Swept Off My Feet

It’s great when a brilliant person admits to doing something mundane because it makes you think you might be brilliant too. This was my thought process when J.K Rowling revealed she was an avid Minesweeper player. Aside from proving that she uses Windows (because only dark witches or wizards use The Operating System That Shall Not Be Named), Rowling’s confession confirmed that playing Minesweeper may not be a total waste of time but rather one of those absorbing activities (like gardening or showering) that allow the creative juices to flow unselfconsciously.

Unfortunately it turns out that as well as being a better writer than me, Rowling is also a superior Minesweeper player. Her best time for clearing the Expert level is 99 seconds. My personal best is solving the Beginner level in one second, thanks to that game-breaking glitch which pops up every once in a while and lets you win on the first click.

For what appears to be a simple game, Minesweeper has a convoluted history. Minesweeping games existed before the Windows version, and the first program that resembled Minesweeper as we know it was a 1983 game called ‘Mined-Out’. The game was written by Ian Andrew and designed for the ZX Spectrum, an early personal computer popular in the United Kingdom. The ZX Spectrum was a revolution in home computing at the time, featuring a colour screen and up to 48kb of RAM (for those keeping score, the computer I’m writing this post on has 4GB of RAM, or 9.5367 ⁷ times the amount of RAM of the Spectrum).

Screenshot from Mined-Out, an early minesweeping game written for the Spectrum ZX computer.
Image courtesy of www.minesweeper.info/wiki

Mined-Out featured aspects of gameplay that would be familiar to Windows Minesweeper players, such as a gridded playing field, numerical clues indicating the number of mines adjacent to your current location, and increasing difficulty levels. The game also included features which never made it to Microsoft’s iteration of the game, such as the bizarre ability to win bonus points for successfully rescuing ‘female worms’ from the dangerous minefield. I suppose I’ll leave it up to you to decide if this makes Mined-Out superior or inferior to the well-loved (but worm-free) Windows version.

Following Mined-Out were a number of similar games which expanded on the minesweeper concept, such as the fun sounding ‘Relentless Logic’ (1985), named from this melodramatic passage from the game’s introduction:

You have two tools at your disposal. One is a mine detector. It will tell you how many mines are hidden in squares surrounding you. You also have one of the most important attributes known to man ... RELENTLESS LOGIC.

The game’s premise is simple: you are a private in the US Marines who has inexplicably been given the critical task of delivering a message that will save the United States from oblivion. In order to deliver your message you must successfully negotiate a minefield. It’s a shame that Windows Minesweeper doesn’t provide a context for your dangerous (and seemingly never-ending) task, but I suppose there are only so many times a low ranking private can save the lives of 313 million citizens before the concept becomes tiresome.

Screenshot from Relentless Logic
Image courtesy of www.minesweeper.info/wiki

The Windows iteration of Minesweeper (a.k.a Winmine) was written in 1989 by Microsoft employees Robert Donner and Curt Johnson. Johnson had already written a rudimentary minefield game, and gave the source code of this program to Donner who had expressed interest in testing out Windows’ programming capabilities. In the early versions of the game, the mouse cursor was represented by a foot which became a bloody stump if the player clicked on a mine. The game was released as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack games suite in October 1990 (which, according to the packaging, is ‘the most fun you can have with Microsoft Windows!’). When Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in April 1992 Minesweeper (and Solitaire) were included with the operating system, and a global addiction was born.

No caption necessary.
Image courtesy of http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki

Fast forward to 2013 where I am now playing the newest version of Minesweeper included with Windows 7. I’m sad to say the latest iteration has lost some of the minimalistic charm of the earlier versions. The dull grey grid has been ditched and replaced with shaded coloured squares, and the default (and frankly terrifying, especially if you inadvertently left your volume up too loud) 8-bit bomb sound has been replaced by an OTT animation of the mines exploding. But the most grievous loss is the familiar smiley face overlord who would turn wide-eyed and open-mouthed every time a move was in the process of being made. Sadly, the proficient sweeper is now robbed of the thrill of watching old mate smiley face throw on a pair of chic sunglasses when the minefield is successfully swept. And we call this progress?

Windows 7 Minesweeper, sans the smiley face.

At this point you may or may not have questioned the inherent political incorrectness of a game involving land mines. The International Campaign to Ban Winmine was created by Sergio Chiodo in 1999, and the organisation cited that the game was offensive to landmine victims and those who risk their lives to clear real life minefields. In the latest versions of the game Microsoft enabled an option for sweepers to play on a field of daisies instead of land mines. The UN has also used Minesweeper inspired posters to alert people to the unknown number of active landmines around the world which claim 65 casualties every day. 

Tiptoeing through the tulips in Windows 7.

About the only thing that hasn’t changed in the latest version of Minesweeper is that I’m still rubbish at it, and it took me several (i.e. twenty five) attempts to win a game on Beginner level. It’s a game that requires patience, attention to detail, the ability to recognise patterns, and a grasp of basic number logic. I am terrible at all of these things. My current win percentage is 8%. My main strategy—a term which I use liberally—is to click around the board at random until I either step on a mine or uncover enough squares to make the game appear winnable. At this point I apply some rudimentary logic and flag about half the mines before becoming stuck/bored and clicking at random again.

Never underestimate the power of the internet to bring people with similar interests—no matter how seemingly niche—together. For most people, Minesweeper is a brief respite from the drudgery of day-to-day existence, and the packaging of the original Microsoft Entertainment Pack reflects a game built for casual play: ‘No more boring coffee breaks! Frustrated when your calls are put on hold? Minesweeper will keep you entertained.’ But for some, Minesweeper is serious business. A small but passionate community of Minesweeper players gather together on the Authoritative Minesweeper website, and the site’s collection of high scores, rules and in-depth discussion of what on the surface appears to be such a basic game is indeed authoritative to the point of obsession. The site also includes a wiki which is surprisingly detailed and includes invaluable tips, most of which proved my suspicions that there are indeed proper ways to be a good Minesweeper player and ‘clicking randomly’ is not one of them.

Due to my penchant for being fascinated by highly passionate/obsessive people—a penchant positively correlated to the apparent unimportance of the passion/obsession in question—I spent a lot of time reading through the Authoritative Minesweeper forum. The community has coined a variety of Minesweeper related words and concepts such as ‘chording’, a playing technique using both mouse buttons which increases speed; ‘3BV’, an abbreviation which relates to the number of left clicks required to clear a given Minesweeper board; and ‘Elmar Syndrome’, when a player equals their personal best time many times without breaking it—so called after German player Elmar Zimmermann who was stuck on his own personal best time for 13 months before finally breaking it.

On the forums you’ll find people discussing many things to do with the game, but like any group of competitors, the primary discussions revolve around skill improvement. The best players sweep at an alarmingly rapid rate, so much so that at first I was suspicious that the high score videos posted were fake. After reading pages of tips and strategy on the forum, as well as estimations of time spent playing the game daily (upwards of four hours in some cases) I could only conclude that these players are indeed that good (as shown in the video below).

On the forums, advice is given (whether asked for or not) on how to improve sweeping times, including these tips from user EWQ Minesweeper, who suggests ‘lubricating your mouse to reduce friction [seems sensible], increasing screen resolution to see more squares at once [ditto], using a flatter mouse to reduce air drag [um…], sitting closer to the screen to see squares sooner [hang on…], and using a shorter mouse cable for faster clicking’ [I’m pretty sure physics doesn’t work like that].

The community takes competitive play extremely seriously. As with any competitive pursuit where personal prestige and records are involved, cheating occurs. Those accused of cheating will be asked to provide further evidence of their sweeping skills, and anybody caught bending the rules will usually be shamed out of the community. Common cheating tactics include using Photoshop to doctor screenshots of record scores or using ‘solver’ computer programs. Suspected cheaters’ videos are scrutinised heavily by other players; one cheater was only caught years after the fact when another player was watching the record video ‘for fun’ and noticed an inconsistency in the playing board numbers. Other cheaters will go to great lengths to make their cheated scores seem legitimate, meaning that they may spend months posting fake times before claiming a new record.

To combat cheating and to regulate the playing field so that record times could be comparable, in 2002 a group of players established The Winmine Congress. Consisting of an elected group of hard-core sweepers who corresponded via email, the Congress attempted to provide a governing body for competitive Minesweeper players. The Congress followed a surprisingly familiar political trajectory and was accused of lacking transparency by other community members. It was eventually superseded by the establishment of the International Minesweeper Committee in 2005. The IMC has banned the use of Microsoft Minesweeper from being used for official rankings because the game has several bugs and known issues which drastically increase the potential for players to gain an unfair advantage. The total actions of Congress and the IMC remain vastly outside the level of detail I wish to cover in this piece (and probably a level of detail that few people will ever require), but if you’re curious, webmaster Damien Moore has gone to great lengths to preserve its history and detailed accounts of the groups’ actions can be found over at the Minesweeper wiki page.

Minesweeper adheres to Bushnell’s Theorem (coined by Nolan Bushnell, whose diverse resume includes being the founder of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese) which states that good games should be easy to learn but difficult to master. Anybody with basic numeracy skills can understand the rules of Minesweeper very quickly, but the difficulty increases when the size of the playing grid increases. This allows players to scale their own difficulty levels and to keep challenging themselves as they become more proficient.

Furthermore, Minesweeper is an ego-destroying, soul-challenging, mind-numbing one player game. There’s undoubtedly something uniquely satisfying about competing against your own inescapable flesh, especially when you’re so bad that the only person you would remotely have a chance of beating is your own losing self. Even if you’re not quite at the level of investing in the most streamlined computer mouse, Minesweeper is compulsively addictive. A big reason for this has to do with the game’s simplicity and minimalism. The real challenge of Minesweeper lies not in finding mines, but rather in finding a way to force yourself to stop.

Many thanks go to Damien Moore et al. over at http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/ who are responsible for the wonderfully detailed record keeping which formed the basis for my research for this post.

God himself could not sink this phone

So my Nexus 4 arrived and it’s beautiful. The screen is amazingly clear, and Android 4.3 is superfast. In terms of performance, updating from my Blackberry to this is like going from a shopping trolley to a fighter jet.

Speaking of Blackberry, take a look at this graph from the Wall Street Journal:

Sourced from http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/09/20/blackberrys-slump-in-4-charts/?mod=e2tw

So while all the Cal Hockleys of the smartphone world were paying people lots of money to take them to safety on an iPhone, I clung to my Blackberry and listened to the band as we slowly went down. Thankfully I was resourceful enough to find a boiler door (i.e. my Nexus) and everything worked out okay (except for that person who I was clinging to it with, who may or may not have been my true love and is now decomposing at the bottom of the ocean ... ).

Is it weird that I find Blackberry’s demise sad? I guess I had a vested interest in the company because I had my Curve for so long. I still think it was a good phone too, but age (and my parent’s toilet) got the better of it. Now Blackberry are kind of like that best friend you used to hang around with in Grade Four but haven’t spoken to for a while, and for me it’s as if I’ve just found out they have a terminal disease. What do I do? Wish them luck I suppose, and hope they don’t me ask for money.

So now I’m doing that thing where I’m finding any excuse to use my phone. Someone casually asks what time it is in London? LMGTFY. I’ve also sent a fair few messages that have low or zero relevance except that they’ve been an excuse for me to play around with the (very fun) Android swipe typing feature. If you know me, you probably suspect that you’ve gotten one of these messages in the last couple of days, but then again it’s probably hard to distinguish them from all the other unneccessary shit I send.

I admit the novelty of the new phone is slowly wearing off. Which is a good thing, because I’m still not quite sure how I feel about being so attached to it. But since I can actually talk to my phone and have it understand me I’m leaning towards classifying it as a sentient being and therefore a friend rather than an object. I’d be tempted to go so far as to claim it as a co-dependant relationship but it’s quite clear I need my Nexus much more than it needs me.

Yes I’m scared of becoming a Google fanboy; no I don’t want to talk about it

Two days ago I took the plunge and ordered a Google Nexus 4. If you know about the history of me and my Blackberry, or my penchant for keeping things until they are absolutely, embarrassingly unusable, then you’ll understand this is kind of a big deal.

Basically, my Blackberry is still ‘usable’ in the most literal sense of the word, but ever since I dropped it in my parent’s toilet (unsoiled, thankfully) using it has been even more of a labour of love than usual. Added to my general Blackberry woes of low (i.e. non-existent) compatibility and infinite loading screens was a trackball which steadfastly refused to do what I wanted it to. This is fine if you don’t use the trackball often, but back here in tactile user interface land you must understand that the trackball is the essence of the Blackberry Curve.

My trackball kind of works okay for the most part, but it has become incredibly sensitive; especially in the scroll up/down department (I don’t want to think about what’s causing it to malfunction since its Cousteau-esque adventure). This stops me from scrolling up and down message histories, meaning that I have to commit entire conversations to memory and then hope that my replies cover everything. Too bad if someone refers to a message they sent a couple of days ago, that baby is gone. In a Zen kind of way it’s somewhat refreshing to be constrained to the present, but in an actual day-to-day want to live successfully kind of way it’s shit.

As attached as I have been to my Blackberry, I’m excited about my new phone. I've been checking the order status hourly and telling anybody who'll listen about my purchase. My childish glee may say something about the attractiveness of Google products, because generally I try not to let material objects determine my emotions. This is clearly a lie if you read my Blackberry post, but in any case as someone who tries not to buy into new product bullshit I’m somewhat embarrassed about the daydreams my imminent new phone has induced. 

I’ve been imagining the endless range of apps and games I’ll be able to download, and how I’ll suddenly become infinitely more valuable to my friends, because while they’re all struggling to load an Apple maps page on their iPhone I’ll be whizzing around with the greatest of ease on Google maps (or, you know, something else that people do with smartphones. I wouldn't know). Even stupid stuff that I know I don’t care about—such as the Nexus always being the first phone to receive Android updates when they come out—has me pinching myself as if I’m in some sort of wonderful dream.

And this is all before the phone has even arrived. At the time of writing, the order status is still ‘Pending’*, so I technically haven’t even paid for it yet. Which leads to the real reason I’m worried. I’m not even a Nexus owner and already I feel like I’ve become a massive Google tool. I’m going to be that person at parties who starts talking about all the reasons their semi-obscure phone is vastly superior to everybody else’s and have all sorts of little stupid apps to prove it. I’m going to be that person in the supermarket using Google Goggles to take photos of all the products and then read other Google tools’ reviews of them. I’m going to inadvertently check the wrong box while browsing my Gmail account and sign away my power of attorney to Sergey Brin.

This is troubling because I’ve often been asked why I don’t own/want an iPhone. I usually mumble something about not wanting to be a mindless drone to a giant corporation. And then I go and buy a Nexus. I suck.

*It's probably frozen because they've discovered I use Hotmail.

Zen and the Art of HTML Coding

Part of the course I’m currently doing involves editing content for digital media, and a component of this has been to examine/experiment with some HTML and CSS coding.

I remember learning a bit about this as a kid. Dad showed me how to make a really basic web page and to jazz it up with some colour. It was fun because it was a bit like playing with Lego – you’ve got certain finite elements to use but you can combine them in pretty much infinite ways.

Don’t believe me? Check out the CSS Zen Garden. It shows how different designers can create hugely unique webpages with the same building blocks. It’s awe-inspiring to see how many different ways the elements can be combined. 

The idea that so many different designs can come out of one set of building blocks is appealing, for it mirrors nature. Think of snowflakes, or even human beings: all made up of the same basic elements but no two are exactly alike.

It’s not a coincidence that only recently I have come to find the ‘art’ of HTML quite profound. I’m currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which (among many other things) talks a lot about the inherent beauty of the structure of things, even seemingly ‘scientific’ things, and how art and science really aren’t as far removed from each other as some people like to pretend.* Good web design is an art form – a highly technical, specialised one, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less artistic.

I like the idea that creativity is an expression of each individual person, and this can be found through a Renaissance painting or a website. In every web page a small part of the web designer’s worldview is expressed.

With a basic understanding of HTML you can view the source code of sites and begin not to see just web pages constructed by strings of code but choices. Every page element has been deliberately placed and coded by somebody. There is a reason that a search box is placed where it is, and why it has a grey border instead of a pink one.

I’ve made an effort to be more mindful about encounters with art that I’m having every day. The Google homepage, from a design point of view, is a thing of beauty. Twitter’s ability to present so much information in such a clean format is elegant. The fact these sites just ‘work’ without us ever really thinking about it, is a credit to the designers and their ability to harness the craft of quality HTML coding.

*Apologies to Robert M Pirsig for distilling one idea from a quite complex book for my own purposes. And for stealing his title.

Me Fans Are Stupid Pigs

Of course you aren’t. I would never really say anything like that about my reader(s). But the fact I can offend you in the post title shows how solid our relationship is. We joke, we have fun, we’re striving for a better future. It’s as if we’re characters in a New Radicals song.

What I’m trying to say is that August marks three years of this blog. That equals 40 posts of me trying to put into words how I feel about the internet and digital culture in general. How was it for you? I thought it was okay, and am rather surprised I’m still at it. Granted, during the three years there have not necessarily been three years’ worth of posts (2012 is devoid except for an excited mid-winter three post flurry) but there’s hopefully been something that you enjoyed, or at least read past the first sentence before spending six hours on Buzzfeed instead.

So, three years, and what do I have to show for it? Well, according to the ever-reliable Blogger stats, during that time the blog has had 4,147 pageviews. I was going to look up the Alexa ranking for this but apparently they don’t have enough data to rank the site, which is fairly telling in itself. Also keep in mind that the reality is probably bleaker than that: for some reason there are page hits from May 2007 (i.e. three years before I started the blog) and there would be many times when, despite me checking the ‘don’t record your own pageviews’ box, I have definitely inadvertently inflated my own numbers (logging in from other computers etc.) Don’t feel bad for me though, this is the life I chose.

It was a little cringeworthy reading through the old stuff. Partly because most of my writing back then makes me sound like a pretentious wanker, but mostly because it reminds me that in three years I’ll be looking back on this post and concluding that I’m a pretentious wanker. In any case, the archives are open. Go for a browse if you need more proof.

Before I let you go, let me just have an attempt at explaining the name. ‘The Digital Printing Press’ is meant to refer to the internet itself, rather than my blog. I don’t see my blog as the defining disseminator of information in the digital age (4,147 pageviews), but obviously the internet is going to have incredibly long-term social, cultural and even political implications. That’s what I’m trying to get at. I’m not much of a fan of the name anymore, but since I can’t think of anything else to change it to, for now it stays. I at least hope you enjoy the new banner photo. Maybe one day I’ll go all Kentucky Fried Chicken and change it to ‘DPP’ and hide my shameful beginnings under the soothing power of the acronym.

Fun Facts

Most popular post: Macquarie and Me – I would never have thought a shoddily composed ‘scientific’ dictionary test would be so engaging.

Least popular post: Let’s just say it only had five views. Try and guess. That’s a fun game for you.

Most popular tags: ‘internet’, ‘social’, ‘Facebook’

General highlights

-I used the word ‘conformance’ exactly once, with devastating effect.

-I implied the headquarters of ‘Powerband’ were in a dilapidated Quonset hut.

-I wrote a love letter to my Blackberry and have since dropped it in the toilet (it still works)

-I pretended I was William Randolph Hearst and didn’t get sued by him or Orson Welles

-I edited/vandalised television actor John Howard’s Wikipedia page to make a point.

-I didn’t make a single typo.

Three more years! Three more years!

Pen Licence

For the first time since high school I’ve tried to start regularly handwriting again. I like the way it feels more pure and direct, with no chance to backspace and rewrite. The action of handwriting is smoother and less mechanical than typing. I like the way that it’s an uninterrupted conduit between my head, my arm and the page: the act of writing becomes a real, physical thing. Feeding words into a computer can feel formless and inconsequential—a 2000 word document takes up virtually the same amount of space as a 200 word one—whereas the exercise book I’m writing in is slowly being filled by words, by ink. The words I handwrite have weight and texture; I can run my hand over the page and feel the indentations of the pen marks.

And the words are unmistakeably mine—my handwriting may be messy but generally it’s legible (at least to me). And the pen itself and the type of book aren’t important—there’s actually something kind of satisfying about using inexpensive implements to create something that has more worth (well, hopefully) than what was used to bring it into existence.

I presume that I type faster than I handwrite, but my thoughts don’t really lose pace with my hand as I thought they might when handwriting. Rather the words seem to be stored in my head and as I write they form on the page while my brain remains a couple of words in front. A bit like breathing, it becomes difficult if you over think this process; you sort of just have to let it happen. I learned yesterday that the eye actually skims ahead while reading, so that if the light was suddenly switched off the brain knows the next couple of words ahead of the one that it is ostensibly ‘focused’ on. I presume something similar occurs when writing.

The above is a pic of the first draft of this post as it appears in my exercise book. It’s kind of strange to stop and think about the huge difference between those words appearing on a page in a notebook, which is personal and private, and then seeing those words (or at least a version of those words) up on the most public and pervasive sphere in existence—not that the fact it appears now online necessarily means that it will be read by any greater number of people. But the fact I post this means I am accepting of the possibility that someone may read these words, whereas when I’m handwriting there is a fairly implicit knowledge that nobody will see it (when I was writing initially I didn’t have the idea to put the picture online, thus I was certain that the words on the page would remain private). In some ways it’s a shame that novels etc. are not presented as handwritten manuscripts, because while fonts can be wonderfully emotive they are a barrier between the writer and reader—an extra layer that must be navigated and interpreted.

This may be why I find it so intriguing to see an author’s handwritten notes on pages—it is as if I’ve been invited to a greater level of intimacy with that writer. Indeed, handwritten notes are intimate even if not from ‘famous’ people, e.g. birthday cards or postcards. Handwritten words approximate something much closer to ‘thought’ rather than writing: most people’s handwriting is scrawling and imperfect, arguably like the nature of thought itself. It retains an ‘immediate’ or ‘fresh’ quality, direct from the source. Furthermore, handwriting is always unique—typed letters rob individual writers and their thoughts of their personal nature. Is this loss of personality in handwriting something we don’t miss anymore simply because we’re so used to typed characters? Style and voice still count for a lot, of course—good writers have personality and presence even when working in Courier. But the barrier remains, and perhaps deprives us of a deeper, more biological (even biomechanical?) connection with the writer that only handwriting can provide. 

(at)hotmail.com

Lately I’ve become increasingly self-conscious of my email address, in much the same way that I’m sure people who wear tan shoes with white socks sometimes question their choice before convincing themselves that they look great.

Of course, when I first got my Hotmail address, there really wasn’t much of an alternative—Gmail wasn’t available and, more importantly, a Hotmail address was a prerequisite to use MSN messenger, which was the real reason I signed up for one in the first place. I’m not sure I used Hotmail to actually send an email for quite some time. 

Thankfully, my current primary Hotmail address is respectable in the sense that it’s my name with an underscore, as compared to my first ever Hotmail address which was black_betty42@hotmail.com. This was due to my thirteen-year old self’s love of cheesy pseudo-metal rock music and, I hasten to point out, was selected before Spiderbait came out with their radio-friendly cover and destroyed what little underground credibility the address had. Such is the tragicomedy that is my online life.

The black_betty address is now my version of a dodgy industrial waste disposal site, in which I direct any and all junk and assume that by the time somebody has to deal with the consequences I’ll be long dead. I’m not sure how legally binding blog posts are (this may set a precedent) but I hereby leave my black_betty42@hotmail.com to my next of kin. The password is tattooed in my left armpit.

Part of the reason I like my current Hotmail address is that it’s a small fuck you to the overarching dominance of Google. Sometimes I wake from a nightmare in which Google has somehow programmed all the people with Gmail accounts into a zombie army intent on taking over the world and building a giant Death Star-esque satellite in the colour and shape of the Chrome logo. The only people left to resist the G-zombies are Hotmail users and we end up saving the world and are rewarded by Bill Gates with extra powerful spam filters for our accounts.

The @hotmail thing is getting a bit embarrassing though. The ‘hot’ part alone probably automatically puts any email I send in most people’s spam folders. It just doesn’t look quite as professional as @gmail and smacks of the early-2000s when email was still a bit of a novelty and not used as much for actual serious things like job applications and banking. I thought when Hotmail.com recently became Outlook.com (because obviously Microsoft were embarrassed too) that I would get a much more palatable @outlook address, but Microsoft were very generous and, in order to allow a ‘seamless upgrade’, let me keep my Hotmail address. Bastards.

But I’m averse to switching to a Gmail account, partly because of the aforementioned apocalyptic scenario but mainly because, like most people, I’m lazy and scared of change. Yes, I know that there are relatively easy ways to set up email forwarding so that I won’t really even notice the difference, but the truth is, despite it being sometimes embarrassing, I’ve grown quite fond of my Hotmail address. We’ve been through some good times together, and apart from the one time it allowed itself to be compromised by a mystery hacker, it has never let me down. 

Besides, I’m kind of hoping one day that I’ll be the last person on earth with a working Hotmail address, and perhaps I’ll become some sort of anthropological touchstone, like those people who are the last to speak a certain language, and when they die are mourned because they take with them a small but significant piece of human history. 

Words for Nerds (part one)

Some thoughts on a few words that have different or additional meanings in the early 21st century. I have included the Macquarie Dictionary’s ‘common’ definition of these words for comparison. Where more than one definition exists I have tried to list the one that seems most appropriate to the online/digital/new/additional definition.

stalk – v. ‘to pursue or approach game, etc.’ Derived from the Old English stealcian – to move stealthily. Stalk generally has perverse AFK connotations but has become almost acceptable online in the modern era. To stalk someone (esp. on Facebook) can, these days, often be a legitimate forerunner to in-person contact. In this sense, modern usage of stalk seems to have regressed closer to the original meaning of the word: an AFK stalker often isn’t necessarily ‘stealthy’, because they make their presence known through letters, calling, following closely etc., whereas stalking online indeed retains its surreptitious element. Of course the online stalker often feels the need to make a confession of their activity to a close friend, perhaps as a way to relieve a guilty conscience.

friend – n. ‘Someone attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.’ The Macquarie lists ‘friend’ as a noun but in contemporary reality (esp. since the days of Myspace) it can also be used as a social media verb, as in: ‘I friended them’. Although English already has a verb for this (to befriend) it seems needlessly formal and unsuitable for the fleeting and/or typically nominal nature of Facebook friendship. Also note the addition of a new verb; unfriend, officially used by Facebook (and not listed by the Macq.). It’s worth mentioning that Facebook uses the terminology ‘add as friend’, that is, the ability to perform an action and add someone to the stock of your friendship pools. Friendship thus is robbed of the often gradual relationship construction that occurs in real life; there are no grey-area ‘I know of them’ acquaintances on Facebook. The distinction is binary: you’re either friends or you’re not.

follow – v. ‘to watch the movements, progress, or course of.’ Macq. doesn’t provide the online version of follow in its Twitter sense, that is, to subscribe to somebody’s feed. In terms of social media, following exists somewhere between stalking and friendship. Follow and friend have similar uses as a verb but different connotations: ‘following’ somebody is much less intimate and professes no personal relationship with that person, but to follow someone is a much more transparent act than stalking them. Also, like Facebook, Twitter has introduced ‘unfollow’ into the vocabulary.

cloud – n. ‘a visible collection of particles of water or ice suspended in the air, usually at an elevation above the earth's surface ... [or] any similar mass’. In the 21st century the word refers to the cloud, the mass of data particles accessible by users, a great cloud hovering above, at any time threatening to rain bits and bytes upon us. Just like its meteorological cousin, the cloud appears to exist and is technically definable but cannot be physically grasped. However, unlike meteorological clouds, the user (i.e. us) performs an important part of cloud formation by sending particles up instead of passively receiving precipitation. The printed Macq. doesn’t define cloud in its computer sense, but does note the phrase ‘to have one’s head in the clouds’ as being ‘divorced from reality; be in a dreamlike state’ which, when considering the 1000-yard stare of smartphone and tablet users on public transport, arguably comes close.

search – v. ‘to go or look through carefully in seeking to find something’. It’s a well-known observation that the term ‘google’ (no caps, generic trademark rules apply) is used interchangeably with ‘search’ these days, but I don’t think they are truly synonymous. To google something seems almost fleeting, an act of speed. ‘I’ll google it,’ means to find a quick answer to binary questions, such as ‘Where is the bar?’ or ‘Who is the President of Guatemala?’ To my mind, ‘searching’ implies more in-depth techniques to resolve questions which may ultimately be unanswerable or have multiple answers: one googles the address of a particular bar but searches for a place that serves half-price Martinis on a Wednesday night.

stream – n. ‘a body of water flowing in a channel or bed, as a river rivulet or brook’ or ‘a continuous flow or succession of anything.’ Part of the beauty of a natural stream is the tension of knowing that it is potentially finite; the data stream, however, seems assured, continuous, unending—there is no beauty, mystery or tension. These days online streams seem to have been replaced by deluges, e.g. check your Twitter deluge. Stream can also be used as a verb in the internet sense, as in to tap into data, to take (usually for free) and redirect it for your own personal gains, à la AFK practices of damming or redirecting natural streams for energy/moneymaking purposes.

window – n. ‘an opening in the wall or roof ... commonly fitted with a frame in which are set movable sashes containing panes of glass.’ The act of using the computer is itself looking through the window of the screen, which is then (even on a Mac) divided into further windows which can also be looked through. We are in effect looking through a window to see more windows, and while the screen is generally inert and inflexible the windows in the window are moveable, resizeable—able to be opened and closed at whim to let through information/data/thoughts/feelings. These windows are easy enough to open but can be difficult to shut.

Fragment (consider revising)

I’m not very intimidating. I’m slightly underweight, bespectacled, and have a red beard which generally induces furtive giggles rather than horrified screams. But there is one sphere of my life in which people seem to be daunted by my presence, so much so that they cower before me and beg forgiveness.

Earlier this year I started an editing course at Uni, and I’ve noticed that people have become increasingly self-conscious of the things they send to me via email, text or Facebook. I’ll often receive a message and then have it followed up by apologies for bad grammar, spelling or questionable word usage.

I suppose people think that because I’m considering a career in editing that I’m ‘always on’, seeking any and all syntactical errors in order to flex my editorial muscles. It’s like when people are scared to talk to psychologists because they assume they’re constantly analysing everything they say.

I don’t mind this newfound power. I like to imagine people in front of their keyboards, trembling as they type, hoping that they don’t mess up this most important of messages. They must think that I’m sitting, eyes closed, waiting for the message tone of their ill-fated communiqué. As soon as I hear it, my eyes fling open, I brandish my (digital) red pen like a sword and annihilate their feeble attempt at the written word. Like a warrior in a B-grade gladiator movie, I yell maniacally as I cut swathes through shoddily constructed sentences. ‘Passive voice! Pronoun without antecedent! COMMA SPLIIIIIICE!’

My secret shame, which isn’t really a secret at all once you’ve received a few replies from me, is that I’m guilty of being as sloppy as anybody when it comes to constructing messages. I’m a big believer in the formula that, when it comes to online communication, the hierarchy goes something like clarity > speed > grammatical correctness. There are instances when proper grammar is necessary (even beautiful), but the majority of text messages and emails don’t fall into this category, especially if time is of the essence. If I need to meet you under the big tree in two minutes, I’ll happily bash out something like ‘meat big tree 2 min’ and assume that, despite the horrific nature of that sentence, you’ll know what I mean.

Ninety per cent of the time I don’t even notice other people’s errors until they send a follow up email two seconds later, apologising for their use of ‘toward’ when they think perhaps it should have been ‘towards’, and then implore me not to think that they’re an idiot. But once a person has drawn my attention to their poor grammar or spelling, I can’t help but judge them for it, in spite of all my own shortcomings. I’m as petty as they come in that regard, and as soon as I think I’ve got an advantage over you, I’ll exploit it. Your best bet is to proofread your messages very carefully before you send them to me, and pray that I don’t notice all your misplaced clauses, lest I lower my estimation of you.  

The Lost Art of Sending an Email

Hi there,

Want to know what I find beautiful? Well formatted emails.

You know what I mean. There's nothing worse than opening an email and seeing a huge slab of text, forcing you to do some heavy lifting to find out exactly what the sender is trying to say. 

Conversely, the best emails start with a nice little greeting, then a bit of an introductory sentence, followed by a couple of meatier lines or paragraphs. Yet the way these emails are written, you don't have to work hard to find meaning. Your eye is guided through nicely. 

They even look good from a distance, possessing a nice symmetry as they go from short to long to short again. I'd hope that if people saw my emails from afar they'd be able to tell that I was a good emailer without reading the actual words.

There might be a little one line joke or something to finish off the email and reward the recipient for reading.

All that's left is the sign off,

and it's done.

Gonna Browse Like it's 1999

Your mission this week is to watch this video:

Did you pick the surprise ending? You probably did, firstly because there are only a handful of companies in the world that are presumptuous enough to attempt to link an entire generation with their product (Coca-Cola and Microsoft among them) and secondly because the product name is right there in the video title.

The first time I saw the ad I was at an advantage because I had no idea what it was for. In fact I was quite enjoying the video until the last seconds when the infamous ‘e’ was revealed and I frantically tried clean my eyeballs with sandpaper. Ads are frequently turning to the surprise brending (brand + ending = brending) and it’s an especially useful technique when you want to get the consumer on board before they realise what a horrible thing it is you’re trying to sell.

Column Five, the advertising agency responsible for the ad, have uploaded on their blog an interesting dissection of their creative process. It’s interesting not only because it gives you an insight into the mechanics of designing a successful ad campaign, but also because it provides priceless examples of advertising jargon such as:

To ensure the video was both newsworthy and shareworthy, our creative team worked closely with our strategic communications team in developing the concept with Internet Explorer.

I love this sort of thing. It is my dream to one day to be a member of a ‘strategic communications team’ whose job it is to develop concepts. In order to showcase my skills to any prospective employers, I’ll demonstrate that I understand advertising by translating the above sentence into English:

We paid some people to make Internet Explorer appear less shit.

If you want to hire me you can leave a comment at the bottom of the blog. My demands are that I work from home and get thirty weeks of paid holiday per year.

Make no mistake, selling the latest version of Internet Explorer in 2013 is a tough gig. Despite the fact that IE still holds a significant market share—mostly due to its widespread use in the corporate world where office computers are preloaded with the software and the user doesn’t get a choice—Explorer is definitely uncool. It has suffered from speed and security issues and has been severely hampered by sleeker and more user-friendly browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome.  It is—as Microsoft have gone to a lot of trouble to point out—an outdated product.

Whether or not the new Internet Explorer 10 actually is an improved product is somewhat beside the point of the campaign. Column Five realised that even if Microsoft had managed to develop a product that was much closer to the level of its competitors, years of brand damage couldn’t be undone by a hard sell along the lines of ‘Internet Explorer 10 is NEW and BETTER and you should try it!’ And so they turned to the tried and true advertising technique of blurring the line between product and consumer emotion. As Greg Foyster notes in his article on advertising, there came a point in the twentieth century when ad companies had realised that instead of selling products based on their inherent features, they could make a lot of money by ‘[linking] the consumption of material goods with non-material needs, which were endless.’ The result is an ad like ‘Child of the Nineties’, in which Column Five and Microsoft aren’t selling you Internet Explorer—they’re selling you nostalgia.

I’m guessing that probably close to eighty per cent of the people reading this blog were born sometime between 1985 and 1995, thereby making us ‘children of the nineties’. For most people, the memory of childhood is pleasant—an innocent, carefree time unburdened by the stress of adult life.  I’m sure there are at least a few objects in that ad that you distinctly remember owning, using, wearing, or playing with. The hyper-realistic images presented in the ad help transport you back to a seemingly less complicated, happier time.

Column Five and Microsoft hope that this nostalgia will get intertwined in your brain with Internet Explorer when you watch the ad, and even if you don’t start using the browser, you hopefully will have started to change your perception of it. As Column Five themselves note, ‘that’s the impact we wanted more than anything: a reframing of IE’s relationship with Gen Y.’ Since the 1980s modern advertising has been as much about selling you a brand as it has been about selling you a product. And in this case the brand is of primary concern anyway, because you don’t actually have to buy IE10—it’s available for free. It is brand perception—not price—that has a major influence on your decision to use the Internet Explorer or not.

To an extent the ad has been successful. It has struck a chord with many tech bloggers and online commentators about Microsoft’s ‘creativity’, and has also given the company a great starting point from which to launch IE into the 21^st century. But I do wonder whether the campaign will achieve its longer term goal of actually getting people to use Internet Explorer. Browsers are such unobtrusive things when they work well and many people only made the switch to other browsers when Explorer became virtually impossible to use. To this end, if you’re happy with your current browser, and the new IE offers a similar experience, why would you bother to switch back? Microsoft have done a good job of attempting to wipe the slate clean and starting again with IE, but if they really want people to embrace the browser in the future they will once again have to become trendsetters and not simply copycats of already successful products. The effectiveness of the nostalgia approach is limited, and somehow I can’t imagine Microsoft waiting another thirteen years before they attempt to make Internet Explorer appear ‘cool’ again. 

H4CK3D

This morning I awoke to a true 21st century nightmare—my email account security had been ‘compromised’ (you can thank the military for that euphemism) and my good e-name had been soiled in order to sell some sort of working-from-home scam. Slightly shaken, I duly changed my passwords and performed a virus scan on my computer, which made me feel like a character in a Tom Cruise technothriller.

Just as late 19th century Britons had a vague sense of unease over what seemed to them an inevitable invasion from Germany, so too do I have an underlying anxiety of the consequences if my online world were to be breached. Unfortunately the British unease resulted in wonderful literature like H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds; the best you’ll get from me is a blog post in 12pt Verdana.

I actually don’t particularly like using the word ‘hack’ in this case, as it seems too violent for what happened. As far as I can tell no bank or other sensitive details were obtained. For me, true ‘hacking’ is when somebody changes all your passwords so you can’t login (bad), drains your bank account (worse) and likes and comments on hundreds of Facebook photos of people you barely know (tragic). But I can't really think (or be bothered to think) of such an efficient way of describing what happened and so you can safely assume that every appearance of ‘hack’ within this post—including the title—was forced upon me against my will by the Laziness Fairy that lives on my shoulder. 

Although I escaped with relatively little ‘real’ damage, the spam was rather embarrassingly sent out to my parents, close friends, bosses and real estate agent. It would therefore appear the hacking program had some sort of algorithm that selected frequently used email addresses; but it also obscurely chose people I’ve either emailed once or have not spoken to in years. So apologies to the membership department at the Melbourne Football Club, and also to Victorian Legislative Council member Greg Barber (I can’t even remember what I emailed him about—something filled with pent-up second year university rage, no doubt).

In any case, the level of embarrassment was about the same as walking around for half a day with spinach stuck between your teeth. Some people obviously notice and don’t say anything, yet others are kind enough to quietly pull you aside and hand you a toothpick. Certainly not mortifying, but it’s not really the kind of attention you want to draw to yourself. Thankfully for all concerned the spam was an offer to increase your income and not your genitalia.

Although the only thing that was truly hurt was my ego, there is still a sense of unease about being hacked. It’s forced me to re-evaluate all the information I have floating around out there, and come to terms with the idea that anybody determined enough could probably get to it. One of the main issues we now deal with is our complacency with the online security. This is especially true for members of my generation, who grew up alongside the development of the internet, and quite often made choices as teenagers about email and social networking accounts that still affect our adult lives. Even as adults, do many of us take our security all that seriously? I would guess not. I know many people who use the same password across multiple accounts, including the same password for their social media as for their banking.

The reality is that for a few days (weeks if I’m lucky) I’ll have a heightened sense of my online security, and be more careful about where and when I access personal information. I’m careful to a certain extent anyway, but I do worry that before long I’ll slip back into complacency and possibly leave myself open for somebody to do some real damage. As with any break in—online or otherwise—the worst feeling is that somebody I don’t know went through my stuff. I can’t decide whether the fact that in this case it was probably a computer makes that notion more terrifying or not. Alongside my general anxiety of my personal information being compromised, I am resigned to the fact that humanity is destined to meet its ultimate fate at the hands of machines. I’m self-important enough to be worried that hacking my Hotmail account is Phase One of their sinister plan.

Macquarie and Me

Disclaimer: If you’re not into extreme things like dictionaries, obscure words and timed challenges then I suggest you stop reading now.

For those of you that have decided to stick around, you’re in for a treat. I was recently forced to buy a physical copy of the Macquarie Concise Dictionary for a university subject I’m taking. You can imagine how unhappy I was to be spending money on what I viewed as an unnecessary lump of pulp, since all the information contained within (and much, much more) is available (for free) online. I was even more unhappy when I realised that dictionaries come in editions (because language evolves, forsooth!) and so the book I bought was only going to be unnecessary for a couple of years before it became unnecessary and outdated.  Combine all this with the inevitable crushed vertebrae that I’m guaranteed to sustain from carrying it in my backpack to class and you’ll understand that my new dictionary and I were off to a shaky start.

Partly in the interest of science—but mostly in a petty attempt to validate my theories on the pointlessness of paper dictionaries—I decided to conduct a quick test to see how much quicker using an online dictionary really was, and if there were any benefits of using a paper dictionary at all. I used a generator to create two lists of ten random words, one set of which I would look up via the Macquarie Online dictionary, the other via my new Macquarie Concise.

I’d highly recommend not stopping to think too long about the fact that I actually spent ten minutes of my life in a dimly lit room conducting this test, because frankly the whole thing is kind of weird and pathetic, and if you overthink it then you’ll feel sad for me, and the last thing weird pathetic people like me need is your pity, thank you very much.

On to the science. I vaguely recall learning how to structure a proper report in Year 8 and so I will proceed with the time honoured scientific tradition of winging things based on half-remembered facts.

Aim: To see if using an online dictionary is quicker, more efficient, and generally better than a paper dictionary.

Hypothesis: The online dictionary will be significantly quicker.

Method: I already outlined the method above, but for posterity’s sake here are the two sets of words:

Online: tiara, meal, ova, tidied, nab, kilogram, splint, began, laser, award

Paper: bomb, outcrop, smoke, era, noble, muscle, luncheon, ape, clean, finance

Results:

Online: 1 minute 26 seconds
Paper: 3 minutes 18 seconds

Using the online version was therefore more than twice as fast as using the paper version.

Discussion: At first I thought a minute or two didn’t seem like much of a difference, but it’s the relative difference between the two that count. If I were to extrapolate these results over the course of a lifetime I would end up spending extra years looking things up in a paper dictionary as opposed to online. You may think this wouldn't matter to somebody who went to the trouble of conducting this test in the first place, but even I have to draw the line somewhere.

It’s worth mentioning that using the paper dictionary quickly highlighted how unfamiliar I am with the order of the English alphabet. I actually had to quickly sing the song in my head every time I got to certain tricky spots such as ‘l-m-n-o-p’ and ‘q-r-s-t-u-v’. If somebody would like to comment and reassure me that they have a similar experience when using a dictionary that would be great, because otherwise I am genuinely worried that I have a learning disability which was never properly addressed when I was a child and has since been shoddily covered up with more impressive—but frankly less fundamentally important—topics like the Russian revolution and Kuhn’s paradigm theory.

Now, for the unexpected shock, which will no doubt have people writing angry emails to me demanding I retract my words (actually, I’m not going to pretend I get emails about this blog, because nobody has ever emailed me about it. I really appreciate you reading it though, and that means more to me than a thousand angry emails ever could). Despite my initial hatred for it, and the fact that it’s really inefficient, I found that I enjoyed using the paper dictionary. Before you accuse me of being a Luddite (I think I accuse myself of being a Luddite much more than anybody ever has or ever will. I have a blog called ‘the Digital Printing Press’, for god’s sake) I’d like you to hear me out.

First of all, there is something to be said for the actual physical presence of the dictionary. Stephen King observed that words have weight and my Macquarie—containing all the words—naturally has a lot of weight, both figuratively and literally.* As mentioned, this is a hindrance when toting it around (which is why ‘toting a dictionary’ is a verb-noun combination used about as often as ‘milking a gnat’) but kind of satisfying when it’s sitting on your desk. The thing just appears definitive and authoritative.

Speaking of authoritative, another nice thing about owning a dictionary is that you know, to a reasonable extent, that the information contained within it is reliable and consistent. I shudder to think how much work must go in to actually writing/editing a dictionary, and because of this I’m sure that the information contained within is taken very seriously by serious people in tweed jackets and plaid skirts. Contrast this with the compilers of online dictionaries, whom I imagine to be croc-wearing, Hackey sack-kicking layabouts much more interested in gaining revenue from ad click-throughs than the accuracy of their lexicography. 

The issue of consistency and accuracy is particularly important when you’re talking about words used in a particular region, like Australian English. I personally would not have a clue if ‘dictionary.com’ or ‘thefreedictionary.com’ is better for Australian users, and trying to find out this information on their websites was tricky and seemed to defeat the whole purpose of quick and easy service. Granted, the Macquarie dictionary is available at a price online (I conducted the test under a free trial subscription) and it has the benefit of being updated constantly, but if you’re the sort of person who pays for an online dictionary subscription then I imagine you’re also the sort of person who likes to have a dictionary sitting on your bookshelf anyway. In short, I suppose online dictionaries are generally good for quick, casual use, but if you’re serious about words then it’s hard to go past the authority and consistency of an actual book.

Another reason I liked the paper format was that it had great hidden benefits. The nature of flipping through pages when you’re using the dictionary means that you often stumble across great words accidentally. During the course of the challenge the word ‘feneckapants’ caught my eye. According to the Macquarie, it is ‘a colloquial term of endearment, used especially with children’, but I would imagine that if you try and call a child a ‘feneckapants’ you’re in for some distressed looks from the children’s parents, not to mention the child itself. I actually don’t think the meaning of feneckapants is as important as just seeing the actual combination of letters that make up the word so close together. It’s as if all the cool, edgy letters of the English alphabet (like f, a, k and p) have gotten together and formed a sort of supergroup. These are the sort of opportunistic discoveries that online dictionaries just can't provide.

I’m surprised (no doubt you are too) that I’ve been able to wring a thousand words out of dictionary usage so I will wrap things up here, and leave you with the thought that anybody who uses a paper dictionary may feel good doing it, but they ultimately risk being called an antiquated pretentious idiot. Personally I think this is a little unfair, as I take umbrage at being called ‘antiquated’.

*Okay, so maybe not all the words because I actually have the ‘concise’ version, but the title is really just an in-joke by lexicographers who no doubt think it is hilarious to label a 1,500 page tome ‘concise’.