This is my Livescribe pen and current notebook. I use them all the time, and think they’re pretty fantastic.

My life revolves around Evernote, and Livescribe means that I can upload everything I write without the hassle of scanning everything in. Evernote also does pretty good OCR on my handwritten notes, making them fully searchable. On occasion, the audio recording function of the pen also comes in handy, especially in complex meetings.

Basically, it’s a brill system that I use all the time and highly recommend!

Today marks nine years since I started blogging. Nine years. Increasingly, people are becoming concerned about the permanence of stuff posted the internet. Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign was hampered by the web, and the fact that for almost everything he said, he’d previously given an equal and opposite quote to some other source at some point in the past. And, of course, there’s many other less prominent examples of people’s online history coming back to haunt them.

Anyone with a blog, like me, can essentially make a choice. I could delete a load of old stuff. It wouldn’t make it completely unavailable online, as content from this site is cached all over the place; I guess it might make it slightly more difficult to find. But I’ve chosen not to do that. I’ve chosen to keep the complete sjhoward.co.uk blog intact. And I’m sure many people wonder why.

Firstly, let me say that it’s not because I think everything on here is great. It’s not. There’s some terrible stuff. There’s stuff that’s just plain dross. I’ve written things that I’m a ashamed of, like using “gay” almost as a punchline, or referring to the entire French population as “crazy frogs”. There’s positions I’ve asserted that, at best, are altogether blunter than I’d ever express now, like saying “I’m very anti-smoking”. And that’s before we even open the can of worms labelled “unnecessarily base humour”.

So why, you might ask, do I keep this stuff online, with my name written at the top of the page in a massive font size?

This is something I’ve thought a lot about. In the end, my reasoning was fairly simple. What I wrote in 2003 might have been unprofessional, but I wasn’t a professional then. It might have been immature, but so was I. The date is clearly and prominently shown on all the posts I’ve written. Of course I don’t hold all the same opinions I did when I was 18 – does anybody? We grow, we develop, our viewpoints and opinions change.

One of the more remarkable things about this little site is that you can how it happened. You can see the softening of my opinion on Tony Blair, from barely concealed hatred, to grudging admiration, to actual respect. My changing interests are reflected, from the 2005 election, during which I published daily “swing updates” based on a complex formula weighting different polls, to the 2012 local elections which were only mentioned in passing beneath a pretty picture of a bus stop.

All of this history, and all of these changing opinions, set out the path to where my politics and opinions lie today. And, of course, both will continue to shift over time.

In the end, I guess I came to the conclusion that if someone chooses to judge me on a personal opinion I held a decade ago, then so be it. Though I’d suggest that a far more interesting and intelligent approach is to ask questions: “You once said you thought x: do you still believe that?” or “Your position used to be y, now it’s z. What changed your mind?”

I don’t know exactly when the meaning of the term “flip-flopping” in political discourse changed from being about presenting different views to suit different audiences to being about actually changing your mind on a given issue, but I don’t think it’s a helpful change. I’m vaguely suspicious of people who claim to have “always believed” something – it has a slight whiff of valuing dogma above thoughtful and reiterative consideration of the issues. I can only speculate that the increasingly tribal nature of politics has led to increasing institutional derision of free thought: we must all toe the party line.

If you ask me, the sooner we lose the vogue notion that a change of opinion or reconsideration of position represents a weakness, the better off we all will be.

Recently, the polyphonic ringtone acquired a competitor: A compressed snippet of actual recorded song emanates from the cell-phone handset as if from a tiny radio.

It’s easy to forget how quickly technology progresses. It seems remarkable that this New Yorker article from 2005 already seems so quaintly dated – and yet it was published just two years before the first iPhone launched.

This advert was in the window of WHSmith in the Metrocentre today. I was amazed that anyone could be promoting software to “protect” an e-reader (protect from what?!), but also amazed to see that Peter Norton no longer features on the boxes of Norton products.

Wikipedia says the latter has been the case since 2001, which surprises me. I wonder, given that Mr Norton is 69 this year, whether it’s a case of marketing ageism? I suspect probably not, I guess pictures of software engineers on products are just not fashionable any more. That said, the fictional Mavis Beacon still beams on the packaging of that software.

This is just a few of the postcards I’ve received in the few weeks I’ve been Postcrossing. You can see them all on my “Postcard Wall”.

Postcrossing is slightly geeky but oddly fun as an occasional diversion – why not give it a try?

Those of you unfortunate enough to use Internet Explorer 8 as your main browser may have noticed that the site’s homepage had fallen apart. As a non-user, I hadn’t noticed until I tried to access the site on my parents’ computer.

It turns out that a single misplaced meta tag made the whole homepage screw up. I’ve fixed it now. The site still doesn’t look great in IE8: there are no rounded corners thanks to incompatibility with that bit of CSS, for example. I’d recommend switching to something a little more up-to-date, like Chrome.

A couple of years from now, Britain’s record companies expect to be generating half their revenues from digital.

I nearly choked on my cornflakes when I read this sentence in Dan Sabbagh’s Guardian article this morning. I’m totally amazed that digital revenues don’t already account for way over half of record companies’ revenues, but apparently 90% of Susan Boyle’s records – to cite just one example – are sold on physical CD.

I haven’t had a physical CD player in my house for some years now. Sure, I can play via a computer’s optical drive, or the CD player in my car, but I rarely do. I’m amazed that physical formats remain so popular.

On the day Apple has announced the new Apple TV, I’ve a question about the current model.

This is the remote. It seems to be a single piece of metal, with the only obvious opening being the small one for the battery at the back, which only gives access to the battery compartment. So, I’m struggling to work out how it’s made: how do the innards get in? Does anyone know?

This is Roomba, our deeply futuristic vacuum-cleaning robot. We adopted her about 10 months ago, and she’s hoovered the flat thrice weekly without complaint ever since.

In case you’re concerned, referring to her as female isn’t innate sexism revealing itself, it’s simply a reflection of her female voice…

This morning, I was sent a list of seven papers in medical journals by a colleague. The titles looked intriguing, and I wanted to read further.

I have access to various journals via a number of means: the NHS provides me with access to a given selection via Athens, comprising about 1,500 journals; I personally pay the RSM to give me access to another 1,000 or so; and my BMA membership allows me to access perhaps 100 others. Clearly, the numbers are too large for me to retain details of which portal gives me access to which journal.

So, having found a given article, I then have to cycle through the three access methods, generally in the order outlined above, to find which works. That’s three sets of logins to three different sites (neither the BMA nor the RSM allows direct login from journals’ own sites). This is maddeningly frustrating, especially when I’m trying to glance through seven articles. Accessing each article can take, perhaps, five or ten minutes, which is sheer lunacy. I often don’t have that kind of time.

Now, let me share with you the process for just a couple of the seven papers I happened to be accessing this morning.

First was the Journal of Medical Ethics. I stuck the article title into Google (1 click). The second result was on a bmj.com domain. I often read things in JME, so I knew that I could access this via the BMJ domain with my NHS password. So I clicked the link (2 clicks), and ended up on the abstract page. I hunted for the “Full Text” link, which took me (3 clicks) to a login page. I clicked the “Login via Athens” button (4 clicks), which took me to an institutional login page. I clicked the “Login via Athens” link on this page (5 clicks), entered my username and password, and got redirected (6 clicks) back to the full article.

I make that six clicks and one login to get from my email to the article, for something I know how to access. Clearly, no-one in the field has heard of the three click rule.

Second on the list was a 2011 article from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Again, I copied and pasted the title into Google (1 click). The top result was from Oxford Journals, taking me to the abstract page (2 clicks). I clicked the “Full Text” link (3 clicks) to be taken to a log-in page. I clicked “Login via Athens” (4 clicks), and then “Sign in via Athens” (5 clicks) on the resulting page. I entered my NHS Athens details (6 clicks), and got redirected back to the journal’s login page, with no explanation as to why. Out of confusion, I clicked “Login via Athens” again (7 clicks), then “Sign in via Athens” (8 clicks), and again got redirected to the login page with no explanation as to why.

I assumed (correctly) that the NHS doesn’t pay for access to this journal. So I accessed the RSM website (9 clicks), and clicked “Library” (10 clicks), then “E-journals collection” (11 clicks). I logged in (12 clicks), and searched for “National Cancer Institute” (13 clicks). No results.

So I accessed the BMA website (14 clicks) and logged in (15 clicks). I went to “Library Services” (16 clicks), chose “E-resources” (17 clicks), and “Login now” under e-journals (18 clicks), despite having already logged on earlier. This gave a list of journals, on which JNCI didn’t feature.

At this point, I gave up. I could’ve requested the article from the BMJ or the RSM for a couple of quid, or emailed round to see if anyone else had access (e.g. via a university). But for an article I’m browsing for interest and to casually increase my own knowledge, it’s not worth the hassle or cost.

So now, I’m left more ignorant than I need be because of incompetence (the system is crazy), stinginess (my employer isn’t paying for access), and a touch of defeatism.

I struggle to see how conducting research and then hiding it from people is ethical – isn’t that precisely what skeptics constantly berate Big Pharma for doing? Granted, there’s are important ethical and practical differences between non-publication and sticking an article behind a crazily high pay-wall, but I’m sure there’s an extent to which people on the ground are less informed than would ideally be the case because of this broken system.

Why can’t somebody (perhaps the UK Access Management Federation) compile a composite list of journals I have from various sources, and provide some kind of auto-login toolbar or cookie that gets me straight from the abstract page to the full-text page without the faff, or morosely reports my lack of paid access if none of my providers subscribe?

And why can’t journals like PLoS and BMJ Open have more sensible publication fees for individual authors who, for want of a better metaphor, don’t want to hide their light under a bushel? Funded research should factor in the cost of publication in such journals into it’s funding; un-funded research should be admitted for a nominal fee (or, preferably, nothing).

Anyway, it strikes me that the whole system is pretty crazy – something I’ve thought frankly since I started reading medical journals almost a decade ago. And I needed a cathartic rant. Thanks for reading it.