Steph's Diary (Part the Seventh)
Back to Part Six |
Up to top
steph's Diary
-------------
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Mar 29 14:25:21 2009]--
From: (S) Captain Phone (steph)
Subject: Firsts
First entry in this new diary, now my head is less full of flurry and worry.
The things that bothered me towards the end of last year got worse, and then I
gradually recovered to something approaching levelheadedness again. In the
meantime I took up learning Samatha (a Buddhist style of meditation), which has
proved to be a fascinating practice, even if I don't have a very good answer to
the question `What _is_ meditation, exactly?'
First-time buyer, or at least I'm trying to be. I found a lovely house not too
far away from where I currently live, and after a sanity check from Clare (who
confirmed that yes, indeed, it is a lovely house) I made an offer, had that
offer accepted, and got a survey done. The survey revealed some roofing work
that needed to be done, so I've now revised my offer down by the amount it will
cost to fix the roof. I should find out next week what the vendors think of
this...
First two loaves in my unexpected foray into baking. The first one attempted
to be a wholemeal loaf but was a bit too stodgy, possibly because I didn't give
it quite enough time to rise. The second one was a delicious white `farmhouse'
loaf. `Farmhouse' here means not in a loaf tin. Whether this is because
farmhouses can't afford loaf tins, or simply because they prefer their bread to
come as a tasty ovoid, we are not told.
First time chairing a significant committee, in particular the one that will be
managing the effort of splitting the current excessively large laboratory
network into six smaller (and hopefully more robust) chunks. It is at turns
pleasing that I can start getting things done, and stressful because of the
sheer magnitude of the tast (and also the fact that the task has slightly fuzzy
edges).
First... no, I just can't work out how to start this one with `first'. New IP
telephones are also coming to the laboratory, so I've (largely accidentally)
found myself filling the network support vacuum accompanying aforementioned
network reorganisations. It's quite fun, even if the telephones are annoying
devices whose error reporting needs to read one of Simon Tatham's Influential
Essays.
First Grand Prix of 2009 today, too. Back on Auntie, no longer with ad breaks,
and Eddie Jordan's incessant brown-nosing in place of Mark Blundell's penchant
for stating the bloody obvious. Hmm.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Apr 28 17:16:56 2009]--
From: (S) Captain Phone (steph)
Subject: Seconds
Mono crashed when I tried to write this on the 8th April, and I forgot I'd
saved the text. Since I had, I include it here:
Yesterday was the second anniversary of my father's death, or at least I think
that's right. It's alarming how easy it becomes to lose track of these things.
I wasn't overly sad, just (to borrow a term from meditation) mindful. One of
the things I think about when I remember my father's illness is how incredibly
thin he'd become in his final months. Yesterday it occurred to me that he
would have spent much of those last weeks lying in bed on his back. Probably
not a significant realisation, but one which nevertheless struck me.
Yesterday was also the second day of the Laboratory's VoIP phone deployment.
About 90 phones were deployed yesterday, with about 350 still to go.
Remarkably there have been nearly no hitches to do with the network, so I'm
feeling quietly confident that it won't be the Great Phone Disaster I was
prepared for. Touch wood, melamine, plasterboard, plastic...
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Apr 28 17:28:44 2009]--
From: (S) Captain Phone (steph)
Subject: Bits and pieces
Having finished the phone deployment around here more or less successfully --
the only major hitch turned out to be a hardware failure on a core piece of
network equipment -- I've been turning my mind to the other spare hat I've
ended up wearing: that of reshaping the network. Actually not reshaping it so
much as carving it into six independent networks. The hope is that such
radical surgery will result in a great improvement, but only time will tell.
Unfortunately ploughing through budgets and writing planning documentation saps
my enthusiasm very quickly...
I appear to have learned to solve the Rubik's Cube. I was never able to do
this when I was little, even with the aid of Patrick Bossert's `You Can Do The
Cube'. Now, largely thanks to Gareth's efforts, I can, but the solved state is
curiously unsatisfying.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat May 16 13:46:02 2009]--
From: (S) Captain Phone (steph)
Subject: Too bourgeois for my shirt
Woohoo! Yesterday I exchanged contracts to buy a house, and it will officially
become mine on the 29th May. Gosh, wow, etc. It's still in Cambridge, indeed,
still in the same area of Cambridge, but it will be Mine. Bwahaha. I won't be
moving in straight away because there are a few things I want to do to the
house first: the flat roofed extension at the back needs some repairs, and I
also want to get the loft insulated. Other than that, though, the house is
already livable in (and the sellers are leaving curtains) and because I've been
renting unfurnished for the past few years, I already have most of the
furniture I'll need.
I feel so middle class all of a sudden :-).
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Jun 09 12:06:43 2009]--
From: (S) Carve-Up King (steph)
Subject: The longest of counting
I'm feeling a bit despondent and listless today, so I've decided to waste a few
minutes wittering here instead of plodding through work.
The type of meditation I do on Monday evenings is in a tradition which is based
on focusing on the breath. At the start of a session, the teacher writes up a
grid on the blackboard which denotes the types and lengths of breath we will
use throughout the practice. So it might look something like:
C F T S
9 - - -
6 -
3 - -
1
...where the letters along the top are the type of breath and the numbers along
the left are the length. I won't go into detail about what the various types
of breath are, except to say that it gets in some sense `deeper' towards the
right, and that the first stage is `counting'. Once in the practice, you do
each stage for a while until the teacher says to move to the next, so here, we
would go 9C 9F 9T 6T 3T 3S. Then you come back out, and usually by the same
route, reversed.
After the practice last night there was some discussion about this return path,
and apparently some traditions regard it as bad luck/form/karma/juju to take
a different route out of the meditation to the one taken in. For some reason I
found myself thinking of it like a move on the cube: you do a set of moves that
do what you wanted (but muck up most of the rest of the cube) and then (in the
equivalent of the S breath, I suppose) you make a small move and then undo the
series of moves you first made.
All of which is of little importance or relevance, but it amused me that the
cube can be a metaphor for something other than group theory.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Jun 16 17:43:56 2009]--
From: (S) Blood and custard (steph)
Subject: Whose job is it anyway?
I'm feeling a bit fed up and worn down. If there are days when I think I can
do the things beyond my official role description and will achieve the goals I
have set myself (or have allowed to be set for me), yesterday was one of those
days but today has emphatically not been.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Jul 22 18:18:11 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Chez moi
Well, I've mostly moved. There are a few bits and pieces still at the old
place that I need to pick up before my tenancy officially ends on the 6th
August, but I'm basically living here now.
Moving day was a bit stressful, particularly the moving out part, where I had
to contend with my packing being in the almost-but-not-quite state and a
welling-up of sadness at the history that living somewhere for six years brings
with it. It felt, as it felt when I was clearing out my parents' house, as if
I was packing up a life, except this time it was mine.
It was better once we got to the new place and I was able to put things up,
arrange things, and make the place definitely my own. There are still a lot of
boxes to unpack, of course, and some of them won't be able to be unpacked until
I've got some more bookcases, but the place is now such that I can live in it,
so that's what I'm doing.
Today was spent mostly waiting for either the plumber or Virgin Media. The
plumber, it transpired on phoning him, was extremely busy and will probably
come round later this evening. Virgin turned up at about 5:30, half an hour
before the end of their afternoon `slot' and made my phone work as well as
giving me a new cable modem; apparently the old one would cease working as soon
as the account from my old address was shut down. Seeing my Linux terminal
they didn't flee screaming or shouting that I had to use Windows, but instead
said `Is that Linux? OK, well if you can just tell it to get a new address...'
How things change.
While waiting I did a few bits of unpacking, but less than I expected. Gareth
came round to help in the afternoon so we drank tea, wittered about cubes, and
played Circuit Breakers. I think that probably counts as helpful :-).
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Jul 29 10:41:43 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Lines of the Dead
Purely outside of work my deadlines are as follows:
* Pay plumber
* Finish Constitution programme book (for this evening)
* Prepare Steph Swainston interview (Saturday pm)
* Try to remember some more recent SF telly (Sat pm)
* Find books with interesting jobs in (Sun am)
* Write quiz for con (Sun pm)
* Inform utilities of end of tenancy at old place
* Clear out and clean old place (6th August)
* Get washing machine fixed (before I run out of clean clothes)
* Tidy up new place for visiting relatives
Argh. I don't know when I'm going to fit it all in, particularly writing the
quiz and clearing/cleaning the old house.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Aug 03 00:00:54 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Constitution
Well, that was the con that was, and it went well. Nothing happened that was
insuperable or insufferable, and people had fun. Our Guests of Honour were
tremendous, as was everyone who took part in a panel, ran Green Room, played
games, stepped up for the cabaret, or sold stuff in the Dealers' Room. And, of
course, everyone else who came along to listen and watch,
I stood back earlier, and looked at the Dead Dog Party in the bar, with people
still chatting animatedly as the last firkin of beer approached its end and
thought `I helped make this happen'. It was a moment of almost overwhelming
pride.
There are loads of images that will stick with me from this con, but that image
of the bar, and later one as I sat with a few people in the fountain courtyard
with the filkers audible from the Froud room, will stick with me for, I hope,
quite a while.
There's a slight tear in my eye as I type this. I think I am what they usually
call tired and emotional.
And that's not a euphemism.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Aug 06 14:17:39 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Six and a half years
That's how long I had the rented place: six and a half years. That's a
significant chunk of the time I've spent living in Cambridge, but it ended
today as I handed the keys back to the letting agent. There's no going back
now, and two nice Eastern European girls will be the new inhabitants of what
was my home...
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Aug 10 23:12:28 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Notes on the passage of time
The Friends Meeting House, where the Cambridge Samatha Buddhist `town' class
meets, is closed during August, so there are no normal classes. However, some
out of term sessions for Samatha meditators are being run in a Fellow's room in
Clare, so I went along this evening. I knew the Fellow's name was Rachel
Harris, and for some reason I had discounted the possibility that this was the
same Rachel Harris who had taught me Arabic when I was an undergraduate.
Except it turned out that it _was_ the same person. It was very very strange,
seeing someone who I'd last met in a very different context when I was a very
different (and far more broken) individual. I don't think it was especially
awkward -- even outside of the meditation itself these events can sometimes be
silent and contemplative -- but it was very strange. Over thirteen years have
passed since we last encountered each other.
I may not have made the best impression, though; I have a sneaking suspicion I
may have fallen asleep for a bit of the practice. If I did and anyone noticed
they were kind enough not to mention it. I say `may have' because it can be
hard to tell where the boundary is between sleep and the mind having wandered
completely away from the focus of the exercise.
On the other hand there was a reading afterwards about equanimity and not being
ruled by pride or embarrassment. So I shall bear that in mind.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Aug 19 17:26:24 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: A lengthwise-divisible chocolate biscuit
For a couple of weeks (really since the convention at the start of the month) I
have been feeling very weary and worn down, but with the ongoing reorganisation
of IT here at work I've not really felt I could take some time off to deal with
it. I realised, however, that it was getting to the point where the weariness
was making me gradually less and less useful, so I'm letting myself have a
break. Only tomorrow, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, but a break nonetheless
during which I will not consider servers, networks, telephones, or anything
like that. Well, not unless some disaster happens, anyway.
I wonder if it will make a difference.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Aug 24 23:29:45 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: That monkey inside
One of the goals of the meditation I do on Monday evenings is to get the
hyperactive mental monkey (he jumps from mental tree to tree) to stay still
for a short while. Although this evening's practice was particularly calming,
it seems to have caused a mad monkey-like jumping from tree to tree of the
world wide web. It would be remiss of me not to inflict this on you lot.
So, at some meetings there is chanting, in a language called Pali. Online
courses for this such as http://www.pratyeka.org/Silva/ reveal that
neuter nouns in Pali have the same form in the nominative and accusative cases,
just as do Latin and Greek neuter nouns. An attempt to find out if this
was common to many languages, or many Indo-European languages, or some
other grouping was inconclusive, but Google led me to find some discussions of
Proto Indo-European at http://books.google.com/books?id=aiEqn_WQl-8C&pg=PA44.
This led me to wonder what ergativity was. Wikipedia to the rescue, with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language but perhaps
if you were still unclear on this you might like to try a sequence of
linguistics cartoons http://specgram.com/CLII.1/11.phlogiston.cartoon.i.html
and in particular http://specgram.com/CLII.2/10.phlogiston.cartoon.b.html
So there you go.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Oct 10 13:04:03 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Loops, cycles, and rings
There was a loop on the Physics network this week, which caused disruption to
large parts of the lab. Fortunately, while everyone else's phone calls were
breaking up my network was working flawlessly. Most pleasing.
Less pleasing was when the saddle of my bike spontaneously fell off on Thursday
evening. The bolt holding it to the seat post had sheared through. I picked
up the pieces and wheeled the bike into town to Station Cycles in the Grand
Arcade. They were open until 7pm and took the bike, telling me they'd have it
fixed by noon the next day, and in the meantime gave me a courtesy bike. Not
ideal, perhaps, but it had wheels and lights and got me around. The price for
this service? A tenner. Superb. I picked my bike up the next lunchtime as
planned, and went on my way.
Finally, rings, which you may hear when trying to phone my landline, but I
won't. It is broken, or NFG as we say in the trade. Virgin Media are coming
to investigate it next weekend, so between now and then if you want to get hold
of me I suggest email or my mobile.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Oct 20 10:42:46 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: My hobby
Producing unidiomatic translations of advertising slogans.
"Ou dans le monde? PC monde!"
"Qui vous donne plus? Nous! Nous!"
"Sie koennen es tun, wenn Sie es B&Qn!"
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Nov 13 17:59:31 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Intriguing
I wonder why I've not felt moved to write very much in here of late. Perhaps
it's just because not very much has been going on with life. I suspect that's
good, although sometimes I wonder whether life could do with being a little bit
more interesting somehow...
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Nov 23 14:28:47 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: The elect
One of the things that's been happening recently is the UK Usenet Committee
elections. This committee, for those that don't know, is a bunch of people
that gets to arbitrate on various matters associated with newsgroups under uk.*
Every now and then, some of these posts come up for election, and some people I
know stood for election.
Except it was a very weird election. Some people on the committee standing for
election seemed to be horrified at the very thought that anyone else might
stand. Some predicted doom for UK Usenet if any of the interlopers were
elected, while curiously at the same time insisting loudly that the committee
had no power or influence and thus couldn't break or fix anything in any case.
The electorate was, well, basically anyone who reads or posts to uk.*. Except
that mentioning anywhere that there was an election going on, or even (gasp)
that a particular person might be standing, was regarded as illegitimate
canvassing. Talking about it with your friends, or in your own living room,
was right out. Apparently.
So, an election in which nobody is supposed to stand, for a committee which is
supposed to have no power or influence, about which nobody is supposed to know.
How, er, something.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Nov 24 16:53:29 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: The dumps
I've been feeling depressed today. Every problem is insurmountable, it's a
herculean amount of effort to get even the simplest task done, and even when I
can muster the motivation to do something my memory for short-term details is
working even less well than usual so it's a case of two steps forward and
somewhere between one and three steps back...
There is a big heap of things to do, but that's not normally a problem. My
usual attitude is to find the next thing and do it, and slowly I work my way
through most of what's important. Today, though, it's a huge pile of Stuff
that needs my attention, which in this case I have not got. No less huge,
though rather less metaphorical, is the mess on my desk, which isn't helping.
I suspect I just have to write today off as a bad job and start again tomorrow.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Dec 04 17:20:28 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: In parties
This week the part of the Cavendish where I work had its annual "theme day", a
day of talks about a (usually quite broad) scientific theme, and because I like
to know what's going on around me I went along. Although the theme was in
theory "Cells, colloids, and macromolecules" it seems that the day was largely
about chickens. Here are some chicken related facts:
* If you hold a chicken beak-down to the ground and draw lines away from its
beak, it will become immobile and unresponsive for up to 30 seconds.
* If you take an egg, cover it in pine ash, salt and straw, and leave it for
three months, the whole becomes a vile-smelling delicacy with a translucent
solid white.
In the evening was the Christmas party, my first Christmas dinner of the
season, with the added joy of a murder mystery: a few people played out a scene
between courses and we got to question them a little bit before deciding who
was to blame. It was a little cringeworthy at first because everyone was stone
cold sober and waiting for food while this was going on, but once people had a
bit of food and drink inside them it was remarkably enjoyable.
Our team, of course, was called Chicken Chicken, in honour of the research
paper at http://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Dec 04 23:33:39 2009]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: In parties (II)
That point in the evening where the happiness of being with happy people doing
silly things contrasts sharply with the sadness of being inside my head.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Jan 02 15:17:45 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Happy New Ears
So, we are in 2010. Gosh. And since I've not written anything here for almost
a month, I should fill in at least some of the gaps.
Running up to Christmas I was feeling a little low, I suspect because it's the
season in which my parents' absence is most keenly felt. Also Borders' closing
down sale gave a sad feeling to one of my favourite town centre haunts, and a
broken down oven put paid to the usual Gallery Christmas affair. Perhaps
they'll manage a celebration sometime this year instead...
Christmas itself was fun; I drove up to Hull to see my brother, Sara, and my
little nephew Drew. He's much more communicative now, and he actually answers
questions rather than just parrotting what you say to him back at you. He is,
however, just as bossy, so it was fortunate that I was willing to be at his
beck and call to play pool on his new pool table, or assemble his Scalextric
set (both Christmas presents). A four year old is a definite tonic for what
ails you.
Back to Cambridge on the 28th, and then Clare's ersatz Christmas dinner on the
29th, with spotty crackers, a real log fire, a gingerbread monolith, and Ben
trying to do a 3D rolling ball puzzle by headlight.
New Year's Eve seemed subdued to me. There were few people earlier, and
although there were more later, I didn't feel particularly celebratory, and
sloped off home.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Feb 03 14:00:54 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Minimal
Nothing much to say here, which probably explains why I've not said very much.
Although leavened by having things to do at work, life is still somewhat dull
by and large. It behooves me to note things that have been Cheering and Good,
therefore.
Mary's party to celebrate her birthday and new house was one such cheering
thing. It was very good to see some people I've not seen for a long time and
others I've not seen for a while, and the whole thing with its slightly
different crows was rather invigorating. I also amused myself with my response
to the lack of bike parking at Cambridge station: I just took my bike on the
train and parked at the other end instead!
After a bit of a hiatus I've started to find time for reading again. Le Guin's
`The Left Hand of Darkness' (overrated), le Carre's `The Spy Who Came In From
the Cold' (excellent), and le Carre's `The Looking Glass War' (disappointing).
I'm currently enjoying China Mieville's `The City & The City'.
There's been a little bit of ice on the roads this week. I fell off under
braking on Monday, but the only damage to either me or my bike seems to have
been a slight ache in my right arm. It doesn't seem to be impairing my
mobility at all so I'm just ignoring it until it goes away.
A friend released Chroma, which I downloaded and have found diverting. You too
can be diverted at http://www.level7.org.uk/chroma/
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Feb 17 17:55:26 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Time passes.
Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold, which I'm sure is out of
character. Then again, everyone is a bit out of character in `The Hobbit',
particularly the elves with all their tra la la lally.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. I was ill with a nasty headachey cold thing
last week, from which I have now recovered. It's amazing how much I miss work
when I can't go and do it; I find I get so incredibly bored sitting at home on
my own. Perhaps, though, that's a consequence of being at home and feeling too
ill to do anything entertaining.
I mended the catch on my dishwasher at the weekend. It only took me half a
year to get around to it. Now I need to get its associated gubbins: tablets,
rinse aid, salt, mandril compressors...
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Feb 22 14:07:50 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Gnah
I'm not having a good day today. My brain seems to be oscillating between
incoherent rage (at anything and everything) and self-loathing, with a grey
area of pointlessness and inactivity in between.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Feb 24 18:02:14 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: On the up
The week has gradually improved after that, fortunately...
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Mar 19 16:59:12 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Top tip
I got tired of seeing in my INBOX cron mail saying:
13929 4:37 Cron Daemon (1K) Cron <root@myhosthere> /usr/local/
so I edited the crontab so that the command was:
14 4 * * * root : Backups ; /usr/local/sbin/backup.sh
and now my cronmail says:
13929 4:37 Cron Daemon (1K) Cron <root@myhosthere> : Backups ;
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Apr 13 17:55:46 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Opinion poles
Because life is no fun without numbers, and accurate numbers are only
marginally fun, I have decided to attack the field of psephology with all the
scientific rigour I can muster, i.e. not very much. I shall cycle around
Cambridge as usual and note which households are displaying a poster or
stakeboard. Unless I get bored I will put the results on the web:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/2010/04/opinionpoles.html
As you can see, so far the Lib Dems are heading for victory in Cambridge with a
stunning 87.5% of the vote, but Labour and the Conservatives have lost their
deposits. I hope the plausibility of these results shows the seriousness of my
undertaking and the accuracy of its outcome.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Apr 16 15:40:21 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Clover Cleggs
To the French media he is le troisieme homme, l'outsider, la nouvelle star.
The Germans have him as der lachende Dritte, der Aussenseiter, der Superstar.
To the Americans, who look on amused as Britain adopts TV debates only a
half-century after Nixon sweated his way to defeat, Nick Clegg is Britain's
Next Big Thing, and it's hard not to agree.
For me, with my slightly pale blue Tory instincts, he was the most impressive
of the three on last night's TV debate: far from the Clegg of Question Time
where he seems like a slightly awkward schoolboy desperate to play with the big
boys, he dominated the debate and was much clearer than the others. The points
he made, while I don't agree with them all, were often persuasive, and most of
all he seemed at ease, which neither of the others really did.
Cameron wasn't exactly bad, and made some good points too, but he seemed
slightly stilted. Perhaps with the central podium he was always going to be
attacked from both sides, or perhaps he had an off night. Either way, he
didn't shine in the way Clegg did, or the way the Tory faithful might have
hoped. He's probably grateful more hasn't been made of the (probably
accidental) implication that we might find ourselves at war with China, and
hoping the next two debates go better.
Brown was, well... I'm used to hearing him on the radio, where he sounds
slightly dour. Combine that with the visuals (one CBS wag described him as
having `all the charisma of oatmeal') and he looked like a slightly weird bank
manager beating up customers for having dared to ask for a loan. He had a
command of the numbers, as you'd expect from someone who's sat in front of
them for over a decade, but the passion in his arguments seemed somehow fake,
put on for the cameras, and the only really heartfelt message was `anyone but
the Tories'. Well, that and `I'm with Nick'.
It was Clegg's night, and it was well-deserved. In America the first debate is
the one that has the most impact, and I suspect the same will be true here.
Still, in America the debates are sterile formulaic affairs and this was
anything but; perhaps debates two and three will yet surprise us.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Apr 19 21:59:10 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Party time
In last week's debate, Nick Clegg kept referring to `the two old parties', by
which he meant Labour and the Conservatives. You can see why -- `New!' is one
of the oldest tricks in marketing -- but how true is it?
If you go by the simplest figure, the date of foundation of the current party,
then the Lib Dems are certainly the newest. The party was formed in 1988 from
the old Liberal Party and the SDP. By this metric the modern Conservative
party was probably formed in 1912 out of the merger with the Liberal Unionist
Party (hence the `Conservative and Unionist' moniker you occasionally hear).
Labour started calling itself `The Labour Party' in 1906. So the Lib Dems are
the newest party and Labour the oldest.
But the Liberal Democrats didn't spring fully formed from the head of David
Steel. The party constitution explicitly says that the party is `the
successor to the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party'. The Liberal
Party arose in the early 19th Century but the party's foundation is usually
dated to 1859. The Conservative Party's formation is traditionally attributed
to Sir Robert Peel in 1834. This makes the Conservatives the oldest party and
Labour the newest.
A pleasing completeness could be accomplished if one were to start stretching
things Really Quite A Lot and claiming that the Liberals were the inheritors of
the old Whig party. The Whigs came about in the 17th Century, thus making the
Lib Dems the oldest current political party. The party, mind, that passed the
Great Reform Act of 1832. Old isn't always so bad, is it?
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Apr 30 11:08:59 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: The trouble with twitter
Several of our local parliamentary candidates, and in particular the Liberal
Democrat Julian Huppert, have been making use of Twitter during this campaign,
so in an attempt to keep up I've dipped my toe into its waters. In summary,
it's a disaster. More precisely, I think there are three significant things
wrong with it.
Firstly, it's a broadcast medium but is used for person-to-person
communications and makes no distinction between the two types of message. If
you read a particular person's messages, you will read not only the things they
want to broadcast to the world (e.g. `I am going to Anglia Poly to campaign
about tuition fees') but also messages from them to other people e.g. `Yes, I
agree absolutely'.
The second point follows on from the first. The commingling of interpersonal
messages and broadcasts wouldn't be a problem, except that the system makes no
effort to thread or connect together the messages in a conversation. If I want
to find out _what_ the aforementioned twitterer agrees with absolutely, I have
to visit the twitter page of the person to whom the message was addressed and
attempt to guess which of _their_ messages prompted the reply. We gave up on
unthreaded newsreaders some time last century and now Twitter has brought them
back with a vengeance.
Finally, retweets. This is where an individual with a Twitter account thinks
someone else's message is so interesting and important that it should be
forwarded to all their friends. It's like office copier humour without the
humour or any kind of restraint as to what gets forwarded. Worse, the only
indication that something has been forwarded is that the letters `RT' are
prepended to the message. Add multiple layers of this, possibly with a bit of
the interpersonal messaging I mentioned earlier, and it's an uphill struggle
to work out who said what to whom. Oh, and by the time you've added all the
menagerie of punctuation and abbreviation that supposedly indicates this, the
message is now longer than the maximum length and gets truncated.
Hopeless. Utterly utterly hopeless.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu May 06 11:40:25 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Veto Troy
This election campaign is the first I can remember where I've changed my mind
about who to vote for. I started out being sure I'd vote for Julian Huppert,
the local Lib Dem. He's a scientist in the research group where I work,
generally a nice guy, and I even worked on a sort of paper with him. It's been
interesting having more of an insight into the campaigning and if (as seems
likely) he wins I suspect I'll be much more in touch with my MP because he's
someone I know.
Yet I didn't vote for him in the end. We disagree on a number of issues and my
instincts have always been Conservative. As I went through the main parties'
manifestos last night I found I agreed more with the Conservatives than with
any of the others, and when Nick Clegg told us to vote for what we truly
believed in, that sealed the deal.
I'm fairly relaxed about the result, whatever it ends up being either locally
or nationally, although I confess I will think Cambridge has lost its mind if
it votes in Old Holborn. A lot of people seem enraged about other
possibilities, though, as if a Conservative government or more Gordon Brown
would be somehow intolerable. I'm not a Labour fan (however did you guess?)
but I wouldn't be leaving the country or desperately unhappy if Labour win.
Life will go on much the same as normal. You have the argument, you win or you
lose, you move on.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon May 10 22:20:21 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Delete
There was another entry here, written in a state of barely coherent rage. It
has been deleted, because I do not think such rage is in character for me.
This in itself is worrying.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri May 28 12:15:11 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Mayor, he quite contrary
Boris has been on good form recently, describing the new coalition government.
First, there's this from his blog:
`We looked at that scene in the Downing Street garden -- the dappled sunlight,
the blossom floating past -- and we saw an extraordinary partnership being
forged. They were David and Jonathan. They were Achilles and Patroclus. They
were Gilbert and George. They were Wallace and Gromit.'
...which does rather make one wonder which of Cameron or Clegg is the dog. And
then this from last week's Mayor's Question Time:
`I want to say that since the last time we met we've had a General Election,
and we have a wonderful new Government, and a new era of politics and a new era
of cooperation, isn't it? A new. It's just wonderful, er, fantastic, er, a
new light has broken from the rear end of this fantastic new coalition and it
is a wonderful thing to behold.'
---------------------------------------------------[Sat May 29 20:58:37 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Messenger (Shooting) Act 2010
A
B I L L
TO
Make provision about the Telegraph
BE IT ENACTED by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and
consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present
Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:
1. The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers are abolished.
2. This Act may be cited as the Messenger (Shooting) Act 2010.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon May 31 20:44:04 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Westminster
I went down to London today, and wandered around Westminster a bit. You see
lots of it on television, but it's always disjointed portions -- this doorway
here, that piece of grass there, this bit of road here -- and I've had no real
sense of how it all fits together.
I approached walking south along Victoria Embankment, with the MPs' newish
office building Portcullis House on my right, and the clock tower visible in
fromt of me. Two main things are noticeable about this: the first is that it
doesn't look as tall as it somehow should, and the second is that it's set
further back from the river than the rest of the Palace of Westminster.
Walking west along Bridge Street takes you to Parliament Square, a pleassant
square of grass adorned around its edges with statues of great statesmen, among
them Churchill, Lloyd George, Peel, and most recent of them all, Nelson
Mandela. I lied slightly about the `pleasant square of grass' bit, though; it
is that way on Google Maps, but when I visited the grass was covered in a mini
Strawberry Fair gaggle of tents with placards for miscellaneous causes, and
some of the statues (poor Robert Peel) were obscured by banners. I'd like to
think this is a temporary thing but reports I've heard elsewhere suggest
otherwise. A quick demo and then going home: fine. Using the place as a
municipal campsite: not fine.
Stepping away from this, I turned right along Parliament St, which turns into
Whitehall, flanked by various Departments and Ministries, first the Treasury,
and then the Foreign Office, in front of which is the scene for so many
Remembrance Day services with the Cenotaph. Then to the left is Downing
Street, although I couldn't get a good look through the gates at what lay
beyond as a demonstration was busy being loud about the latest Israeli outrage.
I skirted it timidly and carried on. Further north, the horses at the
Household Cavalry Museum obliged photographers, and then Whitehall gives onto
Trafalgar Square, with Nelson's column central, and the National Gallery
behind. I never knew it did that!
Thence south-west, through Admiralty Arch and onto the Mall, and then
left along Horse Guards Road, which runs between Whitehall and the parkland,
and there past Horse Guards Parade is the rear entrance to the Treasury where
David Laws approached time after time on Saturday's rolling stock footage.
Right along Birdcage Walk, and then through St James Park to arrive at the
Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace. Turning west along
Constitution Hill one passes through the (2002-inauguruated) Memorial Gates,
and then arrives at the Wellington Arch.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Jun 28 17:43:34 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: If things were different...
There is a roar, and then a confused murmuring and grumbling. Surely?
`Mr Lampard is challenging the call at the goal line. The ball was called
out.'
Much shouting, clapping, vuvuzelas sound out as a giant animated football lands
in a giant animated goalmouth and the word `IN' appears.
`Two all.'
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Jul 30 17:05:51 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Je penche a droite [*]
I have recently been finding, perhaps a couple of times a day, that my sense of
balance shifts so that my body thinks `up' is about 30 degrees left of
vertical. The effect of this is that I instinctively start leaning (or, while
on a bicycle, steering) to the right. In politics this is probably not such a
bad thing, but in real life it's distracting so I went to the doctor. He
prescribed me some tablets which turn out to be anti-psychotics (!) which I
delayed taking for a week or so because I was scared of the side effects.
I've started taking them now, and the main effect of this seems to be to turn
the more distinctive leanings into a sort of general wobbly cloud. I'm not
sure if this is a good or a bad thing, so I shall keep taking the tablets for a
bit and see what happens.
If I appear a bit wobbly, that's why.
[*] I lean to the right. Please do not suggest that more Conservatives should
be prescribed anti-psychotics :-)
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Aug 12 14:14:45 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Unobserved time
A couple of days ago there was a programme on Radio 4, one of the `Inside the
Ethics Committee' series presented by Joan Bakewell. In this case it was about
someone who had attempted suicide but had been unsuccessful, and how various
`living will' statements should apply.
I was reminded, unsurprisingly, of my mother's suicide in 2007. She probably
killed herself on the 10th October, but since I only found her on the 13th
there's a window. Before I heard the programme I hadn't considered the
possibility that she didn't die immediately on the Wednesday evening but might
have suffered for some time afterwards. It doesn't bear thinking about.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Aug 21 23:09:34 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Alright Eros
On the recommendation of fivemack I have been trying out one of these online
dating sites, namely OkCupid. This site lacks many of the distinctive charms
of some of its competitors, which boast such unique selling points as:
* Filling their books with fictional female members
* Saying that it's all free and then charging you to find out what the messages
people have sent you actually are
* Sending people fictional messages from fictional members to get money out of
people.
OkCupid appears to be ad-supported (mostly ads for other online dating sites,
umm) and is free, so I've given it a go.
So far it's been an amusing experience. Someone random has sent me nice
messages on the basis of my profile, and I've sent out a few messages to other
folk. (The site's authors seem to know that some people are reticent about
communicating with strangers, so it's quite enthusiastic about encouraging you
to contact people.)
It is also immensely reassuring to find that there are plenty of normal sane
people on the site. Aha, you say, but they could be pretending. Well they
could, except at least four people the site has selected for me I actually know
in real life. Here, therefore, is a question of etiquette. What should one do
when one encounters someone one already knows on a dating site? It feels
rather odd.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Aug 24 18:12:25 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: What's in(tel) a(md) name?
Next year's PhD students are almost upon us, and in my neck of the woods many
of them will end up with a 64-bit computer and OS, so I have been readying
parts of my infrastructure for these new beasts. There is, however, a plethora
of different ways to name them.
Intel's grand plan, you will recall, was that we should all move to their new
Itanium processor. Linux (via uname -m) calls this ia64.
AMD didn't like this and came up with something that is backward compatible
with the old 32-bit x86 architecture, and many people called this amd64. Intel
later produced something compatible and called it Intel 64, or possibly EM64T.
Snappy. Debian calls the distribution for this architecture amd64, but the
linux kernel calls it x86_64. NetBSD does likewise. Solaris calls the whole
PC platform i86pc but calls the 64-bit variant amd64.
If you expand the environment variable PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE on a Windows
system, not running any 32-bit emulation, you will get x86 for the original
32-bit Intel CPU, ia64 for Itanium, and amd64 for the 64-bit thing that
everyone uses. If you're a 32-bit process in a 64-bit world, you can look at
PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432 instead.
However, in various bits of Windows (for example the window where you make
available printer drivers for users of other architectures) there are
references instead to x64. This is apparently Microsoft's official name for
the thing they don't want to upset Intel or AMD by misnaming.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Aug 31 12:15:13 2010]--
From: (S) Seisin's Greetings (steph)
Subject: Assuredly Amor
I promise not to talk about OkCupid all the time in here, not least because I
will run out of Cupid's pseudonyms. However, I seek guidance once more on a
matter of online dating etiquette.
The website has its own internal email system, so that you can send messages to
other users without exposing a `real' email address. If you get a message, the
system sends you a real email to tell you so that you can log on and read it.
So you send a few messages out and from most of them you get no reply - fine:
this is expected, they're gone/bored/uninterested/dead/busy, move on and send a
message to someone else.
However, if you do get a reply, and perhaps a reply to a reply, and then the
conversation goes dead, it's not as clear-cut. Should you:
(a) Assume they've decided they're not interested or that you've bored them to
death, or,
(b) Wait a little while and send another message, because there could be all
sorts of reasons for their absence?
It's an intriguing one, because you can well imagine that some busy people will
have the site as a `back burner' thing and will only log on when it emails them
to tell them they have a message, so conversations are rather more fragile. On
the other hand, it seems at best impolite to speak `out of turn', and it really
wouldn't do to seem to be pestering somebody.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Sep 07 17:58:53 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Rentree
After a month off -- the Friends Meeting House is closed during August --
meditation classes started up again yesterday evening. Not only was it good to
see people I'd not seen for a while, but the actual practice went better too.
I think it'd been sufficiently long since I'd last done it that I had lower
expectations and was gentler with myself when my attention wandered. As a
result I felt like my mind had been lightly dusted.
You can tell Autumn is approaching though. At the start of the session (7:20
or thereabouts) it was light. By the time we'd finished sitting it was dark.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Sep 21 23:35:05 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Spy vs Spy
Autumn is upon us, and the TV schedules wake from their Summer slumber.
Spooks, the BBC's casualty-rich spy thriller returned last night, for a ninth
series. What was strange was that Spooks spymaster Harry Pearce (Peter Firth)
found himself facing a new Home Secretary played by Simon Russell Beale... the
very same Simon Russell Beale who has been playing George Smiley in Radio 4's
adaptations of John Le Carre's spy novels.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Oct 11 09:22:18 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Percussion
Yesterday during the day a strange noise kept coming from my chimney, which is
on the party wall I share with the neighbours. Lots of loudish tappings
interspersed with loud squeaks. I thought about it a bit and decided it was
some strange DIY or chimney sweeping or some such and left the neighbours to
it, thinking this might be very annoying but it was probably a one-off.
When I got back from the Gallery in the evening (about 8ish) the noise was
still going on so I went round to complain that they shouldn't do their DIY in
the evening. Through the window I saw that it was not DIY but a rubber drumkit
right on the other side of the chimney-breast. The taps were hits on the drums
or cymbals, and the squeak was a hinged mechanism, probably for the rubber
bass drum. Anyway, I knocked on the front door. And knocked and knocked. And
knocked on the front window (not three feet from the drummer's head) and
knocked and knocked. Only after about five minutes of knocking did he notice
that there was someone around and come to the door. I explained the problem
and he mumbled OK and the noise was no more.
From this arise several questions, though:
This morning I have sore knuckles. How does one knock loudly and noticeably
without suffering this fate?
The chimney seems to transmit more noise than the rest of the party wall. How
is the chimney arranged inside? Is there only one layer of party wall inside
it, perhaps? Is there perhaps some way I can make my chimney more insulating
of noise from the neighbouring living room?
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Oct 14 16:19:36 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: This day of all days
It's been three years, give or take a day or two, since my mother died. Life
has carried on. I seem to have fewer dreams these days where it was all a
mistake and my parents are still alive. That's good, right?
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Oct 30 17:03:41 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Manifesto, he wrote
`Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state.
Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to
live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could
not afford.'
-- Labour Party Manifesto, 2010, drafted by Ed Miliband
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Oct 31 14:25:15 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Radio ewomanations
On an otherwise entertaining programme on Radio 4, there was a contribution
from Tam Dalyell, former Father of the House of Commons. He referred to one of
his contemporaries in the 1950s as a `taliswoman'. Oh dear, oh dear.
The word `talisman' probably comes from the Arabic `t.ilsam', according to the
OED, which adds `the final -an is not accounted for.' Certainly the last three
letters of the English word `talisman' are not in origin a reference to the
male of the species. Have they become so? I'd say no, and wouldn't have made
Dalyell's correction...
I'm more amused than anything else, really. Very recently one of the minor
news items on the radio was about how the desire to correct `dropped aitches'
had sprinkled extra instances of that letter onto our words.
People are silly. It's no particular surprise that language change can be too.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Nov 05 09:55:38 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Union Killed the Radio Start
I was late into work this morning, because of the National Union of
Journalists. Let me explain.
I usually wake up with a clock radio (which starts at 6:30am) tuned to Radio 4.
backed up by an alarm clock at about 7:45. The radio eases me into
consciousness with the talking of familiar voices and by the time the alarm
goes off I'm able to get up properly. Then, while I go about washing,
dressing, eating, etc. there are regular time-checks to tell me how much of a
hurry I should be in.
This morning the Today programme was not broadcase due to a strike by the NUJ.
It was replaced by comedy of the sort one usually finds elsewhere in the
schedule, which definitely does not sound like the Today programme. The result
of this was that when I woke up my brain registered that Marcus Brigstocke was
not John Humphrys, decided it must therefore be Saturday, and went back to
sleep.
Next time this happens they should replace the Today programme with something
that sounds the same. Perhaps a recording of the previous day's Today?
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Nov 15 17:20:38 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: To come to the aid of
It was my birthday on Friday, so I had a party on Saturday to celebrate
reaching a square once more. I procrastinated announcing it until only a week
before, so some people weren't able to come. Fortunately, however, lots of
other people were and it turned into a bustling party! Hurrah!
I think I had a chance to talk to almost everyone, and everyone seemed to enjoy
themselves. At different times different people were tasting beer, juggling,
examining a music box, solving cubes, trying out my piano, reading the back
covers of Doctor Who DVDs, and arguing about whether Jet Set Willy was
completable.
Part of the exercise was to show off my house, which lots of people hadn't
seen. It seemed to meet with approval, and it also worked well for a party; it
seemed to help that the ground floor is a double doughnut so there are several
ways to get between different rooms. I'm sure Gareth said something when he
first saw the place about it being `Genus 2' but that sounds like a Trivial
Pursuit edition.
But anyway, thank you to everyone who came - it was great to see you all and I
had a good time too. (And, with the aid of the dishwasher, all those dirty
glasses just disappeared!)
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Nov 18 17:31:45 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!
Someone has gone around all the doors in the Laboratory affixing little
stickers to them. `Bragg First,' says this one in the tone of a slightly
vicious political campaign, `Any problems with door, please call 37xxx.'
I wonder how many people are going to have problems with a door which they are
unable to resolve themselves by using a different door. I further wonder how
many people are, when presented with a `problematic' door, going to look at the
label at the top corner of said door. How many calls are TPTB expecting about
recalcitrant doors?
It reminds me of the cones hotline: well-intentioned, but just a bit silly.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Nov 22 09:55:05 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Slip sliding
My brother Giles, Sara, and Drew visited me in Cambridge this weekend, which
happily coincided with the opening of `Cambridge on Ice' on Parker's Piece.
Drew is only five, and hasn't been ice skating before, but enjoyed it hugely.
He went round, mostly holding on to the edge, with either Giles or Sara holding
on to his other arm. I worried that he might not be enjoying it -- he has a
determined look when he's trying to do something that's hard to read -- but
afterwards he was saying `We're going to go ice skating again very very very
very very very soon'.
When I stepped out onto the ice I was immediately struck by what a foolish idea
this was. I wobbled and hung onto the edge and tried not to fall over. It was
as well that there's an hour session because it was only about 45 minutes in
that I finally found my ice legs. I wasn't zooming around madly like some of
the more practised skaters, but I was able to go more or less where I wanted
without wobbling too much. There is a danger that I may give it another go
this weekend.
One tip for anyone wanting to go, by the way: they operate hour-long sessions
and chuck everyone off on the hour, so aim for early in the hour rather than
late if you want to get your money's worth. (There are no notices that say
this, and we actually got on a couple of minutes before the end of a session,
when an announcement told everyone to get off the ice. I told a marshal we'd
only just got on and she let us continue, but other marshals may not be so
lenient...)
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Dec 14 16:02:09 2010]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Winter's lease
I'm on holiday. This should be a cause for fun and frolics, or at least for
relaxation, but instead I seem to be worrying about things and getting bored by
mid-afternoon. There are plenty of things to do, many of which are fun, but my
mood seems to be low and unmotivated.
Still, the Christmas tree is up, I've made a start at present shopping, the
car's MOT is organised, and the car battery is on charge so that the car will
get to car's MOT, so that's a small set of accomplishments.
The recipient of my Secret Santa present at Blue Christmas -- for which many
thanks to Clare for organisation -- seemed to appreciate it, and I got a nifty
Countdown calendar (conundrum + numbers game per day) which will keep my brain
going for most of 2011.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Jan 03 23:13:28 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: The smell of Saturdays
I'm not happy at the moment, particularly. Everything is dull grey and this
usually ends with a visit to the doctor and some new miracles of modern science
in tablet form. But before we get there, what does it feel like to be here?
My memories of life when I was younger are bound up in sensations. They're not
filmic moving pictures, or even photographic stills, but impressions: of who
and what was where, and what it felt like. So I remember getting back from
school on Saturday afternoons and dozing off while the vidiprinter blapped out
the final score: it was warm and cosy where it had been far too cold out on the
school's playing fields.
Or I remember a bank holiday afternoon where everything felt stale, fusty,
immobile and yet it was still comfortable. Or the dim-bright warmth of
settling down in front of the telly on Sunday evenings with the family. Or
bashing away at some code or coded monsters on the computer, becoming
completely enveloped in my own little world while rain splattered on the
window.
I try to make things feel nice, to make them feel like I remember, but the
living room isn't the warm cosy cocoon no matter how you set the lights: it's
just the living room. Falling asleep on the sofa is just falling asleep on the
sofa, and these days when I sit at a computer I'm mostly wasting time on the
Internet.
The thing is, perhaps these could all be just memories, but recent memories or
the day-to-day stuff just doesn't have any of the _texture_ of real memory.
It's just surface detail, insubstantial and unemotive. I'm living in my life
as if it's a house rather than a home, and it doesn't seem easily possible (by
arranging the furniture, going to particular places, doing particular things)
to scatter the soft-furnishings of old memories about the place to make it feel
like mine.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Jan 06 14:06:25 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: `They say,'
said Bernard, `that when your second parent dies, you finally accept your own
mortality. I wonder if it's true. To accept death, to be ready for death
whenever it happens, without letting that acceptance spoil your appetite for
life -- that seems to me the hardest trick of all.'
-- David Lodge, `Paradise News'
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Jan 18 23:23:12 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Absit chit
I seem, intermittently, to be finding people difficult at the moment. I keep
finding that rather than spend time talking to people (in person, on IRC) I'd
rather just be quiet by myself and read. It coincides with a lot of impostor
syndrome: the sense that I'm only here (in this job, in this social circle) by
some freakish luck and at some point I will be found out.
Oddly, it's not all the time, just sometimes.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Jan 22 16:13:08 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Curtains
I have a window on my landing. Looking at it from inside the house it looks
like this:
<--- 65cm ---><6cm>|
+------------+ |
| | ^ |
| | |
| | 1 |
| | 0 |
| | 4 |
| | cm |
| | |
| | |
+------------+ v |
The line on the right is the wall, coming towards you, of the bathroom.
Currently this window has a roller-blind right up against the window inside the
little alcove, which I learn is called a `reveal'. But this makes it look a
bit bare, and I think I'd prefer curtains. However, the shortage of space
makes for several potential problems with this:
First, there won't be room for the curtain pole to be balanced on both sides,
because of the right-hand wall. Will it look weird to have a bobble on the
left-hand end of the pole but for the right-hand end just to end flush with the
right-hand wall?
Second, if one gets an ordinary pair of curtains, the right-hand one will be
bunched up in the tiny space on the right, or will obscure some of the window.
Would this look weird, or is it going to be OK if the curtain is of a more
lightweight type? An alternative suggested by the internet is to have two
curtains of differing widths so that the bunching on the right is less of an
issue. Thoughts? I also considered a single curtain but I think that would
look too lop-sided.
A final issue is slightly separate. This window is in the wall to the left of
the stairs, at the top of said stairs. Would a curtain pole, sticking
out perhaps 10cm (at its outermost extent) look too intrusive as one climbs the
stairs?
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Jan 29 12:54:59 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Je penche
Is it just me, or is `The News Quiz' on R4 being much more biased against the
Conservatives recently? It used to be merciless about politicians on all
sides, and even when it was a Conservative being lampooned it was usually at
least mildly funny and there'd be a joke about someone else along in a minute.
At the moment it seems particularly partisan and relentlessly... vicious.
Or is it just that I notice it more now a government of my hue is in power
again, and Labour supporters felt just as unhappy between 1997 and 2010?
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Feb 02 17:34:31 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Signs and Portents
I've noticed a few things about the demonstrations in Egypt.
Some of the Mubarak supporters have placards which bear a combined crescent and
cross symbol, which has been used to symbolise religious solidarity and
tolerance in Egypt. (It was used in January's peace vigil of Muslims outside
Coptic churches after the Church bombing in Alexandria.) The slogans are
`Against Terrorism'.
Listening to some of the chants earlier in the week I recognised once again a
rhythm which I've heard in demonstrations in many other parts of the world.
`Der-DUM Der-DUM Der-DUM-di-dum-di-DUM,' if you'll forgive a rather poor
rendition. Does this rhythm come from anywhere or is it just something which
has spontaneously emerged in lots of different places? It goes well with
marching, I suppose, if you're doing that.
On the rolling news channels (or at least CNN, BBC, AJE) the presenters in the
studio have often asked the correspondent on the scene if they're safe to carry
on reporting. I don't remember this from earlier incidents where
correspondents were possibly in the line of fire. Have broadcasters become
more concerned about their correspondents' welfare?
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Mar 24 14:06:24 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Absence of Presence
David Willetts, Minister of State for Higher Education and Science, is around
the laboratory today for the inauguration of the Winton Programme for the
Physics of Sustainability. (No, I don't know either.) What's strange is that
there's no sign of any protestors. When I went to hear David Willetts speak a
few weeks ago they were gathered outside the lecture theatre causing University
Security a bit of a headache, but today there's nothing.
Perhaps they're all on holiday^Wstrike.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri May 13 17:53:16 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Time passes
I have not written here for quite some time.
The slight depression I had at the start of the year has lifted and I am
currently rather happy, which is good news. Things which have contributed to
this happiness include:
* Noticing Spring happening in the garden, with accompanying nesting blue tits
and awakening plants. This prompted me to pay it more attention, so now I am
also hoping some bulbs will come up, watering roses, and trying not to kill
too many seedlings (which came from a free pack of seeds on the front of a
magazine)
* Eastercon, which was very good and re-engaged me with reading and thinking
about SF. I have since enjoyed `Zoo City' by Lauren Beukes and am currently
reading Ian McDonald's `The Dervish House'.
* Doing leafletting and canvassing for the local elections and referendum
campaign. It's cheering to find there are at least some people who agree
with me, even though we didn't win locally. Also, cycling and walking around
quiet bits of Cambridge suburbia was fun in itself and I was able to admire
gardens far better tended than mine!
* I have a new Virgin TiVo, which is good news because the old TiVo stops
working at the end of the month. I'm impressed they kept the old service
going for so long after the last box had been sold; it was probably costing
more to run than it brought in in subscriptions.
* I'm still playing the piano slightly regularly, and possibly getting a little
bit better at it even though it's clear that there's a long way to go; some
of the pieces in the tutorial book have been significantly simplified, and I
bet I'd have a hard time with the original pieces!
---------------------------------------------------[Fri May 13 19:47:17 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: First TiVo impressions
The main thing is that it more-or-less behaves like I expect a TiVo to behave,
so I've been able to drive it easily. It makes the same happy bippy noises and
has the same sad bong. So far it's been able to record what I wanted and has
let me play on-demand things I forgot to tell either this or the old TiVo
about. For me, then...
Key plus points:
It has three tuners so it can record three things at a time, possibly while you
watch something else you had recorded. No more `I can't record that because it
clashes with the other thing I want more'.
It links the TV guide to the on-demand section so that you can see that a
programme in the past is also available on-demand.
It has YouTube. This is less of a gimmick than you might think because it
links individual programmes to YouTube searches for them. So if I'm unsure
whether I want to watch a new series I can watch (using the TiVo interface,
naturally) the producer's trailer on YouTube to see if I'm likely to like it.
It has a cunning thing along the top of the screen which at first I thought was
a waste of space filled with adverts for things Virgin thought I might like.
In fact it's context sensitive, so if you're looking at information about a
particular programme it will have links to actors who are in that programme (so
you can find other things with them in) or to other programmes which are
related in some other way (similar categories or production team, being
`new'...)
Key minus points:
Fast forward and rewind do not work properly on radio recordings. Fast forward
skips uncontrollably, and rewind does the same.
All playback seems to start three seconds into the recording.
There's currently no red button interactive support (for things like watching
the other snooker table or F1 Friday practice).
Although there are links in the TV guide to the on-demand content, clicking
them takes you to the on-demand menu rather than straight into viewing the
thing you clicked on.
When it's on standby it doesn't light its front LEDs to show that it's
recording something.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat May 21 21:58:49 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Firewalling Bridge (over the River Kwai?)
Since I moved into Mays Way and acquired my own network connection I've run a
small router in the form of a Soekris net4501. This is basically a small PC
with three network ports and no fan, so is ideal for sticking somewhere
unobtrusive where it can route packets and keep the internet out. However, it
has two main problems. First, the only local access to the system is via a
serial console, which is a huge pain. When you want to get your firewall going
again, the last thing you want to do is play with serial cables, baud rates,
and hopeless serial terminal software. Secondly, the system's storage is in
the form of a compact flash card. Every now and then (and with increasing
regularity, it seems to me) filesystems on the CF card would become pureed and
I would have to open the box and feed it a new card. (And play with
aforementioned serial cables, baud rates, and hopeless terminal software.)
So, on rjk's recommendation, I bought a Fabiatech fx5624, which is a rather
more powerful computer in a similarly small box. It has real VGA and keyboard
ports for emergencies, USB ports on the front from which one can boot, and a
real SATA interface. I bought an SSD for its main storage (yes, this does
theoretically have the same problems as CF, but I suspect SSD is going to be
better at coping with them) and installed Debian on it from a USB stick. The
initial setup with firewalling was done in about an hour.
The thing has six ethernet ports, so it seemed foolish to connect it to a
switch with two other things. Instead I configured most of them as a bridge
with
auto br0
iface br0 inet static
address x.y.z.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
bridge_ports eth0 eth1 eth2 eth3 eth4
...in /etc/network/interfaces, and a bit of tweaking to my firewall so it
didn't stop traffic betweeen the bridge ports.
The result is that I now have a system I have more confidence in, one fewer box
in the corner, and also one fewer power supply. I think this counts as a
result.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Jun 06 10:31:31 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: When a bad man writes Doctor Who
I should get it off my chest and on to the record: Saturday's episode of
`Doctor Who' was absolute unadulterated twaddle from beginning to end.
We've come to expect end-of-season episodes to be a bit off. The ridiculous
`arc' they insist on spanning across multiple stories has to be paid off, and
although I wouldn't have the arc at all, the producers evidently think it's
important. That's fine. But even if the end-of-season episode has sometimes
been a bit off, it's usually had a fair bit of ludicrous over-the-top fun.
This was _dull_ over-the-top crap, the Who turdbucket flowing over, and it's
only made worse by the idea that Moffat probably thinks he was being deep and
clever.
I could probably excuse the dreadful acting, the random personality changes,
the idea that this was somehow the Doctor's `darkest hour', the `revelation'
of something that was utterly predictable if you cared (I didn't), the terrible
pacing, rushed to make lots of room for exposition so clunky that a Cyberman's
footfall is positively balletic by comparison, and, oh, I don't know, the
SHEER POINTLESS DREADFULNESS OF IT ALL...
No, actually, I can't excuse any of it at all.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Jun 27 21:01:54 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Wearing a bit thin
I'm feeling old. My lower back aches intermittently and I really must see the
doctor about it. I slept awkwardly and badly last night and so I'm tired and
have done something to a muscle in my upper back so that some moves or breaths
are twingy. For a long time now my brain has baulked at handling complex (or
actually fairly simple) ideas, and I seem forever to be complaining to the
neighbours about bass coming through the walls.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Jul 29 14:32:44 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: The Formula
So, as everyone has now heard, the broadcast rights to Formula 1 races are
going to Sky Sports from next year. The BBC will still be covering half the
races (and qualification and practice) live on TV, with live radio commentary
and highlights programmes of the rest.
I'm not particularly overjoyed by the move. The BBC's coverage over the past
two years has been superb and would be a hard act for any other broadcaster to
follow. It has increased audiences to levels that Sky Sports can only dream
of, and will still only dream of next year.
And that's the thing that's perplexing. F1 is expensive, and part of that
expense is paid for by the cars being mobile advertising hoardings. The
Formula One Teams Association apparently weren't consulted about this deal, and
I suspect they will have something to say about a deal which dramatically
reduces the number of people who get to see their sponsors' logos.
I've already heard someone say `I hate Murdoch' about all this, but that seems
to be about as meaningful these days as a cheery `Death to America' in Iran;
I'm not inclined to lay the blame at Sky's door. Bernie Ecclestone and FOM for
setting the price so high, possibly. The BBC for being unwilling to pay the
price, possibly. (The story is that the BBC had to cut costs in either F1 or
Wimbledon, and Wimbledon won.) The Government for forcing the BBC to take on
more responsibilities with a frozen licence fee, possibly. There's no shortage
of other variables to plug into the formula, but the result is that the Formula
has lost out.
If it all goes ahead, then a lot of F1 fans will lose out too, either because
they can't get Sky Sports at all -- no dish, no cable, whatever -- or because
they can't afford the subscription. I am fortunate, with access to cable and
the fourteen pounds a month it'll cost to get the channels I need. I don't
particularly want to spend money on a channel I'll watch ten times a year, but
F1 is the only sport I could honestly say I follow, so I'll do it anyway.
And who knows, perhaps Sky's coverage will be some good. Unlike ITV when they
had the rights, Sky won't have adverts mid-race, which is already a good start.
I imagine they're all too aware that for ten races next year they have to do
better than the Beeb.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Jul 29 18:33:51 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Formula Update
If Martin Whitmarsh (McLaren team boss) is to be believed, the BBC's
`highlights' coverage for races they're not covering live will actually be a
full repeat of the race. If true, that's better than expected.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Aug 02 23:48:33 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Dimensionless quantities
I watched my first 3D film this evening. Harry Potter VIIb, which looks like
something he would have written on his exercise book at a more normal school,
but it's not the film I'm interested in particularly but the 3D.
You are given a pair of 3D glasses to wear as you go in. If you already wear
glasses, then tough, approximately. If you're lucky you can perch the 3D pair
on top of your normal pair, and to be fair mine only felt like they were
falling off once or twice.
However, to be honest I'm not sure what the point was. 3D added nothing [*]
and removed something very important: brightness. Potter the Seventh-and-a-
bit is not a bright film to start with, but you can still see what happens
Put a pair of murky goggles on and you lose vast quantities of light, so
everything is played out in a slightly brown-tinted haze. I did occasionally
find myself taking the glasses off in order to see what was actually going on.
Can they not up the brightness on 3D prints to compensate for the glasses? Or
do Vue use unusually dingy specs
I did also come out with a headache, but on the other hand I went in with a
headache so I don't think I can blame that on the extra dimension.
[*] I tell a fib. One scene where Voldemort exploded into flying bits of ash
gave the very vivid impression of ash floating about in the cinema. But he
only did that once.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Sep 13 16:18:13 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Malade
I went to work yesterday, but found as soon as I tried to do something I
became all headachey, felt slightly giddy, and my temperature regulation was
completely screwy. One moment I was far too hot, the next I was shivering. I
offered a cup of tea and paracetamol to the problem, but it failed to go away
so I crept home apologetically. I almost feel worse leaving work ill after
having come in than I do on days where I email or phone in sick in the first
place. It's partly that it signifies a lack of judgment: not only am I ill,
but I failed to self-diagnose this in a prompt and convenient fashion. Partly
also that I dislike the slightly self-pitying air I find descends on me when
I'm feeling ill; in an ideal world I wouldn't expose my co-workers to this.
I was still feeling ropey this morning. I think it's a little cold thing, of
which I seem to get a lot. They're usually done and dusted within forty-eight
hours or so, so it's not a huge burden on work, but I still feel guilty about
it. Until the cancer that finished him off, my father barely had a day's
sickness in his working life -- apparently the consultant thought there must
have been some mistake because his medical file was so thin -- so why am I so
prone to random illness?
It's possible I'm no more prone, of course, and that I just take time off when
he would have stuck it out. Is that good? I don't know. My yardstick is that
if I start the day debating whether I should go to work, I probably shouldn't
because there's probably something wrong. After all, most days it never even
occurs to me that I might not go to work. Perhaps this is too lax, though?
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Oct 02 15:40:27 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Transported
Yesterday, in what is surely one of Network Rail's most inspired scheduling
decisions, Cambridge railway station had no trains because they were redoing
the signalling to cope with the new platforms. Any weekend would inconvenience
someone, but perhaps it might have been better to avoid the weekend when
students new and old will be attempting to get here...
Anyway, it was also gloriously sunny so I didn't want just to sit at home, so I
resolved I would take the new misguided bus to Huntingdon and catch a train to
London from there. My first plan was to wander to the nearest stop on foot and
catch a bus from there, but luckily I checked the timetable beforehand to
discover that buses to Huntingdon don't leave from that stop. Instead I had to
go to a stop a little further away, so I cycled there, only to find that there
were no cycle racks! I chained my bike to a railing on the "platform" and
hoped.
The little information screens told me I had about eight minutes before my bus
would arrive so I got a ticket with very little fuss from the ticket machine
and then waited. It did feel very much like waiting at a small railway
station, complete with the realisation that if you were on the other platform
you might actually get some shelter from the sun. Still, the bus soon hove
into view, I got on, and it set off.
It was rather weird: with its leather seats the bus seemed like it was trying
to be posh or up-market but somehow something about it made it feel less posh
than your average standard class train carriage. Perhaps it was the plasticky
blue finish to the bus body, or something about the arrangement of the seats,
but it felt like it was the bus that wanted to be a coach. Still, it was fairly
comfortable and fairly cool.
However, the supposedly smooth ride on the concrete guideway was incredibly
bouncy: the bus seemed to lurch slightly upwards and downwards about twice a
second on the guideway such that it was actually a relief when we reached the
guideway's end and drove on some shiny new asphalt. That was short-lived,
mind, since after you get within spitting distance of St Ives, the super-duper
express transport device turns into a plain old pootly bus apparently bent on
driving past the front of every house in St Ives and Huntingdon. It took about
twenty minutes to get to St Ives, and then another three-quarters of an hour on
ordinary roads to get to Huntingdon station.
And of course, once you're on ordinary roads the bus lurches and wobbles like
any old bus so any pretence that you can work or read on it like you can on a
train goes out of the window.
Still, it did get me to Huntingdon station in time for a train to London, and
it did get me back to Cambridge in the evening. My bike, fortunately, was
still chained to the railing where I left it.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Oct 08 16:44:38 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Luftkissenboot
Ben's been wondering about hovercraft recently, and so today I went with him
and Ian to try out driving hovercraft around an airfield in Suffolk. Ben went
first, because it was his idea, and after doing a few figure-of-eights around
cones to learn how the thing handled he did three laps successfully. Then it
was me.
I made it round the cones, mostly successfully, although I did have to learn
one of the most counter-intuitive things about driving a hovercraft, which is
that you need _more_ throttle going around corners rather than less. Sadly on
the first lap around I discovered something else that the initial figure-8
didn't really teach me. The tailwind, and not leaning enough (which is the
main way of making the thing turn) meant I failed to make it round the corner
nearest the entrance and instead ploughed into the day-glo plastic fence.
Oops. I was fine, as was the hovercraft -- the fence is largely there to
indicate that you have run out of course rather than to stop you -- so I
righted the steering and let off the power to stop. This probably makes me
better than some customers who failed to stop at this point, but I still felt a
bit sheepish.
Armed with the knowledge that the wind has much more of an effect on me than
I might expect and leaning much more to turn, I made it round the next two
laps of their course without incident and it was actually rather fun, but still
I was happy to get out and watch while Ian had a go and then both he and Ben
did another few laps. I probably could have done more laps myself (and the guy
who runs it did ask whether I wanted to) but I decided not to: if I'd had any
further incident I'd have been completely mortified and it would have taken the
shine off the whole experience entirely.
The weird thing about the point where it went wrong was that it didn't have
that `panic' feeling or the slow motion feeling you get when you fall off
your bike, where events are heading very fast towards an inevitable conclusion.
I don't know why this should be so.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Oct 15 12:01:55 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Rapidity Rap
A few weeks ago I drove to Peterborough because I had one day left to use of a
3-in-7 Rover ticket and the train timetables didn't work if I took the slow
train from Cambridge to Peterborough. On the way back in the evening,
surprised by a one-way system, I missed a speed limit sign and assumed the
national limit applied on the dual carriageway I drove on. Flash, went a
light, and sure enough a 40 limit repeater sign was to be seen just ahead.
That was how I found myself on a speed awareness course at the St John's
Innovation Centre on Wednesday. I was a bit sceptical about this, and sitting
in a room full of boy racers didn't appeal, but it seemed marginally likely to
be more useful to me than points on the licence so I gave it a try. I was
pleasantly surprised.
The clientele was very much a mixture, spread across the age range, with a
similar spread of attitudes. One older lady cheerfully said she did 100mph on
motorways, another was mortified at being on the course because she always
tried to drive below the speed limit and had missed the signage when they
changed the limit on her usual route. There was even a boy racer, though his
actual racing was on tracks and he was annoyed that there weren't more speed
cameras in spite of having been caught by one.
Anyway, over the four hours the content of the course turned out to be useful
and interesting. Highlights include:
* Tips on dealing with the `fan club' you may accumulate behind you when
driving below the speed limit
* `In town, window down' as a technique for regaining awareness of urban speed
when coming off faster roads
* Compared to other roads, motorways are extremely safe, but have a larger than
expected number of pedestrian fatalities, usually folk who have broken down.
Advice is no longer to put out the warning triangle when broken down on the
motorway.
* Quite how sharply the fatality rate increases as the car speed increases
between 30mph (50% of pedestrians KSI) and 35mph (80% KSI)
* Tesco and Sainsbury now speed-limit their vans to 50mph.
* When and where to expect to see speed limit signs and repeaters. Knowing
this would have prevented my original mistake, so hurrah.
* Speed cameras (in Cambridgeshire at least) are only ever placed where there's
been a death or serious injury, and can't be placed where `there's going to
be an accident there one day, people go through so fast'. (This was what
annoyed the boy racer, who felt communities should be able to request
cameras; apparently in one place where this was tried most of the speeders
turned out to be the locals.)
* AA DriveTech trainers (who run the course) aren't allowed to present the
course if they have any points on their licence.
I think it was helpful, and it seems to work more generally. 1 in 4 drivers
given points and a fine for speeding reoffend. For those who go on the speed
awareness course, the number is 1 in 12.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Oct 24 14:04:10 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Submeteorological
I'm feeling grey and glum today, in a very typical depressive way. It's not
related to anything that's actually happening: it's just hard to do very much
and easy to stare into space. I notice this more acutely because I've not felt
this way during the day for quite some time. The happy fact that this state is
unusual does not, unfortunately, alleviate the effects of the state itself.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Nov 09 16:14:04 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Efficiency cuts
After quite a long time of grumbling about it, I finally got around to seeing a
doctor about my back, which aches most noticeably when I try to lie down to
sleep. I made an appointment on Thursday, and saw my preferred GP on Friday.
As well as referring me for an X-ray to see what might be up, he did me a
repeat prescription for my asthma inhaler and gave me the flu jab since I was
there.
Yesterday I phoned Addenbrooke's to organise the X-ray, and got an appointment
for today. It was on time, so I was out of the hospital less than half an hour
after my scheduled appointment. A whizzy cycle ride later I'm back working at
the lab. How's all that for efficiency?
In other news, I had a haircut on Saturday. It's not much changed at the front
but is substantially shorter (and wider, due to not being tied back) at the
back. I think I like it, and there've been favourable comments from people
who've noticed...
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Dec 06 21:26:45 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Phylacteries
As any player of Dungeons and Dragons will tell you, a phylactery is the jar in
which a lich stores its soul. Just destroying the beastie itself won't work;
you have to destroy the phylactery as well. These were the thoughts that went
through my mind as I waited on the verge of the A14 roundabout with Milton
Road, watching my car forlornly blinking its hazard lights. A bit of its
exhaust had fallen off, said the AA man, handing me said bit and telling me it
could be replaced. So perhaps the car's not quite dead yet, or even undead,
but at some point it will finally give up the ghost.
I bought that car from a friend after my father died in 2007 so I could visit
my mother. She seemed absurdly proud that I had a car. Six months later it
became the car I used to deal with her estate, to clear out the house. It
became the receptacle for memories.
There are a lot of them. That old TV was a birthday present when I was in my
teens, this shaver was my father's but no longer keeps a charge, so they have
to go -- what's the point of a broken TV or a shaver that no longer shaves? --
but as they do it feels like a little bit of the past goes with them. So, one
day, it will be with the car, the microwave, the tumble drier...
At least one thing will persist, mind. It was my mother who insisted on buying
me AA membership when I got the car. Thank you.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Dec 22 17:31:34 2011]--
From: (S) the dream began to fade (steph)
Subject: Legomen (legete, legousi)
There's been a great deal of hoohah recently on the Intertwitterspherebook
about Lego's forthcoming new range of Lego kits designed to appeal to girls.
Called Lego Friends, the most obvious manifestation of the new range is a
girl Lego person who is rather less blocky than the traditional squat minifig.
Of course she (it?) still has clawed hands so she can hold things and the feet
are still exactly one stud apart so that she can be stuck to the arbitrarily
angled surface of your choice, but it does rather look like you won't be able
to take her legs and head off and replace them with roof tiles.
Aaaanyway, lots of people wailed that Lego was always gender neutral when they
were little and that this is all a horrid innovation: I know this is not true,
because when I was little and staying with my Nana in North Wales, I distinctly
remember the girls next door having special girls Lego. It had lots of kitchen
bits including as I remember a Lego egg (although I cannot find evidence of the
egg on Bricklink) and at that tender age I was dead jealous. This, part of the
1970s `Homemaker' series of Lego sets, is one of many attempts Lego has made to
attract girls over the years.
In the late 70s / early 80s they released the `Scala' range of Lego jewellery,
and then the nineties saw several more attempts with the desert island themed
`Paradisa' sets, `Belville' fairy tale princesses (which resemble Playmobil
much more than they do Lego), and the return of `Scala' as a range of vaguely
Legoid fashion dolls. And then in the new millennium they gave the
Lego jewellery idea a second shot with `Clikits'.
There are plenty of reasons to criticise and commend Lego for their latest
attempt to break through the `Lego is for boys' wall, but whether you think
this latest addition to their range is good or bad, it's certainly not new.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Jan 16 11:25:44 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: In Busy Bee Town
Sometimes I have found myself realising that one week was much like the last
one, and that there wasn't much meat to distinguish this grind of days.
Although not one for New Year's Resolutions as such I have been trying to do
more different things so far this year. It can be small things like going
somewhere different for lunch every day, but this weekend was remarkably full.
When I was little we would go shopping, either in Wellingborough or
Northampton, and I would come back with something: a toy, a game, a magazine.
Saturday morning felt like that: I got up earlyish and pottered around the
shops for things I needed or wanted, and bought myself a couple of Lego Technic
sets. I got back and built one of them while listening to the radio and then
had lunch. In the afternoon I drove Gareth to Richard B's party, where it was
good to see a number of people I've not seen for a while (James, Chris+Yasmin,
Brian) and play with assorted small children. Lovely to see everyone, but
afternoon parties always leave me feeling tired scarily early, so I drove back
to Cambridge in the evening and slumped at the Gallery for a bit. That's at
least three things in one day!
Sunday was likewise busy. Starting with the usual Sunday morning stuff of
papers and `The Archers' I then zipped off to the station to meet Ben for a
mystery walk near Sandy. Then, later than usual, returning to the Gallery for
Sunday TV and gameses.
You'd think I'd feel unrelaxed after all that, but it's amazing what actually
_using_ spare time does for how I feel once I'm back at work...
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Feb 14 17:55:30 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Broken but appreciated
Some of my systems here at work are not working very well at the moment, and
although largely folk haven't noticed, I'm very aware of the problems (some of
which are at the end of a long chain of consequences of the main server not
running normally) and I've been finding it a bit stressful.
In spite of this, I seem to be being appreciated by my users more of late.
Apart from being oblivious and telling me they hadn't actually noticed there
was anything wrong, I seem to be getting more praise than I expect for things I
do for them anyway. Today a quick Vista reinstallation on a troubled laptop
earned me a box of chocolates!
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Feb 18 19:37:36 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: A bad day
Actually, it's been a pretty rotten month. Server problems at work have seen
me in work on two Saturdays so far and there's still no real resolution to the
underlying problem. I was in today trying to push things forward a little bit
and succeeded as far as I could, but some new problems emerged instead. It's a
source of worry that nibbles at my energy and self-confidence so that my
baseline assumption is that I'm a useless nitwit even if it turns out that the
users are mostly fairly content.
I went into town afterwards to get some lunch, and settled on Tatties on Sussex
Street. It was busy, so I shared a table with a couple of German strangers. I
was halfway through my meal when a waitress came along and asked me to move (so
they could fit someone else in). I protested vociferously that I was still
eating and it wasn't on to ask me to move and she went away, only to prowl up
and down and glower at me. I didn't feel welcome enough to finish my coffee
and cleared off feeling completely out of sorts as soon as I'd finished my
food.
(It turns out that that Tatties, which is completely separate from others in
Cambridge, already has more than its fair share of bad reviews. Rude staff,
rotten food, insects in the salad... It sounds like I got away lightly.)
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Mar 01 12:37:11 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Very quiet and quite far away
I took the day off work on Tuesday, because I was feeling slightly headachey
and a bit woozy, as if I were moving through cotton wool or something. I
assumed it was a slightly weirdly manifesting cold, and the slight sore throat
which appeared later in the day seemed to confirm that, so I felt not too bad
about taking the day off work.
I felt better yesterday morning, but there was some more woe with the server in
the morning, leading to about 15 minutes downtime for people who were trying to
work. This sort of event makes me feel very anxious and tense and my heart
rate goes up. Looking back, I think I must still have been a bit ill, because
my sentences kept stopping while I thought of the next bit to say. Things
calmed down, the server came back, and I had lunch, although with my heart
still going a bit fast.
In the afternoon, my left arm began to feel clammy and cold, similar to how
one's whole body feels when one faints. I went to the local first aider and
while I was describing this, I got fainter and had to sit down. He and the lab
safety officer took me to the lab's sickbay and had me lie down while I
recovered. After about half an hour I was OK, but still a little wobbly. A
coworker drove me home, and I thought little of it even though the clammy
feeling had returned to my arm: I was going to take the advice of the first
aiders and rest.
Friends were more nervous of my symptoms, and urged me to go (via NHS Direct)
to A&E. There, over the course of four hours, I had three blood pressure
tests, two ECG tests, one chest X-ray, and a blood test. The blood test was
probably more disturbing than any of the symptoms they were trying to diagnose.
I became faint while the chap was faffing with my hand (I wasn't looking) and
although he was trying to keep me talking about what we did at the Cavendish I
was aware that my description (of the mechanical inputs into stem cell
differentiation, if you must know) was getting wafflier and stranger, with
regular breaks to work out what I was actually trying to say. Sounds came from
a long way away, sounding tinny, and the world was covered in coloured
blotches. I couldn't focus on anything and was panicking a bit because I
couldn't work out how to get out of this state. I was also sweating buckets:
when the next ECG was due the nurse had to wipe my torso free of sweat so that
the little sticky tabs would stay on.
They gave me water and everything returned more or less to normal over the next
10-15 minutes. The end result of the whole thing is that there's nothing wrong
with me and that I should worry less, both about work and about my health. The
other end result is that I will avoid blood tests like the plague in future...
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Mar 19 12:22:05 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Heads of petrol, heads of air
The 2012 Formula One season has started up again, with only half of the races
available live on the BBC. Being the sort to watch things live, I've thus
added Sky Sports to my Virgin TV subscription, and watched the opening race of
the season - Melbourne - on Sunday morning. So what's Sky's coverage like?
The introduction is dull: a clip show to a vague waffly song about driving; it
reminded me of nothing so much as the much-loathed introduction to Star Trek:
Enterprise. Give me Fleetwood Mac or even ITV's yippy-yays any day.
Once you're in the coverage you have an eerily familiar setup as three blokes
with microphones wander around the paddock talking to people, intermittently
introducing pre-recorded segments with some driver or other. The three (for
Melbourne at least) were Damon Hill, Martin Brundle, and some Sky chap called
Simon Lazenby, presumably filling the role that on the BBC is Jake Humphry's.
Lazenby's delivery is somewhere between blokey and wooden, and he doesn't
actually seem to know (or care) that much about F1. Brundle and Hill are
knowledgeable, of course, but there's no disagreement, no controversy. It's
all a bit bland.
In the pits you've got Ted Kravitz, and also on the team are two women.
Natalie Pinkham wanders around doing interviews with drivers and the like, but
asks the most vacuous questions and then giggles at the replies while
apparently attempting to cuddle her interviewee. The other woman's a presenter
who stands in a box with a television (the `Skypad') and raises an important
question: what is the point of Georgie Thompson? Her role seems to be to nod
vaguely and press buttons on the touch screen while Anthony Davidson (another
F1 driver) explains things.
So the pre-race (and post-race) stuff is a bit rubbish. Fortunately, Martin
Brundle and David Croft do a fair job of the commentary, although I do wish
Croft would calm down a bit. There were no adverts during either qualifying or
the race, so that's one up on the ITV years. Oddly, there were no mid-race
`you've just crashed, <driver name nere>, what happened?' interviews.
Re-reading what I've written it seems like the best bits of Sky's coverage are
the experts they've nicked from the BBC. Perhaps the others will grow into
their roles as the season goes on, but so far it's all a bit poor from the
`Home of Sport'.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Mar 20 09:40:32 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: A bad start
This morning, while standing under the shower, the shower packed up and the
flow reduced to a dribble. Then, on the cycle in to work, some pillock on a
bike pulled out in front of me. I was able to emergency brake to avoid hitting
him, but I did as a result go over the handlebars. I'm merely slightly grazed
on my knees and right hand, but it's wonkified several bits of the bike.
Today is not a good start to the day.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Mar 21 09:53:42 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: If I could turn back time...
Andy Burnham was at the dispatch box yesterday, talking about the Government's
Health and Social Care Bill. He said `We will repeal this legislation at the
first opportunity', which of course amuses me tremendously for a variety of
reasons. The interesting one here, though:
Much of the Bill (including almost all of Part 1) amends or repeals existing
legislation. Once the National Health Service Act 2006 and friends are
amended, they stay amended even if the Health and Social Care Act 2012 is
repealed. Mr Burnham would not be able simply to wave the magic repeal wand to
take the NHS back to 2009: he would have to write new text to implement the
way things were and persuade people to supportthe status quo ante on its own
terms.
(I'm a fan of the idea that amending/repealing provisions should self-
annihilate once they've taken effect, for tidiness as much as anything else,
though legislation.gov.uk would have to be a lot better than it currently is
for this.)
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Mar 22 09:49:09 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Turning back time
Looking into things a bit more since my previous entry, I think I'm completely
wrong about amendments. Whether this means repealing the H&SCA in its entirety
would leave things in more or less of a mess is left as an exercise for the
reader...
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Mar 27 12:49:58 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Slightly bold
Prompted by Ben, I agreed to go on a 40 mile cycle ride this weekend: the
Stevenage Start of Summertime Special. I was slightly nervous about this,
since it would be significantly further than I'd ever cycled before. However,
Ben pointed out that I'd cycled 20 miles with him once and this was only twice
that with a stop for cake, and a cyclist PhD student here told me it would be
no trouble at all, so I pulled in with Ben and David into a park in Stevenage.
My first reaction was `ow my eyes' at the sea of bright jackets and lycra. I
got my brevet card, and after a bit of a wait for our turn to leave, we set
out. It was really rather gentle, if anything on the initial stretch rather
too gentle, but even once we'd got out of Stevenage my fears that I would be
far too slow were allayed. We wimbled through gently undulating (and
wobbly-roaded) Hertfordshire and it was largely effortless, to be honest. We
even found ourselves going faster than some people on super-duper bikes, which
surprised me on my slightly battered random hybrid commuter bike. I was
disappointed that nobody said `You came on that thing? You're braver than you
look' but pleased that my usual cycling attire - shirt and trousers - attracted
a comment that we looked very `smart'.
There were a couple of stops to get the brevet card signed to prove we'd got
there, the second of which was in a village hall for lunch. Tea with three
sugars, some rolls, fruit, and a scone, and we were on the way again. I think
the last bit was the toughest: it had actual hills, I was a little bit tired,
and there were other riders around so I couldn't always attack the hill as I
might like. Also I think I had a slow puncture which was making my rear tyre
gradually squidgier as the day went on...
By the end I was slightly sore-bottomed and my left arm was aching for some
reason but the important thing was that I finished within the target time and
am still feeling absurdly proud of myself. Hurrah.
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Apr 29 13:48:34 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Heat
Since buying this house I've always been slightly apprehensive of my loft. It
contained strange pipework and tanks and there was always a niggling suspicion
that the whole lot would at some point spontaneously evaporate and dump vast
amounts of water into the rest of the house. Worrying about (and in one case
getting) freezing pipes over the past couple of winters exacerbated this worry,
so I decided to get a newfangled combi boiler and do away with tanks and the
like.
I got British Gas to do the work, having found they offered a decent price and
that getting a reply out of other plumbers was next to impossible, and they did
this on Wednesday and Thursday this week. I was slightly put out when the man
arrived at 9am, two hours early, but he got started and after a while I left
him and his colleague to it while I went to work.
I knew that midway through the job, on Wednesday night, I would have no heat
since the old boiler would have been removed and the new one not yet connected.
However, I was disconcerted by the confusing `safety note' they had left me.
By virtue of being mostly pre-printed form with scant space for details, this
thing gave me the impression that the (always unusued) gas fire in my living
room and the gas hob in my kitchen were immediate dangers to human life. I
tried to phone BG up for clarification but nobody was able to explain what they
actually meant. Rather put out, I avoided using the hob, and cooked a pizza
over at the Gallery instead. The next morning I interrogated the gas man
(slightly crossly) about what things actually meant, and there is in fact no
danger. (Well, there's a danger if you can turn on the living room gas fire,
but I've never been able to, and they cheated just in order to test it.)
That aside, the rest of the installation went smoothly. The engineers did the
work less disruptively than we'd thought inevitable when planning this with the
salesman, and took the main tank out of the loft, which the salesman had said
they wouldn't do. So now I have a heating system which does not make the house
vibrate slightly when it is running, hot water at greater pressure than I have
heretofore enjoyed, and a new shower. Hooray.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu May 03 18:28:30 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Light
Although computer systems are systems whose operation I make it my business to
understand, it's very clear that there's an emotional layer on top of that
which colours (and is coloured by) my dealings with them.
The best example of this was the firewall machine in my first job. It was a
mysterious Sun box with odd daemons running on it, and I didn't fully
understand how it worked. Even when I did understand it to some extent, it
felt `dark': working with it was like walking along an insufficiently lit
country path at new moon, and although I would usually get it to do what I
wanted in the end, the whole experience was usually unsatisfactory. When I
replaced it with a system I'd designed and which I understood, it felt
`bright', perhaps like a 19th Century machine with lots of shiny cogs.
Of course, replacing something isn't the only way to brighten it. When I first
got seriously involved in networking here at the Cavendish (and somehow found
myself responsible for deploying VoIP) poking at switches, VLANs, and QoS was
a very gloomy business. Once I'd gained understanding of it on the job, by
noticing that folks' phones weren't working and working out why, it felt much
brighter.
I suppose the same could be said for my loft. I didn't understand the dark
gloomy mess of pipework and tanks that comprised my old heating system, so I
disliked touching it. Now I understand what little is there and how the rest
of the system fits together, even the dark loft seems a bit brighter: I don't
find myself almost afraid to go up there.
It's funny, though. If something happens which I can't explain, things can
become dark once more. So it was today when my network started apparently
broadcasting unicast traffic: I couldn't see how this was happening, couldn't
find out where, and as a result the whole network feels darker, even now it
seems to be working normally again. I hope learning more about the problem and
how it might have come about will make my network feel bright again.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon May 14 17:24:15 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Sense
When I was introduced to `Bubble Gum Crisis' I was warned that although the
Japanese rock music in the series may be catchy, looking at the subtitles to
find out what is actually being sung may be unwise going on fruitless: the
lyrics are usually absolute gibberish.
I thus rather regret pressing the `subtitles' button during the theme music for
`The Bridge', a slightly mad Swedish/Danish crime thriller currently being
shown on BBC4. The music is haunting, sung slightly indistinctly, and reminds
me very much of that from `The Shadow Line'. Unfortunately, the lyrics are in
impressively fluent Scandiwenglish, which I don't speak:
Echoes start as a cross in you,
Trembling noises that come to soon.
Spatial movement which seems to you,
Resonating your mask or feud.
Hollow talking and hollow girl,
Force it up from the root of pain.
Never said it was good, never said it was near,
Shadow rises and you are here.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Jun 13 10:45:47 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Sleep
Recently, and this week in particular, I feel very lethargic. At work almost
everything is too much effort and I wish I could just lie down and sleep. The
same goes for my free time: I do things and enjoy them but I'm shattered by
about 10pm. And yet when I go to sleep I wake up feeling just as tired and
achey as I did when I went to bed.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Jul 13 11:49:46 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: No need to ask a p'liceman
This November we'll have the first elections for the new Police and Crime
Commissioners. These elected figures will replace the existing police
authorities in overseeing the funding and operation of the police in their
area. As a member of the Conservative Party, I get a say in our choice of
candidate for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and to this end a small sheaf of
papers plopped through my letterbox the other day. Three would-be candidates
have been presented for my perusal:
Shona Johnstone - http://cllrshonajohnstone.blogspot.co.uk/
Sir Graham Bright - http://www.grahambright.com/
John Pye - http://www.jpforcambridgeshirepcc.co.uk/
So, who to choose? Let's start with who not to choose. I'm biased against
Shona Johnstone for pushing through the misguided bus, of course, but what
really kills her candidacy for me is the episode that led to her resignation as
leader of Cambridgeshire County Council. Unhappy with the Council's decision
to appoint a chief executive she did not prefer, she phoned the would-be
successful candidate to persuade them to withdraw. You can't have people in
public office attempting to sideline proper procedure like that.
Graham Bright is an artificial sweetener magnate, former MP, and John Major's
PPS before 1997. He's no doubt an experienced good egg but his CV doesn't tell
me anything specific about his suitability to become Police Commissioner. His
policies don't tell us very much either, but `priority to fight
Cambridgeshire's largest crime problem of anti-social behaviour' rang alarm
bells for me for several reasons.
John Pye is a bit of a contrast. The paper version of his candidate statement
was much less glossy than the other two, in simple Times. However, it seems to
me that he's the best of the choices on offer. He's currently on the Police
Authority, has thought about how the role of PCC should work, and doesn't start
from the premise that all is doomed: `Local crime has never been lower.' I
think, unless someone points out his secret policy of eating babies, he will
get my vote to be the Conservative Candidate.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Aug 08 13:07:53 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: A Question of Sport
It began with the men's cycling road race. I caught it after the F1 Qualifying
and found myself struck by how nifty it was that British leafy roads were
lined with enthusiastic crowds watching an Olympic event.
I was never an Olympic naysayer. I was pleased we'd won it and hoped we'd put
on a good show, but I simply didn't think it would be `for me'. Once I'd
watched that first cycle race, though, it was only a short step to watching
another race, and since then I've watched a little bit of almost everything.
All the venues look superb, after a few initial hitches everything seems to
have gone smoothly, and it turns out that watching people doing almost any
sport at the highest level can be absolutely amazing.
I hated sport when I was little. Not only did I resent being made to do it in
PE and Games, I was actively grumpy when it was on TV. Whenever my brother and
father were watching something I would grumble and hide elsewhere from the loud
whoopings and hollerings that would inevitably ensue. I'm evidently going soft
in my old age, though, since now I can watch athletics, swimming, diving,
cycling, or almost anything else and find myself drawn in and excited by the
event. (`Almost anything', since I am still immune to the charms of dressage
and water polo.)
So, yes, rather unexpectedly I've become addicted to these Olympics. It
probably helps that there have been a few British successes along the way :-)
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Aug 14 18:11:55 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Cross
I got a phone call on my landline at about 8:15 this morning. It was Virgin
Media calling to confirm an engineer's visit to correct a fault. This was
something of a surprise to me, since I'd reported no problems and booked no
engineer's visits. Since they warned that I would be charged for this visit if
I wasn't there to let them in, I pressed the button on their menu system to
cancel the appointment.
Then I tried to get in touch with someone to work out what was going on. The
automated system seemed unhappy with all my attempts to provide it with the
relevant parts of my password, but in the end I got through to someone. It
transpires I and some unknown counterpart have a genuine crossed line: my phone
has their number and theirs has mine. This was what the engineer's visit,
booked by my counterpart, was supposed to correct. Although the person in the
callcentre assured me that the appointment still seemed to exist, I now have
the horrible suspicion that I have unwittingly conspired against my counterpart
by cancelling the appointment they made to get this problem fixed...
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Sep 04 10:16:39 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Paraparaparaparapara-olympian
I've been watching the Paralympics (yes, for the first time, but it was the
first Olympics I've ever watched too) and enjoying it. I may write more about
this later, but at the moment I'm pondering the broadcasting.
We were spoiled with the BBC's Olympics coverage. Two of the BBC's mainstream
channels provided coverage, and then there were up to 24 live streams from all
the various events. Channel 4's single mainstream channel, and then up to
three streams seems niggardly by comparison. In particular, `minority' sports
tend only to get recorded coverage on the main channel, which is potentially
disappointing for anyone who wanted to catch a glimpse of, say, boccia. It
turns out this isn't C4's fault; the paralympic broadcasting arrangements only
seem to have four live streams available at all. What then gets covered in
recorded or highlights form is inevitably going to be an awkward compromise
between breadth of coverage and depth, with the added constraint of time and
adverts. Overall it seems like C4 is doing a pretty good job with limited
resources.
Very good, actually, if you look at what other countries are doing. Looking at
what data I could find for promised or scheduled coverage for the top ten
countries in the medals table last night I get:
Country Broadcasters Hours of coverage
China CCTV 55
Britain C4 500
Russia VGTRK ?
Australia ABC 100
Ukraine Natsionalna Telekompanya Ukrainy ?
USA NBC 5.5
Germany ARD/ZDF 65
Brazil Rede Globo / Sportv ?
France Minor, local channels ?
Poland Polskie Telewizja ?
? means my cursory searches couldn't find data for this or pin an estimate on
it. I may try to search more vigorously for data. Nevertheless, as far as I
can tell, that means that little Channel 4 is covering _five_times_ the amount
of paralympic sport of the next best broadcaster. True, this probably says
more about the feebleness of the others' coverage (and most searches for
<Nation> Paralympic Coverage produced complaints at its near non-existence),
but I think there's something for little C4, and Britain more widely, to be
proud of there.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Sep 15 22:05:15 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Waggly tale
A song has been bothering me this evening. It is, as you may have guessed,
`How much is that doggy in the window?'. It starts sensibly enough, with an
enquiry about the price of said canine, and some details to help us identify
the beast in question. But then they say `I do hope that doggy's for sale'.
Surely if you're already asking the price you already know the dog is for sale,
and it's hopefully not that likely that they'll have a dog in the window purely
for decoration.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Sep 26 16:46:01 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Mistress Of
Like almost everyone I get spam phone calls and paper spam, but something
strange has happened recently. The first time I got it I was a bit confused:
`No, there isn't an O'Ryan here' and `Sorry, there's nobody called Oyon here'.
It was clear some strange name had got onto someone's database but I couldn't
figure out if it was one mistake variously pronounced or several different
names all leading to my phone number.
It was only when I got a piece of paper spam that I worked out what it was:
Miss Orion Dunn. I'm struggling to work out how they came up with that one --
mishearing, misreading, mis-OCRing might all be possible answers -- but as a
person about whom I can say with an entirely straight face that she is not
known at this address, it's a name that tickles my fancy quite considerably.
If I ever have a daughter...
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Oct 31 17:35:22 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: A brand of weedkiller
I've got out of the habit of writing things here, which is a shame since
there's been quite a bit to say over the last month or two. Let's see if we
can round up one or two of the main events...
Subject: Paralympic Cycling - Road
Back in September I went to watch the Paralympics courtesy of some IT
consultancy firm that does business with the University. By purest chance,
this was the day Zanardi took his second gold medal of the Games, and I
cheered excessively loudly as he made it over the finish line. Some photos
from the various events that day:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/2012/09/paralympics/
Subject: Adventure and Excitement
A&E doesn't actually stand for that, but nevertheless. Last Monday after I got
home from meditation I found that I was having difficulty breathing other than
very shallowly; it seemed as if there was a painful lump preventing me from
deep breath. The situation got bad enough that I phoned NHS Direct, who were
evidently as concerned as I was and sent an ambulance for me. It wasn't
actually an ambulance but an estate car with `Ambulance' written on in crayon,
but the thought was there.
I was taken to A&E where I promptly threw up, and then spent much of the next
three or four hours being poked and prodded and put on a drip. This was by far
the most wimpy drip you can imagine, as I was being dripped paracetamol.
Still, it eased the pain so that I could breathe slightly more easily, and none
of the other tests showed anything wrong with me. Our collective best guess is
that I ate something that disagreed with me enough to inflame my digestion
enough to cause the problems. I took a taxi home and gradually got better over
the course of the next day or so.
While I was at A&E everyone doing some test on me asked me to take a deep
breath. DID YOU NOT HEAR THE PART WHERE I SAID I COULDN'T BREATHE?
Subject: Roofers
I'm having my house re-roofed, so that the underfelt isn't a pile of decaying
paper and nothing leaks. This caused me a bit of concern at first, because
part of the process involves the roof being untiled. What if it rained? It
turns out that roofing felt is tougher stuff than you might imagine and is
certainly no mere feeble lining. I stood up in my loft over the weekend while
the rain battered on the felt and both I and the loft remained bone dry. The
other thing I'm having done is more insulation. I feel like a halfway
competent homeowner.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Nov 09 14:18:29 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Those end of the world blues
A few weeks ago I got an email from the person who came before me in my current
job. He asked, of a post that was becoming available in another department in
the University: `might you be interested?'. It looked like something I could
do, so I applied. At the start of this week I had the interviews, and have
been offered the job informally. Formal paperwork will probably happen today
and on Monday.
So I'll be moving, to a new job, with more money, more scope for career
progression, more Unix and networking, being part of a team, new challenges...
What's not to like?
And yet I'll be leaving this place, which has been a huge part of my life for
over six years, so I find myself tearing up a little bit thinking of it. It
won't be the same place soon enough anyway, as by pure coincidence other staff
are leaving as well: a sort of changing of the support staff guard.
Nevertheless I'm feeling sad as I try to push into documenting as much about
the place as I can. I've had some amazing times here, both socially and
professionally, helping amazing people do some extraordinary science. By going
to seminars and listening to people I've learned so much about so many areas of
physics and I will miss that.
It's change. I never could get the hang of change. Fin de siecle. Those end
of the world blues.
And yet Cambridge is still there, solid, remarkable and unremarked. In some
slightly grander scheme which looks beyond the day-to-day of small people and
their smaller lives, nothing has changed at all.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Nov 27 12:42:00 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Style guides
Someone noticed that the Telegraph prefers to use imperial units for a lot of
things, and this prompted me to find their style guide and that of the
Guardian.
Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/
Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Dec 09 15:38:24 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Things that decay
Lots of `lasts' at work recently, as my last day approaches. Last Christmas
Party, most recently, which led me to wonder if it'll soon be the last time I
see some of these people. For some of them it won't be much of a loss, but for
others, I'd be sad never to see them again. I'm only moving down the road, but
that seems to be the way of it: people move away, you lose touch, they become
dim memories, and the distance only ever increases. Sure, there's Facebook,
which keeps you in vague touch a bit, but not much. Is it possible to keep in
touch with former colleagues, or is it one of the inevitable facts of life that
people drift away? It seems like there aren't so many people these days, that
everyone drifts away...
I've had a surge of activity on OkCupid for the first time in a while, winning
me a couple of nice messages, only one from someone wildly unsuitable. Perhaps
it'll be less rubbish this time around.
In other attempts to distract my brain, I went on a cycle ride along the
busway, until the bit where it's flooded. It was a gruelling slog against the
headwind, and I almost gave up several times, but when I turned around the
speed was joyous and I had a silly grin on my face all the way back to
Cambridge.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Dec 12 21:25:06 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Lack of friction
The whole endeavour had to be cancelled once due to me being ill, and I only
managed to rustle up one coworker to go with, but I've made it to the ice rink
on Parker's Piece.
The coworker who joined me had asked me rather worriedly earlier in the
day whether I could skate. The last time she'd been skating she'd held on to
the side while the person she was with whooshed around with great ease. She
needn't have worried: when it came to this evening it was almost the other way
around! I don't seem to have the knack of gliding, not that that made it any
less fun.
It was a jolly 45 minutes on the ice, and much more tiring and warm than I
expected. It left me with a happy smile, anyway.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Dec 20 11:00:29 2012]--
From: (S) for the people who are still alive (steph)
Subject: Things that are are short, things that should be
After back class and a successful Christmas shopping trip I went to see "The
Hobbit" at the cinema last night. My top tip? Go in 140 minutes after the
advertised start time, and leave after Gollum.
The problem with it wasn't that it wasn't a faithful adaptation, although it
wasn't. It was worse: it was boring. This is a film in which nothing of much
consequence actually happens. The characters get from point A to point B,
their journey being occasionally interrupted by one of the following events:
* soliloquy about the past, segue into cut scene of dire exploding doom
* attacked by random wildlife, loud music of dire exploding doom
* running/falling through ludicrous dire CGI exploding contraption/landscape
* eating, followed by comedic dire exploding Bombur
Sadly I made the last bit up.
You could perhaps have made a nice short lovely film of the Hobbit. If you
were very clever you could have made part one of a three film series and woven
the original into a richly-textured tapestry with bits from the rest of
Tolkien's writings. What you can't do is leave the story as bare-boned
as the original and then stitch in random bits of other stuff in the hope that
nobody will notice the jarring wrenches of pace, time, place, style, or
character.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Dec 21 15:00:26 2012]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Hiatus
This is almost the end. My work leaving drinks were yesterday, because there's
almost nobody in the lab on this last day before the Christmas shutdown.
Yesterday there were still a few, and they did me proud with wine and food in
our big meeting room and a big pile of (mostly coffee-oriented) goodies. Also
a card with lots of lovely messages on it, thanking me for saving their life,
their data, their PhD, or even just for my cheerful friendship. I'm quite
flattered.
Today it is quiet, and those few folk who were in are drifting away as early as
each of them thinks decent. My desk is clear and I'll follow them shortly, to
start a Christmas break.
And then what?
In the New Year I'll work three days here, just to make sure everything is
working, and then I start at Maths on the 7th January. New challenges, new
people, and it's starting to feel more exciting than daunting. I've almost got
used to the idea: let's see if I can make a go of it.
I will try to keep in touch with people from around here, because some of them
have given me a lot and are worth it, but that's not only up to me, so if it
doesn't happen (as my meditation teacher might say) just note it, smile, and
move on.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Dec 29 20:22:52 2012]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Up to the colly birds
I went to Hull last Sunday to visit my brother. For the first time since I've
started going there this wasn't in my little Punto, which I'm planning to get
rid of, but in a hired Seat Leon. The journey was fortunately uneventful and I
got to Hull in plenty of time.
Christmas with the family (my brother, sister-in-law and nephew) was its usual
fun self. Everyone seemed to appreciate the presents I got them, and I had fun
helping Drew play with some of his: live action Angry Birds, Lego vampire
hunters, remote control helicopter. The last said 14+ on the box, which must
come with the invvisible small print `or a bright seven-year-old'.
Boxing Day saw a stroll across the Humber Bridge to Barton and back with Giles,
Drew, and Rudy (the dog). It was quite a breezy day, which was very good for
blowing the Christmas cobwebs away!
The day after Boxing Day was the by-now-traditional visit to the Mills
household, with accompanying alcohol and silly games. This year there was a
`name 6 things' game with a timer, and a game of consequences which was often
hilarious and very crude indeed. Great fun.
Then when we got back home from that and Drew had gone to bed there was one of
those unexpected late night conversations that makes you glad you stayed up.
Stuff about dating, family, parents, all more involved and personal than I'd
want to expand on here, but suffice it to say that it felt really good to have
talked about it all.
The next day was back to Cambridge for Clare's post-Christmas Christmas dinner,
which was jolly good fun, although I was very dozy by the end from the drive
back from Hull.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Dec 31 17:27:53 2012]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Into a swan?
2012 has turned out more eventful than I expected. The big change, applying
for the job at Maths, sits in the middle of it, but around it are lots of
little changes and choices.
Resolutions- keep in touch with people, but don't stress about it if it doesn't
happen; keep giving the online dating a try, possibly even actually meeting
someone in the flesh (could happen, you never know), but don't get sad if
nothing comes of it; self-censor less when dealing with other people.
You should all go and read `East Coker'.
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Jan 13 14:05:50 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Singlemindedness
I've noticed this before, and possibly even mentioned it in these pages, but
current circumstances have brought it to my attention once more: I seem to be
monogamous at some low level such that I find it hard to focus on more than one
`prospect' at a time. (Gah, language is horrible here. I make it sound like
I'm looking for a business deal.)
When I'm interested in someone, I enjoy spending time in their company in the
same way as I might with any of my friends, possibly with a bit of a extra
zing that comes from spending time with someone new you don't yet know well but
you definitely get on very well with. And from the outside perspective that
anyone else might see, that's that. But there seems also to be a kind of
switch in my head that dims everyone else I might possibly be interested in by
comparison. I find it harder to muster the same enthusiasm for other would-be
interests, even though there's every chance they'll be more interested,
available, better suited, whatever. It fades with time and/or confirmation
the other party isn't interested, but it does seem to take a while.
Obviously this is not ideal in conjunction with online dating, where you're
trying to meet strangers to work out whether you like them. If my brain is
warped so they won't come up to scratch somehow (because they're not `the
(current) one') I'll miss out on nice people and won't be giving them my best.
The latter of course is worse: I've had plenty of practice at being rubbish to
myself, but it's rather less fair to inflict this rubbishness on other people.
I expect I shall muddle through and attempt to give everyone my best, but I'd
be curious to know whether I'm unusually twisted in this regard. (And if I'm
not, what to do about it!)
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Jan 16 21:02:49 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Fig
(There is a secret word on the house. What is it?)
Yesterday, for the first time, I met a person from OkCupid in person. Getting
to that point is quite an achievement in itself, really, so I should
congratulate myself. We had coffee and chatted for an hour or so, and it was
pleasant enough, but we didn't seem to click. There was no zing. Perhaps it
would be too much to expect one of those amazing conversations where both of
you fire off what the other is saying and it's full of funny stories and
laughter, but there wasn't even a glimmer of that. I suppose finding this sort
of thing out is what dating is supposed to accomplish.
And yet, and yet, (you may imagine the schoolmaster in my mind saying as he
paces back and forth, fingers steepled.) If I'd not had such a zingy
conversation so recently, perhaps I would have appreciated my date more. On
the other hand, one of these conversations made me happier than the other, and
happiness is part of the point of the exercise, no?
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Jan 18 23:07:42 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: A million microfortnights
I've been in my new job for two weeks now. It's good and I can do it, but my
head is so full of it and everything else that is going on in my life right
now that I do sometimes feel I'm going to burst.
My head goes:
S'io credessi (but of course he was wrong or we wouldn't have heard it, poor
chap, haha)... The nine men's morris is filled up with mud.
(He had been meaning to do something about the maze as well.)
...for the thing one no longer has to say... The unimaginable Zero Summer.
S'io credessi. at regina iamdudum. It breaks if you don't force it. vulnus
alit venis et caeco carpitur igni. Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Is there no dignity? In a laugh on a platform evoked in a moment evoked by a
laugh. There will be time. (Toast and tea one afternoon this week? Don't
mind if I do.)
These fragments. Infinitely hopeful. Hurry up please.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Jan 24 17:51:01 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Metta
I have not been at my most absolutely cheerful this year so far, for reasons
that essentially boil down to doubt. The usual doubt in a new job that one
will ever understand it all, and the more general doubt in the area of
cultivating friendships and relationships. The former, well, it will go with
time as I understand more and am able to do more.
Doubting whether people like me, though, that's been a sport I've played for
years. I may not be hanging up the boots (for kicking onself when down) just
yet, but I feel I may have made a small amount of progress.
I go to meditation every Monday, and this Monday we did a sort of practice
called `Metta', usually translated rather sappily as `lovingkindness'. The
form of this varies but in the past it's involved attempting to send waves of
wellbeing out to all sentient beings in the entire universe, and has mostly
struck me as a pile of twaddle. This time we focused solely on ourselves,
since nobody, the Buddha is supposed to have said, is more deserving of our
love than ourself. We recalled acts of kindness we had done for other people
and got a sense of what feelings or qualities arose from this.
It was warm, rosy, comfortable, and when I came out of the practice I felt
really rather emotional. My overwhelming feeling was `I am actually quite
nice.'
If I can bring that to mind every now and then in my life, the road may be just
that teeny bit less rocky.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Jan 30 19:47:37 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Recent truthful cake
Life has been up and down. Down when I could not bring myself to imagine that
people might like me, and up when I could. I'm starting to believe it more, I
think.
At the weekend I went to London for a random amble around: not to gorge myself
on any one thing but to take in a few bite size chunks of nice stuff. I went
to Covent Garden and watched some energetic buskers (including a very cute
cellist), thence to Foyles to browse around randomly, and finally to the V&A
where there was an exhibition of modern Middle Eastern photography among some
of their usual exhibits.
Today I started early for server reboots, so was able to slope off early for
tea and cake with a friend from Physics. It was lovely to sit and chat, and
Patisserie Valerie chocolate gateau is gorgeous! Hopefully there'll be a
chance to do it again sometime.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Feb 04 17:14:21 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Baby archer misses target
I think I shall stop poking OkCupid for a couple of weeks. It's not throwing
up anyone new that appeals particularly and there are only so many ways you can
sort the same set of profiles before it turns into a chore rather than fun. My
heart isn't really in it at the moment anyway. (I note that my date of last
month has cancelled her account. I hope this means she found someone nice and
appreciative.)
I've been cycling a lot recently. What I thought would be a 25km ride to
Lakenheath the other weekend was closer to 50km, and I got distracted on the
way to buy the paper yesterday and went along the busway as far as the flooded
bit. One of these days I will get to St Ives. Perhaps that should be a
metaphor for something.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Feb 13 12:38:27 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Flipped
I went to a pancake party last night with a friend from Physics. In a display
of spooky synchronicity the invitation arrived just as I was writing an email
in the other direction to suggest some cake-shaped activity...
My friend was the only person I knew there, and the interesting thing was that
maybe once this would have fazed me and I would have sat shyly in a corner and
just talked to the one person I knew. When did it happen that I could just
talk to random people and enjoy it? I don't know, but I did and I had a great
evening, even though it was very clear they were superduper cyclists who put my
modest pootling in the shade :-).
Pancake fillings:
* Lemon and sugar
* Nutella, Maltesers, squirty cream
* Blueberries and custard
* Ginger preserve and chocolate (I think at this point I went `TOO MUCH SUGAR'
and had to stop for a bit...)
* Lemon curd with a dash of lime
And then a gentle ride back home along the southern bit of the busway. Good
job I bought a brighter light, really.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Feb 23 15:21:32 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Reduced
I have been noticing of late that some of my trousers have seemed a little, ah,
baggy around the waist. I assume the extra (and occasionally more
enthusiastic) cycling I've been doing this year has abstracted some of my body
and converted it into fun. This is a fine problem to have, and the mild
satisfaction at going down a size easily outweighs the inconvenience of
having to get new trousers.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Feb 27 09:35:22 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Encased
On Monday evening, after joining post-pizza at Arden Road, I came off my bike
on Kings Hedges Road. The rear wheel seemed to slip down something, there was
a noise as of the rim scraping agains something to its side, and then the rear
slid away and I fell off. Diagnosis at Addenbrooke's yesterday was that I
broke my radius near where it enters the hand/wrist. My forearm is thus in a
cast for a week or two, and then there will be a series of decreasingly awkward
immobilisation devices over the next ten weeks. During this time cycling is
not allowed!
Friends old and new have been brilliant and cheering in all their various ways,
which makes me smile.
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Mar 03 12:25:06 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Glumday
Various thing are making me glum today. The main one is that I've grown used
to a Sunday morning bike ride over the course of the past few weeks, so a
Sunday spent reading the paper and listening to the radio no longer really cuts
the mustard. I'm also trying to organise something for next week but am in
communication limbo, and the uncertainty about what the plan is a teeny bit
wearing. The neighbours are playing music in a vague not doofy way but the
bass is still pervasive. And I have to carry around a stupid lump on my right
arm.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Mar 04 17:55:38 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Up on the roof
Organisation was achieved, and we had Waitrose's finest cake on the roof of the
Maths building, in glorious sunshine. The sky was clear blue and the crocuses
were out. Yeah, that's awesome enough.
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Mar 10 13:41:47 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Grand Tour
Yesterday was to be a 50km bike ride, but with my nadgered arm (now encased in
a very fetching purple cast) that was not to be. Instead I decided to go on a
pub crawl to visit all four of Steve's (well, http://www.individualpubs.co.uk)
pubs in a day. First was the White Lion in Norwich, which was quiet but cosy
with a steady stream of folk popping in for a bit. I had gorgeous (and easily
cuttable!) sausages and mash with a pint of Nero, read for a bit, and headed
onwards to London. The Pembury is hard to miss and is enough of a landmark
locally that it's on the maps at the railway stations. I met Steve there and
we nattered, and visited another local pub (very nice chocolate stout!), and
then had some of the delicious pizza back at the Pembury. All very tasty but it
put enough of a dent in the day that the planned detour to Peterborough to
visit the Coalheaver's Arms seemed lkely to strand me in Peterborough, so I
meandered back to Cambridge for a pint at the Devonshire Arms.
Three out of the current four, then, which is not bad and with better planning
(and being less easily distracted by additional tasty beer) I could certainly
have made all four.
Some will allege that this is a silly thing to do. I have no defence to this
charge!
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Mar 11 09:41:48 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Turbot rain
I was feeling a bit sad the other week. I'd not got the hang of sleeping
properly with the cast and I was really starting to miss the bike, both for
getting around and for fun and that sense of escape that just going somewhere
brings. My friend from Physics extremely generously suggested that I
could borrow one the cycling club's turbo trainers, and she brought it round
yesterday. It's a small stand you fix your bike to, with a roller that your
back wheel runs on, so you can ride your own bike without going anywhere. I
went for a 25min ride in my side passage...
I had to email her to take back anything I might have said before I broke
my arm about not seeing the point, or any quips about `joyless exercise
machines'. It felt _so_ good to get the legs turning and the blood flowing
again! It's not the same as being out on the road, but it's something I can
do, and that's pretty fabulous.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Mar 22 17:15:13 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Dark matter
An inkling that I have been too clumsy and broken it all. Not that there is
anything to be done about it either way, now.
I should focus on the positives in life instead: visiting family this weekend,
a date next week, Eastercon.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Apr 05 14:10:12 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Belief
My previous dark musing was wrong, of course.
In other news, I am enjoying sessions on the turbo trainer much more than I
ever expected I would. I really never thought I'd find myself enjoying
exercise for its own sake. If you don't vary the resistance into a series of
pretend hills it can get a bit boring, but an hour's worth of Doctor Who audio
puts paid to all of that, and I get to watch the birds in the garden as the
light -- hurrah for light evenings! -- fades.
The date was a pleasant evening, easy, comfortable. We talked, played
Scrabble, and failed to hear each other properly over the unexpected pub quiz.
I'm not sure what to make of that. There was no particular spark, but it was
nice and wasn't awkward. Hmm.
Hot Numbers Coffee is OK but their cake selection isn't very large. (Although
the carrot cake was quite good and not overly sweet as some I've had have
been.)
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Apr 08 22:16:46 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Between ourselves
I had a conversation today about Lady Thatcher's death. (Several actually, and
the same sort of thing happened a couple of times, but this was the first; we
were having lunch and the news in the background seemed to be showing a lot of
old pictures of Thatcher.) There was this rather peculiar thing where both I
and the person I was talking to ummed and ahhed and went a bit quiet while
saying that she had been, to some degree or other, a Good Thing.
In my case it's because in the circles I move in, it feels like almost a taboo
to say so, or at least an invitation to a huge and probably unproductive
argument. I have no idea whether this is true for the person I was speaking
to, but it did feel like we had instead a peculiar conversational dance where
we probed the boundaries of whether it was, at least in this case, alright to
speak well of the dead.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Apr 15 09:51:35 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: The kind of cool person who
Last week was a busy one. Monday was a day's handover to my successor at BSS,
meeting my friend from Physics for lunch. On Tuesday I went to Addenbrooke's,
where my cast was removed and I was given a removable splint. Joy of joys,
the doctor there told me I could cycle `carefully' as soon as I liked.
On Tuesday evening I went on another date, and had dinner at CB2 followed by
watching `Cloud Atlas' at the Vue, which was fun but not as good as the book;
ditching the elaborately nested structure of the original made the film a very
disconnected experience, and the linking between the different stories seemed
more heavy handed.
On Wednesday I started to mend the bike so that at some point I would have the
time and courage to take it out on the road. Oh, and did some turboing,
because it's very hard to be uncheered with a turbo.
On Thursday I went with Sally, Tom, rjk, and Adam to see Blackbeard's Tea Party
at the Junction. I'd never encountered them before, but bouncy piratical folk
is jolly good fun. I didn't get up and dance in the second half for a variety
of complicated reasons, but mostly my hand was still feeling a bit tender and I
didn't want to risk bashing it, falling on it, or someone swinging me by it.
Friday evening was random telly night at the Gallery, and an unexpected present
from Gareth. For opaque reasons my usual tea mug at the Gallery has a jolly
FISH on it, so I was given a handkerchief of mine I'd accidentally left,
wrapped around... a FISH mug for my very own!
On Saturday morning I mended the bike, bought and fitted replacement brake
arms, and took it out for a gentle spin. It was weird how light and easy it
felt to ride; the road obviously has a lower resistance setting than the turbo!
I did some more of the latter just to be sure the comparison was right :-).
For the rest of Saturday and Sunday morning I had Drew, Giles, and Sara
visiting, so we wandered into town and showed Drew the skeletons at the Zoology
museum and played with the sciency whatnots in the Cambridge Science Centre.
And drunkenly watched Saturday night TV, went for a Sunday morning wander in
park to run around with Rudy the dog, and had a pub lunch...
Sunday evening Gallery had a purple edible hovercraft, Robo Rally, and crashy
Lego Lord of the Rings. This morning I cycled into work for the first time
since breaking my arm.
I'm the kind of cool person who does all that.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Apr 27 22:17:54 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Caution
When dealing with people I like I am often cautious. I try not to be too
pushy, suggesting doing things too frequently, or doing things which require a
lot of their time and effort.
Since people don't get horribly offended by me and do accept my invitations,
does this mean that (a) my caution is unwarranted, or (b) my caution is
sensible and paying off?
---------------------------------------------------[Mon May 06 23:11:17 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Catchup
I don't know whether all is well, but perhaps I will find out at some point.
In the meantime, as I promised myself I would, I have been doing a great many
more nifty things:
Another opera, this time a very mini one, `The Poor Sailor', in Clare Cellars.
An intimate setting for possibly the silliest opera I've yet seen: a valuable
cautionary tale on why you should not return from fifteen years at sea and
pretend to your unrecognising wife that her husband is deep in debt and you're
his insanely rich friend. Co-starring Chekhov's hammer.
Art, going to see a couple of exhibitions in Norwich one of which featured
ceb's latest work based on Conway's game of Life, and then a meander through
Norwich to one of those great rambling bookshops that goes on for ever.
Punting a choir along the Backs as they sang madrigals in the glorious Sunday
sunshine. A friend invited folk along on Facebook, I said yes, and turned out
to know several other people in the choir. Truly Cambridge is a small world.
The singing was much appreciated by tourists on the various bridges, and on
other punts, as we made our way to Quayside and back.
And now I'm mostly mobile, a slightly zoomy trip to St Ives along the busway.
I made it to St Ives! More tentatively today, on rougher ground, a gentle ride
out to Bottisham and back. I think we're getting to the point where I can
start going on proper rides again, so hooray for all that.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat May 11 16:32:26 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Impostor child
As those who know me or read this will know, I've been doing a lot more cycling
recently. By some vague metrics, I'm getting better at it: I go further and
faster than I used to. This is all very much at odds with my historical
self-image as someone who is not at all sporty and who bought a bike strictly
for transport, even though the latter boat sailed almost as soon as holiday
time came around.
The odd result of this is that in most company I'm slightly embarrassed by what
I do, and I play down my knowledge or achievement by choosing less technical
language. So I'll often not be `on the turbo' or `turbo training' but
`twirling on the contraption'. I'll say `pedalling speed' rather than
`cadence', `cog' rather than `chain ring'. There are probably other examples
that are so ingrained in me that I can't even bring them to mind now.
Interestingly the only exception to this is when talking to my friend from
Physics and other Cycling Club folk, where I don't feel the need to feign any
kind of ignorance or inexperience. I suppose this is because most of them
are hardcore racing types and even the little experience or knowledge I've
picked up along the way is so minor by comparison that I don't have to play it
down to maintain my self-image as a cycling ignoramus. (That makes it sound
like a conscious calculating thing, though; it's much more of a bottom-of-
consciousness tic.)
---------------------------------------------------[Wed May 22 13:58:30 2013]--
From: (S) hints of what could be (steph)
Subject: Silence
It's sad to feel you're losing touch, but what is there to do? You can only
ever be gentle, to yourself and others, and sometimes the gentlest touch isn't
felt at all.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue May 28 23:51:36 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Still point
`I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.'
-- T.S. Eliot, `East Coker'
Or perhaps it's
`In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.'
Or perhaps `a lifetime burning in every moment'. But yeah, be still. These
fragments...
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Jun 05 23:37:04 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Zesty
And after a few weeks of comparative quietness life gets rather busy.
Yesterday I wandered into town for lunch to catch up with LNR and meet Matthew
who is now eleven weeks old and was for the most part remarkably calm and
happy. Friends do seem to have had agreeable babies of late, or perhaps I just
have the knack of meeting them on good days! I was even pleasantly surprised
by Tatties on Sussex Street. These are the people, you may recall, who caused
me to splutter loudly by asking me to move while I was eating. To be honest,
though, their baked potato this time was nicer than the one I had a couple of
weeks back at `real' Tatties on Trinity Street...
In the evening I explored the newly reopened Carpenters' Arms (hm, how many
carpenters?) with Jude. It's half pubby and half restauranty, and seemed to be
quite busy throughout the evening, which I hope bodes well for it. I enjoyed a
very pleasant melt-in-the-mouthy duck accompanied with a fine pint of Minotaur.
And then we played Scrabble and I won. Again. And got the Q and Z. Again. I
promise I'm not cheating.
Today I bunked off early in the afternoon and met my friend from Physics for
cake. We were going to try `Arches' on Bridge Street, but it was a gorgeous
day outside and there was `Cafe du Creme' offering outdoor tables round the
corner, so there it was for raspberry cheescake and lemon drizzle cake. And
natter about this and that in the sunshine. Admittedly mostly about bikes :-).
We wandered back into town together, encountering a strange vaguely Eastern-
looking band on the corner with large carved wooden-trumpeted bagpipes. After
we'd said our goodbyes I asked the pipers between numbers where the instruments
were from. `Germany,' came the response. Medieval style, apparently, although
they did then start playing `Can't touch this.'
And lo, then while unlocking my bike I bumped into Debbie who was once at the
Cavendish but who now works for Zeiss, and had a good catchup by the bike
racks. And, *cough*, talked a great deal about bikes.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Jun 10 23:24:13 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Bolder
After last year's Start of Summertime ride, and getting keener at the whole
cycling thing this year, I'd meant to do the longer SSoSS back in March. A
certain broken limb intervened, though, so it was on Saturday that I did my
first 100km ride: the Flitchbikes 100. Taking the 8:10 train with Ben, we got
to Stansted Airport and then rode the 10km or so to the start in Great Dunmow.
As was entirely predictable my battered old hybrid was the least impressive
bike there among a small mass of swanky machines of various ilks :-).
The route went west through Elsenham, Stansted Mountfitchet, and Buntingford
where the first control was: buy a creamy cake from a shop and keep the
receipt. I almost forgot to get the receipt! We munched cake for a bit and
chatted to a lady who over the rest of the day would zoom off into the distance
only to be caught up by us the next time she got lost. What we lacked in
speed, apparently, we (or more accurately Ben) made up for somewhat in
navigation!
Thence through Shepreth and Barrington and over Chapel Hill to Haslingfield for
the next control, and then back over Chapel Hill. Anyone would think the
organiser had extended the route that way just to make us go over Chapel Hill
twice. Actually I quite enjoyed it: it's a short climb I've done before and
not too hard to bully your way up if you're not tired.
Onwards through Foxton, Chrishall Grange, Audley End, and Saffron Walden to the
fabled Thaxted. I think it was the bit leading to Thaxted that was the hardest
of the ride: I was feeling slightly tired and saddle sore and even small
inclines seemed like an effort, although the climb into Thaxted itself was a
welcome end to that stint rather than an insurmountable obstacle. I sat under
the Guildhall eating cereal bars and quaffing Lucozade while Ben went first in
search of a loo and then of the bag he'd left there. It's amazing the
difference a bit of rest and sugar makes, and the remaining 20km were much
easier. Admittedly there were no more hills left too. I don't remember much
of this stint of the ride, but we made it back to the start, in time, and I
consumed copious tea and biscuits while talking nonsense.
I felt pleased but not excessively so at the end of the 62km ride last year.
At the end of this one I definitely felt I'd achieved something. If you add on
the trip from Stansted Airport and back, it's twice the furthest distance I've
ever travelled in a single day by bike. I bought myself the medal for this
one, because I'd deserved it.
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=5962166 is the route, except the last bit is
wrong; I think we followed the same route back into Great Dunmow as we took out
of it.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Jun 15 19:01:48 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Weeny, weedy
Let the year's Doing Things continue. On Monday, before meditation, I met
Diane (whom I know from meditation) for coffee and we whiled away a pleasant
hour or so talking about this and that. It's very cheering when folk you know
vaguely suggest doing things and you get to know them that little bit better.
(And I should remember I said this the next time I'm the random person vaguely
suggesting doing something!)
Then there was meditation and after that I stopped in at the Haymakers to join
Laura, Pete, Karen, Simon, and some other folk I didn't know. They were mid
pub quiz so I joined them for that, and was able to get some questions
authoritatively wrong. But really it was just a good chance to see some folk I
don't see so often and talk a different sort of tosh :-).
I finally got around to spending some money on bits for the new bike, and
indeed I'll get around to spending some money on the new bike itself after I've
finished writing this entry. (Er, by sending some money to ceb of this
parish.) It's quite exciting. It'll have more gears because I've been picky
about the sort of gear lever I want, and new handlebars because the current
ones are not to my taste. Oh, and I've already bought the mandatory blue
handlebar tape!
Lastly there was today's fun at Harlow Town, where I went climbing with Ian,
ceb, and mdw. I'd never done this before so I was a little scared of what I
might be letting myself in for. Nevertheless, the folk who run the climbing
wall were helpful at finding me the right size and shape climbing shoes, and
then Ian was very helpful at untangling the harness for me. After a bit of
instruction and watching Ian scoot to the top of something Quite High, I gave
something a bit easier a go and after a bit of a wobbly start made it to the
top. I did the same for three other of the easy climbs, which I suspect was
helped greatly by being a bit taller and so being able to reach more handholds.
One of them, though, was one mdw had failed at earlier, and when I got to the
same point, a moment of WHAT THE FUNT AM I DOING I'M UP A WALL hit me and I
lost all ability to work out what to do next, so I had to come down and
reacquire sanity.
It was a good experience, and I'm glad I was able to do some of it tolerably
well, but it's very peculiar. There's a sense of achievement at getting to the
top, to be sure, but the activity diminishes the experience: at each moment you
are so focused on where to go that there's no sense of the climb as a whole.
Perhaps to be conscious is not to be in time.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Jun 27 10:25:36 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Farewell little car
A man came this morning to tow away my little car. It had succumbed to rust
and lack of use over the years and when it developed a habit of turning off the
power steering at random it didn't seem wise to stick with it. As we wheeled
it into place to be hoisted onto his lorry, I had a twinge of sadness and now
the car has disappeared round the corner I'm a bit tearful.
It was my first car, bought after my father died so I could get to
Wellingborough more easily to see my mother. After she died it was tied in
with clearing the house, sorting out the estate, and other trappings of life
After Parents like driving to Hull for Christmas.
I don't need a car, and I hadn't used it for a long time, but the tears are
still rolling down my face because of the memories and the associations.
Bye bye V138 OEW.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Jul 16 17:45:53 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Bits and larger bits
I've not written much here. That's because things are going fairly well.
Fears are mostly unfounded, hopes are under control, and I'm doing nifty things
with nifty people.
There was the big holiday in Merseyside, which was a great break, wandering
around by train, bike, and foot around the various tendrils of Merseyrail.
Lots of pretty stations including the Stately Pleasure Doughnut of St Helens
Central and the superb Art Deco style of the stations to Hoylake, and beyond
the railway there was an amble through Southport, Gormley's `Another Place' on
the beach, a cycle down a disused railway line through a nicely preserved
country station, Superlambananas, Newton-le-Willows, my first Yo Sushi
experience, cycling up and down High Moor. Lots of stations -- I took over
2000 photos -- and lots of general purpose good old fashioned relaxation,
having to worry about very little beyond when the next train was, and even then
not very much about that as the trains are so frequent there.
And the fruition of the big project here at work, which is going tolerably well
in spite of plenty of teething troubles as we deploy the new Linux distribution
to everyone.
And then cake on Quayside in the glorious sun, or a last-minute lunch in the
midsummer gloom, or ice cream in the Botanic Garden. Not looking forward or
back, but letting things be most nearly themselves in company.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Jul 27 23:33:25 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Adventures
I have a new bike, which I bought from Clare after much umming and ahhing.
After a bit more fiddling it was equipped with shiny blue handlebars and
brifters and has since seen me through two big outings.
The first was the Bildeston Lanes 100km ride, which was officially 104km but
102km by Ben's GPS, and in any case lengthened by about 36km for us to get
between Elmswell station and the start. It was a ride around gentle rolling
countryside around Stowmarket, with only one really serious hill and then a
number of smaller ones. Unlike the previous ride, we made a definite effort to
have a decent lunch stop and this (along with the afternoon's cake stop) made
the whole thing much easier. I was not stupidly zogged by the end, and if
anything I slightly missed the strange silly lightheaded sensation I had at the
end of my first 100+km ride. I must be going soft in the head. On today's
ride, I certainly did.
Today, once the sky had clouded over sufficiently that going out did not seem
likely to bake me, I headed out for Brinkley. I don't know if it was the heat,
the headwind, or the longish hill, but this was a real slog and I stopped at
one point wondering if I'd be able to make it. I did, and rewarded myself by
sitting on the village green for a few minutes to examine the map. Then I got
up. And had a massive headrush from getting up too quickly and sank back to
the ground. I think I fainted very briefly, and the sensation when I came to
was very bizarre. I was having this dream about being on a bike ride in
Brinkley, and then I opened my eyes and my bike was by a tree and it appeared I
was indeed in Brinkley. Oh crap, I've woken up in one of my dreams and now
I have to work out what to do about it. It took me a few minutes to remember
who I was, that this was in fact reality, and that I had in fact gone on a bike
ride to this place.
I pottered about slowly for a bit reassembling my thoughts, having a cereal bar
and some water, and establishing that there was nothing wrong with me and I'd
just got up too quickly and wasn't suffering from anything detectable, and
continued the ride, which was mercifully downhill almost all of the way from
there.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Aug 03 23:17:02 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Bike photo
I took a photo of the new bike, which can be seen on the intertubes at:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/2013/08/bluebike.jpg
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Aug 03 23:27:11 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Camping gear is cheapest in December
I went to see the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival's production of Richard III
this evening, in John's Scholars' Garden. It was the first time I'd been to a
Cambridge Shakespeare Festival thing, which is a bit embarrassing since I've
lived here for nearly twenty years, but then everyone has some obviously
Cambridge thing they've not yet done! It was also the first time I'd seen
Richard III, so I read it quickly this afternoon.
It was tremendous fun, and the actor playing Richard looked to be having a
whale of a time. He reminded me hugely of Richard O'Brien. At one point a
random homeless person wandered onto the `stage' only to be ushered away by one
of the staff, but the play continued unruffled. (This is better going than an
interruption I remember at Stratford where a policeman suddenly appeared on
stage to the evident bewilderment of the cast. There'd been a bomb threat and
we had to evacuate; we never did see the conclusion of that one.)
Curiously, the scene where the ghosts of all Richard's victims appear to
curse/taunt him (and encourage Richmond) was completely absent. This was more
surprising because it was mentioned in the synopsis in the programme book. I
wonder why.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Aug 20 22:09:35 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Insane and boring
Among the books I inherited from my parents is a hardback volume entitled `Sane
and Sensual Sex' which, surprisingly since it was in the house when I was a
teenager, I've never looked at. While doing a bit of tidying I picked it up
the other day and... oh my.
The book dates from 1963 and promises on its dustjacket that the book will
`reveal you to yourself' and explain `every known perversion, inversion and
sexual complex under the sun'. And it's only thirty shillings for a tome which
will `help you to either cure yourself or to be able to live with yourself'.
Truly a bargain.
I flicked through it as you do, and the main thing that struck me was the
casual misogyny. This, from a chapter on `differences in sexual attitudes of
the male and female':
`Men think women think men's bodies wonderful. They don't. Men think women
are interested in seeing the naked male body, the penis in erection. They
don't. [...] If a woman likes to seee, thinks of, and plans to observe these
things without applying her energies and her quests to a singular particular
man, then she is either a nymphomaniac or she is oversexed or she is lascivious
or a born sex-kitten.'
Well that told her. The average woman is `cold until roused', treated more
favourably by the law than the man, and has `a superiority complex far in
excess of their actual value and imporance'. Ouch.
I wondered how same-sex attraction figured in this book's view of the universe,
probably expecting some withering language about unnatural acts, and so on, so
I turned to `Problems of Homosexual Men and Women'. And lo, these individuals
have `unfortunate urges', but the author believes that sexuality is determined
at the moment of conception so:
`If, unhappily, abnormality proves to be present, the laws of the country
should be sympathetically disposed, the church should be tolerant and catholic
in attitude. [...] It is then man's duty to assist, to make this new life as
bearable as possible. If he fails to do so, who then is the greater sinner?'
Which is a much more complicated attitude than I was expecting. It's still
problematic, since it regards being gay as abnormal and unfortunate, but I was
expecting something closer to outright hostility. `Trans-sexualism' (to
use the book's term) gets a similar treatment: again it's the destiny of some
people and calls for `the utmost sympathy and understanding'.
There are probably some chapters on how to bonk better too.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Aug 22 23:26:52 2013]--
From: (S) shored against (steph)
Subject: Fitzwhistlestop Museum
A few weeks ago a friend of mine let slip that she'd never, in her seven years
of being in Cambridge, been to the Fitzwilliam Museum. I'm a fine one to talk,
of course -- I'd not been to the Botanic Gardens until I met her there for tea
earlier this year -- but it struck me that I should rectify this lamentable
situation before she leaves Cambridge.
So yesterday afternoon we did a very swift sweep of some of the Fitz's
permanent collections. It's a very different experience going round a museum
with someone rather than on your own: you're drawn to what each other is
looking at so it's much more haphazard and I somehow found myself noticing
things that I'm sure I've seen before but only this time really noticed. The
one that sticks with me, if I've got the right one from the catalogue, is this
little statuette from the Near East, of a man holding a child:
http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index.php?oid=86806
The other strange thing was that we kept having fragments of random
conversation unrelated to what we were looking at, until the next museum thing
distracted us. It lent bits of the afternoon a very strange atmosphere in my
memory, as if it was being directed by someone who liked cutting rapidly
between scenes.
Anyway, we wandered through armour and porcelain, paused at teapots and Arabic
script, moved fairly rapidly through British Art, and wound up in the Founder's
Entrance Hall, which is one of my favourite interiors in Cambridge. The
grand marble stairs and mosaic-tiled floor below and the statuary and gilded
ceiling above were all illuminated by the afternoon sun streaming through the
lantern. And there was that delicious sense of vertigo.
Then it was down to Greece and Rome, the Ancient Near East (with little
statuette man), and Egypt, which is one of my favourite bits of the museum.
The ornate decoration of the multiple nested coffins still blows me away, as
does the way they decorated every level of nesting, including the inside of the
mummy board. I suppose when you're dead you have to have something to look at!
We retired to the cafe for cake and nattered our way until closing time, when
we very nearly found ourselves on the other side of a locked door from our
bags! Fortunately a security chap let us get them back, but being on the wrong
side of the Fitz's security seems to be becoming a bit of a habit.
It was only half a day off work, but as we wandered back into town before
heading our separate ways, it felt like a proper holiday.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Aug 28 17:57:50 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: Intermission
And yet, and yet, the trouble with having particularly good times is the
contrast with the grey days.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Sep 04 13:47:32 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: Fifteen's Company
I get on well with one set of neighbours, who are Slovaks and jolly and
generally a good thing. The ones I share a wall with, though, are numerous,
often noisy, and just generally inspire me to grumpiness. Their most recent
thing is to put up an awning over their patio, and because I don't like the
shade it casts on a bit of my patio (and in particular my grapes) I did a bit
of digging to work out whether such things require planning permission. In
brief, they don't. But I found that in the past an owner of that house had had
two planning applications to turn it into flats turned down, and browsing this
planning application led me to a slightly surprising discovery. My neighbours
are very entrepreneurial: there are at least fifteen companies registered at
that address, and probably more.
It's a strange bunch of companies, with interests, to judge from their names,
randing from metal transport to au pair services, cooking, investment,
building... I won't list all the names here, but it's all a bit peculiar. Is
this normal, though? They're from Hungary, so perhaps it's more culturally
normal to start companies over there than it is here? Or is there something
fishy going on?
---------------------------------------------------[Sun Sep 08 22:57:37 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: Many Meetings
It has been a week of many meetings which has helped get my mind back on its
feet. To those whom I've been bothering with fairly repetitive questions of
late: I _am_ learning that a lot of the questions and answers are the same time
and time again, but working out how to ease the times when I ask those
questions is harder, and involves asking tougher questions...
Anyway, it's been a week.
On Tuesday, I met my friend from Physics for lunch at the Botanic Gardens. It
was gloriously warm and for a change I was the one who was late, albeit only
slightly. It's an amazing place because even when you're just sitting on the
cafe patio as we were it's so much more peaceful than the outside world, which
we put to rights over an hour or so of natter (with a break to buy cake).
Lunchtime is too short really, but you can stretch it a bit with the walk back
to the bikes and the ride back to the parting of the ways between Maths and
Physics...
On Wednesday evening I went to Ely to see Mary, because her friend David
Barrowclough was launching his new book `Ely: The Hidden History' at a talk
there. The talk was very interesting, serving mostly to reveal just how little
I know about Ely -- aha, but I have the book now to learn more! -- and then
after that I walked with Mary and her husband Tim back to their house, which is
Amazing. It's modern, but both large and apparently made of something more
than metal and chipboard, and (reminding me somewhat of `Not The 9-O'Clock
News') has five toilets... After bidding farewell to Mary's parents we sloped
off to a pub for a pint and a bit more catchup before we called it a night.
Lovely to see folk, and I hope it won't be quite so long before the next time!
Thursday evening was a delayed coffee with a friend from meditation. She'd
been looking after an ill friend and too stressed out on previous attempts to
do this, but this time we grabbed drinks from Costa and went on a wander along
the river in the early evening sun. Cambridge is lovely, but you do have to
remember to look at it sometimes.
By Friday lunchtime the warmth had dissipated, but I was still able to meet
Lucy and Edward at John Lewis for lunch (and free tea and cake, courtesy of
some mystic vouchers). Edward is lovely, and now of an age where an adult who
makes stupid noises while pressing noses is sufficiently amusing, so hurrah for
that. It was of course also great to catch up with Lucy (although I never seem
to have enough gossip to share!) and as an added bonus LNR unexpectedly
appeared with Matthew so I got two catchups for the price of one before I had
to drag myself back to work in the drizzle.
Summer's lease hath all too short a date. This week feels like it marks a
transition, somehow. Put aside noon's bright clarity, the endless evenings and
the asphalt heat's embrace, and welcome the cool mists, the drizzle on the
window-pane, the light in the darkness and the warmth of the fire. Hello Autumn
my old friend.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Sep 13 19:36:20 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: Great Expectations
Sometimes I feel I'm my own worst enemy. I mentioned my spiced chocolate slab
recipe to a chocolate-fiend friend last week, and immediately felt I should
make some. I enjoy making it because it involves melting chocolate which has
to rank highly in my list of most sensual things to do with my clothes on, and
it has always turned out well in the past. But making it when someone has said
it sounds yummy...? Might I have oversold it a bit? Judging from the
reaction and the number of creamy spicy chocolatey chunks we got through
sitting on a bench on Parker's Piece, no :-).
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Oct 01 12:43:13 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: Heading for the great escape
A friend submitted her PhD yesterday, in the last possible hour of the last
possible day, so she was celebrating last night with drinks and noodles. It
was a good night, which ended quite early; the party girl was decidedly short
on sleep. Throughout the evening she said `I can't believe it's done, it feels
such a relief' and I realise (thinking back to it) that I can't imagine a block
of work that took that long. What on earth does the end, the release, the
escape feel like?
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Oct 08 11:52:10 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: On the Anniversary
In the Appendices to the Lord of the Rings, there's a little timeline of what
happened when. One thing I remember very clearly from reading it as a kid was
`Frodo is taken ill (on the anniversary of his poisoning by Shelob).'
It's coming up to the anniversary of my mother's death, and although I try not
to dwell on it, it seems to happen that little bits of insecurity and
depression cluster around it. Maybe none of them is significant on its own,
but for some reason the anniversary acts as magnet and magnifier and things I
would ordinarily brush off and cope with become huge black monstrosities which
I cannot shake so easily. Perhaps this is actually just an excuse for crummy
behaviour, conveniently blaming an arbitrary date for my inability to get a
grip, and perhaps it's the onset of the darker gloomier Autumn. But it never
feels like the lack of light or the coming of dark nights is the cause really;
I love Autumn and the feeling of possibilities, change, man's light making a
stand against the darkness.
Inconveniently, but perhaps appropriately, I've been laid low for the past few
days with a fever: alternately shivering and sweating and aching all over while
also grey and sad and worried. On the anniversary of my poisoning by Shelob.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Oct 16 23:46:14 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: Excerpted
In lieu of something cryptic encoded especially for this diary, have the last
sentence from the other diary:
`So I did, and all is well.'
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Oct 26 17:16:35 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: The Rise and Fall of the Scottish Variable Rate
In 1997 the population of Scotland was polled in a referendum as to whether
there should be a Scottish Parliament. In a second question in this
referendum, the people were asked whether a Scottish Parliament should have tax
varying powers. To both questions the answer was yes, and the Scottish
Parliament was duly set up with the power to vary the basic rate of income tax
by 3%. Some dubbed this the "Tartan Tax" although since the variation can go
both ways, what it would be called if the rate were lowered is anyone's guess.
Fast forward to this week, with the closure of Grangemouth. Alex Salmond duly
popped up saying that he "wouldn't accept" closure. But what could he do?
Nationalise it, perhaps, but how would he pay for it? Aha, here's a good idea:
he could use the tax varying power, the Scottish Variable Rate! Except he
couldn't.
After the referendum and the Scotland Act 1998 which set up the Scottish
Parliament and its tax varying power, the Inland Revenue had to set up IT
systems to operate the Scottish Variable Rate (SVR). The Scottish Office, and
then the first Scottish Parliament and Scottish Executive elected in 1999, had
responsibility passed to them for paying for keeping the SVR machinery. They
paid L12m to the Revenue (later HMRC) to get the IT systems going, and an
annual fee of L50k to maintain this infrastructure in readiness such that a
decision to use the SVR could be implemented within ten months.
The administrations elected in 1999 and 2003 told the Revenue on their election
that they would not use the SVR power during the lifetime of that Parliament,
and the service level agreement promising ten months' readiness expired in July
2007. It was not renewed, and at the same time HMRC (as it had then become)
was moving to a new IT system, and the SVR capability was not developed in the
new system. The incoming SNP administration in 2007 decided not to use the SVR
power. Discussions between HMRC and Scottish Executive civil servants went on,
with estimates for the reimplementation floating around L7m, but nothing
resulted from it and the power remained unavailable by the time the 2011
administration came to power.
So the SVR was never used and never will be because, assuming a no vote in next
year's referendum, the provisions of the Scotland Act 2012 come into force.
The SVR is abolished and replaced with the Scottish rate of income tax (SRIT),
which cuts all income tax rates by 10% for Scottish taxpayers and lets the
Scottish Parliament set a rate to make up the difference.
Oh, and what might the SVR have raised? An estimate for the tax year 2007-2008
valued a +3% SVR at about L900m.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Nov 08 22:53:30 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: State of the steph
This is a bit of a catchup diary entry, because it's been so long since the
most recent life event (as opposed to witterings about defunct taxes).
I bid farewell to a friend leaving Cambridge, but with the hope that I wouldn't
lose touch for the sake of a few hundred miles. The weekend afterwards I
ventured a little less far north to visit family in Hull. It was great to see
Giles, Sara, and Drew, and have a very relaxed weekend doing not a great deal
there. We sat and chatted, I played games and built Lego with Drew, and we
went out for Sunday lunch at a local pub. And got covered in hair from the
animals. I seem to be popular with the Hull animals whenever I'm there.
Animal magnetism, it must be!
Discussion of the relative merits of various places led to a silly poll, at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7FYTCDL which you're all invited to fill in for
your entertainment or otherwise. If I want culture or romance I now know where
to go!
There was Emitremmus as the clocks went back, on a day which got darker and
blowier as the Great Storm of 2013 headed in. The winds started out light and
behind us, so the first 50km was (aha) a breeze. But once we'd got to Saffron
Walden and turned around, things changed. The growing headwinds made even
slight hills a tremendous slog and by the time we got to the 75km control I was
deeply uncertain what tea was, how focusing on things with my eyes worked, or
whether I wanted cake. I had cake, and tea, and looked closely at both before
carrying on. It was still a slog, but we got there, in time, and it felt like
one hell of an achievement.
There was a weekend of parties: a housewarming at Andrew and Alison's new hosue
in the wilds of Fen Drayton gave me an impractical desire for underfloor
heating, and a lot of admiration for their utterly gorgeous house. I have to
remember that the loveliness of the house is partly possible because of its
location, and in case I was likely to forget there was a very blustery ride
back along the busway to Cambridge in the evening. Thence by train to Ely, for
a party at Mary's celebrating lots of good things that have happened in 2013.
It was great to see her and to meet some other fascinating friends.
Oh, what else? I had a haircut at Hairy Canary, which always feels like a bit
of a treat once I muster the effort to make an appointment.
This evening I went to Trinity Chapel for Broadway in Trinity: a concert of
show tunes put on by an orchestra and soloists conducted by a PhD student from
my old home in Physics. I had a whale of a time. There's something magical
about the way an orchestra fills space with sound; you're conscious of the
whole, the orchestra-as-instrument, while at the same time you can pick out
each part making its contribution to the whole. It makes my spine tingle.
Then you add show tunes and a lot of humour and it puts a smile on my face.
And then you have Bohemian Rhapsody for an encore. Fantastic!
This steph is in a pretty good state, really. There's uncertainty and worry,
doubt, fear, but I decided 2013 was a year in which I would Do Things And Try
Anyway. It feels like a net win so far.
---------------------------------------------------[Thu Dec 19 18:27:58 2013]--
From: (S) my ends and my beginnings (steph)
Subject: Edinbrr
Actually, it was a lot warmer than you'd expect for the time of year, and if
anything in my big new stomping-around-places coat I was too _warm_. But a pun
felt kind of obligatory so there it is.
Anyway, yes, a longish while ago while we were eating chocolate slab on
Parker's Piece on a grey Cambridge day, my friend from Physics, Sarah,
suggested I visit her in Edinburgh once she had finished the PhD and was back
up there. The result was the weekend just gone.
I emerged from Waverley station on Friday evening into a city in its Winter
plumage: lots of buildings lit up and a mass of Christmas lights in Princes
Street Gardens for the Christmas Market. I met Sarah there and we wandered
around looking at the stalls and gossiping. I was slightly disappointed by the
coffee stall not having chocolate covered coffee beans but got a good selection
of other bits and pieces for Christmas presents. It was the last day of
Sarah's Young Person's Railcard so we took the train home to commemorate this
sad occasion!
Back home, that is, to a lovely house with a wood panelled hallway. I got over
going wow after a bit, hopefully not too long...
The Saturday started with a walk through Duddingston (where Bonnie Prince
Charlie held a council of war before the attle of Prestonpans) up to Arthur's
Seat, where we were blown about quite a bit but the views over Edinburgh were
superb. Then down the other side to the Scottish Parliament building. I may
not be a fan of the current Scottish government but I still wanted to like the
building. It left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Perhaps I'm too used
to the wonders of the Palace of Westminster, but this seemed to be `Parliament
by Ikea' and the pretentious architectural designs (`looks like a tree',
`reflects the crags', `has a meditation pod for each MSP') made me go `er,
huh?' rather than `oh yes!'
Up the Royal Mile then to the Museum of Edinburgh which had some fascinating
plans of how the New Town was planned and how it was eventually laid out, and
to the National Museum of Scotland for a good old wander. Sarah was expecting
to see the whale they used to have there, but the whale has been displaced in
favour of a wider selection of less space-consuming beasties, some of which
were very impressive. As impressive as a giant whale was? Perhaps not. We
also learned that space is big, that pulleys work, that neither of us can
demolish a wall with a catapult, and that sometimes there's nothing you need
more than cake, a hot drink, and a bit of a sit down.
The Sunday featured a different hill, Calton Hill, which has a bit of a
reputation for being dodgy from the Rebus novels. I have no idea whether it is
so after dark in real life; in the daylight it's full of folk sightseeing all
the monuments up there, and is, like Arthur's Seat, a bit cold and blowy. We
wandered up the rest of the Royal Mile, saw various other things (Greyfriars
Bobby, the outside of the Castle) and wandered into a few shops looking for
interesting presents. After a bite for lunch I left Sarah (who does not
like confined spaces) in a cafe while I went on a tour into the vaults
underneath the South Bridge. One of the things that fascinates me about
Edinburgh is the confusing multi-levelness, so the idea of vaults and chambers
underneath the bridge-which-seems-nothing-like-a-bridge is amazing. By the
time I emerged the rain was coming down much more heavily, so we took a quick
amble around a bit of the New Town before heading home.
And in between there was chocolate slab, natter, silly YouTube videos, mulled
wine, being forgetful and leaving my hat and gloves places, and just sitting
reading. I came back to Cambridge on Monday feeling relaxed and refreshed.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Dec 28 18:10:26 2013]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: The Leech
It seems to me that depression can work a bit like a leech. It strikes, and
sucks just enough joy out of things that the remaining joy is overcome by all
the stuff that's left. Take just enough joy out of something -- a family
Christmas, a good meal, a friendship, a romantic interest -- and there's not
enough left to weigh against the doubts, fears, and insecurities that every
experience carries in a general humdrum background way. Worse, though, is that
when you come to look at it and to analyse `what is wrong' you don't see the
absent joy: you see the present pain, and you blame yourself or the situations
you're in. Maybe there were real triggers for this particular grey cloud, but
I doubt I'm in any position to identify them clearly or do anything about them
for now.
I didn't destroy the world in a bang, but it's quite capable of going later in
a whimper.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Dec 31 17:41:15 2013]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: That was the year that was
It's over (but hang on to it for a bit). I:
* started a new job
* slowly learned not to cry about missing the old job
* stayed in touch with someone I didn't want to lose just because of new job
* found another acquaintance became a friend
* got back in touch with an old friend I'd not seen for a year or more
* went to the opera, a play, live comedy, museums, art galleries, gigs
* measured out my life with coffee spoons (and cake)
* broke my arm falling off my bike
* went to Eastercon in Bradford in the snow
* tried the Individual Pubs pub crawl (failed)
* borrowed (and then acquired) a turbo, and got addicted to it
* bought a new bike to match the addiction
* went on holiday to Merseyside
* cycled five 100km Audaxes
* sold my little car which saw me through my mother's death
* went on dates with four people
* became a friend of the Botanic Gardens
* read lots of books
* made interesting/silly birthday and Christmas cards
* made cakes and other desserts including spiced chocolate slab
* went to Edinburgh
It feels like the longest year I've had for... well, for years. So much has
happened, and that's in part because I resolved to _do_ so much more. Perhaps
I've not ended on a particular emotional high, but it really is worth looking
at all that and learning that life really is what you make it and you've got to
take risks. So much of the happy stuff wouldn't have happened if I hadn't
managed to summon the wossname to ask.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Feb 01 20:25:39 2014]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: The Start of the Year Show
A whole month has passed without my writing anything in here, which is a bit
remiss of me. So let's play catchup, but first note that my mood has remained
somewhat iffy this month: when I've been missing people I've missed them more,
when I've been a bit grumpy it's verged on a general-purpose misanthropy, and
even happy thoughts have had a tinge of sadness and tears about them. I keep
on meaning to see a quack about this. Still, I'm not so bad at the moment, and
it's been a month of Stuff...
On New Year's Day I travelled down to Somerset to see some friends who I've
basically known all my life because they were friends of my parents. It was
lovely to catch up with them and we visited a variety of interesting sights in
the area: Farleigh Hungerford Castle, Bath, and Longleat Safari Park. You
might not think there would be much about in a safari park in January, but most
of the animals were out and about including the rarely-seen hippos.
Chancing on a mention of it on the web I went to see `Black Coffee' - an Agatha
Christie Poirot play at the Arts Theatre. Jacob joined me and it was rather
fun, really. From what I overheard from other members of the audience they
were hoping for David Suchet or something doing as close an impression of David
Suchet as possible, but for me Robert Powell inhabited the role well enough
that for the duration of the play he simply was Poirot.
Invited by a friend from meditation, I went along to the ADC this week to see
`Blue Stockings', the new play by Jessica Swale about the 1896 campaign to
allow women to be awarded degrees in Cambridge. It was at turns tremendous
fun as the four protagonists threw themselves into their learning with great
gusto, immensely sad as one of their number had to leave at the end of the
first half, shocking as events take a violent turn as the Senate votes on
whether to admit women to degrees, and in the end celebratory: the 1896
campaign didn't succeed but women were admitted to full membership of the
University in 1948. Gaudeamus igitur, as the song goes.
Sarah returned from her travels in New Zealand, and the stopover in Cambridge
gave me a chance to hear all about them. It sounds like an absolutely awe
inspiring place (and looks so from the photos) and quite a contrast to a grey
Cambridge January, even if the Pint Shop turned out to be a lovely venue for a
meal and a few drinks. (As well as the beer you might expect, they have quite
an extensive gin selection!)
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Feb 11 21:35:06 2014]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Missing link
`You seem kinda lonely.' True, true. Rarely truer. Friends all around but I
am lonely and overpowered by the idea that it will always be thus: that it is
too late, that I am running out of time. `Take chances,' but there aren't the
opportunities any more.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Apr 22 23:11:45 2014]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Easterity programme
Gosh, I've not written much in here for a long time. There have been things
going on but I've neglected to document them. Perhaps soon.
I went to Eastercon at the weekend and I'm only realising in retrospect how
good a time I had. There were no moments of wandering forlornly around with
the impression that I didn't know anybody, and I enjoyed the remarkably full
programme, which included such highlights as:
* Jocelyn Bell Burnell on recent developments in astronomy. Very well pitched
and very exciting, particularly the news of Mysterious Radio Signals from
Beyond Our Galaxy.
* The Aikido/Karate demonstration by Guests of Honour Juliet McKenna and John
Meaney, with Juliet basically wiping the floor with John. She may look like
a harmless grey-haired little old lady, but...
* `Which Space mission was the most successful?' chaired by ceb, with Luna 3,
Voyager, Herschel, and Apollo facing off against each other.
* Universally challenged, pitting writers against scientists. (The scientists
won!)
* Tribute panels to Iain Banks and to the convention's sadly absent guest Terry
Pratchett.
It was just generally full of fun things that kept me occupied almost every
hour the convention was running, and there was only one of those slow stuffy
panels where it's a struggle to stay awake and attentive!
There was excellent beer (Oook! ale with bananas!) and at the Dead Laika Party
I enjoyed random chats with a number of people I basically only know through
conventions.
Today I took a slow lazy train journey back and thoroughly enjoyed not being in
a rush. I finished my current book (a Rebus, `The Hanging Garden'), started a
new one (an excellent Seanan McGuire courtesy of next year's Eastercon), and
had an excellent chat to a Welsh lady who noticed my `Learn Welsh' book and
was very encouraging about my recent attempts to learn the language.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Jun 14 19:20:28 2014]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Bolder
After succesfully managing my first Century earlier this year I did my
first 200km ride last weekend. It was quite an adventure. I started with Ben
at 5am at Mitcham's Corner and got a receipt from a cashpoint to prove I'd been
there, because we were going to achieve the 200km by extending a 150km ride
starting in Ware, which is, aha, almost exactly 50km away from Cambridge. It
took us about three hours to get to Ware, but I remember very little of it
except for views of the mist gradually burning off as the sun rose higher in
the sky. It certainly didn't feel like three hours, but perhaps that was
because I was still slightly asleep. Maybe it was good that there was then
over an hour of waiting at Ware before the real 150km ride started, although I
didn't doze off.
Once the ride-proper got started I reset the bike computer to zero so it
matched the distances on the route sheet, and also so it wouldn't feel like I'd
already done 50km. In practice I divided whichever total distance by whichever
distance I'd done to satisfy my mind that we'd get there. The first leg was
nice enough, up to Dunstable Downs, although it was already getting hot and a
delay getting lunch there meant we left with -20 minutes in hand. This worried
me, but the next bit was mostly descent and Ben pointed out that if we carried
on at that sort of speed we'd have half an hour in hand at the next control.
So we bimbled on, and went down some more, down a rather nice long hill, and
then BANG! CLATTER! And Ben came to a stop at the bottom. `That's my ride
over, then,' he said, pointing to his rim with a new-found hole in it. So he
handed me his GPS and off I went. I've never tried to navigate one of these
things on my own, so I was a bit nervous, but I set off up the next hill as Ben
started working out how to get home.
After his explosion I got to the next manned control with twenty minutes in
hand, which I ate in cake form while feeling moderately pleased with myself.
Rather oddly I bumped into Stephen Hawking's graduate assistant in the loo...
Thence to the next control but the going was very slow and hills were becoming
a real trial, so I was expecting to be out of time or so close to it that I
would be tempted to stop. But when I actually got there I had over half an
hour in hand, so I sat down with a pint of orange juice and lemonade and
relaxed for a bit before leaving again, still with time in hand.
At that point, the route was the same as the one we'd taken into Ware from
Cambridge, so it was familiar. Suddenly I had bucketfuls of legs and I made it
to the end with fifty minutes to spare.
I feel very accomplished.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Jul 12 17:23:21 2014]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: A little piece of Sawston that will be forever France
Well, maybe not, but still. On Monday the University gave us all a day off
because folk getting to work would be too much faff because of a certain
bicycle race starting in Cambridge. So I decided to watch said race and cycled
with Ben down to the Sawston bypass, a nice quiet bit of countryside which
wouldn't have many folk on it. It turned out there was quite a crowd as well
as the entirety of Whittlesford Primary School, but even then there was a good
view and the atmosphere was great even before any cyclists showed up. We
cheered anything that went past: trains, folk with pushchairs, police. Then,
about two hours before the race was due through, came the Caravane
Publicitaire, a sort of strange mini-carnival of sponsors' floats throwing
goodies to the crowd. `Hello Yorkshire!' cried the slightly geographically
confused tourism promotion car.
We got:
* A Carrefour King of the Mountains spotty cap
* A Fruit Shoot
* Some Haribo
* Sheffield Hallam University wristbands
* A squidgy cow keyring
* A pack of McCain Oven Chip herb seeds
* An inflatable Ibis cushion
* A remembrance fridge magnet
* A Festina bag and keyring
* A box of Yorkshire The
While giant bottles of Fruit Shoot pottered down the road followed by giant
cows, people pedalling things, giant bags of chips, a flotilla of Miffy
rabbits, and assorted other enthusiastic and less enthusiastic cars.
Then there was a gap while we settled back to cheering wheeled things passing
on the road, which gradually grew in intensity until there was an official car
or team car every few minutes, and what seemed to be the UK's entire contingent
of motorbiking policemen. Then motorbikes came down each side of the road to
push the crowd back and the first riders came through: a little breakaway of
two. They had a good few minutes on the rest of the peloton, so we had quite a
gap before they all came through, followed by more stragglers and team cars.
For all that we only got to see a tiny portion of the race it was a fantastic
experience. We cycled back to the Gallery and enjoyed the way the traffic was
full of bikes, running the whole range from whooshy carbon confections to
little toddler trikes. It felt like for a day at least the bike was king.
And then back to the Gallery to watch the whole stage with a couple of hours'
delay :-).
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Nov 11 23:36:07 2014]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Time
I have not updated this diary in months, but I should clearly do so now while
I'm still in my thirties. Tomorrow all my faculties drop off and I start
buying high performance cars.
It's Tuesday, which means that I've come back from the gym, which still sounds
like an unusual statement coming from me. These people are Core Cambridge
(aka Delta MSK) and after diagnosing my proto-bad back they recommended gym
sessions to strengthen my core muscles and upper body strength. Since then
I've been going to the gym every week and doing a variety of implausible
exercises with an instructor to tell me what to do. It's done wonders for my
back and my general strength, and with some of the current set of exercises
geared to improving my hill cycling it may actually make a difference to that
too.
Which reminds me of the holiday the other month. Lots of stations, but an
attempt at 200km in the Northern Dales which turned out to be too much for me
because of hills.
I stood for election to the UK Usenet Commitee and lost, which is probably just
as well as they seem to have an above average number of loons to deal with at
the moment.
I've built the new Ubuntu-based desktop at work, and somewhat to my surprise it
hasn't gone pop yet and people seem to like it. The consequential bug fixing
is a little detrimental to my sanity though: so much software is absolutely
awful! You want to configure something? I'm sorry, that's not a normal thing
to want to configure so you will have to recompile. Welcome to the 1980s.
I seem to have a thing about meringue at the moment. It's rather magical.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Dec 01 21:37:02 2014]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: It's dead gym
I had an unpleasant email this morning, informing me, without explanation, that
the excellent gym/physio place I've been going to for much of this year has
closed `permanently'. Apparently the staff were told on Friday, and are now
jobless.
First, I'd like to thank them for everything they've done for me, as well as
for some of my friends: some of what they've done is little short of
miraculous.
Their absence, though, leaves me with a problem. Having got used to bimbling
over there on a Tuesday evening to lift heavy things and perform bizarre
contortions, and (more importantly) having got used to the sense of strength
and stability that it gives me, I now have a hole in my life. I could of
course just go to an ordinary gym and wave things around on my own, but I don't
like that idea; I would be unlikely to have the application to do it regularly,
I wouldn't push myself, and I wouldn't be constantly supervised with my
exercises subject to modification depending on how well I was doing, where I
was hurting, whether I was in a position to do myself harm...
So I think I want more of the same, somehow. A little light twitter stalking
found me one of the trainers, so we'll see if we can come up with some sort of
plan. I've never looked for a gym or training before, because I sort of just
`fell into' Core Cambridge's gym after their physio suggested it.
Or I could just revert to being a feeble stoat who can't sleep due to a wonky
back, I suppose.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Mar 17 17:18:39 2015]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: A week in the night of
I've been a listener to The Archers for most of my adult life, with vague
memories of it playing on car journeys when I was young, but the plot lines of
the past few months have been wearing. It seemed as if everyone was leaving:
Mike and Vicky to Birmingham, Hayley likewise, and the whole of the Brookfield
Archers off to the North. Disaster struck Tony Archer again when he was
trampled by a bull (again?) and Matt vanished off to Costa Rica. It had
started to be a bit ludicrously gloomy, and my interest was waning.
So it's rather odd that it's another Ambridge disaster that brings me here to
write about my favourite soap with a bit of praise. For those that don't know,
usually the Archers is one episode per day, roughly following events in
Ambridge day by day. What they did a couple of weeks ago was different,
though, as all six of that week's episodes took place over the course of a
single night. The cause of this was The Flood. It had been raining in
Ambridge for the previous few nights, as you could hear from the sound effects,
and on that Monday night the rain turned into a flood which submerged the
centre of the village.
The result was gripping, confusing, saddening, and cheering as the community
did the traditional (cliched?) thing of pulling together in adversity. There's
a tipping point in storytelling where the fate of characters starts to matter
to you, and the Archers managed to drag itself back past that point. I pored
over maps of the village trying to work out who was where and whose houses were
safe, I worried about the llamas and the lambs...
Crucially the stories had the ring of truth, and it turns out that this is
because they are transposed amost directly from farmers' experiences in the
Somerset floods last year.
For now, then, The Archers has redeemed itself in my eyes (ears?) and I'm
listening eagerly again. Whether the gloom as the village slowly dries itself
out and rebuilds drags the programme down into the dumps again remains to be
seen. It will need to be carefully leavened with the ligher side of village
life.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Mar 25 23:11:00 2015]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Ingress
One of the new things of this year is Ingress, to which I was introduced by
Heather one evening in the Carlton. Never one to be early to a craze, it looks
like I joined it about two years after it was popular and fashionable.
So what is it? Well, it's from Google, so it's of course a way for them to
gather more data about people and things. In return you get something that's a
game and presumably enough fun that you don't mind (if you ever did in the
first place) feeding the Google behemoth the information it craves.
Basically, it uses your phone's location and overlays on various `interesting'
locations in the real world big sparkly things called portals. Your job is to
turn these portals green or blue (depending on the team you select when you
start playing) by frobbing buttons on your phone while physically in the
vicinity of the portal. You can join portals together with links, and join
trios of portals together to cover an area with your colour. And for this you
get points, and points mean, well, not a great deal. Bigger guns to turn
bigger portals blue, kudos, and that's about it.
Some friends who play it deliberately run or walk places to find portals, and I
think this was Google's intent, but I'm lazy so I mostly sit in coffee shops
poking nearby portals in between book chapters. Or if I happen to be e.g.
collecting railway stations, I'll poke stations. If none of this sounds
particularly gripping, that's because it really isn't. And yet, and yet,
somehow it's still just diverting (addictive?) enough to keep me prodding
portals if I encounter them.
The game has a plot, of course. It makes almost no sense, and involves CERN,
messages from aliens, people going into caves in Afghanistan and then
reappearing in the form of small pieces which need to be shepherded to the
Washington Monument for reassembly. There is no subplot in which you have to
collect the glue to achieve this, mind.
But if you follow the mad conspiracy theories and revelations of the plot
just a little bit (on Google+, naturally, since this is Google's baby), you
start to encounter documents, and the documents almost all have codes embedded
in them. If you crack the code, you get Stuff. This bit is almost more fun
than the rest of the game, as you might be able to tell from the fact I was
delighted when I first cracked one even though I didn't get Stuff because too
many other people in the world had already solved that puzzle.
---------------------------------------------------[Wed Apr 01 22:45:06 2015]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Local warming
I have gas central heating and I've been dissatisfied with my thermostat for a
while now; it's a wireless thing and its battery compartment had started coming
loose so every now and then it would lose the ability to communicate the
temperature to its receiver. Of course, this was the opportunity to look at
the new technology in this area. The big things you see in shops are Hive and
Nest, and these are basically just thermostats. They're `clever' in that you
can poke them remotely and they learn based on what you do, but fundamentally
all they do is turn the boiler on and off: the whole house is either heated, or
it is not.
Since there's only one of me living in a largish house, I decided to opt for
Honeywell's Evohome zoned heating system. The key difference with this is that
as well as turning the boiler on and off, it can turn individual radiators up
or down depending on the temperature in that room. So if (to pick a random
example) I have come back from a 200km bike ride, can't sleep, and want to
watch the recorded F1 in the living room, I can set that to a cosy 20 while the
rest of the house languishes somewhere under 15. The boiler does less work
keeping just the living room warm, and hopefully burns less gas doing so.
I bought a Honeywell evohome Connected Base Pack, which consists of the evohome
controller, a boiler relay, and a gateway box you plug into your local
ethernet. The controller is the brain of the system, and it's a mains/battery
device (it has batteries so you can cart it around but will usually live on its
stand or a wall mount) which communicates over a proprietary (868MHz) protocol
with the other components. It can also function as a thermostat in its own
right.
The boiler relay connects by wires to your boiler's control terminals, and does
the job of turning the boiler on and off at the behest of the controller.
Since this was going to be the scariest part of the job, this was the bit I did
first. Isolating the power, I opened up my boiler and compared the manuals for
the boiler relay and the boiler itself. With a little help from the Internet I
convinced myself I knew what went where and connected it all up. Nothing went
bang, so I did the first of the binding dances.
No, this isn't witchcraft, it's the thing you do to tell the controller about
each component of the system. You poke a button on the controller to say `I
would like to connect a boiler relay' and then poke a button on the boiler
relay. Happiness ensues, and you now have a slightly overspecified way of
turning your boiler on and off.
However, the real business end of the job is the thermostatic radiator valve
heads, of which I bought eight. They're quite expensive, running at about L50
each. If you have existing TRVs they're a doddle to fit: you unscrew the
existing TRV head, screw the new Honeywell base on, and then clip the head onto
that. There's a binding dance where you tell the controller what radiator
belongs to what zone, and then the new radiator controller whirs away to itself
for a bit. And then you're done. Each radiator valve is its own thermostat,
which tells the controller how hot it is. If you want to sense the temperature
elsewhere in the room, you can fit a wireless thermostat elsewhere.
So you wander around your house unscrewing TRV heads, and find some don't fit.
This is because there are a variety of standards for these things. There are
adapters, which fixed things for me, but there is a chance you'll have to get a
real plumber in to fit a new TRV if your existing one is too odd or
nonexistent.
Finally, there's the remote gateway I mentioned earlier. This plugs into your
ethernet and binds (dance, dance) to the rest of the system. It communicates
with a Honeywell web site so that you can control your heating via a
smartphone app or an API.
I'll write another entry in a bit describing my experiences with the system.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Apr 13 17:52:12 2015]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Valve judgements
I've now had my Evohome system for a couple of weeks and I'm pretty happy with
it. Although there is an enormous temptation to fiddle, once you've got it
going it's very easy to leave it be.
The first time you attempt to program it you will probably try the system's
guided setup and rapidly get frustrated with the questions it asks you about
when people get home, go out, etc. etc. Although I did run through this it
turned out to generate too complicated a schedule for my needs so most of the
actual setting was done in manual mode. This consists of tapping on the screen
to create target temperatures for your various zones at various times of day.
There's a facility to copy schedules between days or zones, so you don't have
to do everything manually. Because I also bought the Remote Gateway it was
also possible to poke it from the Android app, which is possibly slightly less
fiddly.
One thing to note is that the controller screen is an older resistive touch
screen so it's not quite as responsive as you might expect from phones and
tablets.
Even if you have the Remote Gateway, there's no official web interface to the
system and there are only official iOS and Android apps for controlling it.
These talk to a Honeywell website which your Remote Gateway also talks to.
Fortunately there's an API for controlling the system via the Honeywell
website, so there is also an unofficial WinPhone app and web interfaces.
If that's not enough or you want to keep details of your heating inside your
house, there's an HGI-80 which apparently talks to the rest of the system and
presents a serial-over-USB interface. Home automation software like Domoticz
can apparently talk to this. If you want to go further down the homebrew
route, there are reimplementations of the RF protocol for custom arduino
boards. I've not tried any of these but they might be interesting to play
with.
The radiator valves whir a bit when they open or close. It's not loud, only
lasts a few seconds, and you quickly get used to it, but if you're a light
sleeper it might be a concern. It's very nice to be able to turn the knob on
your nearest radiator to increase its desired temperature and thus turn the
heating on. Oddly, though, local overrides like this aren't reflected on the
controller. (The radiator reverts to its scheduled behaviour at the next
switch point.)
Some questions folk have asked me:
Won't the temperature at the TRV be different from the room temperature?
Yes, perhaps. You can adjust the measured temperature on a TRV by up to 3
degrees either way to compensate for its location. Or you can have a separate
wireless thermostat somewhere else if you like, and control the TRVs based on
that. If you have multiple TRVs in a single zone -- I have two in my living
room and two in the hall -- the system seems to average the two readings to
establish the room temperature.
What if the controller loses power or dies?
The controller runs off AA batteries so you can wander around with it, but
it'll typically sit on its mains-powered stand or wall mount. Nevertheless if
it fails and the TRV heads or boiler relay don't hear from the controller they
go into a fail-safe mode which runs the boiler some portion of the time.
(Obviously if you have no power at all your boiler can't fire and you're
doomed anyway.)
The TRV heads have batteries in them. Won't they run down?
Yes, over about two years according to Honeywell. There's a battery gauge and
warning on the TRV head itself, and the controller will also warn you about it.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri May 08 17:37:27 2015]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Mourning After
I can't remember a General Election which has left me feeling so mixed. I
remember the happiness of 1992 when the polls were completely wrong and John
Major unexpectedly got back in, and the inevitable Blair landslide of 1997.
This felt a bit like both.
On the one hand my instinct and political identity is Tory, so I'm surprised
and pleased to see my tribe winning. However, there are some big policyy
things that bother me, so it's not an unalloyed delight, and it is always much
emotionally easier for me when the Tories are in opposition because nobody
pours vitriol on me for whatever they do.
But we've come out of five years of coalition government, so I've come to sort
of regard some Lib Dems as on the same side as me, so the near destruction of
the parliamentary Liberal Democrat party feels like a loss even when (as was
often the case) it was the Conservatives who won the seat.
More strangely, perhaps, the Scottish Independence referendum last year brought
a large number of Labour MPs into the `my side' bucket, as they campaigned
vigorously for a No vote. The loss of some of their great figures, and perhaps
particularly at the hands of the SNP, is for me as a Unionist a very upsetting
thing.
Finally, of course, there's the defeat of my excellent local MP, Julian
Huppert. It was easy to vote for him, and to leaflet for him, because he has
been such a fantastic constituency MP. He listens and pays attention, and we
already know where we disagree so we have a good ground for profitable
discussion. But now we have Daniel Zeichner. I suppose we shall have to see
if he is less of a Labour drone than his campaign literature made him out to
be.
---------------------------------------------------[Tue Nov 24 22:23:53 2015]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: A gap in our programming
I have not touched this diary for over six months now. To an extent I've
suffered from the modern day malaise of modern social media, where one says
little of consquence briefly and often. In an era where I barely log into mono
at all, coming here to write little of consequence at great length is getting
less and less likely.
However, it's also been months since I did anything to PuTTY, and I've now done
something to that, so perhaps there is hope.
---------------------------------------------------[Fri Mar 18 10:38:31 2016]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Dicky ticker
For some time now I've been feeling random small chest pains on the left hand
side of my chest, and although they've never been debilitating it seemed
sensible to get them investigated in case they were a symptom of something
serious. After only a small delay the cogs of the good ol' NHS have started
whirring and I've been spending a small amount of time wandering the corridors
of Addenbrooke's. So far I've had:
* Blood tests
* Chest X-Rays
* ECG
On Wednesday I had the rather splendid `exercise stress test'. This involved
them strapping a bunch of wires to my chest and then telling me to walk on a
treadmill. I've never been on a treadmill before, and the technician was keen
that I should `walk normally' (but the ground doesn't normally roll like this!)
or `not lean forward' (but the ground is moving backwards while the bar I'm
holding on to isn't, so of course I'll end up leaning!) so it took a while, but
evidently after a while I was doing OK because she reverted to trying to
distract me by asking random questions about work and life and so on, while a
screen to the left displayed my heart beat from various electrical angles.
The screen, actually, was a bit distracting, and I did at one point risk
falling off the treadmill because I was waving my hands around enthusiastically
while trying to peer at the screen.
Throughout this the technician asked if I'd had any chest pain, and I hadn't,
until there was suddenly a twinge. `Ooh!' said the technician, `he's got
ectopics!'. Ectopic heartbeats, it transpires. Every bit of the heart is
capable of beating and sometimes bits of it beat at the wrong time. Unless too
many bits do this simultaneously it's a benign condition, and could explain a
fair amount of my chest pain, so hurrah for that!
We continued, with the speed of the treadmill increasing in steps until at
about 6mph it was definitely going faster than I could walk and we stopped
after about twelve minutes. The nurses and technician declared me very fit and
let me sit down for a bit for my heartbeat to settle down to normal (or
actually to about 20bpm above normal, which is a usual thing for it to do after
exercise, apparently.)
Because I'm silly I asked them to give me a printout of a bit of my heart,
preferably showing one of the ectopic beats, and I have scanned it for your
pleasure here:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/2016/03/heart.jpg
(No, I have no idea what Protocol: Bruce is. It sounds like some sort of
comedy Australian thriller.)
Then I was free to go, with strict instructions to sit down for a bit to have a
coffee and a bacon butty, so I did that :-).
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Mar 19 14:33:19 2016]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Whether to be ill
I'm supposed to be out riding a 200km today with Ben, but instead I'm at home
with a headache and (more significantly) a wheezy cough. From the way I've
felt through the day I'm fairly sure this is the right decision, but it
prompted many of the same feelings in me when I decide not to go to work.
Normally I go to work and don't even consider not going, so there's something
of an initial assessment rule:
* If I'm even considering not going into work, I'm not 100% well.
But then I second-guess myself and wonder whether I'm well enough to work
despite being below the weather. So I have breakfast, have a shower, get
dressed, and then have another think.
* Do I now feel utterly awful? Hurrah, the dilemma is resolved. Send an
email, and go back to bed.
But what if I still feel so-so. Not well, but not so unutterably bad as to be
unable to do any work at all? Gareth has no option but to work no matter how
he feels, but I have rather more humane conditions of employment, so it then
gets a bit messy.
* Do I want to go to work? If not, I must consider the possibility that I'm
exaggerating my perceived illness to get out of going.
* If I go to work, will I be infesting my colleagues with my lurgy? This is
frowned upon. But maybe it's just an excuse to myself?
* Do I take too many days off work? If I've recently had some time off sick I
feel I have to be iller in order not to go into work.
Self-certification is so messy. What I really want is some kind of magic
button I can press which tells me a binary yes or no whether to go to work, but
of course (as recent exploits in diagnosis show) health isn't as tractable as
that.
Anyway, much though I was looking forward to today's 200km, I think from the
fact my head now pounds whenever I move and the exciting whistling noises my
lungs are producing that I probably chose... wisely.
---------------------------------------------------[Mon May 02 11:12:55 2016]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Snook!
It's the last day of the Snooker World Championship today, and I'm almost ready
to emerge from the state of snooker hermitage I've been in for the past
fortnight. I always like to watch the snooker at this time of year, but I've
been particularly diligently glued to it this year because ceb, bjh, and I went
up to Sheffield to see three sessions of the first round. It was, to be brief,
utterly magical.
I don't usually look forward to things very much -- doctors have commented on
this in the past -- but I was really looking forward to this, and half-expected
to be disappointed. But when I stepped into the Crucible for the first session
on Monday evening (Ricky Walden v Robbie Williams-no-not-that-one) I was
amazed. They always say on the TV that it's an intimate venue but then they
use enormous wide-angle lenses from the back that make it look enormous. Trust
me, it's _tiny_. We were in the fifth row and the tables, the players, the
ref... they were all just _there_.
I bought an earpiece, which gives you the BBC commentary whispering in your ear
over a very short range FM radio. It's helpful sometimes to give you an idea
of what shots the players might be looking for, but not nearly as essential as
I thought; it turns out that I can follow most of the action without, which was
just as well because at the start of a couple of the sessions technical cockups
meant both channels on the earpiece (theoretically one for each table) were
tuned to the same commentary.
Rob Walker is a lot less annoying in unscripted real life than he is on the
(scripted) telly. It's clear he's playing a role, and the cheering razmatazz
at the start does actually add to the atmosphere when you're there.
And then when they're actually playing it's so tense. Even when the players
are being complete stoats and at home you might be getting bored and poking web
pages, in the Crucible itself it's somehow different. Perhaps it's the way you
can see so much more of the players' reactions and how they move around the
table so it's that much more personal.
Anyway, it was a fantastic experience and I very much hope to go again next
year. Meanwhile we have a final on our hands. Go Mr Ding!
---------------------------------------------------[Mon Jul 04 09:15:22 2016]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Only Leave Can Hurt Like This
I'm not prone to strong emotions, particularly not in politics. I've
seen my side win and lose by landslides, and greeted the result by and
large with equanimity. So it took me a little while to work out what
was going on over my Cornflakes last Friday. I'd keep finding myself
slightly on the brink of tears without being entirely sure why. After
a lot of hunting around for similarities I managed to identify the
emotion as grief, which is very strange.
I've never felt strongly attached to the European project. The main
reason I voted Remain was the single market, which as Margaret
Thatcher saw when she helped create it, brought prosperity,
opportunity, and stability to all its participants. It was a vote
with my head, and my heart didn't particularly care.
There was another reason why I voted Remain. As people have come from
elsewhere in the EU to live and work here, our communities have
changed and I find I like the people we British have largely become as
a result: open, tolerant, curious, understanding. I don't just like
having Slovakian neighbours; I like the person I am for having
Slovakian neighbours.
So what was this grief? I think it's about identity. Without even
knowing it, just by taking it for granted, I've absorbed an identity
as an EU citizen and now 52% of the population wants to take that away
from me. 52% of the population seems not want us to be the people I
like us being. That, it turns out, hurts.
It could be worse. A colleague at work now finds she looks at people.
There are four other people waiting to cross the road: which two think
she shouldn't be here or should have somehow to prove her worth with
immigration points? After building a life here for twenty years she
feels it's been thrown in her face. That hurts.
Worse, those same feelings would be there whatever the result was.
Not only was it hurtful that Leave won the referendum, but it was
hurtful to hold the referendum at all. For that I can only blame my
party leader, David Cameron. And that hurts too.
---------------------------------------------------[Sat Nov 26 15:25:44 2016]--
From: (S) ease of well-being (steph)
Subject: Optimism or denial as mental self-defence
A few things recently have given me cause to consider my response to bad things
happening, and my reactions to other people's responses. First, there's
Trump's election in the US which is undesirable and directly or indirectly
likely to cause some people harm (although I doubt it'll have any effect on me
personally). I agree that he's not the best or even a good candidate and I
agree that he has incited prejudiced people to show and act on their
prejudices: people are being hurt. However, I do not like the stream of
articles saying he's a white supremacist or a Nazi or California should secede
or the Electoral College should choose Clinton, or whatever. Part of this is
doubtless my contrary streak, but part of it is something different. I observe
that I am semi-consciously adopting a position that `things will turn out all
right' or `it won't be that bad' because countenancing the opposite is not good
for my mental health.
The other thing is some changes in the wider organisation for which I work;
basically there has been a botched reorganisation which has left most people
unhappy and from what I hear from numerous sources with good reason. This
doesn't currently affect me much and I don't expect it to because of political
realities. However, even just having the argument with someone closer to the
failing department (and more likely to feel its direct effects) seems to be
followed by my feeling anxious and depressed. Again, adopting a constructive
positive attitude (which may appear to others pollyannaish, naive, optimistic,
or just in denial) seems to be a defence I've learned here and I suspect it
helps. But there's more obviously a risk when I'm more involved than I am in
the US case, namely that my optimism will blind me to dangers that will be to
my detriment.
Does my ornery nature come to the rescue, though? Perhaps because I'm at heart
a bit of a grumpy sod and only respect authorities when I think they deserve it
my tendency to want to probe and prod and query and dig my heels in may
counteract the defensive optimism. Or alternatively, I'm optimistic in a
different sense: perhaps I just have confidence that I'll win?
Back to Part Six |
Up to top
Last Modified Friday, 06-Mar-2009 11:17:17 GMT