Iain Cameron's Diary
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2010-04-16 - 9:08 a.m.

Yesterday was a day to get my head down and plough on with the current assignment � which I have another week to complete. I have written about eight pages so far and I have a resonable idea what I can write about tomorrow. The subject area I am working on is one where Government�s record has not been perfect and there has been a fair amount of wasted resource and misplaced effort. Have they at last got themselves sorted out ? Possibly. What are the chances that the next lot will learn from the mistakes of the last lot or will they go back to the start of the learning curve? Well experience suggests that its usually the latter but you never know. One commentator has suggested that a version of Groundhog Day is in operation whereby every few years someone states the core problems clearly, followed by a period of rather fitful and unfocused attempts to sort things out which gradually peter out. Then someone else identifies the same set of problems and states them clearly � and so on round an endless cycle. From time to time there are reorganisations and bodies are created or done away with which helps with the confusion.

An OOP posting arrived which said: �Twitter and the Library of Congress announced Wednesday that every public tweet posted since Twitter started in 2006 will be archived digitally by the federal library.� A little comment at the end insisted that this was really true. Twitter is banned from my machine by the administrator so its hard for me to estimate the scale of what�s proposed here. Digital mass observation carried to the limit?

I have added a couple more bands to the LFM library about which I know nothing except that they have been recommended to me by a usually reliable source- Efterklang and Animal Collective. The algorithm hasn�t seen fit yet to schedule any of their music. In return I mailed my LFM top 30 tracks � I wasn�t sure that it was more radio 2 than radio 6 � perhaps not.

I�m glad I am not planning any journeys by air in the next few days � we seem to be into rather unusual circs on that front. No planes flying overhead landing at Heathrow.

Laurence has sent me a link to five seminar papers that he has just posted online. I have read two and sent back a question about the first � I hope it doesn�t come across as a silly question even though it is a very simple one.

I�m getting more intrigued by the blogosphere partly through reading Dick Jones and partly by following albeit a bit fitfully the OOP posts that come into my inbox which lead off to other usually more or less philosophical blogs. I think my length of posting is a bit non-standard but its not clear that I ought to pare them down. I like DJ�s use of illustration which adds a lot � and then there�s his poetry. I can put illustrations into my word documents � but haven�t really mastered how its done in diaryland although I have seen it done. Some of the philosophy blogs are quite revealing on a personal dimension in a way that I haven�t found possible. It�s more that writing about music and philosophy is a step back towards normality for me � along with having a pretty much 12 hours a day feed from LFM. I am struck by the amount of posting I got through 2002-7 and the fact that it survived in cyberspace while I was away � there are nearly 1000 posts. I read the first 50 the other day and of course it reminded me of things I had completely forgotten. I am not sure when I am going to read the nest 50.

There�s a bear on LFM who appears when you haven�t keyed into the channel for a while. The suggestion is that you may have been eaten by a bear and so its time to close the channel down. That bear gets on my nerves.

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