What it says on the label

You may have noticed, since yesterday, extra green words appearing at the bottom of posts. Yes, I have decided to start labelling - aka tagging - posts so that anyone with a burning desire to read all that I have written, and only what I have written, about, say, Tarporley, can do so at the click of a mouse. Categorisations are of necessity somewhat rough and ready, to avoid a proliferation of taxonomies. I shall (if I don't lose interest/the will to live) retrospectively label all the posts going right back to the start. This process will, I imagine, become slower and slower the further back I go, as I will have forgotten more and more of the posts and have to remind myself what they were about. To be honest, with my cataloguing tendencies I'm amazed it's taken me so long.

This reminds me tangentially of one of my favourite paradoxes, Bertrand Russell's paradox of sets.

Now for this post, should I introduce a new category of 'blog disappearing up its own arse' or should I just file it under....

Not that I'm competitive

You may have noticed a little black and red box appear to the right of this page. A kindly soul by the name of Tony Blews has set up a ranking site for UK waterways websites. Some fellow bloggers were already subscribing to the US based Top 100 boating sites, but I never got round to that - didn't fancy the flashing orange ... thing ... anyway. But when Andrew pleaded a while back for someone to develop a UK based one, I said that if they did, I'd subscribe. So last night I signed up. At that point I was sixth in a chart of six, but the next time I looked had risen to a heady fourth out of eleven. That may of course be the highest position I ever attain, having slipped back this morning to seven.

It is very interesting though, as for the first time now I actually have a way of seeing the number of visits the blog is getting. It would be great if every one of the blogs on Granny's boatroll signed up, and we would have our own top hundred. (Although actually I can't see what's to stop anyone signing them all up anyway...)

I shall follow my progress with interest. Or probably, in fact, obsessiveness.

Interesting if potentially unreliable fact (check? What, and spoil all the fun?). Aeroplane Black Boxes are actually bright orange and are named after a Professor Black who invented them.

Lovely lists

My word, suddenly it's so easy to edit the links list that even I can do it unaided. All on my own, I've added AMModels' site. This is an absolutely brilliant site for looking up old boats - when and where they were built, who owned them, their numbers etc. Mush of this info comes from the lists that Roger Fuller used to maintain, which I guess in turn owe a lot to those lovely little books by Alan Faulkner and others. But Andy's (for that is his name) site has a massive bonus - it's gradually gathering up to date information about where boats are now and/or what's happened/ing to them, and it has loads of photos. Also, where it has the edge over lists in books, is that it's crudely searchable (using the find function) whioch is really useful when, for example, you might want to check whether it was Sun that Water Ouzel used to be. And now the site also has a forum. A small one, so far it has to be said, and not terribly active yet, but looking at the list of members (yes, I've signed up) most of the old boat buffs from CWF are there so the discussion, when it gets going, should be well-informed and informative.

The one downside used to be that I could never remember the URL, so consulting the list meant a quick trawl via CWF. But no more - now I can just click on the handy link to the right here.

Hidden delights

Why, I often wonder, would I want to go abroad, when there's so much I haven't yet seen in England? (Well, you might reasonably reply, because there are more beautiful/interesting/exciting things abroad, and you would be right, and one day I will go to Venice...)

I have, I can say in mitigation - and I have to make this count for a lot because it is the only serious bit of Abroad that I have done - been to Russia. Communist Russia, just about (November 1982). I have been to the Moscow State Circus, where they had performing bears, and the Kirov Ballet, and shared a sleeping compartment on the Moscow-Leningrad train with, inter alia, an Intourist guide with an interesting skin complaint called Stanislav (the guide, not the complaint). Had my father been interested in such things, he may well have been disappointed to discover that Stanislav was due to take over from Irena at the station. The train had a samovar at the end of each carriage, but not, as far as I recall, a toilet (but it must have done. Perhaps it is just too horrible to remember.)

But for those of us who still hold out against foriegn travel (and I really don't mind flying, but I cannot stomach the thought of airport security), here, which I found via Diamond Geezer, is all the evidence you could ever need of the many and varied delights yet to be discovered on your very doorstep. Forgotton, hidden and unbelievable places, touching in their insignificance, or amazing in that you've never heard of them. Astounding in their brilliance, or brilliant in ther mundanity. Go and randomly browse the archives. It will by turns warm and break your heart.

The other Warrior returns

It turns out that my friend Andante Mike is a bit of a dark horse - ever since April he's been blogging Zulu Warrior and I only found out this morning from Granny Buttons. If Andrew adds it to the boatroll, it can snatch from Zindagi the prized place at the bottom of the alphabetical list, a position once held by Warrior, before another six boats (and four non-boat sites with 'water' in their names) intervened.

Mike only links to two other blogs at the moment and one of then is this one! In another little twist, having arrived at his new mooring at Middlewich, he finds Andante - once owned by him, and then by me, which is how we met; sold by me to one Captain Haddock (not, ahem, his real name), who changed her name to Saxon and sold her again - moored two miles away.

Moderation in all things

I've just noticed that Caxton use the comment moderation facility on their blog, meaning that they see any comment left first and then decide whether to make it public. It's clearly a useful facility if you're running a site where you might get people libelling third parties in your comments and be held responsible, but I'm glad I haven't felt the need to use it, and hopefully never will.

It must present dilemmas. Suppose someone leaves a critical or nasty comment. If I don't allow it, it looks like cowardice or censorship. On the other hand, if I do, then it looks either like masochism, or - if I then respond - as if I'm looking for a fight. On the other hand, if someone says something nice, surely modesty should forbid my broadcasting it to the world once I have control over it. So I prefer not to be in control of what comments are posted. Very occasionally, I have deleted comments. Once, on impulse, to protect someone else's feelings; once one of my own, because of a spelling mistake - but I still got accused of censorship - and a couple of times when they were obviously spam. Since instigating the old squiggly letters thing I don't think I've had any more of that.

I don't require commentors to be registered with Google/Blogger - I've had that frustrating experience when I've carefully crafted a comment and then at the last moment find I can't post it unless I go through some signing up rigmarole. Finally, I haven't taken the option of not allowing anonymous comments. I can't see the point. I've been involved in debates about the rights and wrongs of anonymity - albeit in the context of political blogs - and am surprised by how many people are against it. Firstly, in an online context, any name or identity is pretty meaningless anyway. People choose who they want to be. I'm all for that. I'm not pretending to be anyone I'm not when I write on here, or post on CWF as WarriorWoman, but I am representing only one particular aspect of myself, and the name and online identity I use highlights that.

The arguments for and against anonymity seem to me to be analogous to those for and against the secret ballot. My hero, John Stuart Mill, although in favour of widening the franchise and, incidentally, one of the very earliest advocates of votes for women, was opposed to the secret ballot. He thought that people should be prepared to stand up and be counted, literally, because if they couldn't be identified with their decisions they might decide selfishly or irresponsibly. He was probably right, but the advantages of secrecy, in terms of the liberation from possible coercion or bribery, surely outweigh this.* At least, we seem to have accepted that they do in political life. In blogging there's probably even less grounds for denying anonymity, given that anyone can respond and make their own points in response. We should be able to consider points and arguments independently of our views or knowledge of the people making them.

*For this to work, it is vital that you not only can vote in secret and not show anyone else your ballot, but that you must, and that you must be prevented from showing it to anyone else. This is one of the reasons that the expansion of postal voting is worrying.

Hostage to fortune

Well, only a week to go. I was so impressed with Amy's sidebar calendar on Lucky Duck, I wanted one myself, so that everyone can see where we are, and when.

Baz said, isn't that a really bad idea, because then everyone will know we're away and come and burgle the house. I pointed out that the fact that we're going away is already public knowledge, and the burglar isn't going to much care whether we're in Northampton or Acton. And anyway, for all you burglars reading this, Aaron is moving in while we're away, and Carl next door is a one man neighbourhood watch, so I wouldn't try it if I were you. Furthermore, we haven't got a TV for you to nick.

Amy told me how to set it up, but I enrolled Baz too - although with hindsight I think I'm getting the hang of this now - and here it is. Only it's not quite right yet, because some of the entries are too long and you can't scroll across, but you can get the details up with a couple of clicks. It's all very provisional of course, so you'll have to keep reading to see where we are, when, but if you're in the area get in touch.

My, that's done me in.

Tres amusant

If there's one expression that's guaranteed to have me reaching for my metaphorical gun, it's 'I like a good laugh.' People who say this mean either 'I drink Bacardi Breezers and think that chocolate willies are funny,' or, alternatively, 'I am a po-faced misery who completely missed the point of your mildly amusing blog post but will never admit it.'

It's one of those things that, if you have to say it, you clearly have a problem in that department. Who, frankly, doesn't enjoy a little mirth from time to time?

Anyway, I make no claims for the amusement potential of this, but it had me weeping over my desk this morning.

That's better

Thanks Baz. We resized it using Microsoft Picture Manager. That's just how I pictured it. Now, if we could just do something about separating the posts....

Work in progress

Aaaagh, I've gone and done it.
Of course I don't like it.
Steve's instructions worked perfectly.

Adam is right, obviously I need to shrink the photo considerably before uploading it. Baz had already cropped it long and thin - it'll be perfect once we get the size sorted out. Any hints Adam as to what size works just to fill the width of the page?

The thing that really bugs me about this layout is the way the end of one post is squished right up against the title of the next one. Any way around that that anyone knows of?

I will keep persevering; I don't want to give up just because I'm an old stick-in-the-mud and resistant to progress, but I hope we can overcome these little glitches. In the meantime, please consider it very much a work in progress.

A new look for nbWarrior?

Now Warrior the boat has its new look, maybe it's time for Warrior the blog to have a makeover after all. Kindly fellow-bloggers responded, as I knew they would, to tell me how it should be possible to have a photo masthead, showing Warrior in all its glory, and I pursued this, up to a point.

Up to the point where I realised that in order to achieve that end, I would have to replace this tried and trusted (and much loved, by me if apparently very few others) 'template' with a whizzy new modern fab and groovy 'layout' which I believe will look more like this. The Caxton blog, by the way, seems to have got off to a really flying start - 32 posts for July alone SO FAR! And it's so interesting and entertainingly written that I even forgive them for having a bowthruster. In fact, I'll go further than that; I may even reconsider my view of bowthruster owners in general... until the next smug Daily Mail-reading git hoves into view on their semi-trad, anyway.

So, bewarned. I shall start fiddling tomorrow. Hopefully I will manage not to totally screw everything up, and I am trusting (perhaps naively) in Blogger's assurance that the old version will be saved indefinitely and I can revert to it any time I like (but I bet only if I can find the right button, which is likely to be the stumbling block for me).

So. Coming soon: your new, improved, user-friendly, greener, fashionable, digital, forged-in-the-white-heat-of-technology, traditional values in a modern setting, accessible, equal-opportunity and all-round highly desirable nbWarrior.

Ha.

Fallen off again?

It has come to my attention that Warrior no longer appears on Granny Buttons' 'boatroll'; neither, if I remember rightly, does Water Spaniel, for one. This happened a while back, and the reason turned out to be that the list was set to accommodate only fifty names, and as new ones were added, those near the end of the alphabet dropped off the bottom. I suspect that that Andrew then expanded the list to a hundred - never thinking there would ever be so many. But I counted just now and made it ninety nine, which probably means that it is a hundred, given that maths isn't my strongest suit. So, will Andrew just expand again, or will he exert some sort of quality (or quantity?) control and weed the list?

While on the subject I recently weeded my links list a bit. I removed PolPhil Pete on the grounds that he hasn't posted since March, and the world is thus still woefully underinformed about What Would Hobbes Do?; and I removed Save Our Waterways - now it's become a membership group it's hard to see its particular raison d'etre. I've added the Photobucket albums alongside the Webshots ones, and will be using Photobucket from now on, I think - if only because it makes it SO easy to embed a photo in a CWF post.

When I say 'I', obviously I mean I got Sebastian to do it. He tried to show me how, again, but I resolutely looked the other way and stuck my fingers in my ears. I also wanted him to put in a masthead, with a nice photo of painted Warrior but that has so far defeated him. Note to self - ask someone who has a photo masthead in blogger how they did it. I also have a slogan, courtesy of Richard Fairhurst. He says that he sees this blog as being characterised by a 'traditional slant on modern boating'. I like that, and will incorporate it at the top of the page just as soon as someone tells me how.

Spotted again

In a roundabout way ... interesting how these blog thingies (as a caricature Prince Charles might say) link up. I was just browsing Granny Buttons, scrolled down his list to have a quick look at Bones, and she's posted that Caxton have posted about Warrior. With some lovely pictures taken at the IWA Festival last year (even if they have got me in).

So when there's no boating, and no painting, and even no boat-related reading being done, we can still all post about each other.

Caxton is one of only two other boat blogs I know that use this template (think theirs is the later version). The other one was Hagley, but it's now even more sadly neglected than when I wrote about it over a year ago (note Richard's comment there!) - so much so that Andrew has expelled it from Granny's blogroll. Come on Richard, some of us cared! Is Hagley still afloat?

Micro banter

I asked Sebastian yesterday if he would care to come up sometime and dabble in my HTML, to update the links list (sorely needs it... Pete?). He sighed heavily and said, 'Mum, I've shown you how to do it.' 'I know,' I replied with commendable honesty, 'But I wasn't listening, because I thought that I'd just get you to do it.' 'I'll charge', was his answer to that. So the list remains un-updated. I was thinking of adding a link to CanalWorld, my favourite forum. As they say, other forums are available, but as they're not as popular, there's less new stuff to amuse me when I log on every half hour or so.

Sometimes people off CanalWorld (although not, it seems, the History 'n' Heritage section) meet up in the real world and call it a banter. And sometimes a few of them meet up and call it a mini-banter. Today I met up with Black Ibis and FadetoScarlet (aka Amy and James) for a micro-banter, in a cafe by Old Street tube. Amy also has a blog, confusingly utilising the FadetoScarlet brand (great name). They're in the process of buying a boat to live on near Cambridge, and were running out of people to talk to about it, so I was happy to step in.

I'm not quite sure how our paths might cross this summer as we are mainly heading in the same direction, even though they're coming from Birmingham to Cambridge and we're going from Cambridge-ish, but hopefully I'll get the chance to have a look at Lucky Duck when we go back east, whenever that may be. It sounds like an interesting and ingenious boat - and no one knows who built it. I like a nice mystery.

If you can read this, it works!

It's a chilly autumn Saturday morning (Jim's birthday, in fact) and I am writing this with the laptop sitting on Warrior's cabin slide, two gorgeous joshers and a beautiful tug to my right, with the birds singing and the occasional hum of traffic off the A5 ... shivering slightly, but then it is nearly October. It still doesn't get much better than this. And clearly, the T-Mobile datacard is working fine; in fact it's very impressive.

Andante's cabin was blasted yesterday - more thoughts on that when I get home - but it poured with rain before we could get the primer on so that is still to do once it warms up today, which hopefully it will (even though it is nearly October ...) At least we finished blacking the hull on Thursday. The steel was in very good condition, and with the paint off you can really see how well made a boat it is.

Jim has just got back from shopping in Brewood so time to go in for a warming cup of tea!

Blog 'n' Boat

Life is full of new experiences. This afternoon I went into a T-Mobile shop. I signed a contract with a mobile phone company.

I've signed up for Web 'n' Walk Professional which hopefully means that I will be able to Blog 'n' Boat, and Boat 'n' Work. Lockboy has installed the necessary on the laptop, and given me a demonstration of how to use it. Tomorrow I will practise.

Next weekend we are going up to Stretton; I think Andante is being craned out and gritblasted on Tuesday, but it's hard to be sure as my main form of communication with Keith is text message, and there's only so much detail you can manage. In any case, Jim has arranged to see a man about a teapot, and there are plenty of little jobs to do on both Andante and Warrior. So if I post next weekend, you'll know it works. If I don't, it most likely doesn't - I know mobile reception is pretty dodgy there. Or else I've forgotten how to do it.

It might turn out to be twelve months of wasted expenditure at £19.97 a month, but I've a feeling that now we've got it we'll find lots of uses for it, many of them not related to the boat.

By the way, if you sign up for 12 months online the datacard is £58, but if you sign up in one of their shops it's only forty.

Into the digital age

Hampstead Lane locks, Regents Canal, about 2.30 pm today ...

I posted a couple of weeks ago about my trusty Practika SLR camera which I bought in the early 80s when I was about seventeen, and have been using happily ever since ...well, how quickly things change! For my birthday last week (thanks Jim!) I received a Canon Powershot A700 (needless to say) digital camera. Jim's latest engine pictures, and yesterday's stove one, were taken with it. It certainly is a boon to the blogger to be able to point and shoot, upload and post, all within minutes.

But I suspect that the shift from film to digital will also have wider ramifications; it is already affecting the way I think about both taking and keeping photos. Digital images are at every stage more ephemeral, easy to take and easy to delete, and somehow that makes them seem less sacrosanct. Having been a fairly keen photographer, on and off, since my teens, I have many large boxes of prints. I've always felt it would be wrong, somehow, to destroy any of them. But at the weekend, leafing through some prints of Andante in Huddersfield, I found myself throwing half a dozen in the bin, because they were out of focus, or shaky, or simply near duplicates of better pictures. I still have the negatives though ...

More importantly, what about the digital images we do want to keep? Apart from the danger of (someone else) accidentally deleting them, will we have the right software to look at them in ten years' time? Will the hardware be compatible? Will the CDs deteriorate? Do we have to back up our most precious pictures with prints - an expensive process for decent ones. Or do we develop a new attitude to photographs, no longer seeing them as a moment frozen in time and captured forever, but as passing elusive glimpses that will themselves disappear?

Oh yes, and what was I doing at Camden Lock this afternoon? I went up to London for a meeting related to the new job I'm starting in September, and took a half-hour stroll for a little waterways refreshment. Had to fight my way through a lot of tat, but I did get to see the canal in the end.

Bits and bobs

I'm dead chuffed this morning to find nb Warrior on Granny Buttons' blogroll. I am steeling myself to have another go at setting one up here but I am so technologically challenged in this area it may take some time yet. Advance apologies - it will be a bit quiet here for the next week or so: I have to go to a conference in Nottingham next week and then we'll be back at Stretton with Warrior the week after that. Over the weekend I shall be trying to set up a photo website(see above for caveats). I'm thinking of using Webshots - it's less glitzy than Flickr but it looks simpler, and you get to post more photos on the free account (240 as opposed to 200). Any other suggestions?

This afternoon Andante should finally go back to her own spot on the towpath at Aspley (Huddersfield). Just before our epic trip at Easter we got a call to say she'd been broken into (in the middle of the morning! Big lump of stone through the window, followed by a couple of skinny herberts - must have been skinny to get through the window. Nothing taken (nothing to take) except an aging gas lighter, and blessedly no gratuitous damage done, just glass everywhere and a chunk out of the woodwork where the stone landed) so we made a detour to replace the window and fit security bars. At this point she'd been moved into the basin for security and someone else had nicked her towpath spot, so she's been sitting in the basin ever since, right up against the pub car park. Which is really no fun. That is, until I turned up on Monday to find her gone - moved round the corner to make room for a new boat. So this afternoon reinforcements are arriving to fight our way back onto the towpath somewhere. First off though a well deserved pumpout and watering should see her sitting a little less drunkenly. You were right Mike - those tanks are enormous. We emptied Warrior's water tank in three days and couldn't work out what had happened, we've been so spoilt.

Shamed by my boring blog

Yes indeed, I knew I'd been a bit lax with the updating, but I reckoned that as no one was reading it anyway, it didn't really matter. But I've just been totally put to shame by this new(ish) blog http://www.nb-globetrotter.co.uk. It's the work of Mike Beveridge, who I've kept in touch with since he sold us our first narrowboat, the dear little Andante, and it's interesting, informative, frequently funny and above all a pleasure to look at. Well, I can't compete with that - for one thing, I'm not an IT professional, and for two things, I don't live on a boat in the sense Mike does, so have rather less material. But there's enough going on at the moment with Warrior to make that a pretty feeble excuse. And that will be in another (or many other) posts, coming soon, I promise.

Two other hindrances - some other blogs go in quite a lot for giving out information and advice, and I don't really feel up to doing that. Sure, in my own mind I think I know lots of stuff, but there's a rather ingrained aversion to possibly being, well, presumptious. Another blog stock-in-trade is moaning about people/companies/BW, etc etc. I could certainly do that too - just try to shut me up in person! But again, there's something inhibiting me from putting it down in potentially permanent black and white. What if I turn out to be wrong? Or regret upsetting someone? Maybe it's a girl thing.

Still, with those excuses given in advance, I really will make more of an effort to post at least every couple of days now, and then I can actually start telling people that this blog exists! And next time it shouldn't take me so many attempts to remember my password.