tales from urban dilettantia

I was just sorting a few files out in Aperture and came across this photo I took out on the deck in Margaret River when I was staying with velvetbutter in December.  It’s taken with my 70mm-300mm lens and a cheap infra-red filter I picked up for a few dollars from Deal Extreme.  IR photography is great fun – there shall be more!

Being an approximation of what I’m up to at the moment.

I used to be a much more prolific blogger once, and perhaps a better writer if you favour the sort of writer who rambles prettily about the things she’s been up to, or indeed about nothing at all.

To be fair, life has been absurd over the past year or two, and I’m only now just starting to shed the feeling that the bottom has fallen out of my world.  I’ve been reading old posts, and it seems like I fell asleep one day as a art student and have only just woken to find myself thirty, in a corporate job, playing activist in my spare time and inexplicably, terribly in love with Perth.  (Says she who spent so many years plotting her escape.)

I’m a less lyrical writer, a more talented photographer, a more absent friend, a better and more prolific artist.  There’s dust on my musical instruments and on my gaming rig.  I’d like to do something to fix that.  I’m both fiercer and more gentle, both more and less patient. So it goes.

In the interim, I’ve learned something about loving people and places for what they are, and letting relationships be the shape that fits. I have a lot more to learn, but also plenty of love.  And for the first time in a long time, I’m looking at my life and wondering where I’ll be this time next year, instead of fighting to stay afloat in the current.

Being Day Two of the Festival of Helen Posting Things About Her Happiness Project That She Didn’t Post Last Month or Indeed Last Year, which really is a fairly awful name for a festival and may need to be revised.

In the process of looking at language, communication and mental health, I’ve also come across some of my other ways of speaking (both internal and external) that haven’t been particularly healthy.

By far, the most pervasive of these has been ’should’ (and other ways of saying should – need to, ought to, and so forth). For a born perfectionist and procrastinator, these phrases are the devil. For me they carry loads of guilt, obligation, resentment, self-blame, pressure and expectation. I’m learning to say ‘I will do x’, ‘I’ve chosen not to do x’ and ‘I would like to do x, but don’t have the capacity right now, so I’m putting it on my ‘maybe-someday’ list’. Do or not do, there is no should!

Is this anything more than semantics? Perhaps not, for some. But for me, the improvement in my quality of life is dramatic when I’m not playing ’should’ and spending every second moment cringing in indecisive guilt.

Part of this, I think, is to do with the sheer weight of indecision, and part to do with the paralysis of perfectionism, but there’s another part too. It comes from the knowledge that committing is to take a side, to make a decision, and to accept that not everyone will agree with my choices.  It’s about not camping on the fence, and not spending my life chasing an unattainable goal of juggling the happiness of others.

Happy Friday! I am declaring today to be particularly good, even as Happy Fridays go, since (1) I went for a run this morning, (2) the cubefarm has exploded into the amusing chaos of Yet Another Desk Reshuffle and (3) the first person I saw as I walked towards my building this morning was oliverm, smiling and waving at me. Good things.

There will be a Day 2 of Happiness Posting – in fact I will post it tonight, because tonight I miraculously have a night to myself which I intend to use for blogging and painting and the like. (I’ll also take this moment to point out that I never used the words ‘consecutive days’. And in the words of Nick Hornby, yes, that is a sneaky lawyer’s trick.)

In the meantime, have a little of my pontification on one of the Many Shiny Things I am excited about. This particular shiny thing is data. And datasets. Datamining. Visualisation. Information. I accept that this is a field that is dead sexy only to a very specific sub-set of people. However – trust me on this, unbelievers – for those of us wired in that particular way, it can be an intricate, exquisite, fascinating thing.

The web is beginning to engage with data in increasingly interesting ways. For one thing, free datasets are becoming more and more accessible and people are using them in ways that are sometimes artistic, sometimes functional, and very often both. While the plague of inaccessible data, siloed in institutions and organisations, still represents an incredible waste of potential, the situation is certainly improving. And, from an entirely different direction, Web2.0 technology has delivered the tools to easily collect one’s own raw data.

On the latter point, I’ve been running a small personal data collection project recently. Applications such as MapMyRide, FourSquare, Last.fm, LibraryThing, Sleep Cycles for iPhone and Delicious track a whole lot of stats already in a fairly passive, low-effort manner. In addition to those, I’ve adopted Your Flowing Data (YFD) to aggregate information on a number of other variables. There’s a YFD iPhone app, and a spiffy hack for Latitude users. (The very pretty Daytum tool also provides similar functionality.)

In a move that most consider an odd choice, I’ve made most of my staggeringly banal YFD data public, on a page called Banalytics (yes, I’m proud of that one). The reasons I’ve decided to open it up are various, but I’m particularly interested in the way it massively reduces my tendency to tell small, pointless lies, and feels like a gesture to towards understanding that people will choose to like me or not like me just as I am. (And of course there are the cynical days when I wonder whether maintaining privacy for the sake of privacy is a drain on my resources, and no more than a shared delusion.)

On a less personal and more academic level, I’m utterly fascinated by people who create large scale projects of this kind. Nicholas Felton is one of the best-known examples, and his personal Annual Reports have received plenty of coverage. (He also posts some really lovely stuff over at Tumblr!) His passion for design, information, for the appreciation of the very small – these things resonate with me and I can lose myself for great lengths of time in the existential detail of his work.

I struggle to find the right words to explain why I find this field so enchanting; it is a discipline of numbers and forms, not well suited to words. The attraction for me has much to do with shapes and patterns and relationships. Both the analysis and the visualisation are acts of beauty; acts of untangling immense webs, and of deft slicing and assembly. They are acts of perceiving the interconnectedness of things, and acts of holding that up and saying ’see what I have found; see that it has meaning’. And they are the great heart – each heartbeat counted and illustrated – of the the intersection between the analytical and the designed.

For anyone interested in reading further, see below for a rambling assortment of the data blogs, tools, resources and datasets currently available on the web.

Data & Visualisation Blogs:
Data Wrangling
Flowing Data
DataBlog (The Guardian)
Information is Beautiful
Infosthetics

Datasets
Australian Bureau of Statistics
Data.gov (US)
UK Data Archive
UN Data
WHO Data and Statistics
OECD.Stat Extracts
Numbrary
Infochimps
DBPedia
UCI Machine Learning Repository
Time Series Data Library

Meta-lists of Datasets:
DataWrangling List
Datasets for Data Mining

Techniques:
Statistical Data Mining Tutorials

Being Day One of the Festival of Helen Posting Things About Her Happiness Project That She Didn’t Post Last Month or Indeed Last Year, which really is a fairly awful name for a festival and may need to be revised.

One of the most useful books I read last year was Nonviolent Communication. It’s most likely to be found on the self-help shelves, and you know how I feel about the self-help shelves. Nevertheless, I stumbled across a reference to it on the internet it when I was stuck and full of anger and pain, and was searching for a way to talk without lashing out at others. Indeed I think I only noticed it because I’d heard kvratties mention the name in passing. (And indeed I’m still feeling a little shy writing about it here, as I have a quiet horror of becoming Tim Robbins’ character from High Fidelity. ‘Conflict resolution is my job, Laura.’ Oh dear.)

Sidetracking in the direction of John Cusack-alicious films notwithstanding,  the implicit premise of the book is that, for many of us, common use of language and ways of speaking tend to escalate conflict. Assignment of blame, failing to communicate our needs and making demands of others are habitually embedded in the way we speak to one another. Rosenberg proposes a very simple – almost awkwardly so, on first read – practical methodology to deconstruct our ways of speaking to one another and replace them with more functional language.

When I first read the Wikipedia entry for nonviolent communication, it all seemed a bit simplistic and unsubtle, but for me there’s been much value in it. Most significantly, it’s been a tool that’s forced me to articulate (to myself, even) how I really feel, what I really need and what practical things I can do or ask for to get there. And, for someone who previously left these things floating in a fog of inarticulate ‘grrr’, ‘hiss’, ‘rawr’ and ‘purr’ feelings, this has been a huge leap of self-awareness.

I’m unsure much value there may be in nonviolent communication for anyone coming from a family where this kind of healthy interaction was the norm, but for those of us who didn’t, simply learning to say ‘I feel angry’ or ‘I feel invisible’ or ‘I feel sad’ and asking another person if they are willing to help with that – and respecting their response – can be an intensely vulnerable experience.

It’s fundamentally about honesty – about being clear with yourself and with others about what you feel and what you need, and being able to express that without implying expectation or asking more of another person than they are willing to give.  And so, ultimately, it becomes about opting-out of playing games – and if you abhor games and disingenuity as much as I do, that looks like a pretty big win.

It’s been a long while since I’ve written in any detail about my happiness project. A large part of the reason for this is that 2009 has been a psycho hose beast of a year for me, and I’ve been harbouring a feeling that it would be somehow disingenuous to write about happiness when I’ve been so often miserable and struggling to stay afloat.

On closer examination, this is a pretty damn silly approach. It’s easy enough to talk about sustainable well-being and happiness when things are going well, but I suspect that it’s far more meaningful to talk about applying these things when life is hard going.

And so last month I found myself captive with a netbook on a three hour bus ride, trying to recall just where I left off. Seeing as my list of topics had grown intimidatingly huge, I started to write a number of posts, with the intention of posting one a day for a week. And then I left the half-edited text files on my netbook and didn’t post them. Ahem.

However, today I am sitting on the verandah in the sunshine, with a hammock and a bottle of water, watching the little fishes swim circles in my barrel pond. Today, it seems like a good day to write.

This year, none of my half-drafted text posts have yet come to anything, but I’ll have you know that they’re sitting there in the dusty attic of a hard drive, waiting to be unleashed.

In the meantime, I’ve posted some more birdwatching photos to Flickr, including the Welcome Swallows pictured above.  Wings are exciting; I’m having fun times (and sometimes frustrating times) learning to photograph wings.

My excuse for not having written anything of substance – one of my excuses, anyway – is that I’m buried not only under unpleasant work (Large Accounting Firm has jumped the shark, it really has) but under an avalanche of side projects.

Some of the side projects include doing a triathlon, getting my diving certification, building a barrel garden, harvesting the local laneway/vergeside fruit, looking for a new job, soaking up as much of the summer cricket as possible, and two secret things.  One secret thing is is about tentacles, the other is about maps.

Somehow I think spending time at the beach needs to be on the projects list, but isn’t. It strikes me that this is a terrible oversight.

I’m gradually catching up with my backlog of photographs (I’ll do the cricket next, alibaster, promise!) and have just put a whole lot of new birdwatching pics from the Maylands – East Perth river path up on Flickr.

Some of these are just trying to get a half-decent ID photo for my birding site and/or Wikipedia, others are trying to push my own abilities and the limits of the lens (70-300mm AFS) and the D70 a bit more.  I’m definitely getting more consistent shots out of it than I was a year ago, although I’m also starting to encounter its limitations under low-light/high-speed conditions.

In addition to the cricket (featuring a streaker – woohoo!) I still have a few more Rottnest Island photos to put up, and a whole lot of the slugs, spiders, butterflies and beetles I’ve seen around my garden.  Creepy crawlies are in good supply around here and are terribly interesting, with the exception of the hordes of inner-north Perth cockroaches who have started to piss me off to the extent that I was threatening Poison Spray Doom.  However, dried catnip saved the day and I haven’t seen a single roach in the kitchen since I scattered it around the bin. (That said, I do worry that an infestation of catnip-crack-addicts may follow.)

In spite of suffering somewhat in the summer heat, the garden is beginning to take shape.  My succulents (a frugal venture, based largely around stolen cuttings) are flourishing, and the tomatoes, squash and capsicums are starting to yield fruit.  In fact, the squash you can see in the photo set above is already considerably larger than a cat’s head and continues to grow.  Perhaps I will become one of those people who grows giant vegetables.

On the front verandah, I’ve started a second water garden, similar to the one from my old house. I’m going to find a sherry barrel and some wild Pygmy Perch for the new one soon.  I’ve also bought a couple of dwarf citrus – a lemon and a lime – and a young fig tree.

And finally, I’ve done some Actual Research (as opposed to ‘kill first, ask questions later’) and learned how not to kill my orchids and small collection of carnivorous plants.  Turns out that ordinary potting mix is Very Bad for orchids, as is over-watering.  Both the pitcher plants and fly traps need to be potted in sphagnum moss, but that’s where the similarities end.  The pitcher plants need filtered light and constant moisture, while the fly traps need lots of sun and distilled water.  This goes a long way to explaining the high mortality rate among my previous little carnivores.

Big love to lisamax, boxer_the_horse, grahame, Kale and Rowena for the gardening assistance over the past  year.  May your gardens grow tall and leafy, and for those of you in Perth, may they not be burned too ferociously over the coming months!