eat a main and usually share a side and dessert at least, no problem).
So I fucking love bread and potatoes. But instead of desperately searching for good bread here, I'm just not going to look. I'm not remotely compelled to buy shit bread, so I just won't get any. My kitchen is fine, but not super shiny and I don't feel overly excited to cook there, so I probably won't even buy any groceries for a while.
I'm just not going to eat rice. Fine with that.
Okay, so vegetables. I googled a bit and found a list of lower-carb veggies that I'll stick to. I'm not going to go too crazy with this though. I'm going to buy a bunch of nuts and eat them instead of snacking on fruit, though I'm obviously still going to have the odd dragonfruit.
Indonesia is thankfully abundant with tempeh and tofu, so I can lean on those for low-carb proteins. Chickpeas are also good, and delicious. There are loads of organic / health food shops in Canggu, so when I do feel like buying groceries I can stock up.
There is also an amazing amount of restaurants on the street I'm staying on alone which cater for vegans with an abundance of astonishing salads (amongst other things). I'm not really into salads, but I think a month of dining only in Canggu is not going to bore me. And I can choose or tweak these to leave out high-carb vegetable. There are also a lot of juices and smoothie bowls. Having a juice instead of a meal is appealing from the eating less standpoint.. I think I still will, but I'll try to get spinach-y green ones as a rule and not sugary fruits. I can also chase avocados, coconut oil, chia seeds, and dark chocolate.
And.. I will start running again. On the beach!
What I'm not going to do is actually count carbs. It's also going to be difficult to scientificishly assess the change it makes to my body, because I am simultaneously changing location (atmosphere, vibe) and routine. Oh well.
I'm really grateful for all the new friends (family?) I made in Penang. But there's something to be said for being in a new place and not knowing anyone, and nobody knowing me.
That said, I met someone at the airport who is also trying to finish her thesis here (on plant-based cooking!). She'll be in Canggu at the weekend, and we'll be study buddies.
For everyone panicking about me getting dengue fever, fear not! I'm not getting disproportionately bitten by mosquitoes after all!
It's bedbugs.
The hostel have called the anti bedbug people and put all of my stuff in plastic bags. But the hostel staff also suspect I might be having an allergic reaction to the bites because I'm so thoroughly covered and red and itchy, and they all seem to think it's not normal. I've never been bitten by bedbugs before, so I wouldn't know. But they match pictures online. Oh, and I found two dead ones and a live one in my bed, so there's that for evidence. They're so much bigger than I thought.
Nobody else has noticed bites yet though. If I picked them up somewhere, I'm not sure where. The bus to KL maybe? Even if I brought them they should have occupied the rest of the dorm by now. My other theory is that just like I'm a mosquito magnet, all the bedbugs are just hanging out with me and leaving everyone else alone, cos I taste so good. You're welcome.
Amy added 53 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-bali/
A day in Ubud. Breakfast at Atman, Monkey Forest, wander around, stop at Luwak Coffee farm on the way home.
3/4 of a day in Ubud
I went to Ubud for most of a day with A from Romania who I met at the hostel, and met up with N from Denmark who I met at the airport when I arrived. It wasn't a crazy jam-packed day, but we managed to get a few things in.
The taxi drive was about an hour. We ate breakfast at Atman; the 'famous' raw, grain-free porridge was pretty good, and the coconut oil latte was super interesting and creamy.
A and I went to the Monkey Forest (entrance 50k IDR) and spent about an hour there. Lots of curious baby monkeys. Bigger monkeys fighting over bananas and sharpening rocks. Old monkeys lounging around looking wise.
We stopped by the Ubud Palace, but it was mostly closed for renovations. Wandered through the market, then stopped for juice. It was hot (though perhaps cooler than Canggu) and none of us were feeling particularly energetic. I found a trail on the map and we walked along it a little way, and saw a waterfall and some nice views.
N had found a driver willing to take us back for 220k, which was a really good deal between 3 of us. On the way, he stopped at a coffee farm, and we tried many different flavoured coffees and luwak coffee. The luwak coffee was 50k for a cup which we shared, and the others were free. The luwak coffee is the one that is made from beans pooped out by a civet. It was really sweet. We had to get them to promise this was naturally its flavour and they hadn't added sugar. Apparently most people find it sour, but because the three of us don't each much sugar are tastes were different from the average tourist. All of the flavoured coffee samples also had sugar added, and coconut creamer (or honey in the teas). They managed to make six of them without sugar for us, but they were all pre-mixed with creamer. Not what we really wanted in a coffee tasting... We couldn't really taste any coffee. So if you go to one of these places and are a sugar-free kinda person, ask in advance for no-sugar versions of the samples. The only ones they sold were the pre-mixed instant versions too, which was disappointed, so we didn't buy anything.
Ubud is full of nice cafes, yoga studios, and shops selling yoga gear, as you might expect. I suppose I didn't really wander far, but it didn't feel much different from Canggu, minus the surfer part. Mostly tourists; perhaps you have to go deeper to find local culture.
By moving from the hostel dorm to a room shared with one other person at a yoga retreat with a pool. For 20k less. I'll be here until Saturday, then decide what to do next.
May go back to the original dorm for a few days until the equivalently priced dorm at the yoga retreat becomes available..
The tradeoff is no kitchen at the yoga place.. but the pool... and 25% off in their veggie cafe which has lots of raw desserts.. but I like the location of the hostel better... Man, life is hard.
The other evening around 9pm I just fancied a chocolate with my tea. I walked 3 minutes down the road to the organic grocery store and was able to buy a single delicious handmade vegan chocolate. Ah, what is this life.
But on a related note, now when a cafe doesn't have any vegan cake at all I'm proper offended. (Like Betelnut, where I am working from this morning. Cracking smoothie though).
Well I've been here for a week and a half now, so maybe late for very first impressions.
To be specific, I've been only in Canggu, aside from some of a day in Ubud. I'm staying about a 15-20 minute walk from Batu Bolong Beach and a little further to Echo Beach. It's not built up, and there are lots of rice paddys. The streets are lined with villa-style guesthouses, restaurants, and small shops. There's nothing that feels 'local', not that I have any basis for comparison, having never been to any other part of Indonesia. Actually, there are little temples everywhere and they're somehow inconspicuous and impressive at the same time. Several times a day, locals place 'offerings' of banana leaves containing rice, flowers and incense (and sometimes sweets and cigarettes) on the ground in front of temples, homes, and guesthouses.
Most people I see around are tourists. People come here to surf and yoga. The beaches are good for surfing, but the waves are too big to swim. They're fairly unspoilt, not much trash or anything like that. There are a couple of bars on the beach, but nothing excessive. No massive hotel or apartment complexes, like Penang.
I also haven't seen any shopping malls or even supermarkets. But I haven't been far. It took a little while, but I did find cheap local (probably) food at nasi campur places. There are actually quite a few, but they're unassuming and I guess I skipped over them nestled between the fancier salad-and-smoothie-bowl-packed places that cater for health-conscious tourists.
Rather than helping yourself from a buffet (like nasi kandar in Malaysia), you point at dishes and they're plated for you. Tempeh and three or four types of vegetables has so far come to between 10k and 15k IDR (less than 1GBP). For context, main dishes or even smoothie bowls and fancy cakes are upwards of 50k at other cafes. But the nasi campur stops aren't ideal places to stay and work, being largely wall-less and power-less, so hot and not particularly comfortable. The ones I've seen so far, at least.
Random Balinese people one passes in the street are extremely friendly, including the ones who aren't trying to sell you transport. People say hello or welcome, and smile in a way that includes their eyes. I don't think I've experienced any catcalling so far.
Walking around at night is a little more difficult as there are no street lights. There are a few cross streets linking the main ones (which run perpendicular to the coast) which pass through rice paddies, and unless there's passing traffic it's completely dark. I'm walking around with my running lights, anyway. Most people rent scooters as there's no public transport, but I don't feel like now would be a good time to learn to drive. Uber and equivalents are banned in Canggu. You might get one to drop you off here if you're lucky, but you certainly can't get a pickup; local taxis only, and they're not cheap.
There are many more street dogs, but they're not as needy as the ones in Penang. Ie, they don't follow you. Sometimes they bark, but it's usually at something else and you just happen to be passing. I'm still a bit unnerved, but getting better at ignoring them.
Canggu definitely feels like a place people are on holiday, not living. Over the upcoming weeks I'll venture a little further out though, towards the main center of Canggu, as well as Seminyak (which is about a 1.5 hour walk from where I am). I'm not feeling particularly inspired to try to see the whole island. This is good, because I'm supposed to be (and have been!) writing my thesis. I'm trying to keep hold of that mindset. I've done yoga every single day (for the first time in my life) and I've found it easy to start my day at 7 or 7.30 every morning. I think I'll be content on the three parallel streets of Canggu that I know so far, for the most part. Right now I'm by the pool at Serenity, having come here for breakfast and yoga, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on being somewhere else. Maybe I'll make one excursion to see a volcano... But the holiday/resort/chilling TF out vibe is working.
An adorable puppy stole my socks and destroyed them whilst I was sitting by the Serenity pool.
It was a good death.
The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web
Preamble
Even though my deadline is coming up fast, I still have a lot of work to do on this thesis. I am, and have been from the start, doing this in the open; my thesis is in a public GitHub repo, and you can see it at dr.amy.gy (aspirational URL which redirects to github pages). Lots of pieces are still to be written, so don't expect a coherent start-to-finish reading experience. With that in mind, feedback and suggestions are welcome in the form of issues; but unless you're my supervisor or someone who knows for a fact I take your opinions on this topic seriously, they might not receive a ton of attention :)
Abstract
Self presentation is evolving; with digital technologies, with the Web and personal publishing, and then with mainstream adoption of online social media. Where are we going next? One possibility is towards a world where we log and own vast amounts of data about ourselves. We choose to share - or not - the data as part of our identity, and in interactions with others; it contributes to our day-to-day personhood or sense of self. We imagine a world where the individual is empowered by their digital traces (not imprisoned), but this is a complex world.
This thesis examines the many factors at play when we present ourselves through Web technologies. We optimistically look to a future where control over our digital identities are not in the hands of centralised actors, but our own, and both survey and contribute to the ongoing technical work which strives to make this a reality. Decentralisation changes things in unexpected ways. In the context of the bigger picture of our online selves, building on what we already know about self-presentation from decades of Social Science research, we examine what might change as we move towards decentralisation; how people could be affected, and what the possibilities are for a positive change. Finally we explore one possible way of self-presentation on a decentralised social Web through lightweight controls which allow an audience to set their expectations in order for the subject to meet them appropriately.
We seek to acknowledge the multifaceted, complicated, messy, socially-shaped nature of the self in a way that makes sense to software developers. Technology may always fall short when dealing with humanness, but the framework outlined in this thesis can provide a foundation for more easily considering all of the factors surrounding individual self-presentation in order to build future systems which empower participants.
Evolution of presentation of self; social science and social media studies literature. Starring danah boyd, danah boyd, Erving Goffman, and danah boyd.
Some studies on contemporary practices of online self-presentation, starring Max and Dave (A++++ would coauthor again), TomSka and other YouTubers, and the Indieweb. Named for Harry Halpin's thesis/book which made me think a lot.
How these technologies affect self-presentation; how does the big picture change? One idea and its implementation. Starring the Social Web Protocols and sloph, both things I was originally doing to procrastinate from thesis work.
Past time, I finally ate gado-gado. Boiled vegetables in a peanut sauce; usually comes with egg, which I swapped for tofu. This one also had tempeh. SO good. And, at Warung Nelayan, I accompanied it with hands down the best Bali coffee I've had since I've been here. It's so thick and rich it actually tempered my cake craving.
I think the total price of this meal is 25k IDR (about £1.50), though the coffee is on the menu in two places, for 5k and 10k, so we'll see..
So I'm back in the dorm with bedbugs until the dorm at the yoga retreat becomes available on Thursday.
But in a fit of itching and feeling like bugs were crawling all over me in the wee hours of this morning, I grabbed my phone and booked the next three nights in the hostel next door. I didn't need to be logged into booking.com, or put my card information in xD Technology is amazing.
In the cold* light of day I feel like I must have been imagining it and I'm crazy, and moving seems like an overreaction... but I do have new bites. And even if it is all in my head, it'll just be like that again tonight, and I can't go on like this.
It's a shame, because everything else about this hostel is lovely. Hopefully the one next door is just as lovely, minus bedbugs.
However, since I got back on Saturday, I haven't seen any of the owners or staff... So I'd like to like, pay for the two nights I just stayed, and tell them I'm not coming back, but it's proving difficult.
I held a headstand for a few seconds by myself today. I don't think it's an unreasonable goal to be getting all the way up by myself before I leave Bali..
Amy added 22 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-bali/
Canggu: food (Shady Shack, Warung Dandelion (with bunnies), Memoh Warung, Warung Pook), beach, and some hostel interiors or views (Monkey House and Surfer's House)
People who order their sit-in coffees in takeaway cups and "extra hot" must really hate the planet.
Just last week I was telling my friend how I'll never be able to straighten my legs in downward dog because my hamstrings are so uncooperative, and I just accept that. This week, I'm straightening my legs in downard dog pretty much off the bat from the start of class. I'm still never expecting to get my heels down... but...
Yesterday I did my first side crow. It was a sort of mutant side crow. Maybe like a very old one-winged side crow. But it was there.
Last week N and I walked past a cafe in Canggu called Love and Coconuts. We checked out the menu, but didn't stop to eat because we had our stomachs set on elsewhere that night. But while we were there, we were both given a free matcha coconut bliss ball :)
I went past by myself a few days later in the evening intending to eat, but they close at 6. I said hi to the staff who were just closing up, anyway.
Today I finally made it at lunch time. I plugged my laptop in and got comfy in the nice surroundings. I was brought a free turmeric and betel leaf shot before the menu even made it. I ordered and ate a veggie burger and moringa tea, which was seriously filling and delicious. Later I got a free refill in my tea.
I've been here for over 4 hours now. I'm still too full to move..
Nothing here is disposable, except the toilet paper. Even the hand towels in the toilet are normal small towels. The bamboo straw in the tea, I get to keep, and if I bring it back I get 5k off my next drink :)
And the music is really nice. It's good covers of lots of songs I know really well.
Most of the food is vegetarian, lots is vegan, and it's all well labelled.
Yeah I like it here.
Update: Free vegan chocolate cake! They were experimenting last night. It's so good! They've been open a week!
Amy added 19 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-bali/
You guessed it.. more photos of food. And some of the interior of Surfer House. Food at: Avocado, Love and Coconuts, Cafe Organic, Roti Canai, and Serenity
Honestly one of the times I'm most happy is eating in a restaurant by myself. One of the reasons I love travelling solo.
Sharing meals with people who are as into the food as me is also super enjoyable.. but I do love eating alone.
Today I wandered from Canggu to Seminyak and back again. It takes about an hour and a half and for some reason people think that's crazy. I stopped several times for food obviously and planned my route around vegan restaurants also obviously.
Roads here are narrow and fairly busy so not super fun to walk down. Sometimes it seems like it's about to come to a choice between being hit by a van and being up to my knees in rice paddy mud. Fortunately I didn't have to make that choice yet. Here's the route.
I had a breakfast burrito and juice (and later coffee) at Peloton, a vegan cafe not far from Canggu, and stayed there to work for a few hours. I walked to Seminyak partly by way of the beach, and visited Seminyak Square and a market. Not really much of interest. I enjoyed the air conditioning in a mall for a while. Seminyak seems to be mostly fancy villas and tourist shops. It feels a bit less chill than Canggu even, though more going on. Didn't feel bursting with exciting vegan food like Canggu is! Maybe more upmarket, less hippie.
I read about and pinpointed on Google Maps a tofu-specialist cafe. I didn't find it, but around the corner was a street cart selling tofu, so that seemed close enough. I chatted with the vendor as he fried tofu, liberally applied a pile of beansprouts and coated the whole thing in a huge layer of peanut sauce with some chopped chillis and a drizzle of soya sauce. It was super tasty, and 20k IDR. I ate it on the roadside, and while I was doing so, his friend came along with a cart of brightly coloured liquids in jars. They looked sugary, and neither of them were able to explain to me what it was apart from "ice" so I declined. But then I watched someone else get served - he spooned some of each jar into one cup - and my interest was piqued that this was more than just syrupy drinks. It turned out to be es daluman, a cincau grass jelly, coconut milk, and coconut sugar syrup dessert which is on the whole pretty nutritious. A cup was 10k, and very refreshing if a bit sweet. And so far the thing that has reminded me most of Malaysia!
I wrapped up my day with tempeh tacos and iced coconut milk mocha at the Spicy Coconut, another vegan cafe. Totally delicious.
I walked back in time for a yin yoga class at Serenity, and during the class a giant rainstorm hit. The yoga studio is on a third floor, and the sides are fairly open, and the roof is metal. So the noise was so great that we couldn't hear the teacher for most of the class, and leaves and rain were sweeping in. I enjoyed it. It had subsided by the time the class was over, and I sat in the pool for a while.
Now it's bedtime and the cockerals are going fucking mental for some reason. It's not even light! Shut uuuupppp!
I bought a mobile wifi hotspot with enough data to watch Netflix even if hostel wifi was bad and Netflix is blocked by mobile carriers in in Indonesia *splutters*
The fact that it took me til my last week to find this out shows you how productive I've been though!
There are two wee streetside nasi campur warungs next to each other a few minutes from where I'm staying, on Jalan Nelayan. They don't look inviting, but a couple of days ago I braved one of them and of course, because Balinese people are super friendly and accommodating, I was welcomed and fed.. so if you're ever in two minds about whether somewhere that is obvious extremely local, probably just go in anyway.
In the first one, they didn't really speak any English, and I don't speak Bahasar except for key food-related words, but pointing at food is all you need to navigate. And "kopi" of course. I was too late to ask for without rice, so I had a plateful, including several kinds of green vegetables, alfalfa sprouts, tofu and tempeh, with a sambal so spicy it made my eyes water. The coffee came black, but sugared up. This cost me 10k IDR (60p). Inside is pretty grimy and myself and the food were constantly under siege from very persistent unwaftable flies. But the lady was smiley.
This morning I went to the other one. The people inside were younger and spoke some English include "oh my god is your hair real?!" The overall food selection was smaller but the number and type of veggie things was about the same. I had more or less the same food as before, and it tasted as good. The sambal was less spicy but I also had peanut sauce, and managed to opt out of rice. I asked for no sugar in the coffee, but it was sweet anyway; I think part of the instant mix. This time it was 18k IDR.
The second place was even smaller, and didn't seem to be set up for actually accommodating people, but place was quickly cleared at a table so I could sit down. There were fewer flies, but it was also less hot today. Half way through my meal, an old lady came out from the back, topped up the food in the counter and then stopped to chat. In Bahasar. I understood at one point that she was commenting on the fact I didn't have rice so I was like 'yep, no rice, lots of tofu' and then she rubbed my arms and kept talking and I lost the thread. I nodded and smiled and said terima kasih when she left. I think that went well.
I booked two nights in the dorm at Terrace Ampels Villa near Padang Padang beach, in Uluwatu. I stayed zero nights.
When I arrived the staff were kind of grumpy and didn't smile (which I normally wouldn't notice, but because of the attitude of all other Balinese, it stood out). I ate in the restaurant, and worked on my laptop there for a few hours. There's a really nice infinity pool overlooking trees. There were lots of bugs and bats and geckos, which I thought was cool, though some people might not like.
A locker in the dorm room was 50k non-refundable which is unusual but whatever.
Around 11pm I went into the dorm, changed into my pyjamas and climbed up to my bunk. I saw bedbugs crawling along the wood frame. I immediately got down, moved my stuff, and went out to find staff because no. fucking. way. was I staying in a bed with bedbugs again. Not after last time.
I found the kitchen staff, and they woke the desk staff. By this time a couple of other dorm occupants had come back and were sitting around/in the pool. One of them, H, had been badly bitten the night before and she was covered in bites and itchy like I had been a couple of weeks ago. A forth dorm occupant heard about the bugs, and collectively we asked to be moved to another room.
The staff offered us another dorm, downstairs, completely empty. We went to check it out, discovered more bugs and giant cockroaches in the beds. So we came back upstairs, and all the staff had disappeared.
Sooo... four of us packed our stuff and moved down the road to a hotel, to share twin rooms. We checked into the new place about 1am.
The next day we came back to Terrace Ampels to ask for our money back for the night we hadn't stayed (and for me, the next night which I'd pre-paid for).
The staff were to start with kind of unwilling and dithering, until eventually becoming outright rude. They kept saying the had to talk to the boss, we had to wait for the boss.. And meanwhile aggressively asking the other guests why they hadn't complained sooner, since they'd stayed there one or two nights already. The guy who had been there the longest was yelled at by the desk staff: "It's you, you are telling everyone, you are causing this" like he planted the bedbugs or something.. Eventually we had to say we had better things to do than wait around there all day, and we'd come back later.
We were back around 8pm. The boss wasn't there, obviously, and the staff had claimed to talk to the boss and he said no refund. I said no way am I paying 350k for five minutes in the room! The guy tried to say they had no money there, and then also said he'd checked the room and there were no bugs! Like we'd moved fucking hotels at 1 o'clock in the morning for fun. And of course ignoring the fact H was covered in itchy red bumps from head to toe (literally, they bit her face, even I wasn't that unlucky).
Eventually I pushed enough that they gave me the money back for the night that hadn't occurred yet, and the locker rental. So I was down 150k for the night I'd left for the hotel, but better than nothing.
In contrast, when I cut my stay short at Monkey House in Canggu because of bedbugs, they offered to take me to the doctor, cleaned all my stuff, and had no trouble when I wanted to leave. In related contrast, when two of our number changed their plans and wanted to leave the hotel we moved to down the road from Terrace Ampels after one night, they refunded the second night no questions asked and with a smile.
Yesterday I got in on a car rental tour of South Kuta / Uluwatu area. Between 6 people it came to 85k each including parking/tolls. The driver was cool and easy going, took us to wherever people wanted to go. This ended up being a bunch of beachs, until the Uluwatu Temple for sunset.
We went to Dreamland beach, which was fairly busy, not particularly special. Plenty of places selling food; I had a coconut. Then Belawan beach where the sea was crystal clear blue/green, the rock formations were cool, and it wasn't so crowded. We chilled out here the longest. Bingin beach was down a long track and a lot of steps, busy and small. We at lunch at the Cashew Tree cafe.
Entrance to Uluwatu Temple is 30k, and this includes a mandatory sarong. We were there for sunset, but it was cloudy, so nothing interesting to report. There was a fire dance, but I didn't really see it. The stadium was full, and tickets were 100k. Which I would have paid, had the stadium not been full. Everyone else on the tour had seen this before. The tide was in, so we did not get to go in the cave underneath.
This year, the Linked Data on the Web workshop at WWW2017 held an open discussion session about academic publishing. In particular, about what is getting in the way of us getting more research outputs into the LOD Cloud. The discussion was led by Sarven Capadisli, the loudest voice behind the Linked Research initiative, who did his best to remain a neutral facilitator, and let others in the room argue about the things he is normally arguing about.
There was a general consensus that we should have research from the Linked Data on the Web community in the form of Linked Data, and on the Web. Sounds like kind of a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised. Or maybe you wouldn't. The group, around 30 people, discussed the reasons why we, as a community, are lagging.
One of the reasons is tooling. Nobody wants to hand-author HTML, especially not with RDFa in. Nobody really wants to turn their research articles into datasets in any other syntax either. There are (apparently) still a large portion of researchers even in CS who use MSWord to generate their final PDFs so they need something that works at least as well as that to generate Web-friendly submissions.
There is also a matter of incentives, on several different fronts. Most researchers are a-researchin' and publishing their work to advance their career, and to get funding so they can do new cool stuff. So how are individual researchers incentivised to put in the extra effort it takes to generate HTML? On another level, how do we incentivise researchers to improve the state of tooling and resources? The first can be tackled along multiple fronts, one of which is petitioning publishers to demand HTML (just like today they demand LaTeX). What are the incentives for publishers to do this? There were a few ideas thrown around, including how they can improve their SEO, access, discoverability, and creating more pleasurable reading experiences than PDFs can deliver.
But there's a large faction ill-at-ease with depending so much on publishers to drive this change, even if it didn't look like it would be an agonisingly slow process. Some of us, myself included, would like to shift the whole scholarly communications process to be more self-sufficient and less dependant on centralised third parties. We do not want to do this at the expense of quality of work of course! (Which some people immediately assume is the case). Beyond publishing, we want to open up the review process, so it's both more transparent, and so researchers get the credit they deserve for this work. Conversations can continue well beyond the submission process if the reviews are open and public. But again, we need to work on the tooling and incentives to enable this.
Whilst I agree that we are woefully underdeveloped on the tooling front, I object to the weight this was given in the context of getting just Linked Data researchers to adapt to the Web. Personally I think if Linked Data researchers are going to cry about being required to submit their contributions as Linked Data, I will have trouble taking them seriously. Writing HTML is not a high bar. If you're comfortable with LaTeX, you can switch off a few neurons and write HTML instead. Or you can use Pandoc. As Jens Lehmann succinctly put it, the LDOW workshop is about advancing the state of Linked Data on the Web. If this community is not prepared to drive the state of this forward, even (especially?) if it includes working outside of the current system and taking some risks, who is going to?
So overall there was a vague feeling of consensus that we need to do something to take better advantage of Web technologies, and that LDOW as an established and respected venue is a good grounds for an experiment. I don't know if LDOW will manage to require HTML submissions next year, but the organising committee seem like they'll be inclined to strongly incentivise it. Stay tuned (watch the public-lod@w3.org mailing list. And speak up, if you care. Notes from the session are here.
We'll be continuing this discussion in the Web Observatories workshop this afternoon, around 4pm.
PS. the Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication workshop at ESWC this year requires Web-based submissions and is all about building and connecting the tooling to advance the state of academic publishing on the Web. Deadline is 17th of April. See you there.
We had ten years of the Web before we had Google.. We take for granted the future of the Web, but it's really only been around for a tiny fraction of time... Because we put content on the Web is why it grows. If we stop, it dies.
Technologists can't study the web alone. We need a whole interdisciplinary relay to try to understand the Web and make sure it stays good for humanity. Right now I'm worried it's on the cusp of *not* being good for humanity.
Today we're talking about the Web Observatory, and then about decentralisation of the world. They're connected by data. We want Web Observatories around the world... lots of telescopes, links to datasets eg. webobservatory.soton.ac.uk.
Twenty years ago, we started Southampton eprints. People thought we were mad. The rest of the world caught up... but I did not forsee a world where I'd have to pay thousands of dollars to publish an open access publication. That's not we envisioned. To me, a Web Science approach to studying this issue is absolutely overdue.
Prof Denemark crystallises some of the complex political contexts in which people use the Web and social media globally. When we study social media it's easy to forget the real people in real places with real events occurring around them.
It's about keeping our jobs and keeping publishers in business. It's not about advancing the state of the Web. Boring.
Keeping your job is more important than your research having an impact. Okay fine, you can have that opinion. But get out of my way.
I struggle to relate to pushback against Linked Research ideas because of money/job/norms problems. I get that these are important issues for some people, but I'm so TIRED of people using this to blockade even discussing it. It's like they don't want the status quo to change; it's comfortable. They know one way to keep their job or get funding, and won't contemplate developing others. Use the goverment funding assignment as an excuse. Easy out, no point in bothering, the government will never change. Reinforce this for the next cohort of student. Keep perpetuating the problems for the next generation. This isn't what I want from academia, and I won't play.
This morning I got on a train and went for brunch and to the beach without my phone. It was wild. I had to ask people for the time, look at streetside maps to navigate, and could only pretend to take photos of my food.
Disparate mistreatment: different error rates for two groups (eg. men and women) if you minimise error rates overall data.
The semantics of the errors also matter, even if the error rates are the same for both groups.
They found an algorithm for predicting likelihood of criminal re-offending disproportionately favoured white people in terms of false negatives, and biased against black people for false positives.
Algorithms learn correlations between features, but what actually are the features and what does this mean in the real world? This is a really nice look beyond the numbers to who is affected by algorithmic decisions... and how to correct for it!
And the speaker was excellent, explained things really well.
(Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Isabel Valera, Manuel Gomez Rodriguez and Krishna P. Gummadi)
Amy added 8 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-perth/
Perth festival for Buddha's birthday, skies, Loving Hut
Week in review: 3 - 9 April
Went to the Linked Data on the Web workshop at WWW. Took part in a discussion about getting the community's academic work better represented in the LOD cloud: Pioneering the Linked Open Research Cloud
Watching my relatives in Perth puttering around in the garden and house, and also recalling my own parents doing the same at weekends as I was growing up. Both sets of family call it "doing jobs", ie. "I'm just going out to do jobs in the garden for a bit" or "I've got some jobs to do in the kitchen this afternoon". As I try to imagine myself in that situation, I realise I do exactly the same, just digitally. When I'm not working-working (writing my thesis or W3C stuff) I'm pruning, planting and weeding, rearranging and cleaning... my website.
I have grand plans for posting to mastodon from my own posting clients via ActivityPub, and bridging Salmon to LDN so I can get the notifications back.. but right now I'm exhausted and overwhelmed and trying to finish my thesis, so hang tight.
Last month my Fairphone stopped charging unless I propped it upside down at a very specific angle. I tried several cables and diagnosed the problem to be with the charging port, though I can't completely rule out the battery. Anyway, it charges if pressure is applied to the point of connection from below (assuming the phone is flat on its back) and slightly to the right. This pressure can be achieved by balancing the phone upside down (the charge port is on top) against something so it is standing on the cable, but this angle also destroys cables. I can get a connection which is slightly gentler on the cable by putting something underneath the cable, and adjusting the angle of the phone just so.
Anyway this was annoying as I can't charge on the go, but I was getting along fine until a few days ago.
Switching topics for a second, a week or two ago it started complaining of no storage space. Internal memory was full, though phone memory and the SD card have plenty of GBs. I've told every app to store everything it possibly can on phone storage or the SD card, but okay. I don't really understand the difference between phone storage and internal storage. I started hitting 'clear data' for apps I could afford to regularly, and noticed that Google Play Store, Google Play Services, and the fucking Google keyboard were immediately filling back up again after I cleared them.
The last two days, the phone has been charging veeerrry slowly, and last night it was plugged in all night (and carefully balanced to maintain the connection) and the battery level had decreased by morning (from about 50% to 12%). I had just changed the cable I was using, so I switched back to one that had been working fine previously and that didn't help.
Frustrated with the no storage space problem, this morning I disabled Google Play Services and Store completely. Gmail now refuses to work, and I keep getting other random operating system error messages, but whatever.
I have just returned to my phone three hours later, and it has fully charged (in the same physical position it was in all last night).
So... it's probably somewhat a combination of things, but I suspect a recent update to Google Play Stuff was both fucking with my phone storage and battery use. Is this a thing?
Relatedly, I've had my Fairphone 1st edition for about two years, dropped it on very unforgiving surfaces a dozen times (it has fallen out of my pocket whilst running a lot, and once I dropped it on the floor and then my Thinkpad, corner-first, followed directly onto the screen), and it just has a very wee crack on one side of the screen that appeared about two months ago, so all things considered it's doing pretty damn well. When I'm back in Europe I'll probably order a new battery.
Okay after like a week of hermitting in my room, not changing my clothes (pyjamas), minimal interactions with other people in the house, oversleeping, and forgetting to eat... I finally left the house and today I'm working from coffee shops and maybe the library in Joondalup. I realised after I got on the bus though that I should probably have showered before I left the house oh well at least people will leave me alone.
TFW you've been away from somewhere that felt like home for a while, and you get back, and your devices connect to the wifi automatically.
I'm finishing my thesis from Wholey Wonder, the vegan cafe in which I basically lived for the three months I spent in Penang before. I'm being fed and looked after very well, this was a great decision.
My thesis is, and always has been, online at dr.amy.gy. You can read it, and you can even annotate it with dokieli, or open github issues, so long as you acknowledge that I rushed a lot of parts (my own fault). I will continue to improve it over the coming months, and my defense/viva will be in September, after which I expect lots of corrections and to republish a better version. So don't feel bad if you want to wait until then to read it :)
Amy added 31 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-05-penang-kl-tokyo/
A few days in Penang. One night in a capsule hotel (covered by the hostel that double-booked me) and then a few days being fed and looked after by Tammy and Jon of Wholey Wonder whilst I desperately finished my thesis. A trip to Chew Jetty and the underwhelming Crystal Museum. Breakfast with Malaysian Mum at Purple Stone in Air Itam before heading up the hill to meditate.
Amy added 22 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-05-penang-kl-tokyo/
Some photos from the Vipassana meditation center on Penang Hill East, with a view over Air Itam and Kek Lok Si temple. I took them on the last day, when I got my phone back. Then I hauled a number of co-meditators to Wholey Wonder and chilled out there for the rest of the day. Many people had spent the last ten days silently contemplating my dreads (particularly the people who sat behind me in the meditation hall and dining hall), and a few concluded they wanted some of their own.
Weeks in review: 1 - 14 May
Returned to Penang.
Finally 'finished' chapter 2 but I hate it.
Wrote some JavaScript that automatically figures out numbers for referencing from the list at the end.
HANDED MY PHD THESIS IN only a day and a half late really
Went to meditate in total silence on the side of a hill in Malaysia for ten days.
Amy added 6 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-05-penang-kl-tokyo/
One night and a morning in KL. Three hours in a bed-bugged bunk in an otherwise nice hostel. I meditated on the rooftop, and met a cool Syrian guy who advised me where to get breakfast.
Amy added 14 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2017-05-penang-kl-tokyo/
One day in Tokyo with Dave and J, who looked after me in shifts as they were never both free at the same time. I did Dave's laundry and made him eat vegetables for lunch. J made me a super romantic dinner, with candles and light jazz. She homemade vegan spaghetti bolognese, chocolate cake, and coconut ice cream! It was incredible. I gave her a dress I picked up in Egypt a few years ago and haven't been wearing much. Then I flew to Moscow.
I like how this article seeks to accommodate a broad view of viable data sources for research, and particularly encourages data sharing and reuse between researchers.
The authors provide three examples of existing tools which could do (or be adapted to do) parts of the suggested pipeline. I hope that publishing this encourages others who are developing tools along these lines to come forward and let the authors and others know so that the community can start a comprehensive directory, as I'm sure there are plenty more.
It would be helpful to also have a characterisation of what is definitely missing as far as the authors know, and what the authors think are good directions to priortise for near term research and development.
Obviously I agree with the authors' call to open source such tooling for community benefit. I'd be particularly interested to hear your thoughts on the "agreed-upon integration platform" and what you think the best forum for discussing such a platform would be. Hopefully we can come up with ideas for that during the EDSC workshop discussion sessions!
I spent the first few days wandering around the center of Trieste, and easily stumbled upon all of the Piazzi (I'm going to assume this is the plural of Piazza without looking it up), piers, statues and Roman ruins that todo-in-trieste guides tell you to see. The core of Trieste is small and compact, as well as alive and beautiful, day and night. The town is set into the base - and creeping up the side - of hills which turn to mountains. From any perspective the backdrop is stunning. Green mountains dotted with orange rooftops in one direction, and the bright blue Adriatic Sea in the other.
You probably know you can't confine me to a new town's core for very long though. Yesterday we took the 42 bus to Grotto Gigante, a giant cave about a 30 minute ride up and over some hills out of Trieste. Well worth the 9 EUR entrance fee (for student; 12 for 'adult'), this enormous chasm is one of the largest publicly accessible caves in Europe. Guided tours are hourly, and we learnt about the history of the cave's discovery and usage, the growth of the stalagmites and stalagtites, and the scientific research that goes on down there. Our tourgroup was occupied by an enormous pack of schoolkids, but the guide did a great job at distracting them so we (the handful of non-Italian speakers) could take undisturbed photos, and keeping them quiet whilst she recapped the information in English.
The cave really is enormous, and the rock formations are really cool. It took about an hour to tour through it. The temperature inside is a cool 11 degrees C, and damp.
The tickets included a 10% discount at the nearest restaurant, but the staff there were surly and none of the food looked good. There was nowhere to buy a bus ticket around the Grotto Gigante, so I figured we could walk along the bus route a bit and somewhere would surely pop up in one of the villages. Bus tickets here are bought before boarding, from corner shops or (less available) ticket machines. Nowhere popped up. Kit was a good sport and agreed to walk all the way to Miramare though (GPS trace). Some of this route was along roads, but OpenStreetMaps showed plenty of off-road trails which we took when we could. It was a very pleasant walk through grassy woods in between small villages, and all downhill.
We reached Miramare after one and a half hours. Castello Miramare is a stately home standing over the sea, and set in an enormous and impressive park grounds. We stopped for lunch at the cafe in the park, which was nice. I had a perfectly adequate roasted vegetable panino, and Kit ate lasagne and claims he has definitely made better ones himself. The surroundings were lovely though.
I went to check out the castle, but it's a new one not old, and inside was art galleries and furniture. I felt I could spend the 8 EUR entrance fee on something I'd enjoy more. I did find out from the friendly staff in the ticket office that there is nowhere within 5km to buy a bus ticket though, and the best option was just to hop on the bus and plead ignorance if we were asked for a ticket.
We followed the coast around to the park exit, and then along a bit more to the bus stop. The coast between Miramare Trieste for a few km is concrete 'beach' Barcolo with steps leading directly the the ocean. It was well populated with sunbathers and swimmers. Trieste doesn't have any sand beaches, but actually that's far more practical. It doesn't seem to make any difference to the locals.
Kit was done with walking, but after a couple of hours back at the hotel I had itchy feet again. I took the opportunity to quest for vegan mozzerella, at a pizzaria I found on HappyCow, one hour's walk from Trieste center. Walking through Trieste though is never a waste of time, even without vegan cheese at the end of it. OpenStreetMap routed me through some wonderful winding streets, and then along a cyclepath. This cyclepath was sheltered from the city center, and turns out to be 12km long and leads to Slovenia. Awesome. (GPS trace).
Le Agavi did not disappoint. It's far enough away I'm not sure if it's even technically in Trieste, but it was on a quiet street with indoor and outdoor seating. A vegan menu with several options; rice-based mozzerella, tofu, various sauces and veggies, I was spoilt for choice. I devoured one pizza, then ordered two more to takeaway because I'm an adult and I can do whatever I want. I took the bus back to Trieste center. Photos from the walk and eating.
This morning I had pizza for breakfast, then set out to check out Castello San Giusto. A student entrance is only 2 EUR; it has an armoury, some historical rooms, and walls with, you guessed it, specatcular views in all directions.
On the way I stopped for chocolate cherry gelato from Gelato Marco. Now I'm in Zoe Market, an all vegetarian cafe and store, which has lots of vegan options and milks. There's no wifi, but there's one power outlet, and it's a nice place to sit and catch up on blog posts..
After drafting my last post from Zoe Market cafe, I was struck with the urge to see what the Trieste coastline had to offer further south. I walked to the port area, and discovered it's not really a place for wandering.. big highways and industrial buildings. Nonetheless, even the warehouses and apartment blocks were fairly aesthetically pleasing, and at one point a long park runs parallel to the coast, almost like an apology. GPS trace of the walk here.
I did make it to Pedocin beach eventually though. It took a while to find.. I walked around the pier, which felt quite dead, and found the lighthouse. But industrial buildings in every direction seemed to be preventing me from accessing the coast.. though as I walked past one large wall, I could hear children, so I persisted. Eventually I found the entrance, through an unassuming concrete cabin. I think the entry fee is 1 Euro, but there was no-one there to take it. The cabin has two exits, on the left for women and the right for men. A wall divides the beach in two. The beach is pebbles, with immediate access to the sea; small and peaceful, with one vendor selling drinks and snacks. I napped until I was woken by the tide lapping at my feet.
Super pretty white and purple barrel jellyfish fill the bay around here, and Pedocin was no exception. It was only 20 minutes to follow the coast around back into town. More photos here.
In the evening I ate cake from Giardina Tergesteo and pizza (oops) from DNapoli. I had to add the remaining half of a Marinara to the pizza I had already accumulated from Le Agavi the day before.
The next day we picked up gelato and took that and the pizza backlog to Molo Audace, a long concrete pier off Piazza Unita, for a picnic. Later in the evening I walked by myself to ErbOsteria, a charming vegetarian restaurant which uses aromatic herbs for all dishes. I was the only one there for most of the evening, and was treated to a three-course vegan meal with homemade iced tea. It was a wonderful change from the white-flour-and-tomato based meals I've been eating most of the week; high quality ingrediants, freshly crafted, and I was ready to pay gourmet prices. There was no written menu as it changes daily, so I had no idea what to expect to pay.. and three courses plus tea plus an extra dessert to take back for Kit came to 13.50EUR! Unbelievable. My phone was dead so I only managed to take crappy pictures of the food with my laptop webcam. I'll spare you. The starter was fresh courgette, thinly sliced and raw, dressed with lemon and mint. The main was gnocchi (boiled potato dumplings) with asparagus sauce (I heard the blender go, so I think the asparagus was freshly sauce-d for me) sprinkled with almonds. Followed by cake with balsamic herbs. I took a slice of stunning strawberry tart back for Kit, as I don't like strawberries but it looked far too good to go to not be appreciated by someone. He'd eaten it before I remembered to take a photo.
As of this morning, I relocated from Trieste center to a hostel up the coast, near to Miramare. It is directly on the seafront.. this is the view from the balcony, where I'm typing right now. Soon I will be bored of typing, and will go down to enjoy the last few hours of sun from that concrete beach I told you about in my last post, and hopefully find some granita.
Trieste is small, so as you'd expect pure veg*n restaurants are limited. There was nonetheless more than enough to keep me occupied for a week though. Of course, every Italian restaurant offers the chance to take vegetarian pizza and pasta dishes without cheese, and most offer pizza marinara and spaghetti pomodoro anyway if you don't feel like making special requests.
Giardinio Tergesteo: a vegetarian restaurant with a lot of vegan options that I returned to over and over. They have ample seating options outside, inside, and outside-inside in a kind of mall area. There's power and wifi, and it's the sort of place you could go for a formal dinner, or to spend an afternoon with your laptop. At lunchtimes on weekdays they have a changing pasta dish, and the rest of the time they have salads, sandwiches (various breads and fillings) and a variety of vegan cake.
Erb Osteria: somewhat out of the way and in an odd part of town, this is a small vegetarian restaurant where all dishes are oriented around aromatic herbs. The menu changes daily, so it isn't written down. The decor was very cute, and it wasn't busy when I was there early evening. I asked the owner to furnish me with courses of vegan dishes, and was not disappointed. I was even more surprised by the price at the end, which was 13 EUR for a starter, main, dessert, iced tea, and another dessert to go. You would have to go out of your way to pass here I think, but worth a detour.
Draw Food: Draw is raw, but not all vegan. The menu is mostly meat and fish options, but one section is veg*n and some dishes can be tweaked to remove non-vegan cheese. They have their own cashew-based ricotta which I couldn't get enough of. There's power and wifi, and the decor is great. I spent an afternoon here with my laptop, as well as returning for several other meals, lunchtime and evenings. I had the aubergine ricotta dish twice, and it was slightly different but deliciously creamy both times. I also tried courgette spaghetti with mushrooms, which had an interesting tomato sauce, and a wrap. The dishes are beautifully presented, and small but well crafted. From here I also had juices, milkshakes, and coffees, when soya milk was available.
Genuino: is a good-for-you 'fast' food outlet, and everything comes packaged to-go, though there's plenty of space to eat in. The menu is omnivorous, but I tried all the vegan options I think: the vegan burger (a vegetable patty with copious salad, roasted potatoes, in a panini), a wild rice dish with finely chopped veggies, nuts and seeds, and a rich tomatoey sauce, and something similar but with millet.
La Caveja: is on the same lines as Geniuno, but with wraps. They have a separate vegan menu, which includes a hazelnut chocolate dessert wrap. Meanwhile, I tried roasted vegetables with a really delicious harissa sauce.
Gelato Marco: is a well known gelateria which has around a dozen vegan flavours. I worked my way through, trying chocolate cherry, different combinations of fruit sorbets, hazelnut, pistachio, and others..
Le Agavi: is a pizza place on the outskirts of Trieste; I walked an hour from the center to reach it. They have a big vegan menu, of pizzas topped with rice mozzerella and combinaions of tofu and vegetables, as well as different sauces. For some reason, leeks feature heavily. Totally worth the walk; I ate one there and took two back.. more in this post.
At D'Napoli (famous for pizza), they tweaked the gnocchi for me to remove mozzerella and add chilli (most places don't have chilli so this was great). The spaghetti pomodoro I had at a few places on various occasions, ever simple, was consistently rich and delicious. Aside from just wanting greens in my diet, I didn't tire of the experience of consuming this dish.
This article looks at the scholarly communication ecosystem through the lens of social machines; something I have thought about a lot but only partially articulated through my contributions to Linked Research. In particular, the hypothesis that we are struggling to improve the state of scholarly communication despite advancements in technology because we are trapped in a machine we have ceased to see is interesting. I've had many conversations with people over the last couple of years who balk at any suggestion of a radical upheaval of scholarly communication, hiding behind notions of futility of incentivising researchers to do anything other than pubish or persih, the immovability of the for-profit publishing industry. They complain about the state of things, yet are transfixed by the status quo. I think that framing this problem as a 'trap' will perhaps nudge folks into looking for a way out, and social machines is a useful concept to work with, something very demonstrably real in other domains, and this might help with finding a perspective on scholarly communication.
The article mentions the 'ecosystem' and lists some of the stages. I think it's worth noting that in Linked Research: An Approach for Scholarly Communication we characterised the different stages, roles and actors in scholarly communication in detail (there's even a diagram!). It's important because this is a hard problem, too big a space, to talk about all at once, and breaking it down into smaller chunks that nonetheless interlink (and the interlinking is critical) can help.
Dave writes that we see the same articles about how to improve being published over and over again, and this is true. I assembled a collection of some of them here. People lament that it's too hard to change, and us Linked Research-y types release software and publish our work in a Webby decentralised way (just like Dave has done, for the version of his article that I'm reading) and shove it under peoples' noses and cry that here is the proof that it's not too hard, and if only a few more people would bother we could iron out the wrinkles and make it easier and easier for everyone to participate. It's catching on, but agonisingly slowly. Most people still smile sadly, with a look of concern about the non-future of our academic careers. Dave writes of the "Catch-22" of using traditional publishing to try to solve some of the problems; and it's true. Even csarven is pushing 'papers' to academic conferences about Linked Research and related tooling in the hopes that academics will pay attention (and so he can get his PhD within this broken system). We console ourselves that at least the PDFs were generated from HTML and CSS, and a link to an open access Web version remains in the abstract even from behind Springer's paywall. Yet somehow the dual effort of publishing 'properly' and demonstrating alternatives is still not ticking the right boxes! What's up with that? So we need a new tactic, and the questions raised in this article are pragmatic and challenging, and a step in the right direction.
Question 8 is important because I often find that when we provocatively push "extreme decentralisation" via Linked Research, people push back against that as too difficult, too flakey, underdeveloped. We're arguing from this end of the spectrum because we're fighting against the very other end right now. But it is a spectrum, and better - more robust, more powerful - would be something in between. One example: the response that an individual can't possibly be counted on to keep their research online for eternity ignores the roles libraries and institutions (and indeed traditional publishers) can play in archiving and indexing work over time.
Another note to reinforce the importance of stepping outside to look in at scholarly communication: people, mostly software engineers, with whom I work on decentralised Social Web technologies look on at academia with confoundment. People claiming to be Web Scientists are putting PDFs behind paywalls? Life-saving medical research is accessible to what percentage of human beings? It seems obvious to the outside that we're really screwing things up here. Dave implies that we need to push people towards revolution over evolution, but we need to open a few more eyes before this can happen.
So how do we get people to step outside and look back in? This article doesn't address this. Arguably the people who will show up to Dave's presentation of this are already eyes-open, so perhaps together we can scheme to break the spell that the status quo holds over others.
Framing this (improving the scholarly comms ecosystem) as an interdisciplinary research problem could be emphasised more. Certainly we could solve all of the technical problems, but the social and political ones remain. I hope that we can take some inspiration from SOCIAM in tackling this in the years to come.
This article addresses quite a specific problem: collaborative document editing without third-party servers. The reasons for not wanting to rely on Web servers, even if they're under the control of the document author, is fairly well explained and motivated.
Addressing authoring solutions to MS Word users is diving in the deep end, but a worthy goal as this reaches a lot of researchers. However, I question that the idea of installing software is too complicated for most people.. do you not think it's possible to get the installation process for FW to be as simple as for MSWord?
I realise that this article is not about FidusWriter, but rather collaborative document editing via a NAS, but it would be helpful to explain more about what FidusWriter does and how it is normally run, ie. not on a NAS, and some comparison.
The authors seem to feel strongly about data ownership, mentioning privacy potentially being violated by corporations and governments. It's not clear however that FidusWriter provides a publishing solution, only an authoring solution. That is, once an article is finished it seems that a PDF is exported and turned over to third parties anyway? Relatedly, I would love to know more about how the authors envision this fitting in with the rest of the scholarly communication process, as mentioned in the abstract, particularly peer-review. Could a similar setup be purposed to permit reviewers to control their review contents as well? I assume FidusWriter takes care of access control, citations, formulas and figures, though the article does not state that.
The article mentions that there are other web services for academic authoring, but doesn't name any. I'd be interested to know which ones the authors analysed. Is it only the ones in the footnote? In which case only Authorea and Overleaf are problematic in the ways mentioned for running on third-party servers. I don't really see evidence that the authors have performed a comprehensive search for alternatives in this space. There are certainly clientside document authoring applications which run on personal data stores, such as Laverna which can talk to RemoteStorage servers, and dokieli (which I'm pretty sure the authors have heard of) which can talk to LDP servers, not to mention 'decentralised Google Docs' type things like NextCloud and CosyCloud. It would be worth finding out how easily any of these could be extended to add collaborative editing if they don't have it already, since they have the decentralisation part covered.
Thus, perhaps it's worth comparing running FidusWriter on a NAS to running various generic personal datastores. It seems to me that FidusWriter rather ties the editing application with the storage, which prevents the user from easily switching applications. It's not clear if FW follows a standard protocol for data exchange with the server either. These aren't really the problems of the authors in this context, but it is a downside of a non-standard system even if it's open source and installed on the user's machine. Useful future work might be taking the idea of a NAS forward with other storage/server and client/application options.
That said, I would love to see a docker image prepared to easily set up FidusWriter on any server, if that doesn't already exist!
Limitations are appropriately mentioned as cost and power of NAS devices, though no specifics are given.
Finally, the authors assume a status-quo vision of academic authoring (eg. the "need" for blind peer review) and proceed from there with a decentralisation angle. More interesting would be a paragraph or two about how an approach like this is setting the stage for future advancement in the space. I like the idea of meeting in the middle; addressing immediate problems authors have with their current tooling, whilst laying some foundations for progressing in the direction opened up to us by Web technologies.
Minor comment: what is meant by "Linux boxes" (in quotes)? Are you getting at things like Raspberry Pis?
And I can't help but ask: did you collaboratively author this article using FidusWriter on a NAS? Some screenshots of doing so would add a whole new layer of credibility to your analysis :)
I can see how the ultimate goal described by the article - to publish semantic representations of experimental workflows - contributes towards the vision of decentralised scholarly communication. Unfortunately I'm missing how the work described in the article contributes towards this ultimate goal. The abstract says you want to see how semantic workflow creation can "be combined with traditional forms of documentation and publication" but I don't see a result pertaining to this.
To begin with, the purpose of the tool is quite narrow. How do you know for sure that "advancing knowledge about the use of vocabularies in facilitating sharing and repeatability of experiments and replication of results" ultimately contributes towards reproducability of results, which is the high level goal of this work? How does knowledge of OPMW tie in with the authoring or experimentation process, for example? Are researchers expected to document their workflows as they go along, or retrospectively after the fact (I imagine this depends on the task at hand). For which stage is your tool intended? Or is it simply a teaching tool rather than designed for actually documenting workflows? This isn't clear.
I thought I might understand better by running the tool, but it seems to be broken.
I'm skeptical about the open world assumption and the "nature of Linked Data" being used as a reason to not provide any instruction for using the tool... I would have thought that whether instruction is needed is a UI concern.
There is no results or analysis section, and the tense makes it sound like the described experiment hasn't actually been carried out. Are you asking for feedback about the design of the experiment? If so, you should state this clearly in the introduction and abstract. if not then I'd like to read this again when your findings are ready.
The background work sections appear to be fairly comprehensive, but this is not my area of expertise, so if there is related work or other background information missing I am unable to point it out. It's not entirely clear how all of the related work describe relates to the problem at hand though so I'd like to see this be made explicit.
The discussion about nuances of licensing is interesting, for example licensing different parts of a workflow separately, and conveying this to people who want to replicate experiments and use the data produced. I think maybe the licensing topic deserves an article and experiment all of its own. Colour coding or different levels of alerts for different licensing to help people understand is an interesting UI challenge. I think ongoing work on Data Terms of Use might be interesting to you (this is about personal data rather than experimental data).
In summary, the stated goals make this worth further discussion, but it's not clear how the work you've done so far meets these goals. I'd like to know what are your next steps forward for this work, and technically how this could integrate with other projects related to exposing more semantically enriched academic research to the world.
Okay I'm burnt out on small talk after the first coffeebreak. If anyone wants to just stand together without conversing so as not to look lonely/lost I'm game.
Elsevier keeps 'ghost profiles' for people who don't have Mendeley accounts. You can "claim" your ghost, and it's "yours".. but uh.. not really because it's centralised. And this is presented like a nice fun helpful thing. Ghost profiles is some facebook-level creepy surveillence profiling shit. Makes me sad :( But not surprised.
At 12, csarven will present Linked Data Notifications.. Come to the talk for an overview, then if you want to integrate a part of the protocol into your existing applications, or build a receiver from scratch, we're both here all week and ready to help!
csarven presents Linked Data Notifications at ESWC2017... Starting with some motivational use cases in the social web space to which this W3C Recommendation has been applied so far.
About reference implementations... The test suite automatically checks compliance, and most implementations are open source.
From people who are already considering to include LDN in their projects, asking for technical tips.
Authentication/login part... this isn't part of the protocol, orthogonal.
About LDP and Web of Things... can devices send notifications? What if applications can't use JSON-LD? Well, that's part of the Rec that applications must be able to at least do JSON-LD, but to cooperating applications can use content negotiation to agree on a more lightweight RDF format if they want. It's important for interoperability to be able to send JSON-LD in case a receiver can't understand any other RDF syntaxes; but if your sender and receiver both agree on another format (via the Accept-Post header) they can use that.
Do additions to the simple protocol make it complicated? What about spam? LDN recommends application-specific constraints to deal with issues like this. We don't have a blanket suggestion for how to deal with these kinds of problems in every domain though, we leave it to more focused experts.
Portoroz and Piran are touristy parts of Slovenia, close to the Italian border. There's not an abundance of vegan options, but I did find raw cake at Caffe Teatro in Piran (a big yellow building near the port). For 5 EUR a slice, this was a one-time indulgence, but it was very good. At the other end geographically, in a Portoroz hotel spa you can find a rawfood cafe called Fresh4You. I tried some really great cakes and smoothies, and took a raw lasagne and hemp salad to go. A few hours later, they were still pretty good. The portions were decent sized, and the savoury dishes were not mind-blowing, but not bad either. The chocolate cake on the other hand did blow my mind. It closes at 6.
It's dokieli o'clock at ICWE2017. Sarven Capadisli presents tooling for a read-write Web which helps you own your data, and have more control over the user interfaces you use to create and edit content. dokieli includes social features, including sharing and annotations, across decentralised personal data stores.
Your personal data store can be accessible at any URL, you just need write access and a script that understands HTTP requests and dokieli can talk to it. The UI/authentication flow depends on the choices you make about how your server is set up.
... how will it compete with other [centralised] approaches in the editing marketplace?
Well.. dokieli is not trying to take over the world. It's a prototype, to show how we, can decentralise content creation, designed to encourage experimentation in this space.
What happens to annotations when text changes?
You can annotate a static copy of your own. But we have open issues around that.
How do authors know when an article gets a notification?
They can use any LDN consumer to read that inbox.. This is orthogonal to dokieli. An LDN consumer could give them a desktop notification, make their mobile buzz, or print something out of a receipt machine, or whatever is useful for you as an alert.
What about privacy?
Access control is orthogonal, you can apply these rules on your personal data store when you store documents and comments etc.
...and some things to do with trust and provenance.
At the ICWE conference dinner last night, it was proudly announced that they have finally signed a long term contract with Springer for proceedings publication.
I. Am. Confused.
This seems like a backward step. Locking another generation of researchers into a broken system of academic elitism and inaccessibility of knowledge. This does not conjure an appropriate picture of the future for the Web engineering community. Why have we engineered ourselves into a paywalled corner of static PDFs? Aren't we supposed to be pioneering here? Why is it such an "achievement" to pay a huge pile of money to a for-profit company to keep all of our hard work in a dead end, which our libraries and institutions have to pay again to get it back out of?
Why are technology conference organisers scared to innovate?
Why are they scared of taking risks to advance and benefit the community? Where do they get their excuses from? They're all the same and all debunkable. Is there a centralised excuse provider? Do the publishers have dirt on all organisers?
Last night in Rome: fancy pants veg*n dinner at Le Bistrot
Some weeks in Europe
After 7 months in the southern hemisphere, I returned to Europe by way of a cheap Aero Flot flight from Tokyo to Venice that I booked ages in advance. I've enjoyed manageable temperatures and weather conditions, but missed Malaysian hospitality and food variety. I have a new appreciation for medieval stone architecture and winding cobbled streets, and forests without monkeys in them, but my bank account is hurting thanks to comparatively overpriced and substandard accommodation.
I spent approximately a week in Trieste, a week in Portoroz/Piran, and a week in Rome. In Trieste I relaxed, explored, reflected, deflated. In Portoroz I attended the Extended Semantic Web Conference, co-chaired a half day workshop, scribed a panel and Sarven and I won a best paper award for Linked Data Notifications, and otherwise socialised extensively. In Rome I walked a freaking lot, attended the International Conference on Web Engineering, socialised a little bit, and didn't really manage to get any work done.
This morning I took a bus across the width of Italy, from Rome to Ancona. Last time I was in Ancona I noted that this place is probably beautiful in good weather, and I was right. Two years ago I arrived here on delayed trains, worried I was late for my ferry, in torrential rain, with no idea how thoroughly nonsensical the ferry boarding process is. This time I arrived with several hours to spare, and wandered around a little in the glorious sunshine. Now I knew where to go for ferry checkin and boarding, the process was quick and easy. I had a leisurely lunch at Zazie, a small vegetarian cafe in the town center, and bought supplies from a supermarket. The ferry has not departed yet, 20 minutes after its scheduled time. But not to worry, I've got all night. Just like last time, I'll arrive in Split, Croatia, at 7am tomorrow morning.
In Split I'll take the day to myself, spend a night in a hostel, and then on Sunday I'll take a bus to Sarajevo, where new adventures await.
I didn't make a particular effort to explore Rome's vegan offerings, but outside of pizza marinara and spaghetti pomodoro, I did eat at a couple of fantastic places worth writing about.
Ecru: All raw, all vegan, with a very extensive menu. It's north-west of the city center, near the Vatican and the river. There's power and wifi, but not much seating. I spent a couple of hours there early evening, recovering from a day of walking, and it wasn't busy. I shared lassi (cashew yoghurt), smoothie, two mains: seaweed spaghetti which was salty and filling, avocado tartare which was refreshing and came with crackers and vegetable rolls; and two desserts: almond granita, which was super creamy, and a grain-packed granola bar covered in chocolate.
Dharma Cakes: An entirely vegan bakery that understates it; seems like a normal bakery unless you know otherwise. Inside is spacious and a nice place to sit, with a play area for kids. While I was there, a parrot on a leash brought her two humans for lunch. I think she was a regular because one of the menus at my table had very recognisable beak marks, which I noted when I sat down, before the bird even showed up. Power but no wifi. A lunch and brunch menu, coffees with a variety of milk options, and of course an abundance of cake. I shared two to accompany an almond cappuccino, and two to go. Sugary, not the healthy kind, but delicious and varied.
Wadi: Another vegan bakery, but this one is upfront about it. South of the city, near the University area. I went here a couple of times as it was convienent from my conference. They usually have wifi, but their router was broken last week. There's power though; it's small, but nice to sit. The cakes are again not the healthy vegan variety, but change every day and there's a wide selection, at good prices. I had a chocolate doughnut twice in a row.. and also tried various small cookies, croissant and cake. They have some savoury offerings, including a pizza-like quiche with vegetable toppings, a pasty with aubergine, tomato and not-cheese inside, and eggplant parmesan. They make their cheese from coconut oil, lupin flour, water and salt, and it was really good. They have a few salads which I didn't try. Very friendly staff, who recommended that we try..
Le Bistrot: Half way between the University and the city center, more or less, this restaurant is more upscale and super cosy and homey inside. Three of us got extremely lucky to show up without calling ahead and get a table. Moments after we arrived, the rest of the place filled up and everyone seemed to have reservations. It was packed all evening, and with good reason. The food was spectacular. We each tried three starters: polenta with not-cheese, chickpea balls in tomato sauce, and spinach balls with mint yoghurt. They were very different, and each exceptional in their own way. We were all really impressed, and eagerly anticipated the main course. I sampled a French onion soup with vegetable dumplings, and roasted potatoes with cheese and porcini mushrooms. Delicious, but I wasn't quite as blown away as I had been by the starters. The third in our party ate vegetarian-but-not-vegan ravioli, which looked good but I don't have a first hand report. We wrapped up with coffees, and banana with chocolate sauce and cream, vegan tiramisu, and apple strudel. It was almost midnight by the time we were done, and the place was still full. The total (plus water) was 83.50EUR. One of the more expensive meals (at around three times what I normally pay..) but totally worth it. I would definitely go out of my way to return here to try other dishes if I'm in Rome again.
There's not really a shortage of non-white-flour-tomato vegan options in Rome anyway. I came upon a bakery in the center of a very touristy area, on a cute cobbled street, which had four kinds of vegan cake (I think it was called Dolce Vite). I tried the chocolate orange and it was great. Another time, I grabbed a vegetable panini and juice from Smart Food. Several times I passed places like Banco and Alice Pizza which have vegan menus, but I'd already eaten so I didn't try them. I didn't find a single gelateria which didn't have at least three flavours of vegan sorbet, and most have non-fruit gelato flavours in vegan options as well. Many of the wee local cafes, where one stops for a quick coffee or glass of wine, have vegan biscotti, biscuits, and sometimes cake. Sometimes it's labelled, sometimes not; always worth asking. Unimpressive looking chain cafes at places like train stations and bus stations usually do as well, and many carry soya milk. Vegan croissants (called brioche here, but they look like croissants) are not uncommon, and surprisingly good.
On other occasions, I tried to go to VeganEaty, but it was closed up, with no hours listed; and Salotto Caronte (not vegan, but supposed to have good vegan options) but that was also closed.
I wandered around Split and swam in the sea today.
It was busy, and felt more touristy than last time, though I'm about two months later than last time, a month into to summer and high season. It's mostly as I remember it, but some improvements. There are more vegan food options around for a start. Last time I asked at lots of gelato places for dairy free, and got either blank stares or definitive nos. This time, everywhere had vegan sorbet, and one had a vegan sugar free chocolate ice cream.
I returned to MakroVega and Vege Fast Food, places I ate before. I also stopped at Marta's Fusion, a veggie restaurant I did not come across last time.
The hostel I'm staying in (En Route) is a bit out of town, and beside a super weird semi-abandoned mall/stadium. It's new and really nice. The 18-bed dorm is enormous, loads of space, and private curtained pod-beds. Unfortunately it's full of party animals. Right now (7pm) there's music blasting from the common area or outside. When I took a nap between 9am and 11am, there were also ravers in the room. So I'm anticipating the same late tonight as well, or at the very least boistrous late returns. Oh well, such is dorm life.
My main mission today was to get a bus ticket for tomorrow. After being distracted by the beach for a few hours I finally made it to the bus station. Online, tickets cost 210kn, but not all bus companies are represented. There's supposedly a Bosnian company with shorter travel times, but I couldn't find anyone representing them there. In the end I paid 166kn (less than £20) for a one way 8 hour journey, leaving at 7am, with Globtour.
Then I wandered around town... ate food, bought food for tomorrow.
When I first began my #justgo adventure, I had a 52L and a 40L backpack, both of which had some stuff attached to the outside. I've shed a lot of stuff since then. On a brief return to the US a month in, I reclaimed my small laptop backpack, because I missed having something daypack sized. From then, when all packed up, I had to keep my laptop in the daypack and the daypack inside the 40L, and stuff other stuff around the outside of it. Since the 40L is side-loading and the daypack top loading, getting my laptop out (eg. at airport security) became a massive PITA. Anyway, I digress.
In Australia, I swapped my 40L with my cousin Tim for a top-loading ~50L at full capacity, but which zipped to a smaller size, a little smaller than my 40L. It was also much lighter when empty, not weighed down by the novel and exciting but actually not very useful satchel-style facilities, and general extra toughness that my 40L has. It nonetheless has decent side, front, and top pockets. I still traveled with my daypack inside the Tim backpack, but being top-loading this was now less inconvenient for access. I kept the extra capacity at the bottom zipped and strapped up, as tight as could be, so it was at its smallest size.
Tim's backpack is good overall, but a little dodgy in some places. The top handle was missing when I got it, I broke a toggle, and one of the strap sizey things is broken so it takes some manual jiggling to tighten the straps. The main straps are not particularly padded or robust, so if I was packing it at full capacity I'd worry about how long they'd last, or be comfortable for. When I made the swap, I intended to downsize such that I'd ditch my 52L somewhere, and pack Tim's to capacity, then have just that and the daypack.
Now, I have repacked again but left Tim's backpack empty. I have reached a point where I could ditch my 52L and just use Tim's and the daypack, but I've made the executive decision to keep the 52L and rehome Tim's instead, due to the higher quality straps of the former. The 52L is still pretty full, though it could go taller if I needed, and I have to have an extra bag for food when I'm carrying it (I use my WWW conference bag, but a plastic bag would also suffice) as there's no spare room whatsoever in my daypack. But I feel a little less burdened with a much smaller pack on my front now.
Ultimately I'd like to pick up a daypack (~15L) which expands to hand luggage size (~30L) on demand. It needs good side pockets for a water bottle, and a selection of outside pockets as well, neither of which my current daypack has. Something that lets me clip additional pockets onto the outside would also work (my brother suggested this, military style).
Anyway, the hostel in Split were more than happy to take Tim's backpack and slap a 'free backpack' sign on it. Hopefully it'll go on to many new adventures without me.
Since I switched from gmail to thunderbird this week, email has become a lot less distracting since it's a lot harder to look at. I also haven't applied any filters to my inbox yet. Maybe I never will.
Drizzly in Sarajevo, but holy fuck this town is beautiful.
Cool! I can spend a Sunday staying inside and watching DS9 in my pyjamas, but without not-writing-thesis guilt! (This is the first time I've been stable and had the opportunity to since I handed in).
Instead, I just get not-doing-other-side-projects guilt. Can't win 'em all.
You can now contribute to the material presented at The WebConf 2018!
I'm cochairing the developers track with Thomas Steiner, and we are, naturally, explicitly encouraging non-Paper or more Webby contributions. If the developers track can't do it, no-one can!
Authors should be creative in finding the most effective way to communicate their work, and we welcome dynamic or interactive contributions. Contributions using native Web technologies, or otherwise in a format which exemplifies or demonstrates dogfooding of the technology in question are particularly encouraged.
More details about the submission process coming soon, but we will accept (nay, encourage) a publicly accessible URL pointing to your material, and we will snapshot it at a web archive or download it on the submission deadline. For some ideas and tools for communicating academic work on the Web, check out LinkedResearch.
I'm hopeful we have the option for an open review process. Still working that out.
The WebConf organising committee will hold the copyright over works included in the proceedings, but release it under a CC-BY 4.0 license, which allows ACM to publish their proceedings. We haven't worked this out yet, but I'm hopeful that we can allow contributors to opt out of handing their copyright over at all and release their work under a CC-BY 4.0 license themselves. It might be that we have to exclude these works from the ACM proceedings and publish an alternative proceedings to include these, but we'll see.. stand by.
I looooove this town. A short wander to Ciglane market and around the nearby hillside and somehow everything is stunning. In an abandoned, broken down kind of way. I thought I'd found the place where the city trams go to sleep, but turns out it's a standalone little track with four tiny cabins which take you up the hill and back. The journey time is less than a minute, and I watched it trundle up and back several times, a driver inside, no passengers. It's adorable. No ticket machines or anything.. not sure what the deal is. Maybe it's free. It and the nearby steps are all beautifully decorated with graffiti.
Though I live in a city and can easily get everything I need and almost every thing I want, I feel like I am living the simple life because I have neither kettle, toaster, nor microwave.
Walk down the river to find the flea market at Stup, which wasn't there because it's Eid. Checked out an abandoned factory. Took the tram back to the Old Town. GPS trace.
I've been really really wanting to work on sloph for ages but I'm in the middle of a data model update and didn't branch, so my local backend is completely b0rked, making it impossible to add new features.
I wrote some frontend code instead. Now my image-to-album-add posts (eg) and articles with many images in have a slideshow, complete with keyboard controls (arrow keys and escape). Better than nothing.
The anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand seems like a good day to post the pictures I took a couple of days ago of the bridge where it happened.
I did yoga every day for the month I spent in Bali, but then in the two and a half months after that I only did one class. I finally started going regularly again in Sarajevo. Today's was a challenging class with lots of arm balances. New progress was managing a wobbly eka pada koundiyanasana on my left side, which looks a bit like:
But my leg was bent back not out sideways. I think the trick is not to be afraid of faceplanting into the floor, and let the momentum from leaning forward lift your back foot off the ground.
Photos from my run up to Hum Tower, a disused TV transmitter. Stunning views and sunset, tempered only by disconcerting presence of stray dogs. Home just in time for a lightning storm.
Spent a day tracking down bugs that would have taken someone else 30 seconds to fix BUT learnt a lot about Python packaging in the process.
Accidentally went to a yoga class taught in Bosnian. It was fine.
My oven outlet was repaired in a timely manner and is no longer a fire risk.
Climbed Hum Hill.
Ate at Karuzo twice.
Signed a new contract with OCCRP to come back part time (3.5 days per week) until December (my initial contract was only until this month).
Made some progress with converting my site and logs data to the updated AS2 namespace and reshuffling everything into useful graphs to separate content produced by me from notifications created by others, and things that aren't (b)logposts from things that are.
Experienced two technological marvels already this week and it's only Monday. Either that, or technological failings entirely on my part.
The blender I bought from the flea market didn't work. Czesiek disassembled and reassembled it today and now it works. Nothing changed. Guess it just needed shaking up.
After I reinstalled Fairphone OS at the weekend, my 3G stopped working. Fairphone has a number of places to tinker with SIM card and data connection related stuff, and I tinkered with them all. Figuring maybe my contract had expired a few days early, I went to find out from the m:tel shop. The lady confirmed my contract was still active, and fiddled around with my phone for five minutes shrugging and saying 'I don't know' the whole time. Then she handed it back to me, suddenly working. She had no idea why or how.
Heh, my mum does exactly the same thing on Twitter, liking every single one of my tweets regardless of what it is about. Fortunately, as far as I know, Twitter's algorithm isn't using this for anything meaningful. Also, her account is protected so nobody can see the likes but me so it doesn't even make my tweets appear more popular than they really are.
This article was published in issue #296 (Summer 2017) of net magazine!
You may by now have come across the notion of 're-decentralising' the Web, particularly the Social Web. This is about gaining better control over where we store our personal data. It has become common practice to hand over our data to a few major companies in exchange for 'free' services like games, productivity apps, email, and of course social media. Linked Data Notifications (LDN) is a W3C Recommendation, and one of several protocols standardised by the Social Web Working Group as a core mechanism to make decentralisation possible.
Decentralisation
Right now, when you get a notification from your favourite social networking app (or your calendar, or your hotel reservation site) you can view it once within that closed system, and then it tends to disappear. Imagine if you could choose a trusted location to store your notifications data (for example a personal data store or server) and grant access to different applications. Notifications are no longer locked in to the system which generated them in the first place; data from one application can be reused by another.
There are clear benefits of this practice. The end user is free to switch between applications without having to input the necessary data from scratch each time, as well as changing where their data is stored without disrupting the apps they use, because applications can just re-discover the new location. This benefits application developers too, who can now focus on their core product or service. LDN integration means that applications can nonetheless enhance their functionality when users choose to share notification data from complementary services, and benefit from a standard mechanism for doing so rather than depending on the proprietary API of a third-party social network provider.
The Protocol
LDN is a simple HTTP-based protocol which describes three roles in notification-oriented interactions: senders, receivers, and consumers. Any resource on the Web (from a user profile to a single blog post) may advertise a receiving endpoint (their "Inbox"). Doing so is like pointing to a webhook URL, with LDN standardising the discovery mechanism. The receiver accepts requests from senders (for new notifications) and exposes received notifications in a standard format for other applications (consumers) to reuse. The sender can place any data in the contents of a notification - as much or as little as the application determines is useful for its own future reuse, or for sharing with other consumer applications in the same domain. Consumer applications which discover and read in the notification data could use notification contents to trigger another process in a system, or simply display it in a user interface.
So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in social networking scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments through monitoring the state of online resources, datasets and files, or sensor outputs, and sending notifications when changes occur.
Building Blocks
LDN serves as a building block rather than a complete solution for re-decentralisation. The three roles (sender, receiver, and consumer) can be implemented independently from each other (if you want to build a sender, you don't need to build a receiver to do so), or all together in one system. If you don't want to build your own "Inbox" (and let's face it, most people won't) you can rent one from a third-party you trust. Just like outsourcing the hosting of your social media profile today, but without the service-specific lock-in. No matter where your "Inbox" resides, any application can send notifications there. The protocol works well alongside other emerging or completed W3C standards such as ActivityStreams 2.0, ActivityPub, and the Web Annotations Protocol.
You can get started with LDN today; check out a growing list of reference implementations, and run your implementation against the test suite. Although the standardization process is complete, new implementors are nonetheless encouraged to run the tests and submit the automatically generated implementation reports. The W3C Social Web Community Group is the place to go for follow-up questions and comments about integrating this standard into your applications.
Sarven Capadisli (csarven.ca): works on tooling (dokie.li) to improve decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions, and an initiative (linkedresearch.org) to improve openness and access to scholarly communication Web.
Amy Guy (rhiaro.co.uk): is part-time W3C staff, part-time academic, and part time other things; studying how decentralisation affects people, and working on technology that might do some good in the world.
Spent the week in Southampton and one day in Oxford talking about decentralisation, scholarly communication, LinkedResearch, personal data stores and the like with cool people like emax, csarven, bblfish, TimBL, Wendy, Nigel, Ramine, Jun, DDR..
Imagined eprints as a tiny LDN-powered JS app (ldprints).
Meet the Man Who Has Lived Alone on This Island for 28 Years... Morandi endures long stretches of time - upwards of 20 days - without any human contact.
Goals.
Failing to sleep on the night bus. Maybe.. maybe it's because I slept on the day bus.
Greenbay vegan supermarket in West Brompton; lunch at 222 Veggie Vegan; pictures from buses back to Bosnia.
Important announcement: Vego is the best non-dark chocolate ever, and if you get the opportunity just buy it for me okay?
I particularly love the chunkiness of the bars which are perfect for just filling your whole face with chocolate. It's also made with pureed hazelnut or something so the chocolate is kind of fluffy and not as hard as normal block chocolate.
Mostly available in Germany or places that import health foods stuff from Germany. Keep an eye out.
When people lightly cut their hands on TV to drip blood onto something for like a pact or a ritual or for some dark magic thing, part of my mind was always slightly skeptical about the amount that just pours out. Having previously had no experience of hand-slicing, and comparing it to when I've cut my arms or legs on something, it seemed like you'd have to try harder to get that much free-flowing blood from a skin-deep cut.
Anyway I cut my finger making dinner this evening and it immediately generated more than enough to participate in any Klingon ritual you can think of. And it's so bright red!
I have never been queasy at the sight of blood before, but today I guess I was feeling generally off all day, and hadn't eaten much. After a few seconds of staring as it pooled up in my hand and thinking about TV hand-cutting rituals I almost blacked out. Anyway I'm fine now. Back to the pizza.
Last night, in a seamless blending of the current state of my professional and personal lives, I dreamt that Putin and Chief O'Brien held me hostage in a secret underground luxury hotel.
'Mince' made with finely chopped cauliflower, chilli tofu, mushrooms, tomato, soy sauce.
Pizza with a base of chickpea flower and flaxseed (fried on the stovetop to solidify before baking to make it crispy) with Tesco jalapeno not-chedder cubed (super melty) and Violife not-parmesan grated (only the bits not directly exposed to the grill melted, the top went dry/crispy) on top.
Grilled not-cheese, with the Tesco jalapeno chedder. Did I mention this melts super well?
I left my window open today and a cat came in. She chased a fly, hung out, took a nap, left the way she came in. I call her Ishka because she as an independent woman who does what she wants.
Mum sent me to Gram's with instructions to make lunch from whatever I could find. There wasn't a lot in the cupboards, but I managed to rustle up tomato and mixed peppers soup.
I made curry and chapati for Mum, Dave and J too. Also featured: blue not-cheese (coconut oil based) on toast.
Amy added 48 photos to https://i.amy.gy/201708-uk/
I went to the UK for a long weekend cos Dave and J were visiting from Tokyo. I flew in and out of Tuzla and Luton. The WizzAir minibus from Sarajevo to Tuzla takes about 2.5 hours and winds through the mountains. The train between Luton and King's Cross takes just under an hour. On the way out my flight was early and I ultimately gained 2 hours at KGX before my train to Newark. Time for Nando's. On my way back the flight was delayed 45 minutes, but the airport transfer waited and I got back to Sarajevo around 2.30am.
Sunday: Dave and J went airsofting. J looks like an action hero. I went to Gram's and made lunch.
Monday: We went for a leisurely stroll around Woodhall Spa, and to the Kinema in the Woods.
Tuesday: A day out in London. Lunch at Camden market, coffee in the Sky Garden, a walk along the river to Westminster and Buckingham Palace, and then I left them to fly back.
For this post, I'm going to jump straight into implementation. I've chosen PHP, without any frameworks, because if you already have a (local or remote) server it should be quick for you to get going with, without needing to set up or configure anything. The "Linked Data" in the name implies involvement of RDF; in fact LDN uses JSON-LD, but I don't presume any existing understanding of these things for this post, I'll just try to introduce the minimum that you need as we go along. (For a nice intro to JSON-LD see Manu's YouTube video JSON-LD Basics.) I am assuming though you have a basic understanding of JSON, and what HTTP Headers are.
LDN is a three part protocol. We expect front-end applications as well as servers to play the roles of senders and consumers of notifications. The third part is receiving. As the human in the mix, you need to tell the applications you use where to send notifications that are meant for you (or your software to pick up), as well as where applications can read them from (in order to display them back to you, or to process them and trigger other tasks to run). This 'where' is your Inbox. Applications might, for example, discover it from your homepage or a social media profile. You should host your Inobx somewhere you trust. Just like with email, some people might want to rent space from a provider, or maybe your workplace or school supplies one to you. At the moment the market for this is.. pretty small. This Web-data-owernship thing is in its early days.
For convenience, we're going to set some variables for URL paths we will use regularly:
$base = "https://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']; // Your domain
$inboxpath = "inbox"; // The directory where your notification files are stored.
First, your script needs to accept HTTP POST requests containing JSON-LD blobs. We get the data from the php://input path. We also get the request headers. LDN receivers need to support as a bare minimum application/ld+json payloads, so we'll send a 415 if the Content-Type header doesn't match this. We're also going to check the payload parses as JSON since that's an easy way to throw out (with a 400 Bad Request) invalid JSON-LD. If you have a JSON-LD parser handy, you can validate it against that too. I haven't included one here because.. quick and dirty.
Aside: If you do have an RDF parser around, you can accept other RDF serialisations like text/turtle. If you do, you should advertise this with an Accept-Post HTTP header on your Inbox. I use EasyRdf for all of my RDF stuff. If you don't want to include a library there are a few services with APIs you can call, like rdf-translator.
$input = file_get_contents('php://input');
$headers = apache_request_headers();
$data = json_decode($input, true);
if(strpos($headers["Content-Type"], "application/ld+json") === false){
header("HTTP/1.1 415 Unsupported Media Type");
}elseif(!$data){
header("HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request");
echo "Invalid payload.";
}else{
// Write notification contents to a file
}
The LDN specification says that even if you only accept JSON-LD serialized notifications, you should set the Accept-Post header anyway. You can do this in PHP with header("Accept-Post: application/ld+json"); or an .htaccess file with Header set Accept-Post "application/ld+json".
Once we've determined the payload contents are valid, we should store the notification. This is where you might want to do any or all of the following:
Validate the notification according to its contents; maybe you want to only accept notifications of a certain @type, or other specific property-value (predicate-object) combinations.
Verify the contents by fetching URLs you find in the notification and checking that data returned from these sources corresponds with statements about them in the notification contents.
Verify the contents by checking the statements made in the notification against statements from your own (or another trusted) knowledgebase.
Modify the contents of the notification by adding your own provenance information, such as the date you received it.
Store the notification contents in a database or triplestore.
Fire off a push notification to your phone.
But for now, all we're going to do is dump the contents into a file, update the notification's @id to point to the location we're storing it, and set the HTTP response headers:
Aside: This implementation is super simplistic. The notification may come with an @id already set, or even contain several distinct subjects, pointing to resources somewhere else on the Web. Checking that referenced resources makes the same statements as the notification you received could be good practice for verifying the truth of the notification contents. It may also be set to "@id": "", which is relative to request; it basically means 'this'. You don't need to add your own absolute @id if it's already set; you can consider the URL at which you store the data as a graph URI, which contains statements about other things, but not about itself. Alternatively, you could wrap the notification data in @graph and apply your own @id on the top level.
Since we're storing the notifications as JSON files, you probably want to tell your server to return JSON files with Content-Type: application/ld+json. You can do this by putting the following in a .htaccess file: AddType application/ld+json .json.
Part 2: serving notifications
In order to make your notifications reusable by other applications, you need to expose them to GET requests. Specifically, your Inbox needs to return a blob of JSON-LD which points to a list of the URLs from which the individual notifications can be retrieved. You probably want to put this behind some kind of access control, so that only applications with which you have authenticated can read your notifications. I use IndieAuth as a service.
In this case, the URLs in the list are the files we stored the notification data in. The JSON-LD for an Inbox listing should look like:
The listing doesn't need to look identical to this, but it needs to be an equivalent JSON-LD representation. Since there are several ways of presenting the same thing in JSON-LD, you might find you use a serializer that outputs something slightly different. For example, you might see the contains part shortened to: "contains": ["https://example.org/notification1", "https://example.org/notification2"]. You're also likely see the @context appear differently, and prefixes for the properties (keys) might be used. The JSON-LD Playground is a good place to look at different possibilities.
Aside: The "@type": "ldp:Container" is optional for LDN, but it helps other LDP clients understand that they might be able to use your data too.
You could store the Inbox listing in a flat file, and update it every time you receive (or delete) a notification. However, for this implementation we're going to generate it dynamically from the JSON files in our "inbox" directory. (You can take either approach if your notifications are stored in a database, too).
If you want to restrict access to your notifications, this is a good place to check the request against the authentication method of your choice (eg. a token in the Authentication header, or a signature of some kind).
Now that's all done, you can put your script on a server and check it works with the LDN Receiver test suite. If it does, submit an implementation report!
Part 3: Advertising your Inbox
In order to be useful, you need to make your Inbox discoverable by sender and consumer applications. You can do this by modifying any resource on the Web which you control (like a blog post or your website homepage) to link to the Inbox with the ldp:inbox relation. This can be with an HTTP header:
If you don't fancy writing your own script to handle LDN receiving, there are few existing implementations you could self-host on your own server. Plus Linked Data Platform servers work out of the box as LDN receivers, so maybe you want to set one of those up.
During today's Social Web WG call I made the best pizza I've ever made. It was helped by four kinds of vegan cheese, three of which were part of the new (to me) Tesco range. I stuffed the crust with Violife, and on top put chunks of Tesco blue cheese and chedder, and covered it liberally with grated mozzarella. Somewhere underneath were red onions, yellow bell pepper and courgette. The base sauce was chilli paste and tomato. The dough is a mix of spelt and wheat flour, and water.
Last week I made a cake, and recalled that I'd put leftover frosting in the back of my fridge in a cup. This is an unknown ratio (because who measure things) of date paste, coconut oil and cocoa, and it is a perfect chocolate mousse!
What a glorious evening.
Why does duolingo have High Valarian but not Bosanski?
Road trip to Sutjeska valley, the site of one of the biggest battles of WWII, which now features a somewhat neglected but nonetheless impressive memorial sculpture. We took the scenic route, winding through the mountains, with a stop in Gorazde for lunch, and drove for about five hours.
After a swim in the 'lake', the more direct return journey took about an hour and a half, but also took us through some impressive sheer cliff faces and through tunnels bored into the mountains.
I coated soy chunks (twice) in a wet batter (soy sauce, sambal, flax egg, oat cream and various spices) and dry (wheat flour, corn flour, nutritional yeast, spices), then deep fried in coconut oil for a few seconds. I covered potato chunks in dry batter and fried those too. It was good with onion and mushroom gravy, and the next day cold with salad and sambal to dip.
Week in review: 14 - 20 August
Went to loads of films at the Sarajevo Film Festival, including some in an open air cinema, and one where John Cleese made a terrible speech and then it rained heavily and we had to watch the movie indoors.
Cooked and ate various tasty food.
Broke and fixed aleph stuff. Also did some research to improve aleph's data model.
Cookies! Wheat flour, spelt flour, baking soda, white sugar, coconut oil, dark chocolate chunks, 8 minutes low oven. Equal parts oil and sugar, 2x flour, take out of the oven whilst still soft. Good texture, but brown sugar will be better.
Chilli. Good with homemade chips, good in cevapi bread, good by the spoon. Mixed beans, leftover mushroom gravy, lentils, sweetcorn, soya mince, tomato puree, sambal, various spices.
Chocolate hazelnut cookies. Equal parts coconut oil and sugar; 2x that of flour (spelt and wheat); baking soda; cocoa; flaxseed; dark chocolate chunks and hazelnut halves. Smaller and flatter than the last batch, improved the texture, but I still need to ditch the white sugar. The coconut oil makes them so creamy. Best after refrigeration.
Omelette made from chickpea flour with a sprinkling of flaxseed, vegetable stock, turmeric, basil; topped with cherry tomatoes, lightly grilled mushrooms, and coconut oil not-cheese.
Trebevic during Eko-fest, hammock time with Boudicca and Renee.
Sunset from the Yellow Fort.
Week in review: 21 - 27 August
Made a thing with DataTables. It is fucking amazing. Who even needs to write code any more? DataTables for president.
General investigative data wrangling.
Finished the application process for my Bosnian residency permit thing.
Added functions for pagination to sloph, but haven't integrated them yet.
Made two batches of cookies and a damn good chilli.
Got up to date with Rick & Morty (nb. that's a lot of Rick & Morty considering I was barely aware of it last week), and watched more Star Trek TOS with my mouth open in horror at constant sexism.
Socialised at the weekend :o
Chilled on Trebevic in a hammock.
Watched the sunset from the Yellow Fort.
Had a successful flea market day, with lots of great fruit and a wok and rolling pin.
Pear and blackberry tart, made with gluten free flour and not quite enough coconut oil. The pastry was not flaky, but the fruit carried it. I ate one slice, and OCCRP wiped out the rest.
I made spicy battered tofu for Elizabeth. Inspired by kung-pao style. The batter was equal parts gluten free flour, cornflour, and water; coated the tofu then deep fried in coconut oil for less than a minute. Turned out fantastic. The sauce is chillis, leek, garlic, ginger, carrots, peppers, peanuts and soya sauce. Spicy. Served with brown rice noodles, and blackberry lemonade.
Misc Sarajevo. Fancy mint lemonade from Talks & Giggles.
Week in review: 28 August - 3 September
Restarted yoga, finally.
Made some good food... curry, salad, spicy tofu, pear and blackberry tart.
Learnt things about email formats.
Prepared for my viva.
Implemented proper paging for AS2 Collections (eg. /tags/..) in sloph.
Went on a weekend yoga retreat on Jahorina (a ski resort mountain south of Sarajevo) and relaxed and centered myself, hiked, shared experiences with some wonderful women, learnt a bit about ayurveda, and definitely didn't panic about my viva.
A major Azerbaijani money laundering scandal story was launched yesterday, and the raw data of almost 17,000 bank transactions between potentially implicated companies went up today. I played the tiniest role, but I'm dead proud to see my name up there.
ICYMI I'm super psyched to work with all of the amazing, unstoppable folks at OCCRP.
I passed my PhD viva yesterday, subject to minor corrections! Just call me Dr. Guy.
Thanks to my intrepid examiners Dave de Roure and Mark Hartswood for reading my whole thesis and spending three hours on a really interesting discussion of my findings and the implications. I don't even have words to express how grateful I am to my supervisor Ewan Klein, who has humoured me faultlessly for the last five years.
Fun fact: I haven't written my thesis acknowledgements yet because every time I try to think about all of the amazing people who have supported me over all this time I cry.
Amy added 29 photos to https://i.amy.gy/201709-uk/
Sunrise run around Holyrood. Seemed shorter and easier than I remember, and downhill most of the way. I remember it being uphill most of the way before. Drizzled a bit. All the running I did in Boston must have paid off.
Amy added 15 photos to https://i.amy.gy/201709-uk/
Chips on the beach at Portobello, and a visit to Rikki's new place.
The weather gave us a perfect 20 minute window of moody sunshine to enjoy the beach, raining heavily only when we were on the bus or inside. Cheers, Edinbrah.
Whilst eating we were protected by our Seagull Defender, who chased all of the other seagulls away (except the one who was bigger than him) and waited patiently to be rewarded with a chip at the end.
If there are bits of my thesis you've read on the past or are particularly interested in, now would be a great time to file any other issues you've spotted for things you'd like to see updated or fixed in the final hardbound copy of my thesis which will, I presume, live in the University of Edinburgh library, survive the impending technological apocalypse, and generally outlive all of us. I aim to print the thing by the 31st of October.
Climbed Trebevic. First stop, the bobsled tracks. Then on to the summit. Took longer and was more challenging than anticipated. Only got lost in the woods a couple of times. Photos with me in taken by bengo. GPS trace.
Okay, I went out for lunch, went to the market, sat in the sun, uploaded photos from the last week, took a nap, and made chocolate muffins. 7pm seems like as good a time as any to start the day's thesis corrections.
Watching The Original Series has actually been really challenging. I can't binge it and sometimes even making it through an episode is work. Taking notes is helping, and now I've started I feel I must continue.
The really horrifying thing is how groundbreaking and revolutionary the role of women in this show was at the time. Wtf was the rest of TV like?!
S1E0: Captain Pike "isn't used to having women on the Bridge."
Captain Pike is somewhat disgruntled when trapped by aliens with a beautiful woman whose sole desire is to make babies with him. The woman is actually old and wrinkly and somewhat disfigured from when her ship crashed. She's so ashamed of her true appearance that she'd rather stay with the aliens in the end.
This pilot got bad reviews because there wasn't enough punching, and almost killed Star Trek before it began. The female first officer didn't go down well with the network either.
S1E1: Bones still has the hots for his ex-girlfriend so he doesn't notice she's a shape-shifting alien who drains the salt from peoples' bodies, killing several members of the crew. Most conversations are about how hot Bones' ex-girlfriend is.
S1E2: Charlie, a human teenager raised by aliens, has never seen human women before. His re-assimilation into human society doesn't go well, because all he wants to do is follow Yeoman Rand around and touch her inappropriately. Everyone is awkward about this and nobody does a good job of explaining to Charlie why this isn't going to work out. Also he has destructive psychic powers. They let the aliens have him back.
Spock and Uhura have a strangely intimate public moment involving song and harp.
S1E3: The episode opens with bridge officer Gary Mitchell making inappropriate comments about psychiatrist Elizabeth Dehner. In front of everyone, on the Bridge, during work hours. Apparently this is fine.
Gary is the hero of the story when he accidentally becomes imbued with ever-expanding psychic powers which make him think he's better than everyone else. He continues to sexually harass Dr. Dehner. Kirk is very sad that his friend's powers make him think he's better than everyone else, but doesn't seem too fussed about his treatment of Dehner. Eventually Dehner also gets psychic powers and runs away with Gary. She realises at the last minute this might have been a bad idea. They both die.
Kirk makes sure to note in his log that Gary was a decent bloke.
S1E4: Everyone is infected with an inhibition-removing virus. Nurse Chapel declares her love for Spock. Spock cries. Kirk is upset that being Captain means he can't get laid. Riley hijacks the PA system, sings Irish ditties, and has opinions on how the women dress.
S1E5: The Enterprise needs an HR department.
Evil twin of Kirk assults Yeoman Rand. She's interviewed by Spock and Bones in the captain's presence. She's very visibly distressed. Kirk keeps yelling that it wasn't him. "Well he's the captain, I couldn't just... I didn't want to get you into trouble sir... I wouldn't have said anything, only...". A male witness bursts in and confirms it was Kirk. He's escorted to sickbay. Rand is dismissed.
When Kirk is re-merged, Rand goes to apologise to him (or forgive him, or something) on the Bridge. Spock says "the imposter had some interesting qualities, wouldn't you say Yeoman?" and gives her this weird-ass smirk. Spock! Wtf.
S1E6: It's very hard to concentrate with ladies in the room.
Only the feelingless Vulcan is immune from the captivating charms of three "females". None of them are dressed appropriately for space travel, nor do they react reasonably to terrifying space emergency situations. And of course all they want is husbands. The episode is called "Mudd's women"; Mudd introduces them as his "cargo" and Kirk is fine to refer to them this way. If they don't take a pill for long enough, their makeup is washed off and they get some wrinkles near their eyes and can't stand themselves any more. Eve has some character and agency but in the end decides to stay with the abusive miners on desolate Rigel-12 I guess because one of them decided he wanted to talk to her even after he found out she didn't really look how he thought she did. Mining infrastructure on Rigel-12 seems... understaffed. The episode has an 'if you believe in yourself you can be anything' moral, specifically that "homely" women can still be appreciated by men if they "act beautiful".
Spock moment: "the fact that my internal arrangement differs from yours Doctor, pleases me no end."
Finished Season 2 of Sense8. The most unrealistic thing in the whole show is how do Nomi and Neets afford that apartment in SF? Started Season 2 of the Expanse.
Got some of my thesis corrections done.
It got cold in Sarajevo :( I forgot how to handle this.
During 90% of group social interactions I'm happy to be there but would prefer to be invisible. I think that's why I like IRC so much. I'm in a room full of people chatting amongst themselves, nobody is really aware that I'm there but also nobody minds that I'm listening. I can interact if I want, but there's no expectation that I do, even if addressed directly. Real life more like IRC rooms please.
Elizabeth and I made stir fry, bbq cauliflower, roasted marrow, and zucchini noodles. We ate most of it.
I'm thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year. I last took part in 2013 (and feebly at that), before my phd and associated distractions took over. That was a long time ago. My fiction writing foo is completely out of whack. I can barely remember how. I don't know what to write about. This definitely means I should commit to it, I guess.
Since I started thinking about nanowrimo, my brain has changed mode. It's like I'm listening on frequencies I haven't listened on for a long time.
To start with, there was nothing. It was horrifying. Where did story ideas even come from before? Have I lost the connection with that part of myself? Total static. An endless black page with nothing to write about.
A couple of days in - not specifically trying to think of ideas, but just having opened that door in my mind again - I started to hear sounds in the distance. Whispers.
Then I saw a place. Felt an atmosphere. Then I met my character. She introduced herself and showed me around. Very slowly, she has been feeding me tidbits about her life. Out of nowhere, when I'm wrapped up in something else - from yoga, to buying groceries, to writing bash scripts - I gain another little insight. She tells me something new about herself. She hints at what she's up to, and what might happen in the future. Just hints.
At the same time, I can feel echoes of things I have written in the past and media I am consuming recently, as well as things in my own life. I can really feel these influences painting the backdrop in a way I'd never noticed before.
It is absolutely thrilling to have made this connection. I used to have this all the time, when I wrote a lot. Non-stop, characters were chattering at me, spaces were inviting me to explore them. I got used to it I guess, and then didn't notice when it went quiet.
Now it's back, I realise what I was missing.
I have a person and a place, and a general sense of the world, but no plot. I get the feeling we're going to find out what happens together, in November.
I read, made notes on, and wrote a small literature review on some papers yesterday. Part of me loved it, it's been a while. Part of me suffered greatly from PhD PTSD I guess.
Last night I watched the original Blade Runner. I've definitely seen it before, but I didn't remember it well.
I was completely thrown by the rape scene. Not because it was necessarily out of character, but it was just a huge fucking unnecessary sidetrack from all of the other interesting things happening in the movie.
The first thing I did was search "bladerunner rape" to see what the rest of the Web has to say about it. There are a handful of posts by people who are shocked and appalled, and the rest is people defending it along the lines of:
It was the 80s.
you didn't understand these scene because you weren't paying attention to x y z complex imagery and film themes blah blah
it wasn't supposed to be rape they just acted it badly (I'll say, their acting very thoroughly convinced me it was 100% rape).
it wasn't rape because she initiated it.
*double take* .. *back up* .. I'm sorry, what?
Some of those people even went so far as to point out that "she initiated it" by playing the piano and taking her hair down.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
Some people said if she'd said no he would have stopped. She literally ran for the door!
jfc
Some people pointed out that after he told her to say she wanted him, and she did (with pure terror in her voice) and then she said other sexy things without him telling her to that meant it was okay. His job is literally to hunt her down and kill her and every move she made after she realised she was trapped in his apartment (including staying here after he left) appeared to me to be out of abject fear for her life. That doesn't seem a whole like like consent, eh.
My landlady is nice, but she's also a benevolent overlord who controls my heating and I can't figure out the pattern yet. Sigh.
(I can turn radiators off, but when they're on I don't know when they're actually going to emit heat. The last few days they were on in the evenings, but tonight not. Last week they started coming on at 6am which was loud and pipe-bangy and not ideal, and they were cold again by the time I actually wanted to get up).
More annoying than "hey guys" is "hey guys... and girl."
(Traditionally I don't mind being incorporated in the "guys" because my last name is Guy so I can identify easily. But I know 99% of the time people aren't including me in that way on purpose. I know when they are because they say something along the lines of "ohhh see what I did there!?" which kind of ruins it. Also I take a stand against guys-as-gender-neutral on principle these days).
(In case you're stuck "hey everyone", "hey folks" or just plain ol' "hey" are actually not that challenging with practice. You can even get used to using them on rooms of people you think are all the same gender).
A morning run around Copenhagen's lakes. Avocado rye toast.. I'd forgotten what it was like being in a real city. A wander around the city center and indoor and outdoor markets. Lunch at Bahn Mi.
Ninni had a party, then stayed out until 8am (I didn't). The last photo is: I fetched her a veggie burger and fries for 'breakfast' before she went to sleep.
I walked 12 miles around Copenhagen, through various parks, the Kastellet, the Little Mermaid, to Christiania for great vegan food, mega hippie vibes, and a walk in the woods, and back via Rosenborg Castle gardens.
Monday wandering, from Zee's for breakfast, up the Rundtaarn for overcast views of Copenhagen; a couple of hours in the library and a leisurely lunch at Yellow Rose; the sky turned blue in time to wander through a park and watch the sun set; AYCE vegan Chinese buffet for dinner at Veggie Heroes.
Contributions to the Prana Yoga potluck. Aubergines stuffed with veggies and bulgar wheat, sprinkled with vegan cheese that my mum brought me from the UK. A sugar free beetroot cake with lemon cream cheese icing. The cake turned out a bit weird, but was enjoyed by people who already had weird diets.
Pulled an all-nighter to get my thesis to have page numbers and the correct margins for print. When I've recovered from the trauma, I may write about it. (Spoiler: I ended up using latex for page numbers).
Spent way too much time researching convoluted ways to get around Europe. Booked one of five upcoming journeys.
it's fucking day 1 and I'm already highly sleep deprived. Only a few sentences under the daily target, but completely incapable of producing more at the moment. If only this post counted.
I'm aiming for a 750words streak for the whole month at a minimum. I expect I'll be maintaining the 1667 daily average in fits and starts. Tomorrow I'm not going to work.
My database has been broken for twelve days, and for all of those of you who were missing reading what I had for breakfast fear not! It's fixed, and I kept logs on paper. Regular service will resumse shortly.
I'm dead serious. Stranger Things 2 exists entirely for Steve's character development. Right? It was fine and all, but all I really cared about by the last few episodes was Steve. Go Steve.
That feeling when you are now so far behind the finish-on-time Nanowrimo target that you stop writing for the word count and start writing for the story, and then it gets easier again.
I discovered today that my Nanowrimo (Of the Moon) is set on the same planet where I started another story (Quest for Brothers) several years ago, but thousands and thousands of years in the future, after an apocalyptic event wiped out the first inhabitants.
One of the characters in QfB, whose story I didn't get very far with at the time and was the least interesting to me of the three MCs, apparently had great adventures and went down in her peoples' history in a series of legends about her deeds.
Anyway looks like my MC in OtM knows more about other characters I've met in the past than I do.
Dunno if it's a coincidence, but since I've been writing fiction every day I have had fewer mega-lows, and zero urge to curl up on the sofa with a colouring book and pens.
This also coincides with my phd finally being actually properly and for real wrapped up, so I can't scientifically identify a correlation here.
But definitely writing is making me feel good, everything else aside.
Hey I have almost 15,000 words and a whole world that I didn't have two weeks ago.
Spending all day every day either working dedicatedly at one thing, or feeling overwhelmingly guilty about not working dedicatedly at one thing, seemed to make complete sense at the time and had a kind of honour associated with it. But in hindsight it was really stupid and more often than I think I even realised, especially towards the end, I was hellishly miserable.
Don't get me wrong, I loved doing a PhD, and I got a lot out of it. I got travel opportunities, and great friends, and fantastic mentors, and learnt a lot about myself. One thing I always tell people I love about postgrad was the freedom to work under my own steam, on topics that interested me. I could work when I wanted, how I wanted.
In hindsight.. I should have used that freedom to not work all the time.
That makes it sound like I worked all the time. I did not. I spent an awful lot of time not working, but because most of that not-working time I could have been working, I felt terrible about the fact I wasn't working. On and off over the years I tried a schedule - to build in non-work-not-guilty time. Sometimes it worked. And sometimes I'd go off on an adventure (a walk around a new city, or climb a mountain) and tell myself I need a break and it's okay not to work that day. Sometimes it escalated, and I'd spend an entire day watching Star Trek and tell myself it was okay and I needed a break. Then I'd do that a few days or even up to a week in a row, and realise that I could no longer justify this as a mental-health preserving break, and all the good energy-saving would be undone in one fell swoop of crushing guilt. Then I'd watch Star Trek for a bit longer out of misery.
The lesson here is probably something about better time planning.
I've had Syre on repeat for two days now. I'm starting to forget how to function without it in my ears.
Gently psychedelic weird rap, the album as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It varies in pace and style, and is chaotic throughout in a way I love. Louder is better.
I particularly love B.L.U.E and Lost Boy, and Icon has grown on me enormously. But it really makes the most sense as one 70 minute track.
Concluding this month's inadvertent how-long-can-rhiaro-do-a-full-time-job experiment, during which I went to work for 8+ hours per day, five days a week, for three weeks straight, and had some overly social weekends and evenings, I have determined that the answer is 3 weeks at a stretch and now I am out. Of. Steam.
I will retreat henceforth back into the safety of antisocial part-timeiness.
I know most people work at least this much in non-solo environments. What I don't understand is how.
I alternated writing with cooking and listening to Syre. I made bulgar wheat with lentils and veggies; baked a loaf of bread; and now I'm making leek and potato soup to accompany the bread.
Edinburgh times, with the bird, and Holyrood, and food.
Now my student card has expired and I can't access Edinburgh University buildings to bum around with my laptop at the weekend, it's nice that I can cosy up on a sofa at the SHRUB for a couple of hours.
It's a lovely welcoming place and community of people, and it's come so far since I volunteered here a bit about three years ago.
Emergency cakes chez Mum. Self-raising flour, bicarb, baking soda, 3 bananas, Vitalite, almond essence, dessicated coconut, and coconut milk until it was the right consistency. Dark chocolate chunks. Shockingly good.
A gloomy run from Stickford to Stickney; Boston (original) early morning; a train to London.
A day in Ghent
This month's convluted travel routing took me through Ghent, Belgium. The bus timetables didn't quite line up to let me go straight through from Boston (the original) to Sarajevo, so I figured if I have to spend a day in a city I should pick a nice one, and one that I haven't been to before.
I arrived, early, at 0530. It was very cold. Thankfully one of the earliest opening coffeeshops happens to be an all-vegan one - Full Circle Coffee. Unfortunately I still had two hours to kill before 0730, which I spent shivering in a corner in the train station. It wasn't the best.
When I made my way to Full Circle, it was still dark. The place is super welcoming, with sofas, comfy chairs, as well as tables, and a wall-facing bench lined with power sockets, so it's clear laptopping is welcome. I started my day earlier than usual, with an oat milk flat white, and chocolate pie (8EUR total). Their other offerings included carrot cake and chai carrot cake.
The wifi was fine, and there was a power socket by a sofa. I curled up there and watched the sun rise out of the glass door which leads to their back terrace. The sun didn't so much as rise, but the sky turned a lighter shade of grey. I thought about leaving for a walking tour at 10, but just as I was making my mind up to close my laptop it started to sleet. I stayed.
Just after 11 the weather had improved, and I headed to Mie Vie, a vegan cafe in the town center. I had a somehow spectacular cheese salad sandwich on crusty bread, and a danish pastry. This place was also welcoming, and also had good wifi and power options, and a decent amount of space. It didn't get busy over lunch time.
I joined this walking tour at 1300. It lasted two hours, and was fun and informative. I learnt that French Fries are Belgian, there are three peeing children statues (compared to Brussels' one), and there's art in one of the cathedral's that is the most-stolen ever. It rained, hailed, and the sun came out a little, but mostly it was just overcast. Our Mexican tour guide is in the final year of his PhD in international politics. It was a pretty large group; I tipped 5EUR.
I almost caved and got chips because I was cold, but resisted, holding out for a vegan all-you-can-eat buffet later. I went to the library (De Krook) to be productive for a while. It's a pretty cool new building with interesting architecture. There were lots of people studying on the top floor, but still space.
Next I headed to Komkommertijd for dinner. An all-you-can-eat vegan buffet for a lofty 17EUR. The place was packed and I was permitted a table on the condition I left by 20.00. This wasn't ideal as I had been hoping to use this as my warm place until my 22.00 bus. In any case, I ate all I could. The food was good; a selection of hot stew-y type dishes, all rich and cheesey, as well as spring rolls and pakora-type things, soup, bread and various salads. There was a blueberry cake for dessert. They don't serve tap water unless a drink is ordered which I thought was a little unreasonble given the cost of the buffet. I watched a tiny old lady next to me polish off plate after plate. There was no wifi.
I decided to head back full circle to Full Circle Coffee for a hot chocolate, if it was still open. It wasn't. But around the corner I stumbled across Lokaal, which I'd heard about but forgot to look for on the map. From there I did get a hot chocolate, served in a giant vase. "Sometimes we like to play practical jokes on people and today it's you." Out of the corner of my eye I also saw two women struggling to eat dessert from a comically oversized bowl. I stayed well past closing time (21.00) since the place was still half full. The staff were friendly and funny and it had a generally silly vibe. Just as I was leaving, someone broke out Twister but with vegetables and George Michael instead of the usual coloured circles.
Then back to Dampoort, for bus number 3 to Cologne Airport.
I lived in Edinburgh for 4 years, but the vegan offerings have ramped up in the 2 years I've been away since. On my last two visits, in September for my viva and December for my graduation, I visited old favourites, as well as crammed in as many new places as I could.
The classics
The Auld Hoose
I went to the Hoose almost every Monday evening for 4 years. They have a 20% discount on food on Mondays. They also have a ton of vegan options in a laid-back grungy pub atmosphere. They had vegan cheese on their GIANT nachos before it was cool.
The menu changed while I was away, and these days along with their vegan chilli, vegan burrito and vegan burger they also have a fried tofu sandwich and raspberry sorbet sundae. I miss the veggie haggis and mushroom pie of ye olde days though, gotta say.
But you really come for the nachos.
Anteaques
I practically lived in Anteaques when I ran SocieTea. They were our best sponsor, and I am as unfailingly loyal as you can be to a tea shop. They also have at least one homemade vegan tart at weekends, usually chocolate and raspberry. Rhubarb apparently briefly put in a seasonal appearance last month, but I missed it. Anyway I'm happy to eat the chocolate and raspberry tart with a pot of tea every single time I go, it's fantastic.
The tea is also good.
Rigatoni's
I used to eat at Rigatoni's a lot. It's a lovely family-run pizza and pasta joint. It's not the cheapest, but the quality is outstanding. Over the years I developed my perfect topping combo: spicy kidney beans, artichoke, and mushrooms or olives (depending on what I was in the mood for). I went so regularly they'd remind me to remove cheese from my order if I forgot to mention it. They don't have vegan cheese, but the pizza sauce is so good it holds up a pizza all on its own. The XL is best value for money, and would usually last me one and a half to two meals. It's great cold the next day, smothered in hot sauce.
Henderson's
An Edinburgh veggie institution, there are now about three or four branches of Henderson's in different forms. Felicity and I went to the vegan deli version, and tried a whole bunch of stuff. It was all great. It is not particularly cheap.
I've been to the main restaurant (vegetarian not vegan) for full meals a couple of times too on special occasions, and it was always really good.
David Bann
This is an upscale vegetarian restaurant, also generally reserved for special occasions. I've tried every vegan option on their menu at this point, and they're all good.
Last time I had a late bus out of Edinburgh, Jane and I were killing time beforehand. Despite having just demolished Hoose nachos (see above), we hauled ourselves to David Bann for fancy pants dessert and coffee. We really had no space for it, but enjoyed it nonetheless. If you wanna go for a full meal you probably need a reservation, but they were good enough squeeze us in unannounced at 2130.
Forrest Cafe
This is somewhere between a classic and a new for me. Forrest has been around in various forms for a loooong time. The cafe is all vegetarian, with lots of vegan options or amendments. I think it's run by volunteers, and/or extremely low-paid do-gooders. I only visited a couple of times when I lived in Edinburgh, and only for coffee and cake. Recently I stopped for a meal and a few hours of laptopping. The burrito was incredible, huge, cheap, delicious, and they now have vegan cheese. There's not loads of space, but there is power and wifi if you go at none busy times. There's usually also a box of free bread by the door.
New and exciting
ATFresh
In the newly refurbished Appleton Tower, a cafe has sprung. They have a bunch of vegan options on their small menu, including a pizza flatbread with vegan cheese. Suddenly hungry in the 15 minutes before my graduation ceremony started, I stuffed this into my face. It was about £3 and quite delicious.
Herbivore Kitchen
This place is great on a number of levels. Clerk St is a very handy location. It is all vegetarian and mostly vegan, and everything is well labelled. They have a good selection of cakes and drinks, and both large and small mains. They have loads of seating downstairs, so I would feel no guilt whatsoever taking my laptop there for several hours (there's wifi and power).
It opened in late 2017, and I went several times over my last two visits to Edinburgh, feeling a need to try as much of the menu as possible. It has all been really good, although a turmeric latte was a bit bland. The milkshakes are elaborate and luxurious though, and the flavours have been different each time I went.
The pancake stacks are pretty epic. I wanted to try the kuku but they hadn't had a delivery yet when I was there.
My biggest life regret may be not staying in Edinburgh long enough to try their christmas menu.
Nova Pizza
An all-vegetarian pizza place in New Town. The vegan menu is so extensive it could stand alone and you wouldn't know anything was missing, over starters mains and desserts. Jane and I shared two pizzas, as well as a 4-'cheese' bruscetta to start. We were too stuffed for dessert, but a hazelnut latte went down very well. This was £40 between us.
Holy Cow
This place is all vegan, and hidden away behind the bus station. It's small, but the cake selection is huge. They have a bunch of different kinds of burgers. I didn't even look at the juice and smoothie menu. The chips were fantastic. It was all good. I wanted to eat everything.
I took photos of all of the cakes so I could think about them more whilst eating my burger.
ConsiderIt
These folks used to sell handmade vegan chocolates at markets, and now opened a shop across the road from Summerhall. The Summerhall guest wifi reaches, and there's power, and a reasonable amount of space, though it's not super comfy (yet - I think it's being developed).
Anyway it's a VEGAN DONUT SHOP so who cares about the seating.
Felicity and I tried four between us, along with oat milk mochas. We took chocolates to go as gifts.
Yeah this was good.
Soul Sushi
A new (to me) sushi place on Nicholson St seemed worth checking out, and they have a lot of vegan options. The veggie 'garden platter' can be veganised upon request. When I went in to pick up our order, the guy behind the counter told me they're working on introducing a lot more vegan options, including fixing their breading so it doesn't use egg. Keep an eye on this one!
Bread Meats Bread
Uuuugh it's a burger bar, but the vegan menu is extensive, so I guess it's good to show demand. They have branches in Glasgow, but the one on Lothian Road is the first in Edinburgh.
I had an Angry Vegan, which was seitan based, with not-cheese and good salad. The spicy buffalo sauce was good too, and Felicity and I shared chips with blue not-cheese dip.
Pakora Bar
Exactly what the name says, this place is mostly but not all vegetarian. When we were there ordering all of the vegan things, we were told they're introducing more veggie and vegan options in the near future too. They have a haggis pakora, which you can't really say no to. We shared a variety of pakoras, and also the red bean soup which was really good. What looks like a small amount of food is surprisingly filling, and the prices are good too. It's in New Town.
Usually my problem is that i can't get vegan cheese or chocolate but right now i only have vegan cheese and chocolate which is overall an improvement i guess but i dunno what i'm having for dinner??
In a spectacular feat of learning absolutely nothing from my recent three-consecutive-nights-on-buses excursion, I have now booked an upcoming trip involving two night ferries and a night bus (and two day buses).
I was tryna do it in three ferries and one bus, but the Bari-Dubrovnik line is apparently ~seasonal~ and not running in January how selfish.
tl
For anyone interested in further details of my folly, my goal was to get from Malta to Sarajevo in the first week of January without flying. During high season it is possible to go in basically a straight line. After I found out (thanks to an unexpectedly fast and helpful email response from Jadrolinja) about the Bari-Dubrovnik line not running however I had to work out a more indirect route.
The ferry from Malta to Catania (Sicily) is a given. It's 9 hours overnight, and a steep 60EUR. But no way around it. (Tirrenia ferries.)
The next most obvious option was to bus from Catania to Ancona, and take the Jadrolinja ferry from there to Split (Croatia). Split to Sarajevo is easy. To my surprise, there's a direct bus from Catania to Ancona; 15 hours and 80EUR. But I've done the Ancona to Split ferry twicebefore. There's nothing wrong with it, but I'm seeking new experiences. It's about 50EUR, and 12 hours. OH and one other thing. It only runs on Tuesdays and Fridays. The earliest I can leave Malta on a Thursday night and there is just no way I can make it to Ancona by Friday evening, so started planning to spend 4 days in Catania, because it would be cool to climb Mt Etna and more interesting than waiting around in Ancona for the next available ferry. I found accommodation for about 40EUR for the whole time. In total, this would get me back to Sarajevo on the 10th of January, and cost about 190EUR in transport and accommodation.
If I take entirely buses though, I can shave off three days and 60EUR, but I also sacrifice an extra vacation in Sicily. I could do this with a bus from Catania to Venice (80EUR, 14 hours), Venice to Ljubljana (3.5h, 15EUR but only an hour to transfer), an afternoon in Ljubljana (+10 points) and a nightbus to Sarajevo (11h, 33EUR). Down to less than 130EUR. Time in Ljubljana would be cool, but it'll still be cold and I'll only have like 4 hours of daylight, and the bus to Sarajevo is not until after 1am. And I want more ferries.
What else have we got? *rhiaro peers furiously at maps of Italy*
A ferry from Catania to Napoli you say?! Don't mind if I do. It's 45EUR and 12 hours overnight. (TTTLines via Caronte Touriste.) That gives me a full day in Catania (enough for a half day jaunt to a volcano perhaps..) and no accommodation costs. Compared to costs of other transport options in Italy this felt like a real bargain.
Napoli to Ljubljana was kind of awkward, timing-wise, for the connection to Sarajevo. But Napoli to Zagreb with Flixbus was a euro cheaper anyway for some reason even though it's the same line, and there are more connections to Sarajevo from Zagreb. There's a change in Rome; I shaved off 2EUR (and added an hour to transfer time) by booking Napoli-Rome and Rome-Zagreb separately. I already know that Rome Tiburtina bus station has a small cafe with vegan cake options, so if the bus does arrive on time it's a fine place to wait a couple of hours. I'll be there early evening, a hospitible hour.
From Zagreb I have a three hour wait before the trusty Centrotrans 12.30 connection to Sarajevo (25EUR). This whole option is 121EUR, adds 8 hours on compared to the all-bus route, but I get to keep a ferry, have more time in Catania, and can still make it to work on Monday.
I have spent several days over the past month intermittently researching the options and waiting for various January ferry schedules to emerge. Totally worth it.
I wandered around Leipzig for a couple of hours this morning, looking for food. It turns out that lots of places in the city center are open, but the ones which are are packed, full of families being festive. They were also on the fancy and expensive side. None of these appealed. I could not find a fast food place or a supermarket.
Eventually I found myself in the main train station. This is a small bubble of the city where on the 25th of December, life continues as normal. A lot of the food outlets are open, and I enjoyed a coffee and a pretzel in tranquility. I also saw a dm and a smoothie place on my way in, so I can get supplies for later.
I'm sitting in a bakery in the station right now. There are a few people about, and it's interesting to observe the folks who are doing not-christmas things this afternoon. A few families with small kids; people not speaking German to the cashier who probably just arrived or are waiting to depart; old couples and old solos.
Cafes and restaurants in the city center didn't feel like places it was okay to sit alone, even if there was space.
But the train station vibe is safe and comforting.
I have made it to 34c4, registered as an Angel, procured a SIM card for internal comms, and wandered around this enormous venue. It's all coming together.
The first really good talk I've seen at #34c3 was BGP and the Rule of Custom by cjd. Good thoughts about the interplay between network structure/hardware and the social surroundings.
Social Publishing
Though most bloggers and social media users do not explicitly set out to log small events in their lives, other kinds of social publishing can also be considered a form of self-tracking. Indeed, it is these types of data which Web Observatories today are most commonly consuming and analysing. Blogs have been around since the early days of the Web, initially for collecting links and then for documenting ideas and experiences. More recently, such expressions are commonly published to centralised social networking site, and many systems facilitate deeper data logging than just prose content. For example, the Facebook 'status update' input presents preset options for mood, location, films, books, friends, and other activities. These are easily attached to a text post through a seamless user interface, where the intent feels quite different to services and devices specifically marketed for self-tracking, but the end result in terms of data collected is largely the same.
While there are various efforts to address decentralisation of the Social Web [8], of particular note are ongoing formal standardisation efforts at the W3C. The W3C Social Web and Web Annotations Working Groups are developing standards for not only publishing content, but interacting with content in the same manner as one would through centralised social networking sites. Unlike centralised systems, instead of coordination between common technology stacks or shared access to databases, they use mutually implemented communication protocols. The ActivityStreams 2.0 (AS2) [19] specification provides a syntax and vocabulary for types of data commonly found on the Social Web, as well as an extension mechanism for adding new types of activities and objects. ActivityPub [24], Micropub [16] and the Web Annotations Protocol [18] define protocols for publishing which facilitate decentralision by decoupling clients from the servers which store the data. Linked Data Notifications (LDN) [4], Webmention [17], and WebSub [6] provide mechanisms for propagating social interactions and other data between otherwise unrelated servers.