You Are Awful (But I Like You)

Ages ago, we went to Majorca for a family holiday.  We hired a car, toured the island, and one of the places I wanted to visit was Magaluf, the popular package holiday destination.

“Why on earth do you want to go to Magaluf?” I was asked.

“I want to see what it’s like” I replied.

“It’s awful!” was the response.

“Well, in that case I’d like to see how awful it is.” I continued.  This cut no ice, and we didn’t go there.

At a party we went to whilst on the island I brought up the topic with some friends.

“Magaluf is awful!” Was the general opinion of all present.

“In what way is it awful?”  I asked, but no-one had been there.  They hadn’t been there because they knew it was awful, but no-one could explain why it was awful, apart from the fact that it was particularly full of people enjoying themselves.

I wanted to see thousands of people enjoying themselves, and thereby understand more fully what was so dreadful about this, but didn’t get the chance, either on that holiday or another break we had, more recently, on the same island.

For another holiday a few years later three of us went to Marbella.  I wanted to see how the rich lived.  I discovered that they live well, in Marbella.  I spent the mornings jogging around town, not being able to see over high whitewashed walls into the luxurious villas inhabited by people like Sean Connery, and the evenings at restaurants where the cost of even the cheapest items made me weep for my wallet.

One day, I insisted we drive to Torremolinas.

“Why on earth do you want to go to Torremolinas?” Was the question I had to answer from my family.

“I believe that it’s one of those places where thousands of people go to, to enjoy themselves, and I want to see what it’s like.”

“Well…it will be horrible.  It’s an awful place.”

“Have you been there?” I enquired.

“No.  It’s awful.”

But anyway, we went there.  Apart from being really difficult to park within a mile of the beach, Torremolinas didn’t actually seem much different from other places along the coast, apart from being much busier.

“I bet it’s awful in the evening.”  My family said.

“Can we stay until the evening, then?” I asked.

“Certainly not.  That would be awful.”

So we left, and I had to cash in a further travel cheque in order to eat at the local restaurant back in Marbella that evening.

Visiting places that other folk think are awful has always fascinated me, but as is becoming obvious, I’ve had very little opportunity over the years to get to them.

One place that some people would probably think was awful is Haggerston Castle.  It’s an extremely large caravan park and leisure centre, usually totally mobbed, and we visited it several times when the kids were younger.  They loved it!  They loved the swimming pool, which in those days had so many people in it, even first thing in the morning, that actually swimming was completely impossible.  In any case, there was so much chlorine in the water that the last thing you’d want to do would be to submerge your eyes.  Even after paddling, the chlorine oozed out of you for the rest of the day.

The entertainment, put on in the main hall each evening, was brilliant, I discovered, after drinking six pints of the local beer.  I wouldn’t want to guess what it was like if you were sober.  The kids loved the early evening games, organised by some very good kiddy entertainers, which kept them busy whilst I was up at the bar.

The kids also loved the swing park, riding on horses round a small paddock, and the very tacky games arcade.

Jamie came back to the caravan one afternoon really pleased with himself.  What was that in his hand?

“Dad…it’s tickets!” He replied, proudly holding up a two-foot long string of coupons he’d got out of one of the arcade games.  “If you get enough tickets, you can get a prize!”

“Let me see them.  Hmm.  You’ve got twenty there.  If you get another three thousand, you can get a plastic duck.”  I told him, confident that he was too young to understand the sarcasm inherent in my estimate.

“Dad!  Can I get some more money so I can win more tickets?”

“Listen, Jamie, if you really want a plastic duck, I can buy you one.  It will be much cheaper”

“But Dad…you don’t understand…the ducks are FREE when you win the tickets.”

Well – all I can say is that I bet he doesn’t bring up that incident when he goes for his interview for a place at Oxford University to do an MSc in Economics, next month.

Tim Moore is another person who’s fascinated by awful places, and he’s written a book about them, called You Are Awful (But I Like You).

As soon as I read the review in The Sunday Times, I downloaded it onto my Kindle.  Here is a whole book about going to awful places.

I’m really enjoying it, several LOLs even in the first 3%, and I’m figuring out how on earth to get to some of the places featured.

It is a very funny book indeed.

Rubbish stuff from publishers 5

Update 29 Feb:  Maney have updated their website.  Thanks!

I come across loads of errors at various publisher websites, and have decided to post about them as they crop up.  These are commercial publishers that I’m talking about.  Many of them, as we know, make large profits from their customers.  So, shouldn’t they keep their virtual houses in better order?

These are as I found them on the date of this blog post.  This one is #5 in my series

Austrian Studies is a journal published by Maney Publishing (according to the Maney website).
Print ISSN: 1350-7532
Online ISSN: 1350-7532

Click on the ‘View content online‘ link on the Maney home page for the journal and what do you get?  Nothing but a ‘Content not found’ on an ingentaconnect page.

That’s very confusing!  Where’s the content?  Read more closely, and you find out that the content is now on JSTOR.  So there should be a link here, shouldn’t there?

Edinburgh – the most dug-up roads in the world

Roads are like arteries for cities.  Roads get you places.  Cyclists, walkers, buses, cars, trucks, etc, all need to use roads.  The place would grind to a hault if it wasn’t for roads.

Unfortunately, Edinburgh has the most dug-up roads in the world.

I went into town the other day.  I saw miles and miles of roads being dug-up.  The entire length of Princess Street is being dug-up for the second time in three years, because some idiot signed-off the tram work when it was defective and the work had to be re-done.

Haymarket is a mess.  Shandwick Place is closed.  A few months ago they put down some nice new cobbles on Castle Street, and now they’re digging a trench down it!  They’ve been digging up North St Andrews Street for years now.  And that’s only what’s happening in the very centre of town.

Bus routes are diverted all over the place.  Roads are closed for hundreds of yards.  Shops suffer.  Everyone suffers.

You’d think that there would be some urgency to get the work done, but no!  See if you can spot anyone actually doing anything in the two photos below.  Shandwick Place is usually very busy.  It’s right at the west end of the centre of town.

Shandwick Place - looking west

Shandwick Place - looking east

Shandwick Place - a few months ago

It’s actually not that long ago that Shandwick Place was resurfaced, as you can see in the centre of the road above.  Soon after, they came along and dug up the edges where they’d previously put down a green, bus-route surface.  And now they’re digging it ALL up again!

Goodbye ticTOCs – with mixed feelings

I’ve been contributing to JournalTOCs, the free service where researchers keep up-to-date with scholarly papers, since I retired.  It’s a great service IMHO, with a lot of further potential, and many people are finding it useful.  In January, there were record levels of use.

JournalTOCs grew out of another similar service called ticTOCs, and so it was with mixed feelings that I read recently that the ticTOCs service will be discontinued at the end of March 2012.  Just to be very clear about things, JournalTOCs will continue as a top service for researchers.

My feelings are mixed because on the one hand it has been confusing having two similar services in existence at the same time, even though JournalTOCs has many more journal Tables of Contents than ticTOCs and has also several more features (such as search within TOCs, RESTful APIs and email alerts).  The reason why there have been two services is because projects funded by JISC (such as ticTOCs) are mandated to keep available their outcomes for at least three years after the end of the project. After March, there will be only one, freely available to all, journal Table of Contents current awareness service, called JournalTOCs, which will make the situation much clearer (Zetoc is not freely available to all).

On the other hand I’m a bit sad to see ticTOCs go, because I worked on it from 2007 to May 2009 on a .25 fte basis.  I wrote the bid proposal with input from Terry Bucknell, and was delighted when it received funding of £200,000 from JISC.  A lot of work went into the ticTOCs bid – building the consortium, explaining and testing the concepts, getting backing and in some cases money from various organisations, institutions and publishers, etc.  A lot of work also went into the two-year project, but even so, some things remained uncompleted at the end of the project, which was a disappointment.  The delays also had a negative effect on the connected Gold Dust project, which although very well managed, was also not able to fulfill all of its potential as a result.

Both of these projects sat slightly uncomfortably within the JISC Users and Innovation programme, where most of the other projects seemed to be about learning technology.  I remember one programme meeting at York where we had to draw lines to represent the connections between all the projects in the programme on a large sheet of paper – there was only one line going into ticTOCs (from Gold Dust, which itself had a few lines connecting it with other projects that used RSS).  Most other projects had lines going all over the place.

The original ticTOCs concept recognised the importance, to researchers, of keeping up-to-date with the latest publications via the contents of newly published journals, where the results of much scholarly research are reported.

Ensuring efficient and easy access to the contents of the latest journal publications is also, of course, important for journal publishers.  Publishers have an interest in ensuring better exploitation of the latest output of what has been estimated to be a $5 billion+ industry.

Authors of scholarly publications also want their output to be available to as wide an audience as possible, as soon after publication as possible.

Therefore, the ticTOCs work had relevance to researchers, publishers and authors.

ticTOCs was designed to be at the centre of work which would enable the smart aggregation, recombination, synthesization, output and reuse of standardised journal TOC RSS feeds and their content.  There’s a lot in that statement, and it is all still relevant today.

The objectives listed in the bid were:

a)     To create a ticTOCs web-based environment that allows researchers to easily discover, subscribe to, search within, be alerted to, aggregate, personalise, export and reuse standardised Table of Contents RSS feeds and their content from any networked PC at their convenience

b)    To facilitate the exploitation and acquisition (via site license, subscription, open access or purchases) of the full text of articles discovered by users via ticTOCs, in the period shortly after their publication

c)     To facilitate the re-use of aggregated journal TOC content on a subject or topic basis by gateways, subject-based resource discovery services, library services, VREs and other services, where it can be exposed to a wider market, act as a showcase of the latest research output, and deliver relevant content to researchers.

d)    To enable library and information services, publishers, gateways, content aggregators and journal directories to allow their users to embed journal TOC RSS feeds of interest, with one click, into a freely available personalisable web-based interface which will perform as a current awareness environment.

e)     To create advocacy materials on journal TOC RSS standardisation, and thereby facilitate their interoperability and improve the quality of their data.

f)     To develop a business plan to maintain ticTOCs as a self-sustaining service, free to the individual end user, after the project phase

g)    To disseminate the findings of the project to ensure knowledge transfer.

The bits that were not achieved by the project were:

… search within, be alerted to…

…facilitate the re-use of aggregated journal TOC content on a subject or topic basis by gateways, subject-based resource discovery services, library services, VREs and other services, where it can be exposed to a wider market, act as a showcase of the latest research output, and deliver relevant content to researchers. [well, in fact some of that was at least partially possible via the ticTOCs API]

…enable library and information services, publishers, gateways, content aggregators and journal directories to allow their users to embed journal TOC RSS feeds of interest, with one click, into a freely available personalisable web-based interface which will perform as a current awareness environment.

…develop a business plan to maintain ticTOCs as a self-sustaining service, free to the individual end user, after the project phase. [Well, there was a business plan, but it didn’t result in a viable and self-sustaining service]

JournalTOCs has since achieved some of the above things which were not possible within ticTOCs.  Some other things might one day be possible, though they would need to be altered to take into account the rise of social media.

Reading the ticTOCs Plan, I realise that I’d forgotten all about the bit about ‘chicklets’.

Chicklet concept

A miniature verson of this sort of ‘chicklet’ graphic, which was a play on Chiclet, was supposed to be available and used all over the place – especially at publishers’ and library websites, to enable users with one-click to embed a TOC into their freely available personalisable current awareness interface.  i.e. you see the chicklet somewhere that a journal is listed, mentioned or displayed, and you click on it, and that journal’s present and future Table of Contents will automatically appear in your own personalisable current awareness webpage (in a vaguely similar way to how Sharing now works in Facebook and Twitter, etc).

From the ticTOCs Project Plan, I can see that the total project budget was £391,093 which shows how big a project it was.

Other things we didn’t get round to completing, apart from investigating them, include:

• Ranking journals in ticTOCs displays by impact factor, or by download use using data from SFX servers.
• Development of ‘more like this’ selection options for displayed content.
• Collaborative filtering concepts in feed selection and content display.
• Data mining possibilities (showcasing popular items, plus “broad issue scanning”, etc).

I think that nowadays, ‘collaborative filtering…’ etc would come under the heading of social media stuff.

The work detailed in the bid document was way too ambitious for a two-year project, I knew that from the start, but I had hoped that by listing some of the possibilities for the future that these could form the basis of a further bid.

We didn’t manage to get a semi-automatic in-flow of new TOCs via DOAJ, CrossRef and Open J Gate (which has now disappeared), plus various other things, but I feel that the ticTOCs Project did achieve quite a lot.  We built a major database of journal Tables of Content from freely available RSS metadata, we made it available on an easy-to-use website which many researchers have made use of, we produced the Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers (which now needs to be updated to take account of hybrid journal Open Access content), and we generated some good publicity (amazing that that article has been viewed nearly 15,000 times).

More important, today, is how much further can be done to develop the JournalTOCs service in the future.

Watching the ticTOCs concept develop was a pleasure for me.  I’d like to thank all of those who were involved in one way or another: Lawrie Phipps the JISC Programme Manager, Terry Bucknell the ticTOCs Project Leader, Joe Hilton the ticTOCs Project Manager, Santiago Chumbe the ticTOCS Technical Manager (who now continues as the very able JournalTOCS Manager), Malcolm Moffat (Project Support) and later, Lisa Rogers (Project Support), Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef), Helle Lauridsen (ProQuest), Paul Evans (Emerald), the ever-enthusiastic John Harrington from Cranfield University, and all the others who contributed to, or supported, the project.

I think I can draw a line under ticTOCs, now.

Now just a running t-shirt

Saas Fee village

The only part of Switzerland that I didn’t enjoy was Geneva Airport.  It was hot, humid and busy, and there were too few seats at the packed restaurant.

The boy on the restaurant checkout has a good scam going, which I was too slow to pick up on until it was too late.  There’s a crush at the till, and you’re struggling with your cabin bag, your jacket, and your tray of food.  He serves the person before you, and gives them a receipt.  When it comes to you, he says, “Swiss pizza?”  Well, he knows darn fine that what is on your tray is a Swiss pizza, but when you answer “Yes” he knows that you’re not Swiss.

So, he just says “Swiss pizza, cafe, citron…twenty-nine.”  You hand over a SF50 note and he gives you some change, but he hasn’t rung anything up and he doesn’t give you a receipt.  So, you reckon he’s either on the fiddle or is overcharging you, and you ask for a receipt.  He rings everything up and gives you a receipt, which you look at, and it says SF29 and you struggle away with your tray, thinking that he hasn’t overcharged you and that the restaurant owners should be happy that you’ve stopped him pocketing the money.

You’ve been so distracted by the receipt business, and the fact that the place is mobbed and there’s nowhere to sit, that you don’t realise he’s slightly short-changed you.  Not by much, but if he does that many times a day, he’ll make a bob or two.

Apart from at Geneva Airport, everything in Switzerland works well, and is on time like clockwork.  This is because they don’t dig their roads up every month, so you can guarantee that it will take you half an hour to cross Geneva by car, and not over an hour like it takes in Edinburgh.  The Swiss have managed to put roads through whole mountains and keep to a budget.  Unlike Edinburgh, where 7.5kms of trams are going to cost the taxpayer roughly £100,000 per metre.  We should have employed the Swiss to run the whole tram development.

Early morning

The village centre

Storage huts

The corners of the storage huts are on ‘stilts’ consisting of wood, then a round stone, then wood.  This stops mice from climbing into them.

The glacier

Ellen Foley

I remember really enjoying listening to Kenny Everett on the radio, in the 60s & 70s.  He was quite mad (in the best possible way).

Here’s Kenny introducing Ellen Foley on his Kenny Everett Video Show.

And here’s the original.

What a belter of a voice she has, and what a great rock song.  What fantastic sax.

Nightout

There’s several good tracks on that album.  It took me an hour to find it in the attic.

Here she is performing in 2009.

Last days in Saas Fee

We went up to Allalin again to redo the runs that we’d previously fallen on.  The visibility was much better, and skiing was easier.  This time, we didn’t fall.

From Allalin

The helicopter ambulance was at the top

Lindsey coming down from Allalin

Red 10b

Above is where we’d previously fallen.  As you can see, it’s not a difficult run, but previously, when the conditions were poor and the snow was in your face, you couldn’t tell which was was up or down.  Lindsey is 4th from the top, in the centre.

Lindsey makes it down

Fun park

Just down from Egginerjoch is a fun snow park.  If you click on the photo above, you can see a boarder jumping, beside the flag.

Another boarder jumping

The ski schools wear hats to identify who is in which class

Black run 11 above Spielboden

Red 11a

Lindsey coming down 11a