The other day, I spent an irritating hour battling a Word Document. It carried an application form we had to fill in, and some fool had misdesigned the thing. Type in your details, and they shifted the rest of the text onto a new page. It was a muddle.
We couldn’t reformat the page, however, because the same fool had ‘protected’ the form and sealed it up with a password. Copying and pasting the text into a new document was impossible, as was saving the file with a new name.
Then followed a further hour searching for and downloading apparently ‘free’ programmes that promised to remove the password. None did, because the free trial features were limited to discovering passwords of five characters or less.
Eventually, I found the Ultimate ZIP Cracker. This is also a paid for programme, but it does have one advantage over its competitors, in that one of its free trial features is the offer to simply remove the protection on documents. It won’t actually tell you what the password is, but for my purposes with the crappy application form, it was perfect.
Tag: Diary (Page 15 of 30)
Here are some of the quotes that caught my ear at the Convention on Modern Liberty, which took place yesterday at the Institute of Education. Not ann executive summary of the day, but the imperfect jottings of my notebook. As such, they are perhaps not 100% accurate, so I will correct them as and when footage or transcripts become available, as they are starting to over at the Convention site. They are, however, in chronological order.
Dominic Greive
“The totally mythical State of Absolute Security”
“Perfectly decent people of course do not realise they are actually [abusing power]. They too are like the frogs going into the water and the heat is turned up they don’t realise they area becoming authoritarian, they think they are the good guys.”
“To abolish the distinction between ‘suspects’, and those suspected of nothing, to place them entirely the same category in the eyes of the state, is a clear hallmark of authoritarianism.”
“A courageous nation would not be afraid of its own newspapers.”
“Imagine a government that trusted the people who elected it. Imagine agencies of the state that regarded the people’s privacy as something it was the state’s duty to guard, rather like the value of their money and the historic individuality of their town centres and their freedom to speak and write as they like.”
Today I start a new job, as Campaigns Manager at English PEN, promoting literature and human rights worldwide. A dream job for a blogger, I reckon.
As before, consider this full disclosure to the bloggers’ register of interests, and sufficient explanation should this site suddenly begin to feature more posts on imprisoned writers or UK libel law.
One of my first acts will be to go an hear Giles Ji Ungpakorn speak about Thailand’s archaic Lese-Majesty laws at SOAS, 7pm. Its chaired by Carole Seymour-Jones, chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. PDF details here.
I wonder if either of my regular readers have noticed a subtle change to the way I’ve been posting recently? In the past, I’ve maintained fairly well defined barrier between my private life, and what I’m prepared to reveal online. In the past couple of weeks, however, I’ve let that slip. First, I drew attention to my Flickr account. An then I went the whole damned hog, and posted a link to video of myself online: Note on Modern Liberty. This in turn allows those who are prepared to click their computer mouse a couple of times, the chance to see family videos and the like.
In the past, I’ve been careful not to provide details of my social networking presence on the blog. This is not because I believe that in so doing, I can totally maintain my anonymity… for this is manifestly not the case. Rather, it is that a small degree of privacy is retained. If people want to know about me, they have to go out of their way to do so.
Furthermore, I had hoped that by refusing (until now) to put my face, or the comings and goings of my personal life online, I’ve built a bulwark against the cynics and the ignorant who seem to think that blogging is nothing more than narcissism (though ironically, this little bit of meta-blogging is pretty narcissistic). I can assert with some credibility that it is a much more outward looking project. Or its a scrap-book. Its not narcissistic to create a memento, even if its one for your thoughts.
(Now I think of it, I did put a bit of my face in a blog post once, but there’s nothing to note that its me).
So what’s changed? Well, I think it is seen as less geeky to have a blog, and to post messages to it. On the rare occassions on which I have to explain myself, it is increasingly my interrogator who comes off as out-of-touch, a luddite, lacking the imagination to see why I might find this sort of activitiy useful. Clay Shirky provides some usueful ammunition here – his lecture on “congnitive surplus” is the definitive smack-down to those who sneer “where do you find the time?” In Here Comes Everybody, he also explains how the question has shifted from “why publish?” to “why not publish?”
Second, I’ve noticed that even the biggest of bloggers allow some private moments into their public square. Jason Kottke recently posted a graph of his wife’s weight during her pregnancy, and Andrew Sullivan’s wedding photos are online. So I think disallowing my face from an little-trafficked, eponymous blog is probably unnecessary.
Finally, I’m struck by the idea of personal or organisational “channels”. I now produce YouTubes, podcasts, blogs and Twitters, all of which appear on Facebook without me ever having to actually visit the site. Its an experimentation in communication, self expression.
The Convention on Modern Liberty has invited its attendees to post video responses to the messages that their key speakers have created in support of the project. I’ve had a go, and created an archetypal ‘head to camera’ YouTube video:
My take is to highlight the problem of small, minor liberties being taken away without comment. If we guard against the loss of these, then the large incursions onto our freedoms, the kind that bring about a totalitarian state, will never happen. But those freedoms are also valuable in themselves.
I am slightly uneasy about saying that the large infringements, such as the 42 days detention laws, or the existence of Guantanamo, are somehow ‘abstract’. Some might see this as an insensitivity to those who have fallen victim to such state-sponsored action… and that may indeed be the case. However, my aim in making the video (or rather, making the point) was to provide a persuasive argument that may convince people that remain ambivalent, rather than a place to show anger, solidarity, or both.
I think that feature has come to be the tone of this site over the past, say, twenty months. I’ve found this is less a place to rant, less a place for me to find catharsis… and more a place to push an argument into new places. If it appears to some people that I have missed the point, then there’s a chance that the argument wasn’t intended for them in the first place.