Metamedia

Doctor Who Is Done

With the finally published R1 DVD of Logopolis, I have finished my Doctor Who marathon over the past 3 months or so. It has been a wonderful time, from the very first episode all the way up to the end of the original series in season twenty-six. 

It was an accident, but a most appropriate one, that Logopolis was last.

I've seen ALL the new Doctor series, which are great in their way, but the new series has a serious lack of larger scale narrative. Unlike the usual 4 to 6 episode stories, most of the new Who are a punchy 42 minutes aimed at twitcher generation attention spans. It is hard to imagine a large scale narrative like the superlative Key to Time series with its 26 episodes even being contemplated in the new format (much less such a companion.)

The only item left on my list to see is Doctor Who: The Movie, which is the only appearance of Paul McGann as the 8th Doctor. But I'm not shelling out the money for a R2 import, I just want to see it.  So, until it does come out on R1 where I can rent it, it will remain unwatched. My firm rule for DVDs is I never buy what I haven't seen: which just goes to show you how stupidly the entire DVD region codes system defeats itself.

The Value of Failure

A nice quote from an episode of The Doctor involving robots and greed (among other interesting things), which I was watching last night as part of my Whoathon.

While the Doctor is helping out a robot who can't quite do something (because, of course, in this future world, the robots are functionally designed for just certain tasks and have only limited knowledge -- some labor, some speak, some command), he takes a moment to teach:

You've failed. But Congratulations. Failure is one of the basic freedoms.

What a wonderful way of putting it ! How important is it to be where we can experiment, try out, and learn, since in this story, that is essentially the task ahead for many of the characters, who, now shaken out of their comfortable social construction, will have to a lot of learning.

Makes an interesting contrast to a common Dalek command (imagine this said in that nasty Dalek tone of voice):

Do not fail!

The episode was written by Chris Boucher, whose scripts for both Who and also for Blakes 7 are sometimes peppered with nice quotable nuggets.  (An important part of the plot of this particular episode involves the notion of robophobia, the irrational fear of robots, which one character suffers from -- not rather unlike the wikiphobia of today. But that's another post...)

It reminds of a conversation I had once in grad school with my Linguistics Professor William Diver when one of my cherished hypotheses about the meaning of some grammatical system I had been analyzing failed and had to be discarded. To console me, he said:

We should have a party to celebrate every time a hypothesis fails.

Why ? I asked.

Because you're that much closer to finding the right one.

Doctor Who Does Support

I have been watching my own personal "Doctor Who-athon" for the last few weeks. This was prompted by watching the DVDs of the recent revival of The Doctor on the BBC.

Unfortunately, being an American, I missed out on most of the Doctor Who years the first time around, though for a while in college the local PBS station did carry some the shows from the Tom Baker years.

Fortunately, I have found a couple of terrific Dr. Who resources to 'catch me up': the astonishingly complete Outpost Gallifrey website, and a nice discussion forum on imdb discreetly tucked out of harm's way of the big boards.

For my Who-athon, I have over 40 stories to view, chosen after a good deal of research, arranged in chronological order, using a combination of my local independent video store and Netflix as sources. I am now up to the close of the Third Doctor's tenure (and the appearance of Sarah Jane, my favorite companion.)

The Seeds of Support

In the episode The Seeds of Death (1969) we learn a most valuable lesson about technical support.

The story is set in the future when the Earth's transport is managed through a system called 'TMAT' which materializes and dematerializes matter from key transport centers, on both the Earth and Moon. Rockets are not longer needed, and presumably planes, trains, and automobiles aren't either. When the Icemen from Mars attempt to invade the Earth by first commandeering the TMAT relay center on the Moon, chaos reigns on Earth as the world-wide transport system grinds to a halt.

During this crisis, which forms the backbone of the story, key plots points occur because there is only ONE expert on the TMAT system. This one expert, Kelly (a woman engineer as hero in a 1969, yeah!), has to travel in person to the center on the Moon, because no one else can fix it, but while she is on the Moon, meanwhile there is no one left on Earth expert enough to fix the system there.

Her knowledge makes her the single point of failure. More generally, the lack of distributed support makes the system vulnerable to sudden catastrophic failure.

And in addition to this poor support plan, the system has an architecture designed only for success and intolerant of failure (rather like its ancestor, the interstate highway system).  Also noticeable is the complete lack of a disaster recovery plan.

Of course, with the help of The Doctor and companions, all ends well, and the last scene shows Kelly arguing for a better support plan for the future.

Those who ignore future history...

But we aren't that dumb, you say. Everybody knows you shouldn't do that, you say. Can't happen here, you say. And yet it does. It happens to me everyday.

Education is the business of colleges. It is their only business, performed by faculty, paid for by tuition, engaged in by students, and so you would think that Learning Management Software, an extension of the classroom, would be at the top of the priority list for support.

I'm sure it is some places, but where I am, I play the role of Kelly -- almost every day I am shuffling from the Earth to Moon by myself, sometimes snarking SQL settings, sometimes training faculty how to do set gradebook percentages. And not in one, but two LSM systems, I am the sole Kelly: I do everything from configure the LMS web servers to answer phone calls to remind students to click the "Lost your password? Click here." link. And I am alone in this. When I am not here, it just waits.

Of course, just as in The Seeds of Death, no one cares until something catastrophic goes wrong.

I'm sure that Kelly had pointed out the flaws in her system many times, and each time the administrators said, "Yes, but you know the system is working well, and we really need that money for some other worthy project in the budget this year."

Hopefully, it won't take an attempted invasion of the Earth by the Icemen of Mars to get a good support plan in place for you where you work, but those who are ignorant of future history do seem predetermined to repeat it.

Meanwhile, if you are a support person, check out Gia Kelly, heroine of The Seeds of Death, and perhaps consider showing it to the Eduministrators you work for.  Maybe it will get them to see the light.

But in case not, keep practicing up on the magic mantra of support: "I told you so... I told you so... I told you so..."

Copyright Fair Use Update

Check here for an update on watered down version of the failed original DMCRA bill, introduced to try and return the Fair Use back to actual Fair Use, the way it has been for decades, and the way it is still for ANY analog information.

Q: What are educators asking for? 

A: Simply, the ability to use information under Fair Use as it has always been, regardless whether the format of that information is analog or digital.

If the DMCA and similarly legislated economic privileges remain in place as the process of converting most of the analog information on the planet into digital form accelerates, the logical conclusion -- and the obvious goal of the corporate Media Cartel --  is that Fair Use will be extinct in one to two generations.

Sounds like a good sci-fi film, of the Future World subgenre: a world in which ALL access to ANY information is commodified, and in which all ASSOCIATIONS of information are based on the (temporary and corporate) ownership of that information, where everything is a commercial tie-in. Maybe it was a Gibson or Ballard novel ;)

For an intriguing twist on what such a world might be like, I recommend The Girl From Monday Hal Hartley's chillingly funny "science fiction" (two separate words, not one phrase).