Monthly Archives: October, 2020

No, wait, I have a cunning plan…

I’ve always been an advocate of getting rid of the ridiculous Daylight Savings Time. If some people prefer more light in the morning instead of the evening, or vice versa, why don’t they just change their personal habits and get up at a different time?

If the majority of people in a company, or school, or even a whole town, felt the same way, they could simply have different winter opening hours, instead of imposing on the entire country a periodic change in how we actually calculate something as fundamental as the time! Anyone who has tried writing calendar software will know what I mean.

This has always seemed so obvious to me that I assume whoever would actually be responsible for implementing a return to normal timekeeping has had it on their to-do list for years, but it’s never quite been as important as the 15 things above it, so it just hasn’t happened. Sigh.

However, having enjoyed a marginally more relaxed Sunday morning this weekend, I have a cunning plan, of the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” variety. I admit that it, too, has some minor inconveniences when it comes to time management, but, unlike the current system, it is brilliantly simple, predictable, and offers inestimable rewards. Are you ready?…

Let’s put the clocks back every single night! Then we could have a lie-in every single morning!

Pondering the length of the Tube

I do enjoy YouTube. I’m conscious that more and more of my time is spent consuming content from there, and creating content which is uploaded there.

Some of the material I’ve created appears on my channel, for general consumption, and those videos are usually linked from here, but quite a lot of it is not publicly listed, and is family, university, business stuff you can only find if you have the right links. At the time of writing, I have about 160 videos uploaded. Some have had just a couple of views. Some have had a couple of hundred thousand.

Hovering in the back of my mind, though, is the long-term danger of being so dependent on a platform I don’t control. I’m not too worried that YouTube will go away any time soon, though Google do have a tendency to cancel products on a pretty regular basis. This blog used to contain quite a few links to content on Google Video, for example. Remember that?

No, YouTube is too big just to vanish now. But it’s very possible that, at some point, there will be a significant change in the way it works: in the licensing, the amount of advertising, or, more worryingly, in how long they are willing to keep archiving material. We’ve seen other sites, like Flickr, decide that they can’t keep holding on to all your stuff forever. Or they may decide to start charging, and perhaps charging too much, to hang on to it for you.

So I have to assume that, at some point, everything I’ve done on YouTube will need to be shifted somewhere else. I used to ensure that anything I uploaded there was also on Vimeo, but I haven’t been quite that diligent recently. Nor could I easily lay my hands on the original masters of all the videos I’ve created.

No, a big item for my to-do list – perhaps a New Year’s resolution for 2021 – is to catalog all my videos and make sure that, for every YouTube video ID, I can create a URL to an equivalent hosted somewhere else. (Remember the golden ‘3-2-1’ rule of backups: You should have at least 3 copies of everything, using at least 2 different methods, and at least 1 should be off-site. Off-site may mean “off somebody else’s site” if they have the primary copy!)

Anyway, I don’t think this will happen soon, but I’m pretty sure it will happen eventually. What will you do with YourTube then?

Sledging through the 5th

This is, I think, wonderful.

When I first saw it, someone had appended a Spanish title, so I presumed that it was created by an artist with whom I didn’t share a language. No textual language, anyway, because this is a testament to how art can capture emotions that we all share!

It was created by Doodle Chaos.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser