Posts Tagged ‘freenode’
Turnings on the path of life
I’ve been meaning to blog about a few things that have happened lately but I don’t seem to be able to settle to do anything that requires some expenditure of effort at the moment. Even simple e-mail replies to friends are taking days because I just don’t seem to be able to get them done. My posting frequency on here has returned to the pathetic once a month on average. It’s rather rubbish, but I suppose given that it’s now the holidays it’s alright and I hope to be back to my usual form by the time 2008 draws to a close. I’ll have to as of course the usual January exams loom and I shall be revising hard for those. For the past year my school has had a building site on the field as a new school is constructed as the current one really is falling apart. We’re finally moving into it after this Christmas holiday, but said exams are due to take place in the mobile buildings that form part of the old site. According to a charismatic religious education teacher I know, the one that my maths exams are to take place in has been recently nicknamed ‘the fridge’ so we’re going to have an interesting time with that.
One reasonably major change that happened recently is that I’ve stopped living at my father’s house during the week. Since my parents split up about ten years ago, my sister and I have switched between the houses with a very complex system that no-one else seems to understand, spending time at both during weekdays and then alternating over weekends – and carrying or sending piles of stuff (mainly school books) back and forth. For years I have got on poorly with my father and have tried to get away from living there whenever I can, and now that I’ve turned eighteen my mother says she isn’t going to stop me anymore and is happy for me to live more at her house during the week. So now I only go to my father’s alternate weekends. I’m obviously not entirely happy with this turn of events: it’s a bit rubbish that I dislike living with one of my parents and my sister thinks I’m being very selfish. I don’t think this is a very fair assessment. I’ve done it because the general atmosphere in the house is rarely pleasant as my father and I clash continuously over trivial things and this is especially true on week nights when I’m dashing off to ringing, coming home late due to after school activities and trying to get homework done. My sister and I have an even worse relationship (always have) so to me it makes sense to try and defuse this situation where I can by spending less time together. You may well disagree, and as I say I don’t think it’s ideal. But given that I think in the long run people will have a pleasanter time during the week, and it’s not as if I’m leaving entirely, it makes sense to me.
Something else that has happened is that I’ve been asked to leave freenode‘s staff team because I clearly don’t have the time these days. I think I should have voluntarily given up the responsibility given that I knew this myself, but I just loved the place and the people too much to do that. So now I’ve been retired and told that if I do have more time in the future, I can always reapply. I’ve had a fantastic time with freenode. I’ve met some great and dedicated volunteers who I am definitely not going to lose touch with, and I’ve learnt a great deal about dealing with the more difficult users of the network. I do hope that I’ve been useful in the other direction and freenode has benefited somewhat. I will be sticking around the place and I am still on the network for SilentFlame and Wikimedia channels. I am going to try and focus more on my Wikimedia responsibilities with the extra time: I have jobs that are ideal for the amount of time I have and I shall very much try to do them effectively.
Far more exciting than the above notes is that I received a letter yesterday to inform me that I’ve got a place at Oxford at the college I wanted (Balliol) to study Maths and Philosophy for four years starting from October 2009. I just need, of course, to get the three As at A-level required but assuming I don’t do anything really stupid I think I’m on target to get this. This is fantastic news for me – I feel like I can do anything if I’ve managed this. After going down there to stay for three/four days to be interviewed about ten days ago, I really could imagine myself having a great time there. All the students looking after us were very nice, even if the sixth formers were loud and constantly trying to show off a lot of the time (I befriended two quieter Maths and Philosophy students and lo and behold all three of us got in!). The environment is of course very impressive in terms of the buildings, and the college library is such an amazing place to learn in. Accomodation is basic but fine and the food is okay but is served in a hall of epic proportions. The Balliol tutors who interviewed me were also lovely and I can imagine learning a great deal from them. And of course there are things such as the Oxford Union Debating Society, THE place for debating; all the usual university societies such as gaming and lots and lots of ringing; and it’s not at all a bad city to live in. After such a long time of waiting around and wanting to know I can finally imagine myself there with reasonable surety that it’ll happen.
The interview experience as a whole is a very convoluted affair. The amount of variation between Oxford and Cambridge and between the individual colleges is pretty astonishing at first. I stayed from Sunday evening until Wednesday evening and the vast majority of this consisted of sitting around and reading or revising material for interviews. Everyone gets an interview at the college of choice that they applied to and then at least one other at another college in order to try and give no disadvantage to applying to particular colleges which may, in any individual year, find themselves oversubscribed compared to others which may not have ‘enough’ applicants. The problem is that such extra interviews are arranged in a very haphazard way. When I arrived, the noticeboard holding interview details was about a metre wide and hadn’t extended too far with sheets of paper covered in names and times for various subjects. However, with people arriving and departing all the time and more and more interviews being arranged, the board spread out to the right rapidly, filling the common room’s noticeboard gradually across – including duplicates making it necessary to read everything to ensure you didn’t miss something aimed at you. I was also rung up when further interviews were arranged. By the end there was a dismissal notice up for all the maths and related courses but there was a special section at the bottom asking me to stay a bit longer to be interviewed again.
I ended up being interviewed by three colleges, but two of these had seperate interviews for maths and philosophy so I was interviewed five times in total which was rather a lot. Interviews themselves varied very widely. In maths, in one I was asked reasonably difficult but not exactly brain-mashing questions; in the second I merely chatted about recent topics studied and about the entrance test (which apparently I did pretty well on but I wasn’t told my percentage score); and in the third I was guided through a very hard problem (attempting to define a function of n that would tell you the number of zeroes on the end of n!; got there too). In philosophy, I was asked several technical questions relating to the problem of induction, and some interesting political and linguistic questions that I probably shouldn’t share on the web as they do like to reuse them.
And now it’s Christmas day and thanks to the above I have the best present possible. It’s been a very eventful year and it’ll likely be an equally eventful January, but I’m enjoying the fact that I have an absurd amount of family members over for Christmas right now before I start thinking about such things. In our tiny little three bedroomed semi, we have fifteen people: two grandparents, three aunties, two uncles, five cousins, one father and one sister to give their relations to me. My father’s girlfriend’s house is being used to house some and others are staying in a local bed and breakfast. I went ringing this morning while they all strained at the leash of present opening (I pointed out upon entry that calling people to worship is the whole point of the day *nods*) and now I’m at home writing this and am going to put the turkey in the oven for the non-vegetarians (i.e. the other fourteen people) while they’re out for a walk, which after walking all the way up to and back from my mother’s (fifty minutes each way) to get my Oxford letter yesterday and walking all the way to the cathedral this morning (about an hour) I think I’ve done enough.
Time is a lot more valuable than it used to be
I have long accepted and understand that the sixth form can and should be a lot more work than before as the level of study is significantly higher. That has finally become apparent at school in terms of difficulty where things are taking a step up (although due to personal skew and paranoia this is not apparent in history) at last. I am happy to be challenged and to question and to explore, however PC that may sound. However, sheer quantity of work has been proving a problem lately as I am not finding time for a lot else, as described in my previous post. This can’t be good – I should be doing things other than homework in an evening and could do with a longer weekend. It has been suggested that the initial burst will level off once teachers are satisfied that pupils (or ‘students’…) have got the message about what the sixth form is, and it does seem to me that things are getting a little less, but it is hard to tell if this is just me getting used to it. It is meaning that I am having to make changes to the things I do.
On an aside here, I am not always one hundred percent sure that I am doing the right work. I do things very throughly, wanting to do well and to get as much into my head now so that revision is a lot easier. But often for history I have reams of notes I am told to make and I don’t know if I am ramming too much detail down and wasting my efforts. I plan to speak a teacher about what I should be doing ideally.
For starters, I am unable to do little things on top of what I already do when they would normally be easy to accomodate. For example, there is a club starting at school for a board game called ‘Diplomacy’ or some such – I would love to go, but I really can’t devote another evening to an activity such as this. Another example of this problem is the National Cipher Challenge. I am on a team for that (we are actually doing rather well; will post on it when the competition gets serious and those in it for a laugh are eliminated from the ‘everything right so far’ group) but it is interfering with things already. This isn’t a major issue, really, because all it does is inconvenience me when I have the afternoon of the day the challenge is released off. But the point stands that I am having difficulty fitting small projects or events around what I do any more. Having to say no to constructive activities is not something that I am used to. Another example of this issue is the distinct lack of progress on the new SilentFlame website.
The above makes sense during term time but my involvement in my online projects, Wikimedia and freenode, has also been suffering. Wikimedia works a great deal over the medium of mailing lists, which we find very practical for discussion as they work with all sorts of configurations, assuming people use plaintext e-mails, which they do. I am subscribed to a lot of these lists but have them filtered in three directions: labels called wmfe for external and public lists, wmfi for internal, closed-subscriptions things I am involved in (not strictly true – I have at least one list on there that is not mainstream but that I do need to keep up to date on everything that passes through) and wmwp, which is for project-based lists such as for Wikipedia itself, rather than the parent organisation Wikipedia. Out of these, only wmfi actually arrives in my inbox where the rest get auto-archived. This is because I couldn’t and wouldn’t particularly want to keep up with all of those lists, so I have the important ones coming into my front view. The problem is now that even with this reduced quantity of lists, I simply do not have enough time to read everything that goes through. Or if I do, I am not reading efficiently enough. Even though I find most of the things on the lists fascinating and worth reading, I find that sometimes I have just had enough of the threads and am reading for the sake of reading. This is a waste of time – but what do I do? I do need to know what is going on within Wikimedia.
My specific jobs with Wikimedia are a different matter. I am ensuring that individual responsibilities will always be completed as I have been entrusted with them, and I have no problem getting them done. However, as with real life situations as described above, I cannot take part in smaller events and discussions if I wish to as I must focus on certain tasks. It makes things a lot less fun than they used to be where I could really get into my work. With freenode I am simply not doing as much work – this is fine as I do have a reasonably excuse, but it doesn’t help keep our image of availability of staff very strong because I am not around as much. However, I am still involved in the community there. Despite this I have had to give up one job, that is the verifying of group registration contact information, which is a shame. On this note, swhitton@freenode.net is no longer a valid e-mail address for me, so please do not try to use it if you are one of the few people who does. It was for group registration, so I do not need it anymore.
Throughout this I am always so thankful that I have my hosted Gmail account set up. Gmail is wonderful for keeping things organised and being patient when I don’t read my mail there 
I don’t think I would manage without it and so I am so grateful for the service from Google and the fact that they recently increased my 2GB limit (it does not go up continuously as it does on @gmail.com traditional Gmail. The conversation grouping, labels and filters do it for me.
It has been suggested that I don’t actually use my time as well as I could, and this is something that I have considered. It could be argued that by engaging in small-scale activities I am wastingtime, but I try to be consistently productive in choosing what to do. However I often dither between activities and become rather distracted and messy while not focussed on an activity, which is a really bad thing as I allow time to slip away. This I need to sort out – if I am not doing something, I should be reading e-mails or some such. I need to force myself into more productive habits, but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. I will keep trying.
Education, education, education
I have been holding off writing a post to report on how the new year has gone because I have been waiting until I was sure a particular issue which I will describe later was sorted. Now it has been, I am very happy with my situation: it is clear that my expectations during the latter part of last year that the Sixth Form would be a lot better than the previous five years were correct and I am finally enjoying learning again. I have said for five years that I “enjoy school but not secondary school” and this is no longer the case. I am enjoying my time now. There are so many things that are better.
For those who don’t know me, I am taking maths, further maths, history, physics and philosophy (shortened on my timetable to the unpronounceable “phphy”. I was also aiming to take politics but this wouldn’t timetable. I am glad that I was persuaded not to persue it as really, the work would have been too much and I wouldn’t be doing a lot else (such as writing this entry). However, it seems my attempts to do six AS levels caused the single politics group to have an awkward timetable and then I didn’t actually join it, as the teacher has been telling her pupils (or students – I generally object to this term but since officially we are and can join the NUS in the Sixth Form, I am being somewhat less verbal about it). My subjects are working out very well; maths is great but I hope it doesn’t get too hard once we end the rehashing of GCSE material. My marks are looking fine at the moment. Physics is also interesting but a lot of it is just the same as mechanics lessons, which is good for reinforcement but can also be a bit boring and repetative at times. However, after Christmas, we go on to “Waves, Particles and Quantum Phenomenon” which is very exciting. After Christmas, I will have half an A-level in maths, which is an interesting thought.
History isn’t quite so positive. For two major assessment points, that is the end of Y9 and of course my GCSEs, I have underperformed in this subject and I’m never quite sure why. I do find in intermediate tests and thought I enjoyed it; I certainly find the study facinating. However, I seem to like it less and less as I am always unsure that I am doing the right amount and critically the right direction of work. A-level is different to GCSE – there is more knowledge and more essay writing, but at least it is only one question per exam. While I suspect I will drop this after Y12 (I don’t know yet of course, but out of the four it seems the most likely right now) I do intend to work hard to get that A, even if I am not very good at it. I am always unsure of my ability and this doesn’t make it too much fun.
Despite the fact I have only had two taught hours of it and thus it is hard to make a fair judgement, philosophy is looking very good at the moment. The group is interesting and wants to engage and is a pretty good size, so it should be a way to add some arguments to my convictions… There is at least one arrogant one in there who can be engaged in debate. Debating within the school is hopefully changing this year too with the return of “Debating X-Treme”, a group for more formal debating. We are pulling in more people from the English department to popularise it and now that Mr Moore-Bridger is finally in every day of the week things are a lot better because as a pupil it was pretty hard for me to organise anything proper. We are having internal competitions to decide on a team to go forward to national things which we miserably failed at organasing before and this is positive. Mr M-B has suggested that we also ask the Debating Society, “the thing which started it all”, to act as an audience and to try and formalise debating more there. My opinion is that this would be great as our own self-developed style doesn’t allow a great deal of depth, but we will propose it to the group and hope they are willing. I have no desire to force it upon them as this would be totally unfair as I am concerned they may not be willing to put in the extra work. But we shall see.
My posts often seem to contain the notion that I am busy in some way, probably because I am writing them whilst thinking “arg, I haven’t updated my blog for a while because I have been so busy”. This is definately the case now and I am completely snowed under with homework most of the time. It is infact rather ridiculus at times in the sense that I don’t do a lot else. At the weekend I only got about six hours, not including my job on a Saturday morning, at home working on Wikimedia, freenode and SilentFlame which seems rather short. However, Tim from my newsagent tells me that they pile it on in the first few weeks to ‘prove’ that the Sixth Form is harder work and hopefully it will ease off. I certainly hope so, otherwise I won’t have a lot of time for my other activities and this will be mad. I have given up Oxfam every week to do it in the school holidays only already and I don’t want to have to give up more. This may of course be because I am putting in a lot of effort, but that represents History where I am working very hard for obvious reasons.
As promised, I will go over the reason that it took me so long to update my blog with school, aside from a lack of time (tonight I have slightly less homework and tomorrow morning free to do it in). Back in May/June, I had been told that it would be requested that I be put in a particular form next year, one with a teacher I knew well and that was based in the library, where I live. However, come the Sixth Form induction I did not get this form and was rather surprised, so decided to immeadiately chase it up, knowing it ought to be achieved before the proper school holiday. I was told that a member of staff had expressed concerns that I was not branching out enough by being attached to the library. Surprised that the member of staff who made the request was seemingly not being listened to, my mother wrote into the school to request reconsideration. For the past three weeks I have been fighting hard for the form change, something which required a great deal of time and effort on my part. But I believe I was victorious through my perseverance and am now where I want to be. I am happy that things will be that bit easier in that form. Everything is sorted for a great year.
Restoring sanity to the masses
It seems my recent reminiscence is shared by a friend David Gerard, who pointed me in turn at Clay Shirky, one of Wikimedia’s advisory board members. As David claims he was, I was mentally nodding as I read through, as the patterns that are described for online communities are ones that I think I have been subconciously noting for some time, as I’m sure many have. However, the theme seems to be that things need to be done before a community is set up in order to avoid problems later on. While Jimmy probably envisioned that a community would arise surrounding the encyclopedia project, it seems unlikely that he and his fellow starters would give it much thought as that was not what they were aiming for. If only Shirky’s essay had been written a little earlier, people might start to notice the tell-tale signs of things going wrong before they got to the point of no return. While Wikipedia trundles on and will probably keep doing so in its current form, it could be so much better if we were to sort out a lot of the problems that the community faces. But either people are powerless to do so (and likely don’t know what to do either, like me), or those who do have that power haven’t got a clue what to do about it, however much they want to.
In the comments following his post David seems to think that the best thing to do is to put the developers in charge as an ultimate authority (something we don’t really have at the moment). He claims they already have a great deal of power anyway. While those who administrate our servers will always have the ability to “pull-the-plug”, for some it will cost them their jobs and really, we are not going to have a developer revolution. Yes, we depend on software to keep us going, and yes the developers control the code and the implementation of it, and yes they have a well-established cabal like the rest of us. But I don’t think an automatic shoulder-load of power to them makes sense because a good coder does not necessarily equal a good leader. Don’t get me wrong here, I have great respect for the devs and what they do (you have to be a really good coder or sysadmin to navigate the mess of our servers, apparently) but at the same time you can’t be good at everything at once, generally speaking. A technocracy isn’t fair.
The problem is that I don’t have any solutions to the problem either, and it seems no-one does. So people pull back from the encyclopedia with a “screw this” attitude into their cabals, they work away at either things above at Foundation level, they move to other Wikimedia projects to write dictionary entries or news articles instead (this is fine, but it may not be what they want to do), or they hide away with articles that get little attention and work quietely. People are only going to keep seeing the attraction of this, with closed mailing lists and IRC channels being so much more pleasant. When you are in one or two the outside community starts to look a lot worse than it used to, as you realise the alternative. freenode staff and helpers have had this problem recently as I describe here, because our own private communities are a lot nicer than the outside, public social channels. Unless we do something soon, more and more will retreat up and out – including me.