I side with Ken Smith on this occasion though. I hate spelling mistakes and love to point them out. Only yesterday I saw a greengrocers’ apostrophe and instinctively growled. But that is only because I am a cheeky wee pedant. Deep down, I know that the rules of the English language are strange and, ultimately, pointless.

What is the purpose of language? I would say language is what allows people to communicate with each other. Accordingly, rules should develop naturally, and as long as the two parties communicating understand each other all is well. However, for grammar fascists, language rules are just an opportunity to crack the whip.

It is worth remembering that a strict one-size-fits-all suite of language rules is a very modern concept. Standardised spellings only came in when some smart fellow decided to become the first lexicographer and hoodwink people into believing his services were vital.

William Shakespeare did not even have a standardised spelling for his own name. Was he wrong? If we follow the joke that the easiest mark in an exam is for spelling your name correctly, it looks like Shakespeare himself would have failed his English GCSE.

Now, hopefully you have noticed that I like to take care over my spelling and suchlike. But this is a personal choice that I took because I believe that adhering to these rules allows me to reach the widest audience possible. That, and it means I don’t get bombarded by complaints from snobs.

If someone else is content to spell things incorrectly but can still convey their message to its intended recipient then that is their personal choice. There is nothing wrong with people deciding how they can speak and write for themselves.

Language has always evolved naturally, and I see no reason why that should stop now. The purpose of a dictionary is to record language as it is written, not to tell people how to write it. If different people spell things in different ways, then that is just part of life’s rich tapestry.

After all, we tolerate and even celebrate — and rightly so — variations in pronunciation in the English language. Only the snobbiest of snobs would demand that everyone speaks RP. In this age where regional accents are celebrated, we usually find we have no trouble understanding people. So why should people also be expected to write in the same bland, standardised, colourless RP all the time?

What gets me is the sheer snobbery of some people who insist on “correct” spellings. Who is to say that you are right and they are wrong? Closing your ears and stomping your feet complaining about how thick the other person is does not get anyone anywhere. Is there not room for some give and take, just as there is when having a conversation with people who have a different accent?

Ideas of Civilisation attempted to show how ludicrous Ken Smith’s suggestion is by filling his post with a myriad of misspellings. Of course, were Ken Smith’s idea to take hold and language was allowed to evolve naturally, we almost certainly would not face a wholesale dumping of the dictionary, with standards completely replaced by arbitrariness. Instead, new standards would emerge while the most common misspellings would be tolerated.

Txt spk is the perfect example. Snobs may turn their nose up at it, but there is no denying that this development which emerged naturally has had an important influence in simplifying the language and removing barriers to communication. In fact, it is an ingenious solution to the problem we all face, stuck with the QWERTY system which was originally designed to slow typists down. What is wrong with people using their initiative to speed things up again?

Then there is the text message itself, where brevity is key. Messages are limited to 160 characters which means you have to keep it short if you want to avoid being charged double or even triple your normal rate. The new standard of abbreviations is a clever and natural way to evade this restriction.

That is not to mention instant messaging, where speed is as important as clarity. When you are having a fast-paced IM conversation, it is only sensible to take the odd short cut. It should be no surprise that in an age where we rely more heavily than ever on inefficient keyboards and restrictive technologies that new standards should emerge.

Moreover, what is wrong with “embarassing”, “beleive” or “pleasent”? Or even the odd “there” instead of “their” or vice-versa? You would still know exactly what I meant were I to use those spellings. Any exam marker with two brain cells to rub together would know that as well. If he were to mark down someone for putting one ‘r’ instead of two even though the meaning is still perfectly clear, then that would make him a petulant, authoritarian shit.

If you click through to the photo’s Flickr page you will see the notes I have written to explain everything. But I will describe my set-up here as well.

As you can see, I squeeze everything on the one screen — even the ITV television broadcast! It’s a pretty big monitor (the same as Ollie’s, if I’m not mistaken), so it can handle it. It is a bit of a squeeze, but it’s the most convenient way for me to do it as there is not a television in the line of sight of where I sit at the computer.

Going clockwise from top-left, we begin with the ITV live video feed. I only fire this up after the chequered flag because during the race it essentially shows the ITV1 London feed — adverts and all. After the race though, it switches to the FOM World Feed. After the race, the world feed contains a nice montage of replays from during the race as well as the press conference, which ITV do not always show during their television broadcast.

While I’m watching the FOM feed, I pause the television (which I watch via Windows Media Centre). When the FOM programme finishes, I start watching ITV again to watch all of the post-race analysis and interviews.

Beneath the television I have FOM’s own live timing system. As far as I’m concerned, this is an indispensable tool if you want to know what’s going on all the way through the grid. I notice that it is a ubiquitous presence among the other photographs / screenshots I have seen.

Finally, we have the F1Fanatic liveblog in the bottom left. Lots of top chitty-chat goes on in there and it’s sometimes a great way to get advance warning of some news as people from around the world report what their commentators have told them. Some eagle-eyed viewers also spot stuff that I would otherwise miss.

The green mug contains my coffee. This sits on a coaster with a photograph of David Coulthard in action in his MP4-13. The clear mug contains an emergency supply of apple juice in case I get thirsty during the race. Peering behind this is a 1:43 scale diecast model of Damon Hill’s Jordan 198.

Not in the photograph, a digital radio sits to my left on another desk. I use this to listen to the Radio 5 Live / Sports Extra commentary. This way I avoid James Allen’s plonkery. One problem with this, though, is that the radio is a couple of seconds ahead of the television. This means that I hear the action before I see it, but that is just a small worry.

Hello.

I’ve been wondering a bit about the way technology news is still ghettoised. I don’t mean news about the latest rubbish web 2.0 start-up with a ridiculous name. I mean quite important stuff. Security problems and the like.

Take what happened last week. A patch to fix a major flaw in the DNS was released. It is pretty important stuff. But the only mentions of it have been ghettoised in the darkest recesses of the technology sections, cordoned off in yellow and black tape with “warning: geeks only” written on it.

I don’t watch the television much these days, so I might be wrong. But I saw no mention of it on the news. I heard no mention of it on the radio. You certainly don’t hear people talking about it on the streets or in pubs.

You might think, “So what? Security update for X, Y and Z are released every day. You can’t have the news reporting it every day.” But something extra happened with that security update that was released last week: it crippled many users’ computers. Including my parents’ computer.

It is just as well I was still able to use my computer to try and find out what the problem was and how to workaround it. It turned out that ZoneAlarm threw a hissy-fit after Windows XP had updated and prevented users from accessing the internet.

In fairness, the BBC reported this on their website — but that’s not very useful if you’ve got no internet. Perhaps there are still people scratching their head about why they’ve not been able to access the internet for the past week.

The problem is twofold. One, the mainstream media seems quite averse to any technology story unless it’s to do with [say this like a caveman] “GOOGLE” or “APPLE”. Or “GOOGLE”. Simply, if you want to find out anything meaningful about technology you have to really know where to look for it.

And this brings me on to the second part of the problem. The people who don’t know where to look for information are also the most vulnerable users. There are people who, for whatever reason, can’t be motivated to take proactive measures to prevent themselves from the various security issues that inevitably arise when you use the internet.

I have a friend who bought a new computer a few weeks ago. The other day he complained to me that his new computer has already got spyware on it. The thing is that it’s not difficult to protect yourself really.

I’m not really a computer expert in the slightest, but I know the basics of how to protect myself — essentially keep all your software updated with the latest patches and don’t click any dodgy links. I don’t think it’s really a difficult concept. And — touch wood — these basics have worked for me. Since I got my own computer early last year I’ve never had anything worse than a tracking cookie on my computer (as far as I know — I just know that this is an invitation for my computer to explode under the weight of pop-ups tomorrow…).

But even simple measures like these that anyone can take are difficult to get through to some people. So many people still treat computers with awe. It is sometimes easy to forget how foreign computers are to many people.

I remember a couple of years ago when there was a really bad signalling failure on the train line into Edinburgh. Basically every train was cancelled. An old lady pointed to the automated departure monitor and asked why it said a list of trains towards the bottom of the screen were still listed as being on time.

This is what she said in protest (as though it would make her more likely to get on a train to Edinburgh): “I thought computers were wonderful things that never ever went wrong.” But even my basic knowledge of how computers work told me exactly why the trains were still listed as being ‘on time’ — because they hadn’t even departed from their start station, so hadn’t passed any sensors and weren’t technically late at all. The computer was none the wiser for obvious reasons.

This can be put down to the old issue that people in their thirties and younger have been using computers for almost all of their lives and understand what a computer is good for and what it isn’t. Youngsters who have lived with computers all their lives understand how a computer works, but for many people older than that computers just work by magic.

The thing is, that divide between young and old is not so clear cut as I used to think. I was listening to iPM yesterday and there was an interview with Clive Sinclair. He pointed out that back in the 1980s computer users really understood computers because they had to in order to get them to work. Today’s youngsters growing up with computers generally don’t understand computers at all.

So we come back to my friend who is the same age as me and has a problem with spyware. I have had a few conversations with him where I have tried to persuade him to use Firefox. For him, the internet is the internet and he doesn’t understand how one browser can be better than another. Even though I have told him about all the superior features and better security that a browser like Firefox or Opera can provide, he persists on using Internet Exploder version bum point poo.

Many people, through ignorance, don’t take the simple measures to keep themselves safe on the internet. I’ve had a look at the stats for this website to see what bad browsers visitors to this site are using.

In the past month, an amazing 20% of visitors used Internet Explorer 6. This is a web browser that was originally released seven years ago and last updated four years ago. It is notorious for its security problems. The more up-to-date Internet Explorer 7 was released almost two years ago.

You would expect Firefox users to be smarter, right? Not always. In the past month, 243 Firefox users that visited this website were using a version of the browser that is considered unsafe (which I defined as 2.0.0.14 and below). This included 19 people using 1.5.0.12, 11 using 1.0.7 and 8 using 1.5.0.3. Most amazingly, 4 visitors were using Firefox 0.9.1, a browser that has been out of date for four years. I dread to think what kind of security problems these users have been getting themselves in.

It got me wondering. If this many people are using dodgy browsers, how many people are still trying in vain to unsubscribe from spam emails? How many don’t know that even viewing an image in an email alerts a spammer that your email address is active? You could go on.

I don’t mean all this in a preachy kind of way. I completely understand why it is difficult for people to keep up to date with all the security issues that arise. I just find it really frustrating that simple awareness issues are not, well, made aware to people.

Things don’t get much more ubiquitous than the internet. It is impossible to imagine that someone growing up today will not be a regular internet user in some form or another. And there are real dangers on the internet that aren’t to do with [say this like a caveman] “PEDOPHILS” and “CYBER BULLIES”. But the media reports on made-up dangers like “KNIVES” and “YOOFS” and “KNIVES” as though we are on the verge of bladeageddon.

Yesterday I was listening to Digital Planet. They had a chap called Stefan Frei on reporting that around 60% of all internet users are using an out-of-date browser. He had a really smart way of thinking about software security. You should think of software as being perishable, just in the same way as foodstuffs. You wouldn’t eat a mouldy slice of bread, so why would you use a browser with a huge security hole in it?

It’s a really smart analogy that should be spread far and wide. It’s just frustrating that the place I heard it was on Digital Planet, which is probably listened to mainly by people who already know that they should be updating their browsers.

White Noise was the idea of David Vorhaus, a classical double bassist with an interest in electronics. After attending a lecture, he approached members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — Delia Derbyshire (creator of the famous Doctor Who theme tune) and Brian Hodgson (who created the sounds of the Tardis and the Daleks). Together, they worked for a year on An Electric Storm, perhaps one of the most seminal electronic music albums there has ever been.

Incidentally, Delia Derbyshire was a genius in her own right. On an album showcasing Music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Derbyshire’s work stands out. ‘Time to Go’ takes the famous pips of the Greenwich Time Signal and turns it into a cacophony of blips and bleeps before descending into farts, burps and squirts. I wonder if it inspired David Lowe?

‘Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO’ is my favourite though. An utterly mad piece of music centring around a mad robotic chant. It sounds like it could have been created by a trippy early 1970s rock band, but it was made by a geek in a lab. There is a clip about this particular piece on this page about the BBC documentary ‘Alchemists of Sound’.

Back to An Electric Storm though. Listening to it, you can tell that it is not a recent work. It contains the sort of tricks used by the Radiophonic Workshop. But in a way this is what amazes me the most about it. This album is almost forty years old, yet it sounds more amazing than a great deal of the electronic music made today.

It’s all the more impressive when you consider the multiple hurdles the group had to clear. Having signed a contract with Island Records, they realised that they didn’t know how they were going to record the album. The first works were made by sneaking into the studios of the Radiophonic Workshop. But making an entire album this way would have been too risky. They had to build their own studio and using home-made equipment.

The album was made in an era before the widespread availability of synthesisers. Most of the noises were made by tape manipulation, a laborious task. The technique sounds a bit like an audio version of stop-motion animation. An original sound (from, for instance, Vorhaus’s bass) would have to be sped up or slowed down for each and every note. Even echo effects were achieved by rather crude means — playing two identical tapes out of phase.

A particularly ambitious song, ‘The Visitation’, took three months to make. Recording was taking so long that they faced legal action from Island and had to finish the album overnight. That the track in question — ‘Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell’ — doesn’t sound as though it was particularly rushed boggles my mind.

And what did White Noise receive for their toil? The album sold a paltry 200 copies in its first year, and the group made just £280. Luckily for us, and for electronic music as a whole, it gained traction in subsequent years and became an underground classic. This year it was remastered and re-released.

It is a genuinely pioneering record. Today an artist is labelled ‘experimental’ just for using a farty synth. But White Noise were actually pushing the boundaries and creating something truly amazing. It’s incredible to think that something so ambitious for its time should actually stand the test of time this well.

The album opens with the intriguing ‘Love Without Sound’. Vorhaus’s intention was to release this as a single to try and convert the population to electronic music. The result is a song that is equal parts accessible and impenetrable.

John Whitman’s vocals are other-worldly and detached. The music is a surreal, part-humorous, part-unsettling cacophony of clicks, clacks and warbles. This cleverly interacts with female laughs and moans. Despite the wide and unpredictable range of sounds, the resulting collage makes perfect sense, in its own surreal way. Think the “ho-ho, he-he, ha-ha” bit in ‘I Am the Walrus’, but lasting for an entire song.

This is followed by ‘My Game of Loving’. This track features a famous section of mad tumbling drums laid on top of a kaleidoscopic orgy which is comically followed by snoring. The sex-frenzy is sonically interesting, but make sure you don’t have your iPod too loud or you’ll get some funny looks on the train.

This track particularly reminds me of two more recent electronic acts. The spliced tabla-style drums remind me very much of Asa-Chang & Junray, while I would be amazed if the orgy section didn’t inspire some of Aphex Twin’s more humorous moments. This is not to mention Stereolab and Broadcast, who are influenced by White Noise as a whole.

The humour continues on the next track, ‘Here Come the Fleas’. While today’s electronic musicians are perceived as being serious, beard-stroking types, ‘Here Come the Fleas’ reminds you of the comedy potential of electronic music. The song lays into a lazy slob’s poor hygiene standards. The middle of the song is dominated by a brilliant section that would have made a cool guitar solo. It would have been so easy just to pick up a guitar and do it, but they had to go the hard way and make it with tapes, didn’t they?

That is on the “happy” side, known as ‘Phase-In’. People must have thought that this pioneering electronic music is a barrel of laughs. They were in for a shock when the turned the record over for the ‘Phase-Out’ side. The smiles and laughter are wiped away and the listener is treated to something that approaches the horror genre.

‘The Visitation’ — the track that took three months to make — is, for me, the highlight of the album. This stunning piece is about a couple of lovers who are torn apart by a motorcycle accident. As the girl screams, “please don’t go”, the motorcycle crashes. The spirit of the man who was killed tries to communicate with his weeping girlfriend, but is unable to.

It’s quite spine-chilling really. The music is genuinely haunting and really paints a picture of a dark, rainy night on a remote road where the motorcyclist is killed. It uses stereo to brilliant effect as well.

The singing and narration also creates the right mood. The spirit’s voice echoes spookily, while the singer is the coldly neutral bearer of bad news. When he sings, “Her lover’s not asleep, he’s DEEEAAAAD”, it makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

As I said, it could actually be a horror film. It would make a cracking piece of radio drama. This could be one of my favourite pieces of music. An eleven minute journey into a horrifying affair — it’s impossible not to feel sad listening to it.

Listening to An Electric Storm, there is no doubt that it is a unique product of 1969, the like of which could never be made again. Pitchfork’s review of the album says:

White Noise’s landmark 1969 album An Electric Storm might not the first thing most people think of when considering 1960s music, but there are few records anywhere tied more intrinsically to the moment of their creation. Recorded in the months immediately prior to the widespread availability of keyboard-based synthesizers, An Electric Storm might be one of the most painstakingly crafted electronic recordings of all time. Pieced together on improvised equipment via innumerable tape edits, this remarkable album is at once futuristic and unavoidably date-stamped, serving as a fascinating audio snapshot of a bygone era in sound generation and recording technology.

This was a time before the widespread use of synthesisers and computers, but at a time where there was a lot of enthusiasm and ambition for electronic music. I can’t help thinking that it’s just a little bit too easy to make electronic music today. It is impossible to imagine anyone except the bravest / maddest of souls dedicating a year of their lives laboriously fiddling about with tapes when they could just use their laptop to embark on a sonic adventure.

Given just how mind-bending this early electronic music is compared to a lot of today’s identikit techno, I can’t help but wonder if advances in technology have restricted musicians as much as liberated them.

If you are remotely interested in electronic music, I would recommend this almost as a must-buy. Not only is the music amazing, but it is also a real insight into the painstaking approaches of electronic musicians of the past (the sleeve notes are brilliantly educational in this regard). It really is true to say that they don’t make them like they used to.

• Last.fm page for An Electric Storm with sound clips
• A great review of An Electric Storm
• White Noise Wikipedia entry
• Official White Noise MySpace (!)

This was also just in time for cheap tickets to become valid, so there were a lot of elderly ladies wanting to make their trip to Edinburgh. One went into a boring tirade about how this never used to happen when she travelled on steam trains.

Another looked at the monitor with all the departure times on it, and thought that because some trains (trains that were coming from the north and were hours away from turning up anyway) weren’t showing up as “cancelled” that the staff members must have been lying.

Staff member: “You can’t go by that. It’s all computerised, you see.”
Old lady: “But computers are meant to be wonderful things that never ever go wrong.”

She’s obviously never used a computer.

Last week my train back from Edinburgh was delayed by 70 minutes, also because of a signal failure at Haymarket.

This has spurred me on to finally sign up to First ScotRail’s text alerts, which is actually pretty cool. Imagine waking up to a message that says

KDY to EDB: 10:41 may be cancelled or delayed – signalling problems, 10:57 may be cancelled or delayed – signalling problems, 11:29 may be cancelled or delayed.

You could just go back to sleep! Brilliant! Mind you, it’s good to get up early I guess.

I’ve not got any ‘update’ alerts yet though, even when the actual website has been updated.

Update: Unlike last week, there is a story on the BBC News website:

“As part of the Waverley redevelopment project major investment is being made in the signalling which services at Haymarket.

“The problems underline the importance of that work.”

Bloody right.

Update: Big article on Scotsman.com.