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17th December

12/20/2011

I was born on the 17th December. What else made this day special?

Births:

1944 – Bernard Hill, English actor
1945 – Ernie Hudson, American actor
1953 – Bill Pullman, American actor
1972 – Laurie Holden, American actress
1973 – Paula Radcliffe, English runner
1974 – Giovanni Ribisi, American actor
1975 – Milla Jovovich, Ukrainian-born actress
1987 – Bradley Manning, American soldier, leaked information to WikiLeaks

Deaths:

1830 – Simón Bolívar, Venezuelan military leader (b. 1783) (interestingly, he led a revolution on the same day 11 years before!)
2009 – Dan O'Bannon, American screenwriter and actor (b. 1943)
2010 – Captain Beefheart, American musician (b. 1941)
2011 – Kim Jong-il, North Korean leader (b. 1941)

Events:

1718 – Great Britain declares war on Spain.
1777 – France formally recognizes the United States of America.
1790 – Discovery of the Aztec calendar stone.
1819 – Simón Bolívar declares the independence of the Republic of Gran Colombia in Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela).
1837 – Fire in the Winter Palace of Saint Petersburg occurred.
1865 – First performance of the Unfinished Symphony by Franz Schubert.
1903 – The Wright Brothers make their first powered and heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
1935 – First flight of the Douglas DC-3 airplane.
1947 – First flight of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet strategic bomber.
1950 – The F-86 Sabre's first mission over Korea.
1957 – The United States successfully launches the first Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1960 – 1960 Munich Convair 340 crash: 20 passengers and crew on board as well as 32 people on the ground are killed.
1969 – Project Blue Book: The United States Air Force closes its study of UFOs, stating that sightings are generated as a result of "A mild form of mass hysteria, Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetrate a hoax or seek publicity, psychopathological persons, and misidentification of various conventional objects."
1973 – Terrorism: 30 passengers are killed in an attack by Palestinian terrorists on Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport.
1983 – The IRA bombs Harrods Department Store in London, killing six people.
1989 – The first episode of television series The Simpsons, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", airs in the United States.
2003 – The Soham murder trial ends at the Old Bailey in London, with Ian Huntley found guilty of two counts of murder. His girlfriend Maxine Carr is found guilty of perverting the course of justice.
2003 – SpaceShipOne flight 11P, piloted by Brian Binnie, makes its first supersonic flight.
2010 – Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire.This act became the catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution. The success of the Tunisian protests sparked protests in several other Arab countries.

I've always remembered the fact that the first powered flight was on my birthday (70 years before) but never thought to list other stuff.

Food for thought

12/14/2011

Again, an email conversation at work prompted this post today.

" Two centuries ago, a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation: 'A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.' "

- Elmer T. Peterson, The Daily Oklahoman, December 9, 1951

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to selfishness;
From selfishness to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage."

- H. W. Prentis, "Industrial Management in a Republic", 1943

Obligatory Christmas Moan

11/30/2011

What would we be without Christmas, eh? I'll tell you. Richer.

Middle of a recession. Everyone moaning about money (or lack thereof). Prices and bills going through the roof. But we (as a nation) STILL have the money to shell out on Christmas gubbins.

OK, that's out of the way.

It's been a while since my last post. That's because my little world is changing. Amy's pregnant, David is at college (and doing quite well) and Anne is trying to get treatment for a year-long headache. It's actually a year ago today that she was in hospital for it the first time.

She had a lumbar puncture (third attempt) and found out that the pressure in her spinal fluid was DOUBLE what it should be. That's quite scary. It should be about 15 or so, and 20-25 is cause for concern. Hers was at 37.

Amy's just got over a serious bout of morning sickness. She was hospitalised three times to be rehydrated because she couldn't keep anything down. There's a name for it but I can't be bothered to go look it up.

So what's the real point of this post? Good question. For once there isn't one. There's no big message coming. I just wanted to share my news. Not on Facebully or Twatter, but in my own little corner of the interweb.

I suppose the biggest realisation has been that I'm going to be a (step)grandad. That's pretty cool. I need to cultivate the image, so I'm growing out the full beard and might bleach it and dye it grey. That's what grandads are supposed to look like. See, there's a reason why the Christian God is a bearded bloke with snowy white hair, if you ask me. It's because it makes us all think about our grandads.

A small irony is that I suddenly became interested in the garden this summer - something I always remember about my own grandad. Maybe the world was trying to tell me something. Maybe in the coming months I'll start enjoying DIY and cricket.

We also remodelled the living room over the weekend. Amy doesn't feel that she's ready to move out yet (for a variety of reasons) so we need to make space in our tiny house for another life. Amy needs the bigger bedroom so Anne and I are moving into the living room (Amy's tiny tiny box room is too small for a double bed).

So. Big changes. Interesting times indeed.

Creativity

10/31/2011

I'm wholesale ripping off someone else's post today. Not for lack of ideas, but... Oh, just read the bloody thing. You'll get it.

The post is by David Morgan-Mar, an Australian webcomic artist and physicist. He is discussing the creative process behind a guest comic created by his non-comic artist friend Andrew Shellshear.

"The hardest thing about being creative is not coming up with ideas. Coming up with ideas is easy. You can come up with dozens of ideas in a lunch hour. (And we often do.) You can come up with ideas just sitting in front of the TV. We and a group of other friends have a private collaborative idea space on the net, and we're constantly filling it with new stuff.

What's hard about being creative is doing the stuff. You can't do creative stuff just sitting in front of the TV.

Some people tend to look at creative work, particularly things like modern art, or the little projects that people post on the net, and say dismissively, "Bah, anyone could to that. I could do that." But the thing is, they didn't do that. Sure, maybe they had a similar idea some time, but they never got off their backside and actually did it, whereas the person who actually went out and created it... did. It's easy to criticise stuff that other people create. It's hard to create stuff.

Another thing that Andrew has learnt over the years is that after you've made your first creation, it's far too easy to stall and not make a second. As a creator, there is a natural tendency to want to improve, to make things better than last time. But this can easily become a fear. What if your second effort isn't better? What if it isn't even as good as the first one? When you start thinking like this, you can get caught in a trap of demotivation and apathy [...] you should not fear making something worse than what you've made before.

[Andrew] expresses it as follows:

"It's better to have something that nothing, even if that something isn't better than the previous thing - in other words, first quantity, then quality."

As someone who has created over 3000 comic strips, published daily (except for a glitch or two near the beginning), I could not agree more. Yes, some of those strips weren't great. I created some very good ones, and I followed up with ones that weren't as good. But I followed up. There was always another strip being made. And by continuing to create, some of those later strips turned out to be pretty good too. If you want to create, if you feel the urge to make something - create! Make something! It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't even have to be very good. The important thing is you're now a creator, and once you've done it once, you can do it again, so long as you don't feel the need to make sure everything you do is better than before.

Because the thing is that the more you create, the better you become. It's a natural thing - it just happenes over time. And here's the second point Andrew made in his recent e-mail:

"If it sucks, keep going. It definitely won't get better if you don't work at it. I think people treat creative endeavours too much as something you are innately good at, rather than as something you need to work at."

When I started, I was not very good at making comics. Now, well I may not be great, but I'm definitely better. People who are good at art - they're not good because they were born able to draw or paint. They are good because they spent a lot of time doodling and sketching in the margins of their schoolbooks, drawing stuff whenever they got the chance, painting rubbish, then picking up the brushes and painting again. And again. And again. They're good because they're not afraid of sucking at what they do, and that lets them keep going, rain, hail, or shine. It's okay to suck at something creative, and to keep doing it regardless. Because with quantity behind you, quality can follow. If you're not creating things then... you're just not creating anything.

In an alternate universe, there's a copy of you who just got a creative idea.

Which one of you is going to stop watching TV and go do it?"

Good, deep, meaningful stuff there. And much of it strikes a chord with me, hence why I've plagiarised it. but it's credited, so it's OK.

Internet = society

10/18/2011

A conversation with a friend from work today resulted in me typing out something I usually say at meetings about web sites. Since it was typed I though it would be good to record it for posterity.

“Once a website is live, the work is not done. The real work is, in fact, only just beginning if you want the website to be successful and dynamic. Someone will have to monitor, update and repair the website all the time. There will be no thanks for it and there will be no recognition for it. There will be no management support for it and there will be no job created to do it. If you’re lucky, then x months or x years down the line there MAY be some recognition, but don’t count on it.”

The conversation we were having was that society at large tends to follow the same misconception that once something has been thought of and implemented, it will manage itself. Projects, communities, technical advancements, banks etc. Everything needs some sort of management by people who KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING or it'll fail.

Just a small point really, but one that tends to be true and tends to be forgotten.

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