stuff 'n other stuff

Mary Beard recently had a piece on her blog complaining about the rise of the e-christmas card.

And it’s undoubtedly true that as the postal service declines more and more people are turning to sending seasonal greetings by email. I don’t have a problem with this – an annual newsy email from friends and families overseas is always welcome. What’s less welcome is the email of someone’s dog in a santa hat which has been sent out as part of a distribution list.

Somehow it just doesn’t have the sense of anticipation you get by opening an envelope. Partly of course this is pure nostalgia for a simpler world when a card from overseas or the other side of the country was something special.

And the same can be said for the commercial season’s greetings emails from people you’ve done business with. Once it used to be a christmas card sent out as bulk mail, but at least you could put them on your office wall for a bit of seasonal colour.

No one is going to do that with an email – basically they go straight to delete.

So, we need to re think this Christmas card thing. It started on the back of the penny post when, witha  universal postal service, people could send cards as greetings – and to be cynical it did involve some slick marketing by the greeting cards people. Before then the post had been for letters, and handwriting a lot of  greeting letters at christmas was a chore. Christmas cards allowed you to take a prepackaged item, add some personalised words of greeting and send it to someone, and you could include a letter or a note if you felt like it.

Over the years it turned into a mass exercise sending cards to everyone you knew – christmas card lists turned out to be like facebook friends lists – some you know, some you don’t, and who the hell is she ?

And as sending cards became more expensive the habit moved online and became this bulk anonymized exercise we see today.

Let’s reclaim the card – something special sent to those few people who are someway special in your life.  And yes, if that mean’s using the postal service, let’s use it like it was 1891.

For the rest let’s use the technology –  there’s always facebook and twitter – but let’s not pretend it’s really personal …

Yesterday I received a letter, yes, a genuine letter printed on nice paper from a local hospital inviting me to apply for an eHealth record. (eHealth is an Australian government initiative to link up individual medical practice records and aggregate data so that eventually your doctor, your optometerist, your dentist, and the random doctor you went to in Darwin when you unexpectedly came down with a chest infection can all see your past history).

As I’m interested in identity management I thought I’d go and step through the registration to see how they’d done it rather than procrastinate which is my usual response to filling in health forms – I’m the guy who didn’t have a preferred GP for five years after my previous one upped and left for the north coast. Medical registration is of course an interesting problem. People are naturally concerned to keep personal matters personal, and the medical profession have at times an exaggerated view of patient confidentiality and data security.

So, the registration process. First of all you need your medicare number (actually you need it twice) and your date of birth. Fair enough.

Then the fun begins. Then they need an address – which one, Medicare has two addresses for me, my street address, and my post office box which is where my bills end up. As the letter had come to the house mail box, the one we don’t use, I guessed it would be the street address. I guessed right.

Then they asked me when I last went to the doctor, how much it cost, how I paid, and who did I see. This is a problem. I’m pretty healthy and hardly ever go to the doctor. This is how I survived for five years without a GP by using either the campus staff and student drop in centre, or a practice with a drop in service.

Most times I wouldn’t have had a clue. This time I did, only because some fool ran into the back of my car a couple of months ago and I had myself checked out for whiplash did I have a recent date. Didn’t know the date, but trawling back through my online banking records I found the record, how much I paid and how I paid. Only problem was that I didn’t see my usual doctor, but his partner, who is a nice Indian lady from London with a seriously polysyllabic surname.

The only way I got that last bit of information was because she’s suggested I should have some routine blood tests, and being the arch procrastinator I am, I still had the referral form as I hadn’t had them done.

Now I am someone skilled in identity and data management. This whole exercise took me about forty five minutes, not least because when I entered the fee last paid it complained that the data was in an invalid format – I’d typed 75 not 75.00 despite the lack of any instructions as to how to complete the field.

I now have an eHealth record. But I do wonder how the less organised and less skilled will manage – the whole system showed a lack of user acceptance testing. Surely it would be better to prepopulate all the records, have a ‘claim your record campaign’ and base identity on what people know, their medicare number, their phone number and perhaps their Driver’s licence number – that way we might actually get some people registered …

Well the answer’s no.

Readers of one of my other blogs will recall that I experimented on myself with Amazon’s self publishing suite back in January.

No surprisingly I’m not amazingly rich as a consequence, sales have been trickling along at about a couple of copies a month in both the US and the UK although there was that strange unexplained burst of 9 sales in the UK in November.

What it does show is how simple it is to put something out there. And while Amazon does take a fairly hefty cut what it does mean that it would be relatively easy to publish scholarly material such as conference papers, monographs and the like via Amazon with no upfront cost …

Last Friday, I watched a documentary on Semphill and Rutland, two British airforce officers who, at the end of the first world war went to Japan to render the Japanese military and technical assistance.

That they became spies for the Japanese is without doubt. What interests me however is the genesis of their involvement.

During the first world war Britain and Japan were allies, and both participated in the allied intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution. Britain’s alliance with Japan was terminated in 1920, largely due to American presssure.

Churchill was of course a member of the post first world war coalition government and the main mover and shaker behind Britain’s participation in the allied intervention. Churchill was also utterly paranoid about the Bolshevik revolution.

So the question has to be asked – did Semphill and Rutland begin their involvement with tacit but deniable official British approval in order to ensure that Japan remained a credible geopolitical blocker to any Bolshevik plans to expand and consolidate in the east and perhaps occupy Manchuria?

So was it simply a case of  Semphill and Rutland going feral?

The interesting thing is that despite their behaviour neither Semphill or Rutland were arrested and tried for treason. Rutland, not being an aristocrat was interned and later quietly released, Semphill, an aristocrat, agreed to withdraw from public life.

For a whole set of obvious reasons, we will probably never know the whole story.  Just too political, too cynical, and realistically not worth the risk of making the facts public. If true the records may have been shredded later to protect Churchill’s reputation.

Over the weekend I read a short compilation of some of Chekhov’s letters home during his overland journey to Sakahalin in 1890 – before the Trans Siberian railway was built.

Chekhov is an amusing and candid letter writer. As well as being incredibly rude about the inhabitants of Tomsk he describes the society he finds there and the growing presence of Chinese and Japanese in eastern Siberia as well as articulating the very Russian fear that they will lose the territories to the Chinese, or perhaps the Japanese as a result of being double crossed by one of the great powers of the time.

I read the compilation purely for interest and as background for our planned trip to the hopefully not too wild east. But the thing I found really interest was Chekhov’s description of life in the prison settlements on Sakhalin -and their undoubted resonance with descriptions of life in early colonial Hobart and Sydney with prisoners and trusties everywhere doing ordinary jobs, despite their possibly brutal pasts.

I’ve heard it claimed that Russians tend to think of Australia as a sort of British Siberia – far away, and settled in the main by convicts and exiles. No matter the truth of this, there are clearly parallels, perhaps uncomfortable ones.

Lost, one poem.

it was about ethernet cables. No, I didn’t write it, but thought it charming and saved it to a hard drive somewhere.

Saved it in the days before evernote, before dropbox.

My guess is that it’s on the old Toshiba laptop, last used in 2007, and no, I can’t remember the password.

Now I can’t find it in Google. Might as well be gone.

Structure your content, people, or else it’s gone, lost, unfindable in the cosmic overwhelm …

As part of planning for our Trans Siberian trip I’ve been doing a little background reading.

Now you would expect the opening of the rail line to the far east and Siberia to have an impact in Russia, but it also had a significant impact in the west – as suddenly the north of China, the various foreign concessions, Japan and Korea were in reach. Not two months by ship, but perhaps two weeks by train from London.

Businessmen, missionaries, adventurers and the like could actually make the journey and be back in less than half a year. Something that carried on well into the thirties with people like Robert Byron settling in Beijing and adventurers like Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming passing through

The result is an outpouring of books about the TransSiberian and guidebooks telling you how to travel, what to take, etc.

Like today’s Lonely Planet’s the guidebooks of the time offered advice on hotels, best places to stop, what to take with you on the train.

Now we tend to find late nineteenth century adverts slightly amusing. Portable rubber baths and Dr Jaeger’s sanitary underwear tend to produce a slightly preposterous, Pythonesque, caricature of Victorian and Edwardian travel.

Baedeker’s 1914 guide to the Transsiberian doesn’t mention rubber baths but it does suggest taking several changes of woollen underwear for the journey.

This isn’t quite as stupid as it sounds. Nowadays we’d tend to think of cotton but of course brands like Icebreaker have been agressively promoting merino base layers for backpacking in part because it doesn’t get as smelly as synthetic thermals – washing and drying it might be a different issue, and of course the eponymous Dr Jaeger’s woollen underwear was sanitary because of its ability to absorb smells.

So given our twentyfirst century fixation with cleanliness on the train the answer might in part lie in good sensible nineteenth century advice from an age where coping with poor washing facilities along the route was the norm …

Some of you may remember that a couple of years ago I became mildly obsessed with the questiona as to whether the anglo-saxon cleric Sighelm could have visited the St Thomas christians in Kerala.

Of couse it really wasn’t about clerical interactions but really about how well established trade routes were before the rise of Islam and how disrupted they were and whether that would turn his journey into either fantasy or a story based on remembering earlier journeys.

The key thing about Sighelm’s (possible) journey is that it quite easily follow the trade routes for pepper in the opposite direction, and that there was a now half forgotten infrastructure of christian monasteries and guest houses along the route.

However, while concentrating on spices I forgot the other great mystery of the east – lapis, the blue stone that comes only from Afghanistan. And as it’s prized, people traded it. In fact the have traded it for a long time, as seen by its presence in Sumerian grave goods in Ur.

Both Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury mention that Sighelm returned safely from India. It is of course more than possible that one chronicle entry was derived from the other but William’s comment about the aromatic liquors and bright jewels could have a kind of sense to it if Sighelm came back part of the way on a spice trading boat to the Gulf and perhaps picked up some lapis in Dubai, much as you can even today …

The federal government announced an initiative last weekend to get all schoolkids to learn an Asian language.

While laudable I suspect it won’t work. Chris Rau has an excellent piece in this morning’s SMH explaining one set of reasons.

I’ve got another set of reasons. Learning Russian taught me that to learn a language is to learn a culture, the names of shops, how other people’s power bills work and the rest. Simple things like sour cream coming in green top bottles is something you need to know to interpret ‘he had a smile like a half open green topped bottle at the back of the fridge’.

What the collapse of the Soviet Union taught me is that language is evolving and transitory. Brands changed, new loan words arrived for example profakapit’  – to fail to deliver a project – and suddenly while Dostoyevski remained Dostoyevski and Tolstoi Tolstoi, newspaper and magazines became incomprehensible.

I have this fear that on our planned trans siberian trip that at best I’ll sound like an anachronism from the last century, or at worst find myself incapable of organising a taxi.

And this is the point. Learning a language, and being able to use it requires continual engagement. Yes, if you learn the basics in school you’ll probably be able to muddle through getting a taxi, a hotel room or a meal, sometimes with hilarious consequences for example the time Laos where the staff in a restaurant in Vientiane mistook our accents and decided we must be Russian and gave us the Russian rather than English menus.

You won’t be able to do more than that. If you get good you can probably understand the instructions about how to put together a set of valves. You won’t be able to go out for a drink with people, talk about soccer or anything else.

So learning Asian languages will give a generation a basic familiarity with the sound of a language and maybe better able to help visitors or ask where the toilet is. Useful, but it won’t deliver a generation of upskilled literate managers