Naming Conventions

If you browse this site regularly you may have noticed that the title of the communication doesn’t immediately have a lot to do with the content of that communication. It does, it’s just not obvious.

When I review a film on this site then the title of that communication is the name of that film such as this review of Now You See Me from 2013. There is a page somewhere in the old sites that has reviews of films going back to 2004. There might be stuff mentioned about films in this page which has stuff going back to 2004, I can’t be bothered to read it all.

Some of the cadet camp communications follow a naming convention of using the RAF TLA for the base where I stayed like this one from my first summer camp as a commissioned officer. I used the term BZN for the name of the RAF Station. That way I know I can find the other camps by searching although I think the Cyprus camp was named Via Platres. This was a reference to the name of the village we drove through everyday to get anywhere from Troodos base high in the mountains.

The Lego communications follow the format of Lego XX – Kit Number. The XX stands for the number of the communication of that type. It turns out there have been sixty six communications about the building of Lego sets. The last one is here. I think quite a few cover my building of the bucket wheel extractor a few years ago.

All my album reviews are named Album – Band. This makes a certain amount of sense and along with the movies is probably the only group of communications that is easy to find. Although as I write this I am only up to the P section of the albums by name. I chose to write these alphabetically by album name because I wouldn’t then be writing reviews for twenty AC/Dc albums on the trot. It mixes things up a bit.

The main problem with me trying to be clever about the naming of each communication is that I forget what they were called and end up searching my own website to find what I wrote or thought about a particular thing. This isn’t easy as sometimes I haven’t used the words that I thought I did when writing about that topic. In one communication I reference the Olive Harvest but that doesn’t mean anything unless you have the key to the code.

I’ve basically created a mess with these communications and I love it. It makes things harder to find. I end up seeing stuff I’d forgotten about. It is also slightly click-baity for which I apologise. You see I’ve written something and it won’t be obvious what it is unless it’s in those categories mentioned earlier, I bet you can’t wait to find out what madness lies within.

It’s Probably Nothing

I have a communication I am trying to write but I can’t yet find the words. I know what I want to say and can probably sum it up in two short sentences but I really want to elucidate my offerings with my personal experiences, up to a point.

So, I wondered if I could glean some data from this website. It takes effort, time and concentration to write these communications, even if it doesn’t look like it. I thought I’d look at how many communications I had published each month since this site started and spot how that fits into my plans for another piece of writing.

Fooyah Communications
Fooyah Communications

I don’t like Excel, or at least the graphs it draws but this is a start. Except I’m sure it doesn’t show what I expected. Believe it or not that is a good thing in science. But it won’t help me with my writing.

Perhaps a moving average would work?

Fooyah Communications Moving Average
Fooyah Communications Moving Average

Nope. There’s not a great deal I can take from this either. My hypothesis failed entirely. Which, again is a good thing. Great bounds in understanding are made not when things go right but when they don’t go as expected. “Hmmm, that’s interesting” is probably the most exciting thing a scientist can say.

So, this didn’t work. I need another way of getting into writing the next something. It’s currently sitting as a draft with thirty words looking all sad and alone. I will get around to it. The tricky bit will be deciding which words and what order!

Didn’t Make It

Last month I wanted to beat my record for communications published in a month. After seeing the most I had managed previously I gave up reaching that total but had wanted to aim for 31 communications giving an mean of one per day. I even failed to make that.

I’ll try again another month. It does seem that February would be the best month to try and get that average. Let’s see what happens.

Not Gonna Make It

Sorry people and Fooyah fans. I’m not going to make my target for January 2017. I had hoped to publish more communications this month than in any other previous month and I thought the total I had to beat was 32 [August 2011].

I need to warn you, if you care, that I am going to fail because I had failed to notice May 2013 when I published 68 communications.

I still think I am aiming for >31, which would be an average of more than one per day. But, as I tweeted, quality may be affected.

Devil’s Work

Ha ha ha ha.

Devil's Work

I just noticed that I have published 666 communications. Although, the problem is that this one will make it 667. That’s a shame. If I had actually bothered to look at my stats a bit more then perhaps I could have made this one self-referential.

Holy Cow

Holy Cow, Batman.

I’ve just passed 500 communications on this website. I have to admit most of them are shockingly boring but then it’s not about you it’s about me. This is my thing. I don’t really care what you think.

This gives me something to do, although I am amazingly aware that it is public and so won’t let out all my thoughts here. I have considered writing another website and really going for it but, you know, that’s just not cricket. I do have some ideas for a new domain but the content of the website is not enshrined yet. It was going to be a site of my album reviews but that didn’t seem worth it. I’ve put them on here. Perhaps I should make it a photolog website? Yes, I do know that there are sites that let you do that for free but, once again, I don’t care. This is for me.

Send me your feedback. Ha ha. ianparish@gmail.com

BBC News Comments

It had been my intention a while ago to comment on BBC News articles every now and then. See my initial news communication. I am going to try and resurrect this over the next while but if I am being honest I think that:

There’s just too many stories on the BBC News website that are clearly sensationalism and non-stories.

So, I will comment on some over the next few weeks and see if I get a severe reaction to the general anger that these “news” stories give me. If I find that I am too angry and can’t stop moaning about these things then it will be time to quit and find another niche for my considerable intellect and comment.