Electric Quaker II

Hoo boy…

…Nice to see life’s still hanging about feeling stressful. Although that said, I’m on Saturday Duty now, and, to save getting up at 0630 and hanging about on a bus, Ruth & I splashed out and slogged off to a hotel in the middle of Oxford, last night, where we hung about in the Spa and things. And we had tapas, so that was good.

I’m trying to get through things a day at a time, at the moment, which I think isn’t a great sign, but there’s nae much more I can do about that, and, anyway, I’m no here to whinge at ye. I’m still liking Diplomacy, incidentally; I’m Russia, or, ‘the purple one’ over there, and, with the exception of the icky blue French bits, the board’s looking rather nice.

Mainly, though, I’m here to say I’ve finally sorted myself out and organised a proper uploading of the photos for my last post, which are rather good, so do go have a look at ’em and admire how astonishingly sloshed I am.

Meanwhile, my hectic madcap social life continues in a long whirl of midnight parties on Thames-cruising yachts; I’m not only planning to meet Statto later, I’m also going to go to the cinema!! For the first time, er, since ‘Seducing Dr. Lewis’ was on at the Arts Centre. In Aber. Yeah, hectic, that’s me. Pft.

Have fun!

A weekend away and an Aftershow

Well. Actually the aftershow for Panto took place a week ago, but I’ve got two photos of it what I’ve taken some time to upload. And even then I needed Ruth to point out how to do the size attributes and things…

However, we’ve just got back from Bath, where we’ve been hiding for a couple of days because we rather needed a break after January, which was rather a stressful month, what with Panto and all other manner of concerns wandering about…

So, aye, we went to a really rather nice place done by Paramount Hotels, which, despite being near Bath felt really rather Northern, which was nice. It was on the upper slopes of a valley, which makes a nice change after the flat tedium of Oxfordshire. Hills I like; flatlands can go hang.

We polled up on Friday evening, after various excursions to doctors surgeries, Waitrose and Swindon (This is what you get for getting on a train direct from Didcot to Bath if Worst Great Western are running it; ie, a train that doesn’t stop at Bath – nice train, though, full of legroom and proper doors you open by leaning out of the windows. Nice to see an IC 125 still wandering about the lines, though).

Saturday we took a wander down into the bottom of the valley, which seemed to contain an interesting looking school, and then slogged back up the hill, beneath a pair of buzzards, which I’m not sure I’ve seen before. We get Kites round here, though. Back on site we went into the gym thingy, in search of, I’m sorry to say, exercise. Not a fan of that sort of thing, but, since I’ve been told it’d be good for my poxy knees to muck about on cycling machines and generally trying to build up the muscles in the approximate vicinity of said poxy knees. That was predictably tiring, but somehow faintly rewarding, and then we piled off and had a bit of lunch.

Come the afternoon we hit the steam room, which, like all steam rooms, is really rather super. No plunge pool, which I was a bit sad about, but the main pool was OK, though slightly cool for me at 28 centigrade. And then there were some really astonishing hydro beds which pumped air though holes in the frame, which gave an experience somewhat like being battered by lots of water being blown about, and was still strangely relaxing.

It was all really fantastically refreshing, which is hard to fault, and so we’re likely to head back at some point in the summer – every couple of months seems a good time to take a break; and since our last proper one was the Ramble, that was a very welcome weekend.

Pantomime Ended
with a big aftershow which was superb. I did, however, get astonishingly drunk, as the picture’s likely to show. Mind, I was knackered as well. The thing what I’m holding is the silver trowel the Sinodun Players dish out each panto since ’96 to the person who’s built up their part the best. Which is super, hooray! (Although I do feel that if I did clever “making it look like a painting” photoshop work on it it would suddenly look like I’d walked out of the cover illustration of a 1070’s bodice-ripper…)

and then Ruth had a picture taken for her industry year report to show that she isn’t just doing Fortran and trying to set the volume of the television to – as she now realises she’s been doing for months – a multiple of five, which has somehow ended up with the following photo:

And now I’m posting this and having done with it, because we’re just coming to the end of V for Vendetta, and I like the ending too much to miss it for the sake of telling you guys what we’ve been up to, toptastic though you all are.

Goodnight!

Edit:
Can’t get images to work. Someone’s gonna have to guide me through that bit, I reckon. Problem with the permissions, I think, but it was making a nuisance of itself.

Two things:

Firstly:

Two of the energy-saving uplighter lightbulbs in my office have gone, and have thus been replaced. Except we’ve run out of white ones; I’m sitting here basking under a sodium street-light glow. It’s giving me a vague headache, but it feels somehow warmer. Evidently my brain thinks I’m sitting here beneath the glow of a two-bar fire.

Secondly:

When I sign of a chitty to say I’ve done a certain book, I date it. Because things here work in the fairly long-term, I date it with the year, as well, so a typical chitty might have something like “04/12/06, JTA” written on it.

Today, for some reason, I keep writing “01/02/03” rather than a more chronologically correct “01/02/07.” And I’ve just realised that’s because the last time I ever dated anything on the 1st of February was back when I was still in the VIth form, in 2003. I know this, because I distinctly recall being pleased that the date was, if you didn’t care too much about the tens or hundreds column, 1-2-3.

That, in itself, was probably quite sad. What’s rather sadder, however, is the way I seem to have clung to this feeble enjoyment for the past four years, to the extent that I keep trying to replicate it as soon as I’ve got to the “/02” stage.

Oh dear oh dear.

And now I’m going to see about a haircut, because Panto’s over and I’m fed up with my fringe poking me in the eye all the time.

Wow.

I’ve just got called down to the front desk to collect some flowers that had randomly turned up there. Cue some very puzzled porters. And an even more puzzled JTA, actually.

[If you’re no’ a fan o’ sappy weediness, ye shud look awa’ noo…]*

Just for the record, Ruth is far too good for me, and I don’t deserve her at all, and I love her enormously, and she has a wonderful talent for making life seem better, even when everything is tiring and stressful and bleak. So a huge thank-you, and I love you to her, and hooray, because you are so very wonderful and kind! And also I appear to be full of cheer and smiles. Hooray!

[Yez can all carry on wi’ yer readin’ from heer. It’s safe noo]

*I’ve been typing in vaguely Scots since December. I’ve no idea why.

All together for the final push…

Four performances left to go. This is good; the whole thing is getting enormously tiring. Also, being the Principal-with-least-stage-time, and having known all my lines for something close to two months now, such adrenaline as I get from the wretched thing remains minimal. Still, the audiences are mostly enjoying it, which is never a bad thing, since they’re the people who are actually shelling out hard cash to come and look at it…

Saturday is going to be a nightmare, however – I’ve one of my Need-To-Get-Up-At-0630-To-Get-To-Oxford Saturday duties, which finishes at 1300, so I can run like blue murder to the bus stop, leap dashingly onto the already-departing X39 by means of a ninja rope and stylish crashing-through-the-emergency-door routine, then fall into the CX for a 1430 matinee, die from exhaustion, do the evening performance plagued once again by deja-vu and then go home, have a thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat and never get up until the next morning.

Still keep falling asleep on buses; I must be getting soft – if I’d kept doing that on the X39 the Muxton-and-Lilleshall Arseholes Brigade would’ve played all manner of practical jokes being malicious cockwits on me. On the other hand, a maroon blazer probably doesn’t look as intimidating as a “I can sue you if I want” -implying suit. Although, to be fair, I got grabbed and shaken by that blazer way less after I shoved a couple of drawing pins through the lapels…

Anyway. I remain very tired.

I’ve also continued reading stuff, so I guess I should give you and update on that, since I’ve nowt better to do but go have lunch.

Since the 15th, therefore, I’ve racked up:

8) A Pinch of Snuff, which is good; trying to go through the Dalziel & Pascoe series in order; Ruth says it’s better that way because of returning characters…
9) The Historian, lent to me by Liz, playing the Fairy in Panto. I rather liked that; not normally a fan of dracula type stuff, but since he was killing archivists…
10) The Power House – working through John McNab, at the moment.
11) The Game of Diplomacy, which is a bit strange; I don’t think I agree with the man on a lot of points, but then it is from the ’70’s. Also, it seems to be amazingly hard to get, so if it isn’t on the same floor of the library you work in as your office, it might be a bit harder. The NLW should have a copy, though, for you Aber people who are curious.

Have fun!

So… Sleeeeeeepppppeeeeee…

My God, I’ve never before realised how exhausting it is to do both a show and a full-time job before. At least, in the past, I’ve always been at school, doing a moderate amount of work, or at Uni, doing even less. There hasn’t been a bus I’ve been on in the last eight days that I’ve not fallen asleep on.

Still, it’s rather fun, and, by and large, it’s fun. I especially like the faintly chauvinistic traditions of the Port Club, wherein such males as are involved and wish to be a part of the club get together in the interval and share a bottle of port between ’em, the only rule being ‘you each donate one bottle, and you can’t repeat bottles, so get in early before you have to hand over something either very old or very rare.’ It makes the second half go by really very well indeed.

I’ve had no time for anything else but sleeping, as a result, however, so I’ll spare you further tedious complaints about how I could do with a few hundred more hours in a day for being asleep in, and point out that, after two weeks out of my 52, I’m now up to seven books (I said I wasn’t going to be challenging; I just want to know how unchallenging it’s going to be…)

Those racked up so far are as follows:

4. The Eternity Code (which, like the other two, is great for reading in ten-minute bursts, which gets me through two to three chapters)

5. The Spring of the Ram (Bryn, this is a great series; if I told you it was like House of Cards but devious, I hope you’d get hold of a copy of the first one, Niccolo Rising)

6. 5 Minute Whodunnits (amazingly shoddy logic puzzles – they’re all either a) “Deduce lie from unchallenging thing in text, eg, glass smashed on outside of window, so it was an inside job” or, b) Three people, two statements from each, which one always lies, which always tells truth, which one changes.” Do yezselves a favour, and dinnae bother)

7. The Stranger House, which is rather decent.

I know there are people out there who find this thing an actual challenge, and I probably shouldn’t mock too much, because there will be times when I’m not getting on as well as I am now (I’m going, for a start, to run out of books, presently, and will have to start making time to find a library what gives ’em out to people) but, even so, I can’t help wondering why they picked fifty books, rather than a hundred. Still, maybe it’s aimed at people who don’t actually read things, rather than people who spot an opportunity to see how much they actually do…

Am going to have to visit the doctor tomorrow, if I can get an appointment; very tiresome and not something I’d do if I could avoid it, especially since it’ll mean complicatedness with work, but it’s been over four weeks since the whiplash thingy and my head still can’t turn more than 90 degrees to the right without it hurting, and I still can’t lie on my right shoulder, so I’m going to see if there’s any tips beyond “take more ibruprofen” they care to lob in my direction. I plan, also, to take the chance to ask if I could have something other than ibruprofen for my knees; I’ll’ve been taking it in 4- (&, occasionally 8-) -hundred mg doses for seven years come spring, and, aside from the fact it seems to do increasing less in teeny 400 mg doses, I’m not entirely convinced that’s unrelated to the recent delicacies of my stomach, which, in recent years, have done things like make me start to get travelsick, and stop me from having coffee on an empty stomach.

Hey ho. I’m way too do more of this. G’night.

Well it *could* be challenging…

So, aye, those of you with suspiciously good recollection of previous things I’ve done may now be smug and remember that, once, a long time ago, I was attempting NaNoWriMo 2005. That lasted about a week, and then I got a) bored and b) stressed out by housemates wankers.

Still, another year, another thing I can have a go at, and then forget about in the coming weeks (which, with Panto now sucking my every non-working waking moment down into a black hole of sleeplessness, shouldn’t be too hard) – there’s a thing in which you read 50 books in a year, and then tell people about it. That gives you a fortnight’s grace, I guess.

I figure, what the Hell. I used, back when I caught the rotten No. 83 to school each day, read much more than I do now, but since I’ve been working again, I now have to read in order to take my mind of how horribly strong I have to make my instant coffee if I hope to stay awake to the next break. So I’m racking up ninety-odd minutes of reading time each weekday, which might help.

I’ve not looked into it enough to be able to tell if there’s a set word limit each book needs to have, so I’m going to say I’m counting monographs, but not open serials, such as the Guide from the Saturday Grauniad, or Private Eye, or the xkcd alt-text. As an extra restriction, I’m not going to count monographs I come across whilst cataloguing ’em, because that would be a) rather implying I’ve got sufficient free time to loll about reading the stuff here at work – which I haven’t, and if I had such time I’d spend it sleeping, at the moment – and b) kinda cheating, especially since almost all the stuff I run into here isn’t stuff I’d normally pick to read. So deliberate stuff only, then.

To be fair, I’m not convinced this will be a “challenge” in the sense of “something which is challenging” – mean, come on, “Read slightly less than a book a week for the next 52 weeks!” is hardly up there with “row across the Atlantic,” or “Trek across the sahara desert in a camel costume,” or “go a whole day without a cup of tea or coffee,” is it? My interest lies not in reading slightly less than I’m normally likely to read, but in finding out how much more I read, now I’ve got more “free” time which I typically spend reading. I might, of course, get to December and think “O no! I’ve only read 37 books!” but that will be interesting, too.

I appreciate I’m starting a week late, so you get a bit of a lump summary of what I’ve clocked up so far…

1. Artemis Fowl
2. Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident
3. Eurekaaagh, compiled by Adam Hart-Davis

…I reckon that’s it so far, as I’m working my way through Spring of the Ram fairly slowly. I’ll tell yez when I’ve clocked it up. Or else get really bored o’ this and give up…

2007: All Good So Far…

…2006 ended interestingly, as well. Got a lift North to Maulds Meaburn, yonder Cumbrian village what Dan mentions, and where, at weekends, Ruth’s father hangs out, away from nuisances like telephones bearing people who want to speak to him.

We arrived – Ruth’s mother (the Rev.), her brother Robin and I – in horrible weather, and bang between the starter and the main course of a dinner Tom & Judith were giving for a couple of friends they had staying for New Year. The timing, all things considered, could have been better, but, dutifully sticking to the Plan (I like sticking to a plan, it means the only trouble you really face is bringing the Plan about and hoping it all goes like you thought it would) I carted Tom away from the table and into the living room, where, full of nerves, I asked him if he’d give me permission to marry Ruth.

…This would appear to be a good point to insert a clarifying parentheses…

(Firstly, I was asking, rather than making a bald matter-of-fact announcement, because we were rather keen that he understood we weren’t – and, indeed, still aren’t – planning on doing anything just yet; we’re waiting until 2010, so we can save up some cash, Ruth can finish her degree, we can say we’re at least a reasonably respectable age [mid twenties], and we can have a nice round number from which to remember anniversaries. By asking a question, rather than making a statement, I was not only inviting further questions [because I didn’t force a simple ‘O, right, that’s a surprise’ issue] and I was, in theory, signaling that we’d rather like him to be OK with it, without giving away too much of the fact we’ve rather been waiting for a chance to do the Ask Tom bit and this was the first chance we’d got…)

In accordance with the plan, he didn’t raise objections once he’d been re-assured on points such as “No, I don’t mean this Summer, I mean at some sensible time” and “Aye, we’ve thought about it and it’s something we’d both like to do,” and “No, we’re not planning on including unhelpful members of the clergy or mendacious white dresses,” and thus we reach a stage at which the whole thing gets rather more public, since we’re not concerned about breaking it gently-ish to sundry family members.

So, aye. That made for a good end to 2006, that did. And, indeed, a good start to 2007, and, when Waitrose opens tomorrow, a good excuse to nab a bottle of their 1999 Moet, the only drink that’s ever given me a hangover, but which is fantastically nice.

In anticipation of some potentially asked questions:

• We’re no doing a “traditional” church wedding because they’re a bit, uh, naff, especially since Ruth only really likes Churches for their musical potential, and I remain deeply mistrustful of the vast capacity for abuse the system of organised religion seems to build into itself in the same way the human body contrives toenails. We’re rather more likely to be doing a Quaker wedding instead, but that’s still some stages of planning away, since I’ll need to speak to my Meeting first, and tell ’em.
• Yes, probably is a bit of a shock. And, quite possibly, to one or two of you more than others. Still, we like it, and are really very happy with the way it’s all panning out, so we anticipate reactions of “I’m not that bothered, please don’t keep telling me about it, shut up” and “Hey, that’s cool, I hope it all goes well and you’re happy.” You’re welcome to have variations on them, and, of course, completely different reactions, but, by and large, we’d preffer the latter…
• We are indeed a wee bit young. But since we’ll be not nearly so young in three and some months year’s time, that’s probably no huge problem. And we have gone through considerable periods of mass stress and penury, some fairly crap times, and some wrist-slashingly abysmal times, so I don’t reckon you could say we’re too young to understand how tough the world can be, or that we’ll go to bits in the event of our first “real” problem, because you’d not get past the first comma before I shoved your fists up yer bum. [I still get tetchy when people say I dunno what shit life can be…]
• I know, I know, I know… telling people via the Internet: lazy, cheezy, and just a wee bit insulting. But the alternative would be ringing you all up, in which case I’d miss someone, and really upset them, or sending out a load of e-mails, which would either be personal, but two lines long, or an impersonal and even more insulting “hello people, here is news, bye”… Sometimes mass communication is kinda handy…
• And, finally, aye, we’ve done the ring bit. Note “we’ve,” – technically, I think, Ruth’s the only person entitled to one, but that smacks to me of a pre-feminist “women are chattels and should be marked as belonging to people” plot to deprive me of the excuse to buy a nice bit of jewelery, so bugger that for a lark, I’m having one as well. And it’s very nice. Kudos to David Lloyd, who are an excellent family chain of jewelers in good old Shropshire, [Newport, Wellington, Ludlow, probably Shrewsbury and some other places] and who’ve done us good on what’s now three occasions, and four bits of sundry gold and silverware. Though, to be fair, House of Williams actually made the things, David Lloyd just ordered ’em and handed them over, with excellent timing, the morning after I returned to Newport.

So there’s a bit of news for you. I’m hoping that I’ve successfully conveyed what’s been going on with a reasonable explanation and sufficient notes to explain that we’re all hugely cheerful about it at this end (and Tom didn’t vanish and return with an axe, or anything), but I imagine Ruth will contrive a post herself, so you can grab a bit of the other side of the story.

And, aye,

Happy New Year
2007!

Merry Christmas!

Wotcha. Dr. Who is on, and I’m no watching it on principle. I dunno if I’m even going to get back to it when the new series comes out but I can’t help but feel that any form of direct or indirect interraction with things involving Catherine Tate, short of shooting the cretinious troll, is only going to encourage her.

One day I sincerely hope that people will discover that catchprases do not, of themselves, create teh funny. Back in the days of radio, the logic behind a catchphrase was something like “It’s the radio, we’ve got a cast of six, and we need to know if Kenneth Williams is playing Julian or J. Peasmould Gruntfuttock in this sketch, so let’s have him say ‘The voices, the voices they told me “Go Forth, Gruntfuttock,” etc’ nice an’ early on.”

And then we got the telly, and bigger casts and, what’s more, could use costume to help show if you was being a bent shopkeeper or a silly old codger and so you didn’t really need catchprases anymore. Certainly you didn’t need ’em shoehorned into the space where the punchline was supposed to go…

Still, that’s how come I’m wafting round the Internet.

I travel North on the 29th (sounds very Period Novel, dunnit), (“…on business, and I fear I shall not return to the overseeing of my estates in Shropshire for some time…” etc.) so I’m hoping to cath up with Newport people on the 27th, which I think is a Wednesday.

In other news, today’s xkcd is very sweet.

Have a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and similarsuch festive humbuggery,

with best wishes from JTA.

Well, I’m back.

Had a reasonable trip back up to Shropshire on Friday – National Express to Digbeth, and then a train down to Telford for a total of £16 quid, which is actually something like a tenner’s saving compared to doing the same trip entirely by train, even with a railcard. Will have to bear that in mind.

Long delays at Oxford, whilst we waited for a lost bus driver to retrieve himself and get to the bus stop. Huge coldness, because Britain being where it is in relation to the Gulf Stream an’ all, we don’t take people standing about for a bus too seriously, and so we all had to wait in the freezing cold. Finland or Canada, or somwhere, they’d’ve given us a nice proper heated station, but all Oxford gets is those little red seats that flap down when you stand up from ’em, and precious little of those anyway.

Still, we did alright. Train from Birmingham to Wolverhampton, after much delays becase the fog was playing Hob with the network anyway, and they’d had a power outage at Congleton, which is somewhere round there. Wolvo was its usual self, and I was just hanging about for something to Telford when they said they were laying on a replacement bus for people after the Aberystwyth service (I am so surprised…) so I hopped onto that and got picked up by my mother and sister at Telford, where a woman promptly ran into the back of the car at about 30 mph whilst we were at a roundabout.

I reckon it was thirty based on a) the heowge dent in the boot – caught us above the bumper, which seems to have saved the chassis – the angle she came at (not that of someone slowing down and following the curve in the road in the understanding there’s a whacking great roundabout six yards ahead) and the fact she got out of her car and said she was very sorry, she hadn’t been paying any attention and she was thinking about Christmas shopping.

So then it was off to the hospital to be inspected for the various forms of whiplash we’d landed ourselves, though we’re all OK in the main, just in varying degrees of pain and stiffness; my sister got it worst, because there’s not back seat headrests, and I got jerked about because the headrest that was in the front was adjusted for her head, not mine. Surprisingly tiring, and I’d never before realised how often you need to lift your arm above your shoulder until all the right side of me torso seized up.

Ah well. Could’ve been worse. Hospital kept asking me if I had a seatbelt on, though, which was a little random… But never mind. House is freezing, as usual, and my fingers are cold because I can’t type with gloves on, and I’ve lost the fingerless mittens I used to do my homework in, since moving out and living in places with more than part central heating and a twenty-year-old boiler.

Hey ho. Merry Xmas eve, and all that, and I shall make some vague post tomorrow when I’m opening my present on LoTGD…

Wow…

…Can I just shamelessly whore Candi, a fantastic little webcomic I’ve found courtesy of one of The Ferrett‘s recent posts.

‘s got a nice big archive, mind, I’m only about half-way through. Reckon Dan would like it, at least, it’s got some gorgeous dark strips, tucked away in there.

Rehearsals going on pretty much nightly, at the moment, which is getting tiring. Still, I’m only working ’till tomorrow and then I go back to Newport. This will be good. I’ve a vague feeling I posted last time about how I’m never outside in daylight, these days, because of the nights being so short…

…Two days ago it occured to me there might be a link between that and the fact I’ve been feeling fairly flat and crummy the last couple of weeks. It could just be that I’m really tired all the time, of course, but it has occured to me to wonder if I’m getting (mild) SAD… My mother get’s it, I know, and I’ve never been especially mopey in winter before [if you discout the three years when I was depressed all the time, which is probably a bit naff as a reading], but, then, I’ve never had this cycle of work when I’m in daylight for ten minutes at lunchtime and not at any other point…

Ah well. Feeling very cheery at the moment, on account of aforementioned. Go read it; don’t make me use the phrase “to whore Candi” again; I’ll start getting comments from disgruntled Googlers in search of punternet. [Aye, I’d link, but there are some things what work might wonder about if they turned up in me browser history…]

Have fun!

What’s this? An update? Surely not!

Nope, this is actually an update. Really. Sorry I’ve been so lax about this, but the last couple of weeks have been a bit full and exhausting, and, whilst this is still the case, the lack of doing a post is really starting to annoy me.

Work, of course, continues to eat vast swathes of my time, like an ever-expanding music-free blob. I’ve been there ten weeks, and I still have a whole load of trouble getting any work done without music somewhere in the background. This sounds like a great big whinge about a totalitarian office policy, but it isn’t; I can see that having a load of people with headphones on, unable to hear one another and headbanging away to heavy metal, or sitting there moping along to Elbow wouldn’t be conducive to the appearance of productivity. It’s just that after four years when I’ve only worked either when listening to music, or to lectures or simply talking to the people around me, I’m finding it really hard to adjust to working in silence. And that’s me as a Quaker talking here; I can sit in silence on me own or with other people for ages and ages and I don’t really get desperate urges to fill in the gaps just so there isn’t so much quiet (which is one of the reasons why, back in the days when I nominally had counseling sessions, Hillary’s tactic of sitting there in attentive silence did remarkably little in the way of making me feel obliged to say stuff).

But for three or four hours at a stretch? Whilst having to do actual work requiring concentration? that’s really hard.

Still, given that, after ten weeks, that’s the only real complaint I’ve got, except for the perfectly justifiable ban on hot drinks like tea or coffee in the office where they might get spilt on books, or something, I reckon I’m doing fairly well.

I’m still finding the commute thing a bit tiring, but I’m getting back into the swing of it, and it’s not as bad as it was, say, in mid-October. At the moment my chief gripe is that I never really see the sun; we leave the house at 0710h, and go to the bus stop in the pitch dark – dawn usually happens about ten minutes into the bus journey – and then we return at something like 1845h, when it’s been dark for close on three hours, and that’s only if I haven’t got off to a rehearsal of broadly indeterminate length. I’m looking forward to Christmas, if only because I might be able to catch up on a bit of sleep, at some point.

Still, life is good in those spare minutes when I have time to notice it; I’ve discovered, for example, that 1982 port can be really nice (and the fact I never really have any spare time ought to help limit the rapid emptying of the bottles that would otherwise ensue) and Ruth & I now own DS Lites, after some horrible budget-crunching, which at least gives me something to do on the bus besides listening to the iriver.

And, just to show that this post isn’t all about saying how tired I am, but to prove that I can still find time to appear eclectic, here’s a list of the stuff we bought at Waitrose this afternoon:

• 1 x semi-skimmed milk (2 pints)
• 1 x 250 g tub of Lurpak “lighter” brand margerine
• 1 x bag of McCain Spicy Oven Cook Potato Wedges
• 6 x 70 cl bottles of Domaine Fouassier Sancerre (33% off offer)
• 1 x Waitrose brand ready meal Vegetable Curry
• 1 x 500 ml bottle Listerine Mouthwash (Coolmint flavour)
• 2 x Waitrose packs of cinnamon and raisin bagels (5 per pack)
• 2 x 500 ml cartons of orange juice (with bits)
• 1 x Waitrose brand ready meal lamb bhuna (with tiny nan bread and metal dish)
• 3 x boxes Kleenex tissues (ultra soft)
• 1 x 70 cl bottle Stones Green Ginger Wine (estd. 1740)

The girl on the checkout looked so confused. Like I can help it if we’re both inclined towards not cooking and stocking up on several weekend’s worth of mid-posh alcohol…

Have fun!

The Real Ale Ramble Update

Wotcha. Yes, I know, I’m a whole week late with a post about the Ramble. This is because this is the first free moment (read “hour between my bus getting into Oxford and being allowed to sign in and start working for Saturday Duty [it’s complicated and to do with timesheets]”) I’ve had in which to post.

Consequently, if you want a post about the actual walking and stuff what we did, your best bet is to pull a ‘See Also’ on Dan’s post about it. In passing, however, I will say it rocked. It was thoroughly tiring, and I was dosed up to the eyeballs on my magic pink (and don’t-work-like-they-used-to) ibruprofen for the bulk of it, as well as scorching hot thanks to careful preparation for November weather when what we got was slightly weedy September heat, but it was very fun.

Photos of the event, or, at least, such photos as could be contrived with Statto’s more-or-less digital camera (the old one; he was inexplicably reluctant to let me take his D70 thing over a bunch of muddy mountains in the rain) may be found in the appropriategallery on Abnib – they get better once I master the art of turning the thing on, giving it a second to auto-focus, snapping the shutter and then turning it off again before the battery warning light could come on. There’s a cracking one of a mushroom we found, and lots of good ones of Ardwyn House, a gorgeous B&B we put up in, on the grounds that “If you think I’m spending a weekend walking, in Wales, in November, and then sleeping in a freezing cold tent, with my knees, then you’re in for one Hell of a shock…” — JTA, September, 2006.

Being tardy with updates has its drawbacks; Dan’s already reviewed the Ramble. Ruth has done a rather sweet post about the fact we’ve now been together three years, so I’m left to do a post about the aforementioned Ardwyn House, photos of which exist both on their website, and, as I probably said prior to some tangent or other, from this bit of the Abnib gallery and then on a few pages.

My experience of Holiday accommodation varies wildly: I’ve done chalets in the Lake District, trailer tents near Caernarfon, a YHA in Boggle Hole, a week, two years running in a caravan in Prestatyn (which gets really dull after the first couple of days), some Penbryn-like accommodation block at Sibford four years back and the Shakespare in Stratford. Ardwyn House comes just below the Shakespeare in that ranking, and I’m not entirely sure it didn’t ought to go higher up, because it really is gorgeous…

And, which is more, in the context of a B&B, the guys who run it seem to be really friendly and cheerful. I’d be friendly too, if I lived in a house like that, but I dunno if I could manage the cheerful if I had to get up and make tasty full breakfasts and tea, coffee and toast for random people who plan to wander off and come back covered in mud each day they’re staying. During the game of Illuminati we played on the Sunday we got a bottle of Moet, on account of the anniversary thing (I’m no a fan of displays of affection on the internet, jpegs not withstanding, because it involves talking about feelings, [something to which, as a man, I am inherently ill-disposed] but it was good…) and the chap was a great help, and very friendly indeed, and brought us a little table, since Illuminati does eat surface space with the power trees, and so on, and didn’t seem to mind at all about sitting in the room across the hall from the library, and listening to presumably nonsensical shouts of things like “Right, so the Bavarian Illuminati, with the help of the Phone Preaks, are attacking to control the Health Food Stores…”

The decoration is excellent – I’ll admit that I prefer Art Deco, but they’re only twenty years out, and the house can hardly help being pre-Great War; it’s all really well done. Hot baths, which we had in abundance, thanks to the walking, were excellent – I’d not realised, until I got back, that the baths in Hafan and at Caro and Jerry’s are hip-baths; nor had I twigged how much I’d missed proper deep baths where you can get both your torso and legs underwater at the same time, without any absurd juggling backwards and forwards to try and keep both ends warm for more than ten minutes.

Antique bed, too. Restored very well, but it all seemed to be period furniture, which gets bonus points. I really liked it. It was more expensive than Dan & Claire’s tent, but I suspect we got a better absurd-luxury-to-pound ratio going than they did, and I’m not a fan of roughing it when it can possibly be avoided – “enjoy the luxuries whilst you can, and worry about penury when it happens,” ‘s my motto…

I’m not great at this reviewing accommodation lark, really, but it was fantastic, and it was rather a shame to leave and return to the not-so-comfy bed in Wallingford, which doesn’t have a mattress so much as something resembling a futon cover (which, as we all know, in’ the world’s most comfy form of padding…)

So, yeah, do check out the piccies, and if you’re feeling comparatively flush when in Llanwrtyd (as so often happens, I’m sure…) get in with ’em; they’ll see you right.

O, and the Spar there sells Black Mountain. Rock!

Gotta go now; they want me on book replacing in the Camera.

Have fun!

That last post was serious! Better put an end to that…

…with stupid memes! Hooray!

So we have:

You are The Hierophant

Divine Wisdom. Manifestation. Explanation. Teaching.

All things relating to education, patience, help from superiors.The Hierophant is often considered to be a Guardian Angel.

The Hierophant’s purpose is to bring the spiritual down to Earth. Where the High Priestess between her two pillars deals with realms beyond this Earth, the Hierophant (or High Priest) deals with worldly problems. He is well suited to do this because he strives to create harmony and peace in the midst of a crisis. The Hierophant’s only problem is that he can be stubborn and hidebound. At his best, he is wise and soothing, at his worst, he is an unbending traditionalist.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

…and that’s about it. Livejournal, my once-reliable source of random memes (and emo whinges by random tosspots) has done away with it’s “random journal” finder, and has replaced it with an all-too-rapidly flashing link to the most recently updated journals. Nuts to that; I’m going off to read bash.

Thoughts For Our Time, No. 1: How d’you like them apples?!

The Set-Up
I meant to do a post about this a week ago, but I somehow didn’t get round to it, so I’m using a bit of me flexitime to get it done now, before I go and forget.

There’s a lot of talk being talked with regard to the environment, at the moment, and the fact it’s screwed and we’re in for a seriously crap time during the next century or so. This is all very depressing, and nobody’s doing much about it beyond saying “this is bad, but we’re going to try and sustain our current habits anyway,” which is tiresome.

About a week back, as I say, Ruth and I had a conversation about the way food gets ferried around the world, and then around the country, for no real reason. It’s all pretty stupid – take Rowse honey, for example, which comes
in many tasty varieties, all of them fairly goopy and in jars.

Rowse have a factory in Wallingford, roughly next door to the Habitat warehouse. From there, insofar as I can tell, the honey is put into jars, given labels and loaded onto a truck. The truck takes it to a distribution centre, where is is collected by various representatives of the supermarkets and other shops which stock the honey with a view to selling it on to such honey-seeking shoppers as come through their doors. The supermarkets drive it to their distribution centres, then load it onto trucks and deliver it on a store-by-store basis, with the end result that the particular jar of honey we’ve been following ends up on a shelf in Waitrose, Wallingford, approximately a quarter of a mile away from where it started out some days earlier.

This cannot, in a world containing inventions such as the Wheelbarrow ™ be a sensible use of resources. Nor can shipping apples from South Africa – prime temperate apple-growing climate – to the prime temperate apple-growing climate of the UK, over 6,000 miles away, be considered remotely sensible. Shipping pineapples and things which don’t grow well over here perhaps makes sense. Shipping apples? What the Hell for? So we can eat apples all year round, and strawberries even in the winter? That’s certainly a convincing “pro” for excusing global warming; I wonder why nobody thought of using it before…

The Hook:
Now I can’t arrange all of this by myself, you understand – I need help from things like the Government and people with money like the supermarkets, so I doubt it’ll ever really happen. However, I reckon the following plan might just work, if only people would back it, and that won’t happen if I don’t tell anyone about it.

What we need is proper information about how far food has travelled to get to where it is when we buy it. That’s the first hurdle. Now I reckon anything up to a hundred miles or so is fair enough, maybe two hundred and then you can cover Scotland without too much trouble.

So you’re now in a supermarket in which you have chiller cabinets where the milk bottles clearly state that some of the milk has travelled – not necessarily come from, mark you, but travelled (remember our jar of honey, from before? – to get there. Some of it, having gone about 70 miles, costs a reasonably typical 90 pee. Some of it, which has managed to go 215 miles costs, say, £1.50.

Yonder we have apples. Those from the orchard down the road are priced at whatever 50 pee a pound is in metric. The ones from South Africa cost about six times that.

…Interesting… Can you see what we’re doing here?

The Tale:
The plan is we slap a nominal tax on foodstuffs that travel more than a distance of, say, 200 miles (although we need to get some boffins in to work out what that precise distance is). The trick, however, isn’t to say “10 pee per mile after the first 200 miles,” but to grade the tax, based on the item in question.

• So for things like milk, which can be got, even in these Dairyman-shafting days, fairly locally, any tax of the sort is going to be about a penny per mile.
• For things like apples, which again, grow in the UK, but not in areas like the Highlands of Scotland, you get a tax of, say, five pence a mile.
• Apples from South Africa, and other locally-available produce that still gets shipped all over the world, take a high tax of fifty to seventy pence per mile after the first 200 miles, which rapidly prices them very highly, making them rare luxury items.
• Things like bananas, which come from a long way off but don’t grow well in the UK still get a fairly high tax – say thirty pence per additional mile – but aren’t priced as highly, because there isn’t a valid local alternative.
• The tax we’re now raking in from this lot can then get funnelled into things like research into bio-fuels, and more efficient forms of renewable energy, and so on. The precise details of that would need to be done by someone who understands such things better than I do, but the main point is there is now readily available funding with which to investigate alternatives to fossil fuels, and high-impact air travel, and so on. Half the problem at the moment is that people working on such things are having a devil of a time getting the money together: no longer. Hooray!

The Sting
What we now have is a system where it costs far more to buy South African apples than apples grown in Devon, for example. This discourages the consumers who blindly wander the supermarkets going “I need apples, here are apples, I will get them,” from buying those items which have a high-impact transit pattern above those who don’t – if it’s costing you an extra fiver to get apples from the other side of the world, you might just get Cox’s instead, no?

This is going to have three main effects:

1. Demand for long-travelling food is going to drop, as prices rise. This is going to force down demand, making it less economical to have foods shipped a long way, and forcing suppliers to streamline distribution in order to keep things economical. (Time Rowse invested in a wheelbarrow, huh?)
2. Demand for local food, in the manner of a see-saw, rises as distance food falls. Local produce sells better, which reduces the damage done by the large supermarket chains, and the mass-production style farming that’s been making life harder for everyone else – sure, the battery farm in Devon can knock out several million more eggs than the local Yorkshire farm, but by the time they’ve got up there, they cost twice as much… Farmers begin to get a better deal, and don’t get done over by the supermarkets any more – supermarket profit margins are dropping, but local grocers are doing better and better, meaning it’s time to cut out the middle man, forcing supermarkets to offer a better deal.
3. Money rapidly becomes available for research into more eco-friendly approaches to everything – fossil fuel alternatives, better distribution networks, and so on. After a while, the money drops somewhat as people buy less of the high-tax, high-distance goods, but money is still coming in because of the token taxes on anything going more than the 200 miles – it’s not as much cash as before, but we’ve just built in a huge time-buying disincentive to long-distance haulage, so we’ve bought ourselves more time to develop the alternatives anyway (and this isn’t supposed to be happening as an alternative to proper funding, but in tandem with it).

So we end up with better distribution logistics, a return to the use of local produce and a boost to the rural economy, a reduction in the power of the big supermarkets to screw over the producers – and, incidentally, a reduction in their profit margins which might persuade them to cut costs by not triple-packing everything – and, because their money is now involved, greater awareness of things like how much impact a ship full of apples has on the environment.

Things which we can only get from abroad do cost more, but they’re only as cheap as they are because supermarkets keep prices artificially low anyway, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and things like South African Apples, for which we have frankly no need, cost far more than their intrinsic value, because, frankly, an apple from 6,000 miles away deserves to be treated like a luxury item that only a few people can afford, rather than the thing everyone munches during a coffee break. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Now I know the supply industry says things like “but we use huge cargo ships – it’s not like we fly the food half-way round the world!” but that, of itself, is not actually a justification: that’s saying “You should be grateful; we could put these babies on a ‘plane, and that’d really screw the icecaps!” and saying “I could be an even bigger bully than I am!” has never been that great as a justification for hitting someone.

I don’t think it’ll ever really happen, since it involves rich people offering to have less money, and there’s probably flaws in it that would need a lot of careful ironing out, but I do still think it’s a damn good idea, even if it’s not a blueprint, and I do believe good stuff could come of it, if only it got thought out properly, and implemented by people who didn’t just kowtow to the rich bastards…

…Ah well. When capitalism collapses, eh?

“I’m sorry…

… but we are currently dealing with an unusually high volume of pain, and are unable to deal with your information at present. Please listen to this litany of swearing and nervousness, and we will deal with your message as soon as possible.”

Wassat, then?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the message that greeted my elbow yesterday afternoon, after I fell, whilst sober, down the stairs.

It really hurt.

I’m still not exactly sure what happened, but the sequence of events was more or less as follows:

1. Begin descent of stairs
2. Crack head, hard, on corner of study wall, where it overhangs the stairwell. Swear.
3. Legs continue to move forwards whilst skull remains firmly arrested, embedded on aforementioned corner of wall. In consequence, legs swing upwards, pivoting around my waist, until gravity kicks in.
4. Hover in air, exactly parallel to stairs, for approximately one second, as per ‘Statutory Scenes in Cartoon Violence Treaty, 1956’
5. Drop two feet flat onto the stairs, where corner of sixth stair up catches me firmly under shoulder blades, winding me awfully. Shout.
6. Slither-and-bump down remaining stairs, shouting “ouch” every second or so.
7. Come to rest in heap at foot of stairs. Struggle into sitting position, feeling very winded and with an aching head. Say “fuck” very distinctly.
8. Put hand on bruise on head, as Ruth and Caro & Jerry run over looking worried. Assure them no real harm done.
9. Remove hand from head, causing horrified gasps from everyone who can see said hand. Trickle of blood chooses this moment to run down forehead and into eye.

Presently, after Jerry had been trying to run my head under the shower for a while, and the pain from the gash in my scalp had temporarily overwhelmed the ache in my back (now returned) I realised that my elbow was killing me, and I’d got a two-inch-square graze of carpet burn, which still hurts now. My head still hurts, too, of course, and is in a rotten state which currently prevents me from either combing my hair or otherwise trying to wash the blood out of it, because any such attempt will pull the cut open again, and I’ll go back to looking like something out of a cheap horror flick.

What was bizarre, though, is that for most of yesterday (indeed, until mid-morning today, when I realised that my back really does hurt quite a lot – not, in itself, that surprising since I effectively battered it with a 13-14 stone lump of wood) my grazed elbow was by far the most painful (and annoying) part of the whole catalogue of injuries, and yet my nervous system totally ignored it jumping up and down saying “Hello? I’ve got grazed, and it really hurts!” for a good five or ten minutes, whilst it dealt with things like my skull saying “Ow, I’ve got bashed, and I’ve split the skin, and there’s lots of blood and pain and things.”

In many ways, this shows a commendable ability to prioritise messages on the part of my brain. It also makes it very annoying that, having finally bothered to take a message from my whiny elbow, it kept taking the message constantly for the rest of the day, long after any risk of further nasty grazing had passed…

And you have no idea how much my head now itches. Still, I’m not going to touch it, or I’ll go seeping blood over everything again…

Bam! (pt. 2)

Following my previous Mansbridge – Statto – Possibly-Katherine Byrne – and-now-Peter targetted “Bam” post(*) I give you another Home on the Strange strip that takes a pop at Robert Jordan.

[Nah, I still don’t like him. This is because I still think he a) doesn’t understand female characters. b) doesn’t understand male characters either, and c) doesn’t realise that putting in lots of needless description isn’t the same as writing a good novel. I’d be less pissed off by it if he hadn’t had such an excellent start; as it is, he took a great idea, pissed it up the wall, and pissed me off something shocking in the process.]

But never mind all that: go have a dekko!

(*) Also someone called Chris. If it’s Chris from Ruth’s course, Hello! Hope HP are treating you well…

Plug ‘n’ Play: compatability not included.

So, as I mentioned on Wednesday I’ve brought my computer down to Wallingford, and, as Robin ran off with my old monitor, I needed to buy myself a new monitor.

Now I’m not working on an Overclockers budget (but I really love ’em and their “anything below high-end? Yeah, we’ve heard of it…” attitude), and I haven’t got the patience to wait for Scan to work out that when I ask for one specific component, I want actually that one, rather than something a bit similar… so I hauled off to Dabs and had a nose about there to see what I could get.

Since, for all it’s now a year old, my box remains fairly beefy (it’s now down to something like “cutting edge,” rather than “bleeding edge;” – buying computers: slightly more depressing than building cool new ships in Stars), the graphics card I’m trying to work with here is an Nvidia 6600, full of DVI-ported goodness, it made sense to go properly digital.

So, I thought, here’s a good-priced monitor, I’ll get that. Dabs duly sent it off, and it got here yesterday.

And that’s where things got nasty. The monitor came with all the usual stuff – a box, a D-sub cable, a power cord, a quickstart guide, a CD and some polystyrene. I’d got Dabs to send me a DVI cable as well, and all was up and running in about five minutes. Except… well it kept saying there was “no signal input” from the computer. How strange…

…So, usual drill for Windows boxes in these situations: cue Safe Mode. That worked fine, but nothing else worked… Or, rather, everything else worked, but only in VGA, which I like in the DOS-box, but which I don’t look for in my main computer, where it’s not so much a low-resolution as a crime against God.

Still, VGA at least meant I could log on, and get the accompanying CD into the drive. Install some drivers, I thought, and then we’ll be away. Or not, as a matter of fact, because what the CD contained was not helpful drivers, but a pdf version of the manual. In the manual was a helpful bit of information regarding the error message I was getting – “no signal input: check cable”.

Basically, it said

Your monitor will not function unless there is a video input: if your monitor displays the message ‘check cable,’ you should check the cable to ensure the cable is properly connected to your computer.

Uh. Yeah, well I was kinda able to work that part out for myself… So let’s try it with the D-Sub connection… Nah, that didn’t work either. So I need drivers. None of the windows generic drivers worked, so I did the usual “hit the Internet” thing…

…Google showed up a load of message boards with people saying they can’t find drivers, and it also showed up the Hanns-G website, which informed me that,

No Operating System specific drivers should be necessary. Hanns.G monitors comply with DD2B plug & play standards.

*

Meaning “Your computer is too good for our cheapskate pile of cack. Tough shit, hotshot, we can’t be bothered to do anything about it.”

This was very annoying. I don’t mind plug ‘n’ play, indeed, I find it very useful. On the other hand, plug n play is a fairly generic thing: you plug in a component, the computer is able to speak to it, and then you can optimise things. As far as I can tell, plug n play is rather like peripheral component Esperanto; it works rather well, but you wouldn’t use it to write poetry. You wouldn’t rely on it for international peace negotiations – you’d get an interpreter, to make everything go as smoothly as possible. Drivers are rather like that – plug n play is good for the average joe, but it’s not going to work all the time.

As far as I can tell, therefore, the Hanns-G approach to providing monitors is something along the lines of firemen who opt for cheaper, 30-yard hoses because that’s enough to put out most fires, and, well, if there’s a few buildings that’re too tall for the hoses to put out, that’s fine, because they’ll burn down to less than 30-yards in no time.

It’s all profoundly annoying, not least because, as far as I can tell, it’s only come about through laziness on their part – who the fuck ships hardware without drivers and just trusts it’ll work on anything? Come on, dudes, I’ve just bought a monitor that’s a whole year newer than my graphics card, and it’s not sufficiently advanced to work with the computer?

Could you not have made it nice and plain that it wasn’t designed for good hardware? How hard is it to describe a monitor as a “Hanns-G Budget Office LCD”? That says everything it’s designed for, and quietly points out to anyone paying attention that they didn’t ought to buy if if their idea of using a computer is more than “opening Word and playing a bit of Solitaire”.

So that was tiresome.

Kudos to Dabs, though, for having a sensible returns policy – sending the useless bastard back is still going to be complicated, but that’s because I’ve got AACR2 training all next week so I can’t take a random day off to orchestrate it all.

Honestly. What kind of fault is “Computer too advanced for monitor to operate,” anyway?

—-
* If someone can suggest a reason other than the plug n play not being good enough and it needing specific drivers, that’s excellent; please do it soon, though, else I’ll have to pay a tenner to have the glorified turd that’s now back in its box upstairs shipped back to Dabs in the hope they can foist it onto someone whose main requirement from the monitor is that it’s flat, and can plug into a wall.

O buggery…

Nigel Kneale’s died.

Speaking as one of the (probably remarkably small) number of people under 25 who knows who he is, I can’t imagine many of you being that bothered, but it shook me.

For the reference of the few who care:
Here is something of an obituary, and here is the Wikipedia article on Quatermass.

That is all.

Ah… Evening Duty…

…Apparently the one time of the week when I manage to get a post done!

Well, now, life here moves on apace. Last week I got ill with a stinker of a cold and got sent home, and spent a couple of days sleeping. Ruth’s birthday happened, however, and a huge pile of family turned up (I say huge, because it was. Ruth says it wasn’t, because it didn’t feature sundry cousins. Such an approach to families baffles me; where I come from – and bear in mind my immediate family is about four people – sundry cousins, of which I have many – are left to fend for themselves). Still, there were about fourteen people (as I say, masses), and it was all good fun, fuzzy headaches notwithstanding.

It’s suddenly got a lot colder down here; I need to fix my gloves up and get some decent dubbin back onto my hat; the lousy weather last month stripped it all off, which is annoying. The practical result of this is that my knees have started playing up on a regular basis again. I figure now’s the time to get the buggers properly sorted out, since the lack of any impact from ibruprofen is starting to worry me a bit. And, of course, it’s actually quite tiring to wake up with knees that feel like they’ve got knitting needles run through ’em sideways, and not shake the feeling ’till you go to sleep at the end of the day…

At the weekend, Friday being nine years since what I still mentally pigeonhole as ‘the Accident,’ Ruth & I headed up to Newport to visit my mother and sister, and generally did Shropshire-y stuff, including Stokesay, which was cool, and a bit of a mooch round Much Wenlock, with it’s amazingly cool butcher (seriously, Christmas Eve you get people queueing up from two in the morning so they can get in when the guy opens at six…)

The plan only really went wrong when we tried to come back, burdened with the computer (on the grounds that it’s silly to let it mothball) and Arriva predictably buggered the trains up. That, combined with the sodding obvious fact that if you run about privatizing a railway network what you get is No Co-Ordinated Timetable meant we didn’t have seats booked for any of the journey and we stood for about eighty miles, i.e, the whole trip from Birmingham to Didcot, crammed into a baggage car like, uh… people crammed in very tightly in uncomfortable trains, and still trying to safeguard a large-ish computer and pile of luggage.

My box, as many of you know, is this cool bastard (but from Overclockers, not the other guys). This seemed to confuse people somewhat; as the Arriva train (finally) pulled into New Street, a guy who’d been sat with two youngish boys, and casting me strange looks, came over and said something like

Him Hi, uh, I’m sorry to butt in, but what is that? [pointing at case]
Me Er, it’s a computer.
Him [to one of the boys] O! You were right! [pointing to other boy] He thought it was a musical instrument…

…so that was a bit random, and faintly cool.

Now the thing’s down here, of course, it needs a new monitor (Robin eloped with my old CRT one) so I’m getting a new one, hooray! DVI and everything, ‘s very nice…

I can do that because I’ve got paid. I like getting paid. I now have to stick to a budget. I like this a little less.

Went to first Panto audition, yesterday; looks like it’ll be entertaining, which is good.

Getting tired of typing, now, and the readers are looking troublesome. Signing off…

Edit – 01/11/06; 1749h:
If you’ve not seen today’s Home on the Strange then make sure you’ve read this storyline and then go read the latest episode; had me laughing as quietly as a could for ages, that did…

Extra, Extra! JTA finds time to do a proper post!

…Realises hasn’t much to Say!

Life here carries on as hectic as ever, I’m afraid. Well, not at the moment; I’m on Evening Duty in a Reading Room, which is quite fun, and rather Big School Library-ish, when there aren’t people wanting to come over and get their grubby fingers onto books they’ve pulled up from the Stack.

Fantastic weekend, for which belated cheers go out to Alec & Suz and Matt-in-the-Hatt and Sian – all enormously last minute and surprising, but I managed to catch some sleep up on the Sunday, so I’m glad I contrived to lever myself out of bed!

I’m still getting my head round the way this place works, but I think I’ve mostly got it sorted out, now; or, at least, I’m probably in a position to be able to work out a vague map, or something, which, as we all know, is Rule One (#5) of Exploration (Rule One #’s 1-4 covering things like ‘have someone who can detect traps,’ ‘if you’re stuck go back and look for hidden buttons,’ and ‘don’t step on the pressure plate without looking about a bit first’ [now I wanna play Eye of the Beholder again… Never did manage to get onto level 6, actually, had to keep bypassing it…])

A little alarmed at the fact I don’t seem to be getting very good at the commuting, yet, and I’m still knackered almost all the time. That’s a bit annoying.

More annoying is the way winter seems to be coming on, brining with it the usual aches and pains and trouble with my knees. As soon as I’ve got a minute I’m going to have to go and register with a doctor and demand they do something better than saying “have these Ibruprofen tablets” by way of fixing the problem – we’re talking little pink pills worth 400 Mgs a go, and I’m up to the point where if I only take one, it does pretty much nothing. If they were giving me morphine, I’d’ve been put into rehab by now…

Still, beyond that, all’s pretty much well, and I’ve not been completely swamped by anything yet. Give it time and I expect I will, but I’ll worry about that when it happens.

Have confirmed my time off for the Real Ale Ramble, at least (Thursday-Wednesday, to give time to get up to Aber beforehand, and to collapse in a heap afterwards), so that’s all fantastic, and means we can start things like “Booking the train tickets in advance,” in a bid to save a wee bit of cash, which is good, especially since I’m going to be getting a new monitor, presently (read: when I get paid), in order to use the computer which we’re planning to manhandle down here in the near future.

And that’s more-or-less that, I reckon. Another update in another week, like as not.

Have fun!

This is a new one…

Fascinating bit of spam today, which I’ve never seen before:

hi Luisa i hope this is your mailbox.
I was pleased to meet you the other day. I hope you are truly had like the New York.
So much so much happening all the time, lots of great opportunities.
And speaking of opportunities, the deal I was speaking you about yesterday embraces a company
named Tex-Homa (TXHE).
It’s already heading up, but the big announcement isn’t even
out yet, so there’s still time. I have got this shares already and made
2000. I propose you to do the same today.

Hope this helps you out. I’ll see you this weekend.
Yours Luisa Gibbs

Now isn’t that wierd? I’m assuming it’s spam, because, well if this were real insider dealing, you, uh, wouldn’t go sending information out to e-mail addresses if you weren’t damn sure who owned ’em, and even then you wouldn’t be quite as explicit as to say “but the big annoucement isn’t out yet, so I’m breaking the law by telling you to buy these shares in this company [insert helpful stock exchange code here],” unless you were keen to avoid all your friends and relations for the next ten years but it’s still a new one on me.

Anyone seen it’s ilk before? ‘s sneaky, and only fatally flawed if you’re not especially interested and don’t read it properly – I did think it was just a case of the wrong address, until the bit about the shares came up.

Proper blog post soon, when I’m on break, or otherwise not getting paid.

Have fun!

The End of Week Two…

…I’m using a bit of flexitime to write this, but that’s fair enough – I’m not exactly short on flexitime (although I will be presently), so much as short on energy with which to do anything about having stray flexitime that I could do stuff with. Still, I hope I’ll get used to it.

Rather alarming is the extent to which I’ve got old over the last six years; back in the day, when I got the stinking 83 to Newport (via anywhere remotely indirect that Arriva could think of, including a huge doubling-back-on-itself loop to the Humbers, where approximately one lazy kid got on or off) I used to be up at 0630h, and back at 1750h, no problem. Now I keep falling asleep on the bus (although I reckon that the instance of that on Tuesday was because I’d got the Today program on the iriver, and Call-me-Dave was talking about, uh, something).

Getting a bit more settled in, now, not making quite as many mistakes as I was last week, which is a good sign, and probably less irritating all round, and I’m starting to learn my way round the stack a bit better (I did get totally lost in there the other day, whilst trying to find a floor that would let me exit to the main part of the building, but since the stack’s the sort of thing that’d give Umberto Eco a headache, I reckon I can be forgiven that. Anyway, I wasn’t lost as such, because I knew how to get out, just not how to get out where I wanted to do so.)

Getting the bus has settled into a proper routine again, after some disturbance the other last few days, following the village the bus goes through becoming a wee bit soggy after the huge rains we’ve been having. It’s sunny again, now, which is a shame, because it doesn’t annoy the tourists as much, but I guess we’ll have to cope.

In other news, I’ve been given a part in the Corn Exchange pantomime, an Archers-tastic ‘Snow White & the Seven Dwarves,’ playing the part of Slurp (who I always think is called Slurm, on account of that being, well, a name). Slurp is basically the character of the huntsman, but pantomimed into a comedy pillock, of the “stupid but a cretin” variety. One annoying voice and ‘Uriah Heep meets the village idiot’ level performace later, and I’ve got myself a part. Which is cool, because I’ve never really auditioned for owt before.

Went bellringing again, last night, and more or less enjoyed it; was on a heavier bell than previously, which made things a lot easier, but I do seem to have stretched the muscles in my chest a bit, on account of stretching up with the sally. Still, it’s a hobby, and could be losely counted as excercise, if you were being generous, so I reckon I’ll carry on with that.

And other than that – and the audition doesn’t really count, since it was two weeks ago on Sunday, and before I started work – I’ve not done much, mostly because it’s all far too tiring. Soon, however, I’m hoping I shall get the hang of this a bit better, and stop feeling quite so abysmal in the mornings, and then I can do something productive, and which doesn’t involve learning difficult things, like AACR2 and MARC, which I’m only slowly getting the hang of, and which I keep having dreams about.

No, really. The last two nights, I’ve dreamed about cataloguing books. This is slightly scary, especially since the dream this morning was me stuck at a party with a bunch of people telling me how they deliberately list things as bibliographies in the 008, even when they know they’re not, and me having to be polite about it, because I didn’t know the way home, and they were going to give me a lift.

Still, that’s probably a good sign, too, because it means my brain is quietly filing things away, rather than just forgetting them, so I reckon thing’s will get better. I feel marginally less confused and useless already, and I still intend to enjoy this once I’ve got the hang of it a bit better, so it’s all good, really, apart from the sleeping, and it’s nearly the weekend, which is proper lie-in city!

Excellent.

Hum

I’ve not actually been given owt to do yet (and, being still in Training, I’ve not got clearance to start playing about and seeing how I can do on my own) so I reckon it’s probably OK for me to make a quick post whilst I wait for further instructions…

 …I’ve got a dual processor terminal. No, really. OK, so they’re both Intel (“They’re both shit, you say?” “Aye, that’s right…”) but since I’ve not built it I’m not going to fuss too much.

So yeah, two Pentium [ugh] 4’s, at around 3.20 Ghz a throw…

…I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something about this job they’ve not told me; I’m sure I can’t need to devote a full processor over to the data entry program.

I’m now torn between going “Wow! Two processors, what do I need those for?” and “Eew, double Intel…” But then, I do lots of gaming on my computers, and you really need an AMD if you’re after much more than, well, er, using Microsoft Office.

Got a cool wallpaper, too; it’s this shot of the war memorial I took a couple of years back.

Commuting remains exhausting, but I just went into the break room and had a hugely strong coffee before I came and signed in to work, so I’m feeling more perky, at least.

I still reckon this’ll be easier once I’m done with the training and don’t come in and sit about looking for something to do, as I am now, but that’s probably just me, and I reckon I’ll be missing these days of gentle “waiting for something to turn up” in a couple of months.

TinyIRC got blocked by the Windows pseudo-firewall, so I’m guessing that’s out, which is fair enough, although it does rank as “another thing I don’t need a seperate processor for” (but I’ve never been a dual-core fan anyway, so that’s predictable).

E-mail still can’t work. Anyone ever use Simeon (it’s be a long time ago; it talks about itself as providing ‘Electronic mail’ in order to ‘replace paper memos in offices with electronic versions which are more economical,’ and I can’t get it to work at all. I need it to work so I can ask someone in the local equivilent of IS is I can have Firefox, please, not IE.

Hey ho. Back to locating someone who can find me a grindstone to practise putting my nose to, I guess…

Have fun!

Oook…

Well now… I’m tired.

Given that I’ve spent two days getting up at 0630 to catch a bus, after a muchly welcome five-year break from the same, I reckon that’s allowed.

Have signed me contract, and sent it off; am anticipating some species of Staff Badge presently, which, combined with my Magic Key Fob ™ ought to give me access to most of the interesting places. Except for the Uber-Secure bit of the stack with all the cool valuable stuff in, which makes sense. I’d not trust me in there if I’d only just turned up, either.

Today I have been given a locker, so I’m taking a huge jar of coffee (instant, mind you, not too good) and me Wikipedia mug in, and I plan to start ingesting that at something like a rate of knots, although not when I’m in the cataloguing room, because you’re no allowed book-shafting things in there, which makes sense.

Have had a tour of the Stacks, still can’t really find my way round anywhere. Keep being told by people who’ve worked there for years that this is entirely to be expected, which is both re-assuring (I’ve not lost my sense of direction) and alarming (I’m never going to be able to get out if I take a wrong turning). Still, I can always follow the hugely cool self-unloading-at-the-right-floor conveying machine, if I can make it down that far.

I have a computer, it has a TFT monitor. It also has a really annoying keyboard, with a diamond on the control key, and matching diamonds and things like “cut,” “paste,” “underline,” etc. on x, v & u respectively. Most irritatingly it has “< " and ">” on the “Home” and “End” keys, which works fine if you’re word processing and is completely wrong if you’re viewing a webpage.

Since that’s the only major quibble I can find thus far – and I have, naturally, been looking for such sticking points – I reckon I’m probably going to be alright, just as soon as I can learn things like what an 020 field does, and if my compter’s ever going to tell me something is pattern analysis blue…

Now I’m going to raid the Abnib Gallery for wallpaper and go to bed.

G’ night.

MMM… Sitting…

Well that was a mental five days! Not without it’s dull bits, mind you, but still all fun. Good to see the Aber people again; apologies for dashing off so early yesterday, but I’m currently in a logistics battle with the luggage anyway, so having to hoof it out of Aber this morning would’ve been deeply unpleasant.

Also, on the train out, something faintly cool happened… The drinks and snacks trolley came by! And, yeah, I’d just had a depth charge at the Mecca, and, yeah, I’d spent most of the day suppin’ coffee from a plastic cup but, even so, I thought “Hooray coffee!” and got some.

Me Hi, er, black coffee, please.
Trolley Dude Yeah, sure. No sugar with the coffee, right?
Me Er, no. *Faint Pause* You know I’ve done this before!
Trolley Dude O yes. Many times…

Well it amused me, anyway. And I still fell asleep between Mach and Drenewydd…

Today I need to haul a big old pile of stuff up to Telford and then buzz down to Oxford ahead of work on Monday. Super.

And something you may’ve missed in the news is that the guy who voices the Cat King in The Cat Returns has died. He was, it seems, also in one of the Bond films I’ve never seen, but I’ve seen Cat Returns lots, so that’s the interesting bit.

Have fun!

Num te tum…

Killing time before I go and pack stuff for Aber. Those of you not yet up to speed with the plan probably don’t care about it very much, but, nevertheless:

I head to Aber this evening, spend several nights crashing on floors there (& several days getting up early and going to bed late, I reckon), then I come back late Wednesday night, crash at Newport – no floors, this time, a proper folding bed, & everything – and then get me a train down to Oxford and an X39 on to Wallingford, where I dig in until the Real Ale Ramble.

I’m hoping that once I’m done with all the moving around I can start sleeping a bit better than I have been. I put the rubbishness to having an east-facing bedroom windee with nae cortans in it. Uh. Sorry, I got a bit sidelined after “windee,” there. No worries.

So, yeah, insufficient kip. I’ve been and got me some dinky business cards, which I can argue I need so as to tell people my new address in Wallingford in a marginally discriminate manner, although precisely how I can be discriminating and find 250 people who I can give my details to remains something of a puzzler. But for basically no money, what can you do, eh?

And, frankly, that’s all I’ve got for the moment. I’d go on, but I expect you’re busy with all the productive things you need to be doing online, like checking e-mails, and reading wikipedia, and following The N00b, so I’ll let you get on with things and go have myself a coffee.

MMM… Coffee…

Growing up, moving on…

I knew, back in 2003, that going off to University would, nominally, at least, change me. And, to be fair, I wasn’t too phased by that; by then I’d undergone sufficient re-wiring of my basic character that I was fairly used to the idea.

And, even by this time last year, I knew I’d changed an awful lot – Hell, by this time last year I’d not only managed to loosen up a great deal, I’d finally realised that I’d needed to loosen up since 2000, when, with the ending of the Anslow Thing I’d decided that I’d sorted myself out and got over sundry emotional traumas (I hadn’t, mind you, but I didn’t realise that at the time).

And now I’m back in Newport, waiting to go back to Aber to get stuck in with Freshers’ and I’m finding myself wondering if I was ever like some of the people I appear to know from back here. Dan may be able to help me on this one, since I remember having conversations with him back when I was still on the edges of the Aber group, and nervous about making a mistake. (Actually, I was that until about this time last year, as well…)

Now there may (Although I personally doubt it) bew Newport-type people reading this, and that’s amazingly impressive, and congratulations on navigating to a web-page, even if you have done it in IE like a slightly nervous sheep…

…For those of you I know from elsewhere, let me give some background:

In Newport we have a sort of mailing list. It’s more a “cut ‘n’ paste lots of addresses into the ‘To’ bar list,” but it gets the job done, as long as you can conceal the full headers, and it’s not too bad. It is, however, full of hotmail addresses.

Now I don’t, in theory have a problem with hotmail addresses. I have one Hell of a problem with hotmail accounts, but that’s a different matter. Lots of people have hotmail addresses. I have a hotmail address, although I haven’t looked at it since October 31st 2004 or so…

Recently, noticing the large number of hotmail accounts on this list, I offered to send people some invites to Gmail, so they could have a look, and give it a go. Nobody wanted to.

Now that, in itself, I find very odd; I’m not someone who lives in social groups where people say “D’you want a Gmail invite?” and people don’t say anything, not even “Nah, I’ve already got a hundred to give out myself, thanks.”

And so I began to wonder: Just who are these people? And who on earth was I when I met them?

This week, it’s all flared up again, when Statto removed two of his e-mail addresses from the cut ‘n’ paste, and said so, explaining that ones like “msn@[statto’s website]” were the addresses he uses for instant messaging, because hotmail is rubbish. He then made another plug for Gmail, and then things went a bit weird.

Now I appreciate that Gmail isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and that some people might give it a go, and say “Actually, this isn’t for me.” I’ve no problem with that, since, as most of us know, it’s not always the easiest thing to try something and then have to stand up and say it isn’t what you expected, and that you don’t think what it actually is is right for you. In fact, just by doing that, I’m inclined to give you a small bag of points.

What I don’t understand is when people refuse, flat out, to try something like this, in a situation where Giving It A Go doesn’t cost anything, and there’s no chance of negative repercussions.

My argument to people wondering if they’d like to give Gmail a go runs something like “It doesn’t cost anything, it takes five minutes to set up, and you don’t have to use it, if you give it a go and find you don’t like it.”

Specific arguments with regards hotmail point out that you don’t have to delete e-mails (Hotmail had got to the point where I was having to throw away e-mail every couple of weeks, which was both a pain in the arse and tiring, as I’d have to keep sifting through things I’d already elected to keep in five previous sortings).

I also tend to point out that, for no good reason, Hotmail deletes all your emails, if you don’t log in for thirty days. This is not at all helpful, and there’s absolutely no reason for it. Sure, you can pay them to not do that, but d’you pay postmen to not sneak into your house if you go away for a month and burn all the letters they’ve ever shoved through the door? Of course you bloody don’t.

I’m not going to list the continuing failings of hotmail, not least because (I hope) telling them to the readers of my blog would be something of a “coals to newcastle” scenario; I’m just listing some of the reasons I’ve suggested people try Gmail for a bit.

I even suggested people could create a Gmail account and then forward such e-mails as they don’t wish to lose to the Gmail account. Important messages are thus kept pretty much forever, and the people doing it don’t have to suffer the embarrasment of trying to explain why they’ve stopped following the herd that is the rest of the Users they hang out with.

What I do not expect, from the people I find interesting, is that, at this point, they should flat out refuse to give it a go. Especially not with arguments like “You’re fools” and “I’ve got 2Gb with Windows live mail”

That’s like saying “You’re stupid to be looking for a new job, I’m making £4.00 an hour just eating poo in the elephant section of the Safari Park, why would I want to read a jobs page?”

Now there was – and I know there was – a time when I had a talk with Dan about the use of MSN and such, and he made some very good points, in consequence of which I began to try Gaim. I don’t do instant messaging much, these days, but when I do, I use Gaim.

That’s because I didn’t lose anything by giving it a go, and then I found out that it was actually much, much better than MSN. I didn’t, you’ll notice say “that’s stupid,” or “I can’t be bothered,” or even “I’m getting a mediocre service now, and I don’t believe I might deserve better,” which is basicaly what the other two boil down to.

Not everyone, I know, is happy with the idea of taking the side of a computer, or re-installing windows, or turning on “show system files” or whatever it is in the view>folders menu. That, more or less, I can understand. After all, people shell out between 500-1000 quid for the average home PC, and they don’t know how it works inside, and they don’t want to. Taking the cover off is like showing a 35mm film to the sun; it might ruin everything, and you didn’t design it so you’re going to leave it alone.

That’s not really my approach, mine being more the trial-and-error-and-abort-undo-quit variety (I was eight when I first attempted to create enough space on the computer to install a new game – I did it by deleting a pile of things called a “.bat” file, which sounded rather silly and pointless, and the whole thing started to come to bits rather spectacularly), and sure, I do things some people wouldn’t, like trying Linux for a bit (not that I ever booted into it very often, not enough games).

But trying new e-mail programs isn’t really the same; it’s all remote and away from you, and there’s no chance you’re going to fuck up. And yet I find people I used to be reasonably good friends with recoiling in horror at the prospect of something new that they might try. Much better stay where we are.

Fire? Pfah. Sure, there’s a burning tree over there, but we’re in the cave right now, and those guys waving lumps of deer at the burning tree can’t be waving us over just for the sake of it, there must be some catch… Let’s stay here until the sun comes up and we can see again. Bloody cave, why doesn’t it stay light in here for longer?

Dicks.

I’m left wondering if I was ever like these people, but I think the answer’s “probably not;” I’m not desperately adventurous in many ways, and I know I worry about things more than the average 21-year-old, which I ascribe to having gone through rather more than the average 12-year-old in such a manner as to make me aware that bad things happen fast.

But really… I didn’t think, back in 2003, that I would change as much as this. Is it, then, not that I have changed very much in essentials, but that they’ve changed? Or were we all always like this, and just thrown together by the circumstances of being in Newport?

I can’t tell which of those three options I’d preffer, to be quite honest; and – and this doesn’t apply to all of the people back here, although I notice I’m still not getting any applications for Giving It A Go – I really don’t think I’ve changed very much in this respect myself. Yeah, I used to use hotmail and MSN, but when people suggested I try something else, I tried it. And I gained a lot from it…

…I guess I’ve just got enough self confidence to not worry too much about trying something new, huh? Or, maybe, it’s not that, but that I’m not too scared to try something new in case I have to go back to the old thing afterwards, but that’s not something you should hide from; try it, like it, keep it, or hate it and go back to the old thing; at the least you can say “I have tried this thing, and it wasn’t for me” and, yeah, that takes guts, but it’s not as scary as saying “someone will fix things in due course, meanwhile I’m going to put up with this shit.” Follow that path, and you’ll be stuffed faster than you can say “I can’t be bothered to try…”

Edit:

Reading this back I notice I’ve been remarkably scathing towards the Newport people. Uh. That would be because it’s stupid and annoying to say things like “Statto has been using Gmail for a couple of years, and he’s just spent six weeks working at Google in London – he must be being paid to offer us invites!”

Yeah, because all 26 of you guys are so crucial to capitalism that either Microsoft or Google will collapse in bankrupt ruins if you do or don’t switch your free e-mail provision within the next week…

Come on, guys, I’ve told yez where to find this entry, now either leap to yer own defence or ask for an invite and give the bugger a go. You lose nothing, really. And if you’re worried that the rest of the guys down here will say “Huh, they’ve got a new e-mail, well I’m not going to talk to ’em, anymore,” then for fuck’s sake, they’re not worth talking to anyway. We’re adults here, aren’t we? Not bloody-minded fourteen-year-old girls?

Seriously, I’m not trying to have a go, and I’m not trying to sound like an angry bastard (Really, I’m not, it’s just happening because I genuinely don’t get the refusal to try something where you can’t possibly lose).

I’m not saying “I don’t want to be friends with you,” either (See point about bitchy young girls, above); I’m just genuinely perplexed to find friends from school to be so different to, well, all my other friends. And I don’t know why that’s the case, and I’d really like to. So go on, leave a comment. The authentification isn’t great at maths, but it does OK.

Cheers.

Sweet Lord, this is *brilliant*

I can’t even remember how I got to it, now, but never mind. And, no, I don’t get any of the rounders baseball referrences, but never mind.

Go read About Rob

Happy Birthday HoTS!

Well, sort of. See, Home on The Strange isn’t actually a year old, so it’s not it’s birthday. It’s more one of those ‘fake’ anniversaries bestowed upon small babies and new relationships; worse even than “six months old,” is today’s HoTS celebration; it’s, er, 100 episodes old.

Still, everyone has to start somewhere; even Dudley’s Dungeon had to start somewhere, and if ever a webcomic was running along on minimal material, you’d think that’d be it. [Assuming you don’t count ‘LOL TEH NEWT!!’ as material, anyway…]
So, yeah. I’m doing links to the funniest HoTS ever. For me that’s a bit hard, but I’m going to plump for The Slap Dance Is Always Better When The GM’s Crying and send you off there.

I’m also going to put in a link to the HoTS that isn’t the funniest – it’s not even that amusing, to be fair – but which doesn’t try to be funny, and doesn’t need to be funny; that’s this one, which is brilliant.

I’d do links to others, as well, but that would annoy you all, so I won’t.

Have fun!