simonvarwell.co.uk

Apart from Nigerian scammers, the Daily Mail website and a dreadful, never-ending avalanche of kitten photos, the internet is a pretty remarkable thing.  It’s been a huge tool in my learning of Esperanto which, five months since I started, is probably beyond the “beginner” phase and into “intermediate” territory.  It’s fair to say that Esperanto went out of fashion for much of the twentieth century, though I sense from discussing the matter with folk that the internet is allowing for something of a modest renaissance for the language.

Thanks to the web, I’ve been able to study the language, exchange emails with other Esperantists, read articles and stories online, and find many speakers to interact with on Google+.  Yes, that much-maligned social networking service from Google may not be the success they hoped it would be, nor the “Facebook-killer” some hoped, but I have to say I enjoy it.  It’s clean, crisp, advert-free (for now) and easier to manage what you do than on Facebook.

One very handy feature of Google+, which makes it ideal for learning a language, are the “hangouts”.  These allow you to have a video chat with a large number of people together.  An Argentinian Esperantist in the USA has started holding a weekly hangout (or “kunvidejo”, literally “place to see together”), and I joined one the other day and found the relaxed chat with him, a Brazilian and a German to be good fun and a useful experience.  Reading and writing a new language is all very well, but nothing beats using it in real conversation to improve your competence and confidence.

He made a video of us all talking, as an advert and encouragement to other speakers (whatever their ability) to join in the weekly chats.  You can see me, and the others, speaking Esperanto so you can get a feel for what it sounds like and even surprise yourself with how much you might find familiar in this satisfyingly simple language.  I look like I’m reading a script in my part, though my hesitancy is purely down to a lack of conversational practice.  That will come in time, I’m sure.

You may remember me speaking back in June at A Night of Adventure, a fundraising evening in Edinburgh for the great charity Hope and Homes for Children. It turned out to be a really fun evening, and very inspiring because I was rubbing shoulders with fellow speakers that included round the world cyclists, mountaineers, endurance runners and others who all told incredible tales of exploration, determination and adventure.  Also, of course, it was a great opportunity to hear more about the charity’s work.

I was quite pleased with my own presentation in the end.  I was the penultimate speaker out of twelve, so I was increasingly nervous as the evening went by, particularly as everyone’s thoroughly daring tales of pushing themselves to their physical limits made my mullet-hunting quest feel like a pathetic triviality.

That, however, worked in my favour because my presentation could come over as a refreshing alternative to the more hardcore end of the adventure spectrum, and in any case my fellow presenters were hugely entertaining and hilarious, so my flippant mission ended up not appearing quite so out of kilter as I feared it might.

The presentations were all recorded, and Al Humphreys, who organised the evening, has put them on his Vimeo page.  Do go and check them out – there are some thoroughly inspiring and entertaining tales.  Mine is right here and, of course, just above.

You’ve perhaps heard about Google+ , the latest of Google’s many attempts at creating a social networking site to rival Facebook.

Previous attempts have sunk, but Google+ seems to be their best effort yet.  It’s much like other social networks, in that you connect with people to share ideas, links, photos and suchlike.  However, Google+ really is different, not to mention better than Facebook, in that it is as easy to use as you’d expect Google products to be, is free from detritus like adverts and silly games, and the most attractive concept is that of “circles”.

With “circles” you don’t just “friend” or “follow” someone on it, you put them in as many or as few self-created circles as you like, with the idea being that you can choose to share anything you post with whichever circles you like and can in turn limit your “stream” (the content you read) according to what circles you want to follow at any time.  To be fair such a feature is possible with Facebook but is a lot fiddlier to do.

I’ve signed up to Google+ and while it does have the slight feel of a bland, modern housing estate at the moment, it is slowly coming to life.  Whether coincidence or not, I’ve seen a corresponding decline in “noise” on Facebook, which I am finding to be increasingly dodgy when it comes to security, privacy and so on.

I’ll stay on Facebook, not least because my author page is on there, but reckon I’ll be doing a lot more on Google+ for the foreseeable future.  I think it is going to be increasingly my social networking site of choice.  Of course I remain on Twitter, but then that’s always been about sharing information rather than social networking.

I think Google+ is invite only still, while they continue to develop it and iron out flaws, so let me know if you’d like one.

Oh, and here’s my profile right here.  And if anyone knows of any good wee social networking buttons that include Google+ in their series (like those on the bottom left of my front page), then I’d love to be directed to them.

Since I wrote a recent post about attempting to get the cheapest bargain berths between Inverness and London, I’ve noticed I’ve been getting quite a few hits on my blog for people searching for terms related to those infamously elusive £19-£49 tickets between Scottish stations and London.  That earlier post was a bit of a rambling narrative and probably not quite so easy for someone looking for tips about bargain berths to find what they’re looking for.

So I’m tidying up my tips into a neat, manageable and hopefully useful list, with a more search-engine friendly title.

1. Mark the Friday twelve weeks before your date of travel.  ScotRail releases pretty much all their tickets twelve weeks beforehand.  Prior to this you cannot make reservations or buy bargain berths; after this they go very quickly if they’re popular (which the bargain berths obviously are).
2. Be quick on the day of release.  There are only about four tickets at each price level (£19, £29, £39 and £49) on each route, so once you have the date in the diary, make sure you’re free around 9am with a good internet connection (or two) as they are released.  The ScotRail site slows right down once the fares go live, but do persist.  You can also follow ScotRail on Twitter to see when they announce the releases, though sometimes this is a minute or two before the tweet goes live, so you’re best just following the website.
3. Bookmark the precise page and do a practice run the week before.  This, for instance, this is the current page for Inverness-London. If you check prior to your intended purchase date you can see how sales are going.  And just in case…
4. Check the page regularly – as this comment on my other post says, sometimes and quite without warning tickets can go on sale at other times of the week.
5. Travel midweek if you can.  Not only are tickets less sought-after (people more often tend to seek the weekend get-away) but for some unfathomable reason the Friday dates particularly are unreliable.  Maybe it’s just the sleepers between Inverness and London, but the Friday dates seem to be released anything up to twelve hours later meaning it’s hard to pounce on the very cheapest ones.  Don’t bother querying ScotRail about this; I’ve tried tweeting them about this and they’ve replied by simply stating that the fares have been released (when quite obviously they haven’t), so it must be something computery that takes a while to automatically update.
6. Split your ticket if need be – for instance, if you want to go to Inverness and the tickets are all sold out, maybe there are still some bargain berths available to Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen and you can change on to an early morning train from there which itself might only be about £15 single or less.  Not ideal, but still probably cheaper than a regular sleeper berth.

Do your experiences match up to this?  I’m not actually that regular a sleeper traveller, and I know of some folk who do it most weeks, so I wonder how they cope with getting the best fares.  So if you have any tips in addition to these, do please share them in the comments section below.

I discovered quite by accident today that Up The Creek Without a Mullet is now available on iBooks, Apple’s rather funky ebook reader for the iPhone and iPad.

Much as I am a huge fan of both ebooks as a concept and iBooks as an application, Apple don’t, for some reason, have as many titles on iBooks as Amazon have on the Kindle, meaning that the Kindle is definitely the leading ebook reader around.

Hopefully Apple will get their act in gear on this front, because it’s a better format – at least when comparing the iPhone apps, which is admittedly the only basis on which I make that judgement.  At the gentle command of your fingers pages scroll over beautifully in iBooks, and this makes for a so much more hands-on feel, something that people say they like about physical books and which the Kindle with its press-button page-change doesn’t seem to replicate.

Anyway, enough of the soapbox – I’m just delighted UTCWAM has another platform on which it is available.  It only seems to be available on iBooks in the UK and USA at the moment, though, making the availability no wider than on the Kindle version.

Perhaps that’ll change in time.  I certainly hope so.

I reported the other day that the Google Checkout function through which you could buy signed copies of Up The Creek Without a Mullet was down.

Well, it’s working again!  Thanks to Matt, who built this website, a wee tinker under the bonnet has sorted it.

There shouldn’t be any problems now, so if any other gremlins appear then drop me a line.  Remember, you can order a copy from anywhere in the world, with simply either your credit/debit card or a Google Checkout account.  Just click here to buy.

Someone who tried to buy a signed copy of my book online via the link I posted some time ago has just got in touch to say there’s an error, to do with currencies. Nothing’s gone badly wrong and nobody’s lost any money, but there was a problem in the… well, I don’t really understand. I’ve emailed Google Checkout to try to get to the bottom of it, and hopefully there’ll be a solution soon. In the meantime I’ve removed the link from my front page.

If you really want a signed copy in the meantime, drop me an email and we’ll try to sort something out.

Anyone else faced this problem? Do please let me know if you have. Apologies all round.

A recent conversation made me recall something I’d heard about a while back – a song written by an Italian in a gibberish that portrays what English sounds like to Italians.

The song was originally written in 1972 but had a bit of a resurgence on the internet lately, and that registered in my mind.  I’ve just looked into it – yes, I know, I’m supposed to be writing today – and it’s called Prisencolinensinainciusol, and this is the video produced of it for Italian TV. It’s a crackingly catchy song, all the more so for the fact it’s a load of nonsense.

The composer, Italian singer Adriano Celentano, seems to have said it was written in total gibberish.  However I like the subtitles that the uploader of this video has added, based on the English words it sounds most like, because it makes it sound even more gibberish.

Longtime readers will know that I am really not a fan of Facebook. I never really thought it did anything that other things (eg this blog, or email, or Flickr, or – gasp! – talking to people) didn’t do. However, I joined a few years ago to give it a try, and found it tolerable though a bit creepy. Eventually though I gave up on it and was quite happy being an exile.

But increasingly, and against my prediction that it would be a passing fad, my absence from it has been felt keenly on a couple of occasions. Most recently and importantly, much of the emerging details about Kieran’s kidnap happened within Facebook so I only got information second-hand with some delay, which was frustrating when a friend was in danger.

Also, with my book “Up The Creek Without a Mullet” approaching its first birthday and still going strong, I’ve been working with my publishers to explore ways of keeping the book’s profile high – and indeed raising it. One consequence of this is that I have realised that Facebook is a valuable tool for those with something to promote.

So it is with a heavy heart – not to mention a full recognition of my own hypocrisy in changing my mind yet again – I have returned to Facebook.

Those of you who arrived at this post via the front door will have noticed some wee icons on the bottom-right of the front page (which I found here). These are direct links to my Twitter, my Flickr and my brand new mullet adventures page on Facebook; not to mention the wopping big box on the right hand side of this post glaringly and shamefully directing you to it.  You may also have noticed the “share” buttons at the bottom of each blog post too, allowing you to link easily via various social networking sites to anything I might have said in here that’s of interest (I know, hope springs eternal).

Further, you can even enter “Simon Varwell’s mullet adventures” as one of the Books that you like on your Facebook profile as well. If indeed you did like it. You might have hated it, but I don’t think there’s an option for that on Facebook. Yet.

Anyway, there are already plenty folk who have – in the parlance of Facebook with which I am slowly reacquainting myself – “liked” my mullet adventures page, and you’re welcome to “like” it too and tell your friends all about it.

I’ve really entered the world of social media now. And there’s no turning back.

I think.

When the software update for the iPhone that included iBooks arrived this summer, I had a scout around the iBooks store for some interesting free books to read.  I wasn’t necessarily a full convert to ebooks, so wanted to read one or two things on the iPhone to see how I felt about the format – especially considering my own book is now an ebook itself.

One of the books I downloaded was Haven (iBooks|Kindle) by American author Justin Kemppainen.  A science fiction story about a city whose aspirant citizens have escaped the grime of ground level for a new city built on top of the old, it sounds like an interesting read and of course at the time it was free, so figured it would be a good chance to read something new as well as try out the ebooks format.  Hence this post is really a review of both the book and the format.

First, the book itself.  Haven is a fairly dark, dystopian story.  At some point in the future, in an indeterminate location, a city has become polluted and uncomfortable, and high rises and new technologies give way to a new city, New Haven, above the Old Haven.  Those who escape commit themselves to a lifestyle of intelligence, wealth and scientific advancement, at the expense of those below who in the minds of those above live a primitive, dark life, good only for occasional raids to provide specimens who are brainwashed into docile servitude.

However, those below have other ideas, and launch an attempt to reclaim New Haven.  And so ensues a plot which is fast-paced, gripping, and multi-faceted.  There is no real central character, and the story follows and unfolds through the eyes of those in both Old and New Haven, so it is not necessarily presented as a clear-cut story of good versus evil.  With echoes of Orwell’s 1984, a perpetually dark tone and feel, and with plenty doses of violence, Haven is not the cheeriest of reads but it’s a very enjoyable piece of science fiction.  And with a cliffhanger ending, things are ripe for a sequel, which will come soon.

Although there are a few things in the story I struggle to get my head around (for instance, I might have missed something but why didn’t those left in Old Haven simply move into the light wherever the outer limits could be found?) and there were one or two characters or sub-plots I’d liked to have heard more about, my only really big criticism is the surprisingly large number of spelling mistakes.  This, however, is something the author has recently commented on and is a flaw I can fully emphathise with in terms of Up The Creek Without a Mullet’s own ever-growing list of typos.  Those few mistakes, though, don’t detract from what is a real page-turner.

And boy, are there a lot of pages.  Of course, it’s not an unusually long book, but on a screen as small as my iPhone you pack in no more than a handful of sentences in each page, meaning Haven weighed in at around 1600 pages.  Of course, iBooks comes to life with (and was really designed for) the bigger iPad, where you can read a page that’s more or less the same length as in a paperback.

I don’t have an iPad but found the iPhone no impediment to the process of reading.  You have control over font size (though I found the standard size perfectly readable), the page turning feature is a nice action, and the ability to put in as many bookmarks as you like means you’re never going to lose your place.  It also makes reading so much more easy to do, wherever you are – as long as you a have your phone you could get through a few pages here and there on the sofa, in bed, on a train, or wherever suits.  I know you can take a book anywhere with you, but an iPhone is so much lighter, more convenient and more robust.

Sure, you can’t lend an ebook, but I honestly believe that the increase in ebook usage (and associated piracy risks) will lead to prices coming down.  Haven, for instance, is no longer free but is on sale for less than a quid in the UK.  You may not get the same ability to linger over a book and read a bit before buying (though that freedom of course necessitates a handy local bookshop) but an ebook’s synopsis and review should give you enough information to make an informed choice, and if it’s cheaper than the paperback it’s never going to be too costly a gamble.  What implication that might have for authors’ incomes is probably a whole other debate, though I guess it is one characterised by arguments similar to those made by bands who say that free online downloads do raise their profile.

Reading Haven has reinforced my belief in ebooks, and while I of course wouldn’t say I’m never going to buy a paperback again, I would definitely explore ebook prices and availability for a title that interested me before automatically getting a physical copy.  Paperback is now no longer my default option for books in the same way that iTunes or other online methods is my first port of call for new music.  That’s quite a decision after just one ebook.  And Haven is a fine read to boot.

Even at 1600 pages.