I am not a Twitcher!

Three times this week, people have referred to me, in good faith, as a “twitcher”. I’m not, and I blame lazy tabloid hacks for creating this misconception, which I will now try to lay to rest.

I am a birdwatcher or, if you will, a birder. I like to be outdoors, with my binoculars and sometimes a telescope, to watch birds. I like to travel to different places, such as hills or the coast, to see different kinds of birds, but I also like to watch common birds, like Starlings, in my garden, or as I move around my home city.

[Picture: Common Starling, Sternus vulgaris, from Creative Commons, by Paul Stein; licenced under Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.]

I like to know their life histories, and to read about and study their behaviour, their conservation and their contribution to human folklore.

All together, this brings me a great deal of enjoyment, and helps me to de-stress after spending long hours at a desk in front of a computer, or in stuffy meetings, in my day job. I try to pay some of it back, by sharing my interest with non-birders, and beginners, and by doing voluntary work for the RSPB and the West Midland Bird Club, of which I’m a trustee.

Occasionally, I am pleased to chance upon a rare bird, or to travel a short distance to a local reserve, knowing one is present. The interest in seeing a new species this way is sometimes tempered by the fact that, if it’s a rare vagrant from Siberia or the Americas, it is likely to be exhausted and near death. At the very least, it will never get home or find a mate.

Twitchers, on the other hand, enjoy an extreme, compulsive type of birding, whereby they will hunt out such rarities, competitively, often travelling great distance, at great cost, and enduring considerable discomfort, to do so. They will often prefer to see one bird of a new species, involving a day or more travelling, over the opportunity to spend time looking at a whole range of other, more common birds (which some of them refer to as “trash birds”). There have been cases of twitchers paying hundreds of pounds to charter a boat or plane to get them to The Scillies or The Shetlands, and one once famously left his own wedding reception and missed the start of his honeymoon, to chase after a rarity.

Unlike some birders, who disdain them, I make no judgements about twitchers, and I know that some are very knowledgeable, and are just as likely as other birders to be involved in voluntary and conservation work.

But I’m not one of them. I trust that that’s now clear.

Triple-tag references to Twitter posts

Further to my post about a protocol for Twitter posts, you can also triple-tag blog posts, Flickr images and similar web utterances, which refer to a specific twitter post (or status) like this: twitter:status=1975532392 – and this post is tagged with that!

[Update: See also my Flickr screenshot of a Twitter post, triple tagged with #twitter:status=1828036334 to reference the same post.]

Poorly lawnmower

One thing that really irks me is when an otherwise working product fails because of one component which is not easily fixed or replaced – “built in obsolescence”, as its called. It may be good for the maker’s bottom line, but it’s bad for mine; and really bad for the environment.

I have a Black & Decker GR280C rotary lawn mower, which still works, but the blade keeps spinning loose once it’s switched off – as it decelerates, the bolt which holds the blade in place unscrews.

Can anyone suggest how this can be repaired, or a part replaced, before I have to junk the whole mower?

Twitter: canonical URLs and Protocols

On Twitter, I’m twitter.com/pigsonthewing, but in my preferred twitter client, Dabr, I’m dabr.co.uk/user/pigsonthewing. We might refer to the former as the “canonical” URL.

There are a number of other web-based Twitter clients, too, and people using them can find my twitter stream, variously, at:

• m.twitter.com/pigsonthewing
• accessibletwitter.com/app/user.php?uid=pigsonthewing
• m.slandr.net/user?id=pigsonthewing
• tweetree.com/pigsonthewing
• m.tweete.net/pigsonthewing
• hahlo.com/user_timeline.php?user=pigsonthewing
• www.twitstat.com/m/index.php?userid=pigsonthewing

Likewise each of my Twitter posts, or “tweets”, has a URL on each of some of those domains (though not on all, it seems). For example:

• twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/1828036334
• dabr.co.uk/status/1828036334
• accessibletwitter.com/app/status.php?1828036334
• m.slandr.net/single.php?id=1828036334

are all the same tweet. We can again regard the first of them, on twitter.com, as canonical.

Anyone using one of those services, and who wants to link to my profile or one of my tweets will either post the URL as it appears in their service, which isn’t much use to people not using that service, or expend time and effort translating the URL into the generic, canonical, Twitter format — which even then may not be of much use to someone using something else.

In the short term, we could do with some recognition of this fact from the above services, which might provide a link to the “standard” or canonical URL for that tweet; and when doing so on an individual page, should link to it using rel="alternate" and/ or rel="canonical".

Better still, there could be browser tools (such as FireFox plug-in or Greasemonkey script) to do that task, automagically.

Ultimately, though, as Twitter becomes ever more widespread, perhaps we need a pair of protocols for linking to Twitter profiles and posts. Using this, authors would be able to mark up links to me and my comments on Twitter as, say:

<a href="twitter:pigsonthewing">Andy Mabbett</a> said <a href="twitterpost:1827840116">something witty</a>.

Then, each reader could set their computer to open those links their choice of browser-based or desk-top/ mobile phone client. The setting to do could even be changed in the installation package for such tools, to aid non-technical users.

Footnote: if you know of another URL for my Twitter stream, please let me know!

Dates and coordinates in HTML5

I’m grateful to Bruce Lawson of Opera for alerting me to discussion of the <time> element on the HTML5 mailing list (where I’ve posted a copy of this blog post) and encouraging me participate; and indebted to him for the engaging discussions which have led me to the ideas expressed below. So please blame him if you don’t like what I have to say

I’ve read up on what prior discussion I can find on that mailing list; but may have missed some. I’ll be happy to have anything I’ve overlooked pointed out to me.

I have considerable experience of marking up dates in microformats, both forthcoming events on the West Midland Bird Club’s diary pages; and for historic events, on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been a staunch and early critic of the accessibility problems caused by abusing the <abbr> element for things like machine-readable dates (as has Bruce). The HTML5 time element has the potential to resolve that problem, but only if it caters for all the cases in which microformats are — or could potentially be — used.

It seems to me that there are several outstanding, and overlapping, issues for <time> in HTML5, which include use-cases, imprecise dates, Gregorian vs. non-Gregorian dates and BCE (aka “BC“) dates. First, though, I should like to make the observation that, while hCalendar microformats are most commonly used to allow event details to be added to calendar apps, and that that use case drove their development, they should not be seen simply as a tool to that end. I see them, and hope that others do, as a way of adding semantic meaning to mark-up; and that’s how I view the “time” element, too. Once we indicate that the semantic meaning of a string of text is date, it’s up to other people to decide what they use that for — ”let a thousand flowers bloom”, as the adage goes.

Use-cases for machine-readable date mark-up are many: as well as the aforesaid calendar interactions, they can be used for sorting; for searching (”find me all the pages about events in 1923″ — recent developments in Yahoo’s YQL searching API (which now supports searching for microformats) have opened up a whole new set of possibilities, which is only just beginning to be explored). They can be mapped visually on a “SIMILE” or similar time-line. They can be translated into other languages more effectively than raw prose; they can be disambiguated (does “5/6/09″ mean “5th June 2009″ or “6th May 2009″?); and they can be presented in the user’s preferred format (I might want to see “5th June 2009″; you might see “June 5, 2009″ — such presentational preferences have generated arguments of little-endian proportions on Wikipedia).

hCalendar microformats are already used to mark up imprecise dates (”June 1977″; “2009″). ISO8601 already supports them. Why not HTML5? Though care needs to be taken, it’s even possible to mark up words like “today” with a precise date, if that’s generated real-time, server-side.

The issue of non-Gregorian (chiefly Julian) dates is a vexing one; and has already caused problems on Wikipedia. So far as I am aware, there is no ISO-, RFC- or similar standard for such dates, other than converting them to Gregorian dates. It is not the job of the HTML5 working group to solve this problem; but I think the group should recognise that at some point a solution must be forthcoming. One way to do so would be allow something like:

<time schema="[schema-name]" datetime="[value]">[date in plain text]</time>

where the schema defaults to ISO 8601 if not stated, and the whole element is treated as simply:

[date in plain text]

if the schema is unrecognised; thereby ensuring backwards compatibility. That way, if a hypothetical ISO- or other standard for Julian dates emerges in the future, authors may simply start to use it without any revision to HTML 5 being required.

As for BCE dates, they’re already allowed in ISO 8601 (since there was no year 0, the year 3 BCE is given as -0002 in ISO 8601). I see no reason why they should be disallowed in <time> elements in HTML5. We wouldn’t, to take an extreme example, say that “<P>” can be used for paragraphs in English but not French; or paragraphs about literature but not music, so why make an effectively arbitrary limit on the dates which can be marked up semantically? Surely the use case for marking-up a sortable table of Roman emperors, should allow all such emperors, and not just those who ruled from 0001AD, to be included?

Coordinates

Another abuse of ABBR in microformats for coordinates:

<abbr class="geo" title="52.548;-1.932">Great Barr</abbr>

Bruce and I agree that this could be resolved, and HTML5 usefully extended, by a “location” element:

<location latitude="52.548" longitude="-1.932">Great Barr</location>

Using the “schema” attribute shown above, for non-Gregorian dates, we can extend that for Martian, Lunar (and eventually other bodies):

<location schema="moon" latitude="52.548" longitude="23.47297">Sea of Tranquility</location>

and for nonWGS84 coordinates, in a manner similar to that I described in my proposals to extend the related Geo microformat.

Now all we need to do is to work-around the abuse of ABBR for durations, in the draft hAudio microformat:

<abbr title="PT3M23S">3 minutes 23 seconds</abbr>

25 things about Andy Mabbett

I’ve been wondering whether anyone would tag me to give “Seven Things you Never Knew About Me”, and how on Earth I would come up with that many. My friend and colleague Emma Routh tagged me on Facebook in a similar exercise, but requesting twenty-five factoids!

For the benefit of those of you not on Facebook (where I’ve already tagged another 25 victims), here they are:

1. I come from a long line of horsemen (following the paternal line). My grandfather was a cavalryman in India in the 1920s, then delivered bread from a horse-drawn cart. His father was a carriage driver for a wealthy Birmingham family, before that, my ancestors were stablemen for a Duke; and were from Fairford in Gloucestershire. I’ve contacted someone called Mabbett whose family has been in New Zealand for generations, but also harks from Fairford.
2. I love flying and watching or reading anything to do with aeroplanes. I had an hour piloting a helicopter as a 30th birthday present, I’ve been up in a microlight, and I sweet-talked my way onto the cockpit of a commercial airliner for the landing at Birmingham International Airport on the return leg of my first flight (to Amsterdam) in 1989; yet I haven’t flown since a business trip to Dublin in 1996.
3. I’m a pacifist.
4. My spelling is appalling. I particularly have trouble using double letters when I should not, and vice versa. This is, apparently, typical of people of my generation, who were taught to read using the “Initial Teaching Alphabet” (ITA) system, which had no double letters. Nonetheless, I’ve always been a good and voracious reader (my reading age was over 16 when I was 9), and could read “proper” English while still being taught ITA. Forbidden, as a child, to read at the meal table, my mother says I would read sauce-bottle labels.
5. I am a published writer: I have written two books on Pink Floyd (the first an update of a previous work by Barry Miles; the second all my own work), contributed to another, and written articles on the same subject for Q and Mojo, among others. When Pink Floyd were inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Seattle, I wrote the programme notes. I was subsequently invited to the induction ceremony in New York, but couldn’t go as I was in the middle of buying my house. My second book is a set text on a university course in the USA.
6. My hair used to be waist-length. Female friends were aghast when I cut it. I sold it to a wig-maker.
7. I used to be a professional computer programmer, in COBOL and suchlike, for Cadburys. There was a time when every bar of chocolate which left their factory at Bournville had been counted by a stock control programme which I wrote. I haven’t coded for many years, though. I’d like to learn to programme again, for the web, perhaps using PHP.
8. My books came about because, for ten years, I published and edited, with friends, a fanzine about Pink Floyd, “The Amazing Pudding“. It was read in every continent except Antarctica (I really must get around or sending a copy to our research station there) and even smuggled behind the iron curtain. We had a subscriber in Kuwait, but sadly I never heard from him after the Iraqi invasion.
9. I hold a certificate in counselling skills. I was encouraged to take my training further, but a job change took my career away from working with unemployed adults and towards on-line work. And how does that make you feel?
10. I absolutely love dogs, but my domestic situation means I can’t keep one. My friends laugh at how often I stop to pat dogs in the street.
11. Through my writing, I’ve met many famous people, and become an unashamed name-dropper. John “Rabbit” Bundrick, the Texan keyboard player with Free and The Who, once cooked me chilli and cornbread. James Galway and the London Symphony Orchestra played just for me (but he still owes me £15). The picture researcher on my first book was Mary McCartney, daughter of Paul. Bob Geldof once called me a cynic.
12. I am a certified first-aider, and once saved a man’s life with CPR.
13. I’ve always done voluntary work. I now do so for the RSPB, such as entertaining children at events (I’m very skilled at making dragonflies from pipe cleaners), and as a trustee of the West Midland Bird Club, for whom I am also webmaster and Birmingham Branch chairman. In my schooldays, I did conservation work at Moseley Bog Nature Reserve. Later, I was a volunteer for the Birmingham Railway Museum, doing almost everything from engine cleaning to shop sales, and from manning a level crossing to booking guest speakers. I also acted as steward on mainline steam trains, looking after the passengers as we went all over the country. The only place I never worked was on the footplate.
14. I only passed my driving test at the third attempt, and have since been involved in four collisions requiring insurance claims. Only one, the most minor, was my fault.
15. I’ve been managing websites since 1994 — the year Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented them founded the W3C (he invented the web in 1991, of course). I’ve been using on-line fora for work and socialising since 1995 since October 1994.
16. I’ve been stalked online for years. If you search the Usenet archives, you will find fake accounts (including someone pretending to be me) announcing that I’m both a convicted “cottager” and a child abuser (I have a police safety-check certificate which says otherwise), have been sacked by the people who still employ me, and more.
17. I collect things. If I had unlimited space, I’d collect everything, but I really have to stop myself, and limit my collecting to books, original artwork showing birds, fossils, and old artefacts related to Birmingham, such as bottles and badges and beermats and coins and 78-record sleeves and… Oh dear.
18. I’m a grammar pedant: I say “fora” not “forums”, and detest the use of “bored of”. I love copy-editing and proof-reading, too.
19. I had the job of demonstrating the World Wide Web to Michael (now Sir Michael) Lyons; the first time he saw it. He’s now head of the BBC Trust, and ultimately responsible for bbc.co.uk, “one of the world’s largest and most visited websites“.
20. The Guardian’s Ben Goldacre once referred to me as “the ever-vigilant Andy Mabbett“.
21. I own an original drawing by Bill Oddie, from one of his books, “Birdwatching with Bill Oddie”. It cost just a couple of pounds on e-Bay, in a job lot with a signed photo of Liberace.
22. I love old street furniture, especially the old cast-iron stuff we have inherited from the Victorian era. One of my achievements was to save the street-urinal from where Birmingham’s International Convention Centre now stands, for Birmingham Railway Museum (though I don’t think they’ve yet re-erected it).
23. I hate bananas. I really wish I didn’t as I know they’d be good for me, and are handy to carry when out in the countryside, but I can’t stand the taste or texture. Even the smell makes me feel nauseous. I love almost all other fruits and, as a child, would usually prefer fruit to sweets.
24. If I go near fresh paint, I can still smell it for a week or more afterwards.
25. The Duke of Edinburgh once trod on my cousin’s toe.

How microformat developments are blocked

The hCard microformat can distinguish between a person and an organisation, by the use of the org property:


<div class="vcard">
<span class="fn">Andy Mabbett</span>
</div>



<div class="vcard">
<span class="fn org">The Red Cross</span>
</div>


but it cannot distinguish between an organisation and a place:


<div class="vcard">
<span class="fn org">The Wembley Stadium fan club</span>
</div>



<div class="vcard">
<span class="fn org">Wembley Stadium</span>
</div>


treating them both as organisations.

On 31 December 2007, I described a way in which hCard microformat could be used to differentiate between hCards for places and organisations.

On 9 January 2008, having received favourable comment, I made a formal proposal to update the hCard specification.

Despite this ten-day gap, Brian Suda, one of the microformats “admins”, the cabal who control microformats, complained that he’d only had two days to consider the matter, and that “More time is needed to fully look over the implications of this change.”

No objections to the method, nor issues with it, have been raised.

Toby Inkster’s superb microformats parser Swignition (formerly called “Cognition”) has supported the method since version 0.1-alpha8, released in May 2008.

One year on from my formal proposal, what changes have been made to the hCard specification, in this regard? None.

Wine REPugnant

I love The Rep in Birmingham. It’s a great theatre, with a noble history (as the civic Birmingham Repertory Theatre), and the staff are invariably helpful and friendly. But I’ve been disappointed recently to see that they’re using six seven “Heatstore” electric heaters (four pictured) outside the building.

Every evening when I pass by there, the heaters are on, over empty tables, with no-one benefiting from them. This is madness, from an environmental and a financial point of view.

I decided to let them know that I thought so, not least since Jon Bounds tells me that I’m good at complaining (I think he meant that as a compliment, and that any complaints I make are always well-founded and cogently-expressed, but I could be wrong…). The heaters actually belong to wine REPublic (see what they did, there?) the trendy wine bar within (and owned by) The Rep, so I phoned and spoke to their manager.

He told me that they’re only [sic] on for three hours each night — we don’t use them during daytime (so that’s the equivalent of having one heater on for 75% of the time 21 hours a day, then), that they are low voltage [sic] and that we aren’t allowed to discriminate against smokers, we have to give them somewhere to smoke.

Which leads me to ask the question, since when has discrimination against smokers been outlawed? Why have no pubs or wine bars been fined for doing so?

And if smokers are protected, why are the Rep allowed to discriminate against them in the daytime, when the temperature is still below freezing?

Winterval – the truth

Mike Chubb got in touch, having seen my responses to falsehoods in the Birmingham Post, about Winterval, to say:

In conversation with Polly Toynbee of The Guardian re the long running Winterval Saga, she suggested that, as the originator of Winterval, I should stand up and put my name to it. So here I am.

I am Mike Chubb, as Head of Events for Birmingham at the time I invented the term Winterval (41 days and nights of festive fun!), fully supported by The Council and the cultural and business community. I am continually fascinated that the term Winterval, ever caused (and still does) such a furore.

Quite simply, as Head of events at that time, we needed a vehicle which could cover the marketing of a whole season of events…Diwali (festival of Lights), Christmas lights switch on, BBC Children in Need, Aston Hall by Candlelight, Chinese New year, New Years eve etc. Also a season that included theatre shows and open air ice rink, Frankfurt open air Christmas market and the Christmas seasonal retail offer. Christmas, called Christmas! and its celebration, lay at the heart of Winterval.

Political correctness was never the reasoning behind Winterval, but yes it was intended to be inclusive (which is no bad thing to my mind) and a brand to which other initiatives could be developed as part of The Winterval offer in order to sell the City at a time when all cities are competing against each other for the seasonal trade.

Each part of Winterval had its own marketing plan… the same as ,for instance the marketing of a brand whose sub brands (ie chocolate)have their own niche marketing.

I do believe that those who took umbrage did it for their own reasons, to sell their own message and of course, everybody got on to their own hobby horses in the process.

I am amazed that no-one could see the simplicity of The Winterval brand, but read into it what they wanted; to further and give voice to their own aspirations/prejudices. It is time for Birmingham to be proud of Winterval and stand up for an innovative initiative that befits an outward looking city.

However on the plus side thank you for keeping the Winterval campaign going and keeping Birmingham in the World’s eye… what fantastic publicity.

As I still have in my posession the original Winterval brochure produced by Birmingham City Council, I can confirm that it does indeed incude the things Mike describes, plus details of a Christmas Carol Concert and pictures of angels. As soon as I can rememer where it is, I’ll post pictures

RIP, Richard Wright

I’ve met and chatted with, or interviewed, every member of the “classic” (1970s) Pink Floyd, apart from Richard Wright. And now I never will.

RIP Richard, the unsung hero of Pink Floyd.