4. 2009-06-09

    Because I've been in the mood for photo housekeeping, here's the remainder of the photographs from our trip to Manhattan last Christmas. They're mostly concerned with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge which occurred on the very morning of Christmas day.

    NYC Christmas, part Two

    We took the train down to Brooklyn and just leisurely walked across. The weather and views were rather stunning, and the city much quieter than usual. We did run into a bit of footpath congestion at the Manhattan terminus; the comic image of a frustrated, lycra-enveloped cyclist failing to exert his right-of-way, in opposition to the crowds, camply yelling "Hello! Bicycle lane!" will stay impressed on my memory.

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  5. 2020-07-18

    You wait six months for a blog post and then I suddenly update all the things at once. Here we are. Site redesign. New Server. New software release. Lets tackle those in order

    Redesign

    I launched this version of my blog originally as 'in-progress' software before it was quite ready, after spending a few years faffing around with experiments intended to replace WordPress. One day I had something I wanted to publish, and WordPress was broken, and the thing was nearly working so I hit go. It wasn't feature complete, and there was completely minimal styling, but I thought it looked OK enough, until a friend pointed out it looked completely insane on a mobile. I felt pretty embarrassed, so I quickly cobbled together a mobile-first grid-oriented thing using zurb foundation 5 as a framework, because that was what we were using at work at the time, and it seemed like an excuse to learn a bit about how it worked. I subsequently reworked it to use foundation 6 with a slightly styled theme based on my old WordPress colours and there we are. Of late, the amount of gubbins needed to support the foundation classes has been a bit of an encumbrance, and so I decided to do away with it. This time I just hand-wrote the styles again, I think CSS has moved on a bit and hope browsers are generally a bit better behaved. Seeing as we were doing this, I did a new theme, it's based on my emacs colours. I don't care that you hate it, no.

    New Server

    I'm sure you all heard, ARM hardware is the new hotness now. As a natural contrarian, I was already hosting my site on an ARM server and so it's clearly time for me to move to AMD64. Not quite. For years I've been having fun hosting this place on one of scaleway's ARM C1 instances, which appealed to my quirky taste in alternative computers, as well as being super-cheap, and in many ways, offering far better raw performance than a VPS or a cheap cloud instance. Seriously. I was running about twelve services per instance, and my own hand-written site software, and performance was more than acceptable. I even hit the front page of the reddits and the orangenews a couple of times with my tech dithering, and soaked up big blog traffic spikes, no sweat. However, scaleway haven't offered any useful updates to their core platform since they experimented with, and withdrew a 64 bit ARM beta, and now seem to be moving more towards a VPS/Intel vision, and it was really becoming a bit limiting to be stuck on Debian 9 and 32 bit. So I moved house, installed some containers on an existing server I had sitting around and now we're live, in Belgium .

    New software release

    This is a little bit tied in with the last item there. The site engine here is written in common lisp, and for the longest time I just had it running out of an interactive repl attached to an emacs. Yes, including the #1 NackerYews story days. I moved it to a systemd service, for process supervision, and proper logging and things like that, and I wanted to get some kind of release management regime in place. So I had a fun time figuring out good ways to build standalone lisp apps, and how to package them up for Debian, and now I kind of have tagged release builds. I'm also running in my own cowboy cloud, sticker-ed together out of LXC, so the blog now can be deployed as a clean, ephemeral contained service any time I want to do a release. Particularly this part of things was becoming quite the aggravation, cross-building for ARM32 isn't really trivially feasible with common lisp, and although I had a lot of fun for a bit building debs on a raspberry Pi tucked under my desk, I eventually ran out of patience trying to keep ABI back-compatibility with older Debians.

    Devops

    My process probably seems a little bit archaic and convoluted to anyone used to thinking about this kind of thing in a modern context. It is true that there are lots of simpler abstractions and services for doing this kind of thing these days. Perhaps less intuitively, doing things the bale-of-twine and pencil sketch cowboy manner I've pitched for is also crazy easy compared to what I remember hand wrangling sites of old used to be. LXC is fairly straightforward to install on Debian stable OOTB. (unprivileged mode is still a bit of twerking, but if you follow the recipe exactly, straightforward enough). Debhelper vastly simplifies deb building (although I'll concede you do still have to do way too much) and gpb is simpler yet in some ways. Quicklisp, buildapp and quickproject make lisp dependencies and builds almost pleasurable. Cloudflare and certbot wildcards make swapping hosts around with full TLS almost disconcertingly straightforward compared to what I've been accustomed to in the past.

    Of course this is still a rolling set of dependencies which may appear complex or unfamiliar, but in a lot of ways there's also a whole lot of faff and bookeeping overhead removed, no accounts or APIs, third-party apps and frameworks to keep up-to-date. Most of this task list was concerned with a full bootstrap from a naked host. For ongoing support I just have to compile debs using standard make, launch empty containers with standard templates, and write posts and maintain code with a straightforward text editor. And there's complete autonomy of hosting and running, I'm not really locked into anything, which is exactly where I prefer to keep things. The modern-day indieweb refuses to die!

    comments at reddit

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  6. 2009-06-07

    Thanks to some free air miles obtained when I signed up for my last credit card, we managed to get an entirely free weekend's accommodation (self-catering apartment, right in the city centre), and flights (BA, return from Gatwick) to anywhere in the closest European zone. The only catch was that they needed to be cashed-in before the end of February '09. We elected to re-visit Dublin, as Mrs S. spent several months living and working there, back when she was studying towards her degree. That was several years ago, neither of us have been back since.

    It hasn't changed much. Right before we left, we discovered the exciting news that we were in the family way . This rather curtailed the traditional Dublin entertainment of drinking stout (the Guinness does taste better, you know) and bar-crawling. Perhaps the most striking change was the effect of the recent economic turmoil upon the sterling exchange rate. Dublin was never the cheapest city, but now things were positively eye-watering; a pint of Guiness was pushing five pounds, a decidedly average meal for two (with no alcohol) in a vegetarian restaurant easily overshot the forty pound mark. Luckily with free travel and accommodation leaving enough elasticity in our spending budget, we managed a relaxed weekend break without risking bankruptcy.

    The February weather was cold, windy and occasionally damp. Wind-swept and grey rather suits this city by the sea. On on the evening we flew in, the night of the 14th, we somehow managed to blunder straight in and secure a last-minute table for two in a little Italian bistro, minutes after we'd unpacked; saving us from having to hurriedly improvise a meal with limited shopping options.

    Most of the rest of the time we just cruised around the city streets, feeding the ducks in the park, dipping into second-hand-book shops, cafe's and what proved to be an astonishingly well-stocked Gibson guitar dealer, where I ogled an array of the fancy new auto-mechanical-tuning robot guitars. I was particularly taken by the effect of the grimy, yet bright, winter sky reflecting off the mosaic-tile pools in the Garden of Remembrance.

    Dublin: Feb '09

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  7. 2009-06-02

    PatchMatch : A randomized correspondence algorithm for structural image editing.

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  8. 2009-04-27

    In Britain, butterflies are also on the wane. In the 19th century, they would flock in the wild in quantities sufficient to obscure your view. Now as populations dwindle , they're a rare treat.

    I've see a lot of encouraging signs of rehabilitated wildlife, as I wander round the green corridors of Bristol, walking that dog . We don't see many butterflies.

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  9. 2009-04-26

    I often travel with a laptop. I almost invariably travel with a charged mobile phone. I enjoy using the fancy multi-touch trackpad in my MacBook Pro, but an odd thing happens sometimes when I've put my phone down nearby on the desk; I reach automatically to try and use the phone as a computer mouse. One of those amusing peculiarities of muscle-memory and reflex that can surprise, when you're engaged by something, within the computer, verging upon a liminal state.

    It's a slightly amusing quirk, but when I think further about it, I find plenty of reasons why it perhaps ought to work.

    External mice are more useful than trackpads, although not enough use to me to justify carting one around. My phone is palm-sized, about the ideal weight, is already paired with my laptop over bluetooth, has clickable buttons all over one face, and an optical camera on the reverse. In short, it already has most of the technology needed to be a wireless optical mouse.

    Most but not all. I'm a bit dubious about whether it could be done in software alone. I doubt that the lens will focus well enough to motion tracking without a special surface, and it's completely lacking the light source, but it is almost tempting enough to try. It might be feasible with some sort of very recognisable surface, perhaps a monchrome checkerboard grid, which would be very easy to render and print.

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  10. 2009-04-21

    Baby pictures
    Strickland 2.0 announced. Late October launch.

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  13. 2009-03-03

    Macropinna microstoma , the barreleye fish has unusual tubular eyes which are extraordinarily good at harvesting light. Furthermore, it can rotate its eyeballs in order to see upwards through its transparent head shield.

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  15. 2009-02-07

    This year's Bristol Comics Expo is going to be held on the weekend of May 9th-10th. Aggravatingly this is the same weekend that I'm going to be away at ATP vs the fans .

    Even more annoyingly, this makes it the second year in a row that I'll miss it. Last year I gave up, after a few attempts to survive the stupidly arranged ticket purchasing queues. Prior to that, I'd managed to go to every single one since Bristol began hosting them , back in 1999 or so.

    Intriguingly, this year, the small press (usually the most interesting aspect of the festival, for me) is broken out into a separate event for some reason.

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  16. 2009-02-06


    • Porter airlines : the only way to fly.


    • A song about the Spadina bus


    • As I suspected, Toronto isn't even cold in the wintertime. Barely dipped below zero, the entire time I was there.


    • Apricot Weißbier, nicer than it ought to be.


    • Prevailing man-hipster fashion trend: Button cardigan, bushy beard, and oversized pseudo-religious pendantry


    • Guitar hero is more fun than I'd have thought.


    • The prehistoric Trypilian culture from the Ukraine, was one of the earliest neolithic civilizations


    • If you own a Birks watch, as I do, you can get it serviced and the battery changed for free at any Birks branch.



    • Do not place your nose into any unusual looking fixtures attached to bathroom walls.


    • Iroquois false face societies , and why you cannot see their masks in museums.


    • My karaoke version of ' In The Air Tonight ' was a surprise success, but perhaps even more suprisingly, my version of ' My Heart Will Go On ', placed me in the final three.

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  17. 2009-02-05

    While I was in Manhattan, I happened to wander past the window of Minamoto Kitchoan , a fancy boutique translation of a traditional japanese confectioners. I'm endlessly fascinated by japanese culture, especially the old-world; I have a pet theory that Japan and the UK are peculiar reflections of each other, there's a lot of cultural resonance, but it's all distorted into wonderfully strange shapes. Nevertheless, I was initially a little too intimidated to enter, as the store was devoid of customers, and the interior looked rather cold and formal. Luckily for me, Mrs S. egged me on enough to overcome my trepidation, and in I went.

    I'm not really experienced enough to count myself as even an amateur aficionado of japanese food, but I've eaten a fair bit, and their sweets are a rum affair; they're intended to please more than just a sweet tooth, designed as much to appeal to the eye, and offer textures to the palate. They tend not to be very sweet, and a large proportion of their construction would seem to be kidney beans. This does mean that they're better for you than many western sweets, I'd have thought. Far less fat and sugar.

    I wandered about the shop a little, it didn't seem like the staff spoke any useful English (this could have been my British accent, of course), but I managed to communicate a request through the universal language of pointing and nodding. Every addition to my shopping list was met by the kimono clad shop-girl with a charming sequence bowing and nodding - and then the whole order was packaged up beautifully in a box to take away.

    Here's what I bought.


    • Kohakukakanme (pickled plum in agar jelly, covered with flakes of real gold)

    • Kabochamanjyu (bean cakes, both shaped and flavoured like pumpkin)

    • Fukuwatashisenbei (a topographically curious biscuit)

    • Hanatsubomi (bean jelly in preserved lemon)





    I then ate them in installments, back at the hotel. They were all pretty good eating, probably the pickled plum made the most sense to my palate - not really too far away from a fruit cocktail. The Fukuwatashisenbei biscuit tasted almost exactly like a custard cream, but was rather awkward eating because of it's shape. The bean pastes are a little bit of an acquired taste, but faintly addictive.

    Japanese sweetshop


    The store is part of a chain, apparently there is a London branch, somewhere in Piccadilly.

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  18. 2020-01-14

    Intro - dreaming of millennia

    I can remember fairly clearly the first time I seriously tried to calculate the future . I was maybe ten years old, lying in bed and re-reading an issue of 2000 AD, and for the first time, I was puzzling over the idea that that title, intentionally and inherently futuristic, represented a real calendar date that would one day arrive, and somehow, calamitously render the name obsolete. I tried to figure out how old I would have to be by the time we reached this epoch, but as I recall, it was beyond my reckoning. It didn’t seem that likely I would live long enough for vengeful androids and routine interstellar travel, and yet even from 1977, the year 2000 seemed countable. And here I am, now, in 2020, A number that looks so impossibly, so implausibly of, from, and for the future my brain isnt really comfortable holding on to it. But first we must put away 2019. Here's my 2019 roundup, in something like 20 paragraphs.

    I rejoined social media:

    2018 I had a year off Twitter, feeling a bit exhausted by it all. It didn't really seem to make much difference. Now the Internet seemed to have invaded, occupied and consumed everything. Surveillance capitalism now so entrenched it was to be a regular part of mainstream think piece commentary. Network effects being what they are, It’s deluded and futile to make even token efforts to keep beyond these tracking networks, the reach is now such that secondary and tertiary associations will just link around you and pull you in anyway. So I bounced back onto Twitter, signed up for Instagram, and even rejoined Facebook-and rectivated Foursquare. I’m not particularly excited by any of them. At best, they represent a low friction way of posting light life updates, and it's nice to get reciprocal insights back about people I know, but don't see regularly. (And now I don't really see anyone regularly, so that’s a thing) It's fine, but we can do better. Ironically 2019 feels like the year everyone started to gently pull back from all this online sharing stuff. Ho hum.

    Gene Wolfe died

    Boo. Probably my favourite author, genre or otherwise. Age 87, which is by any account a splendid innings. A couple of personal resonances last year. I finally finished reading the “solar cycle”, which contains some of my most loved books. I started when I was fifteen, and I was just starting into the final volume when he died. And then the Folio Society issued a fairly exquisite luxury edition of his masterpiece, "The Book of the New Sun", signed, numbered and limited to 750 pieces, and which I somehow managed to discover and purchase before they sold out. I felt pretty decadent, and guilty about spending hundreds of pounds on a fancy copy of a book I already owned, but within weeks people were listing them on eBay for thousands, so maybe it was a wise investment? Anyway, Wolfe is amazing, and-if you havent read him, why not try? Start with the Fifth Head of Cerberus, I would.

    A Haircut:

    Untitled

    by the end of the year, I was bored of the hair, so it's all off again. I suspect the next time it grows back in may well be all white.

    An ASD diagnosis:

    No not me. We've basically known about it for a long time ourselves, and painfully been pursuing a diagnosis through the systems for literally years, but late in the year we obtained a professional diagnosis of ASD for number one child. Shock, relief, and lots to process for everybody, but a powerful sense of progress in a way that feels constructive and enabling, not reductive and labelling.

    Weddings x2:

    Here's a surprise ageing effect. Having got past "peer group wedding” season, and assuming weddings were all done I seem to have hit "generation below hits wedding season" season, and now weddings are a thing again. That's cool, I like weddings. This summer was two, both fancy AF. One in a cathedral, one in Cyprus. The latter was an Orthodox church service, which was quite unlike anything else I have previously experienced. Weddings are a pretty big deal in Cyprus.

    Castles:

    Castles

    Throughout 2019 we held a family membership to English Heritage, and as a result spent a few weekends wading around ancient English castles. There are quite a few spectacular examples In this part of the county, closest to the mainland (we can see France very with the naked eye most days). Dover is particularly astonishing. Pretty middle-aged, I guess. National Trust next?

    Photography:

    I've been getting gently back into using actual cameras for photography. Maybe inspired by instagram? Possibly just because my predilection for "alternative" smartphone operating systems lumbers me with dreadful quality camera software? Regardless, I have been having fun shooting things with real glass - on my much loved power shot GX9-2, which sadly caught some water damage on a recent trip to Malta and is still drying out four months later - but this gave me an excuse to upgrade it to a slightly larger slightly more posh Canon M100, which is more cumbersome and not quite as fun to use, but easily compensates for that in image quality and lower light performance. I don't even muck about with much manual selection, mostly plain automatic shooting, but I really enjoy something about the deliberation, and the ceremony, and having to actively curate, triage and extract the images off the camera in order to use them for anything. Mindfulness? Contrarianism? Whatever, Fun.

    Still in Folkestone:

    Yup. After quitting London to work remotely, we sold the big house, and shifted even further south to Folkestone, where I remain, the most mundane kind of digital nomad imaginable. I like it a lot. I was born by the sea, I grew up by, in and on the sea, and now, once again, I walk, with god, alongside the actual sea, most days. I've even gone in it to swim. Folkestone is my kind of town really - collapsing Victorian splendour, a harbour, vague touches of bohemia, light gentrification, that isn't trying too hard, and you can clearly see France most days, without effort, and that is something I will never not find mind-bendingly magical.. It does rain a bit too much, mind you.

    Dental surgery:

    2019 Was the year I finally gave up pretending I could largely ignore the pitifully untended state of my teeth. Actually, it was the teeth that made the decision for themselves. I have a pretty strong dental phobia (Maltese dentistry in the 1970's was not great), but by the middle of the year something was painfully not right in an area that had been slightly bothersome for years, and pain was escalating alarmingly. I still couldn't manage the appointment making myself, so thanks to my lovely wife, I ended up enrolled with a local private practice, and with a fairly gruesome diagnosis : -an impacted wisdom tooth had grown down into my jaw and accessed, destroying two molars, and threatening jaw damage. Surgical intervention was required, and due to my panic-stricken inability to co-operate, it was to be done under a still fairly Terrifyingly named process of "conscious sedation". That meant a referral, three months of waiting for a slot at a specialist clinic, and an almost constant diet of pain-killers in the interim (as well as two very uncomfortable, and strictly speaking forbidden, international flights) but eventually I got through it. The conscious sedative was one of the most surprising experiences I have ever had. Strapped into a chair in a small theatre, and attached to a drip, I remember a brief chat about consent, and then the next thing I remember I was in the passenger seat of the car on the way home, a mouth full of wadding, having entirely lost a couple of hours and a couple of teeth! I am left wondering if I was out for the operation, or if I have simply retained no memory of it, and what precisely is the dittoed between those two anyway? I find the very existence of this kind of instant blackout drugs and astonishing and implausible marvel. If It were a plot device in a fiction, I'd have scoffed at how completely unrealistic it was. So now I have a dentist, a treatment plan, no headaches, and two Fewer teeth. Lots more work needed, but it feels achievable. And I’ve experienced time-travel.

    Common Lisp@work:

    Love this one. My day job is still working at platform.sh, where we have a home grown container runtime that powers our "cloud" project. Cloud engineering is my team, and literally my first act in the job was to port one of my existing lisp web apps to the runtime as an experiment. Well, it turns out our VP of engineering is also a lisper, and we have ended up extending these experiments to building a couple of internal tools in SBCL, which are of course hosted on the platform. These proved useful enough to keep, and at that point, it started to make sense to productionize the lisp containers, so we can have a first class and maintainable build, rather than shoehorn a lisp install into a capable enough container. At which point there was no reason to not make this publicly available for customer projects, which we announced with a blog post, which was well recieved on the social platforms. I only had a tiny part in all of the above processes, but it is still one of the coolest things I have ever been involved with at work and remains a woeful reminder that I have a pretty cool job and work with a great team.

    A-Rank in Splatoon!:

    I adore Splatoon, Nintendo’s gloriously styled paint-em-up, online FPS. I’ve been playing it quite regularly since launch on the Wii U, and through into it's subsequent re-packaging as Splatoon 2 on the Switch. I love everything about the game, from the mechanics, which are well-considered and balanced, all the way through to the world-building and the whole skate-tween-punk cartoon fish aesthetic. I mostly play ranked, and although I wouldn't claim to be particularly good, 2019 was the year I finally sneaked A rank after years of trying. And not just once, but in a couple of categories (zones, tower, and rainmaker) Yes I realize this is because fewer people are still playing. What of it. I have a badge.

    TV:

    I watch a lot of TV. and I'm not ashamed of it. I know we're living through peak TV, but for me 2019 was a less than stellar year. Plenty of things, I probably should like, I just didn't. I dont have much appetite for "The Apprentice" anymore, although it can still deliver hilariously awful situations from its contrived casting. “Fleabag” annoyed me almost as much as it charmed. Star Trek regularly sent me to sleep (love the art direction still). The concluding series or Mr Robot was great, I've thoroughly enjoyed that whole run, but it was time to sign off. "Homecoming" wasn't quite so great, but it worked. I think my favorite show from last year would have to be discovering “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” on Netflix (awful title. do try to get past the title) - Super-smart, subversive , unpredictable, bingeable, engaging, and great music. I was already a huge Adam Schlesinger fan, and now I guess I'm a Rachel Bloom fan too. So many earworms. Bring back old Greg!

    Books:

    I suck at reading, these days I know it's a common modern Iffliction. I have been trying to make an effort. I finished the Gene Wolfe Solar books, as I mentioned earlier, but otherwise 2019 was not so great. According to my Goodreads account (doesn't capture everything but it's fairly accurate) , I only managed nineteen books, some of which I can't even remember reading. Aside from Wolfe, I think my high points would have to be "The Peripheral" and "Ingenious Pain" . 2020 we have a sequel to "The Peripheral" due, as well as the final installment of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell books and I'm going to do better. Im trying to do ten minutes entirely focused reading a day this year. Going well so far (2 books finished already)

    Movies:

    I'm still struggling here as well, although we do a weekly family movie night, I still rarely get to the cinema. I did make it to see “Rise of Skywalker" and this I did manage to see every Star Wars movie on initial cinema release. I'm afraid the most enthusiasm I can find about that is that I’m glad it's done. Similarly, on the other franchise I finally got up to date with Marvel by reaching “Avengers: Endgame" on streaming, and I'm mostly happy to be able to say “OK, this can stop”. The kids got into Harry Potter, having reached that sort of age, and so I also belatedly got to the end of those, and my goodness they're bad. Things, I actively liked- “Lady Bird”, Netflix's "Annihilation" was superb, and my favourite was probably "Sword of Trust". And on Xmas Eve I decided to watch an ancient favourite, "Lair of the White Worm" which I enjoyed revisiting so much, I may make it into a Xmas tradition from now on. Ken Russell(I) is my man.

    A New kitchen:

    Our kitchen seemed to be in relatively good shape when we bought the house, but it had a conservatory attached to where the back door ought to be, which although it made for a lovely sense of light and space was punishingly cold in the winter. So we decided to get a glazed back door fitted between. And then we found rotting wallpaper trapped behind the kitchen units over damp plaster, and decided to get a nicer fitted kitchen while addressing that. And then we discovered a water leak running down the back wall. And then a cascade of horrors, including a lintel-free window, a removed chimney being held up by what looked like a nail through an old chair leg, three layers of wall cladding, and perhaps most excitingly, several rotten joists not doing the greatest job of keeping the upstairs upstairs. Cue months of no kitchen, stripping everything back to brick, jacking up the roof, replacing beams, dry lining everything. and then potting in a kitchen back on top. And now we have a back door. And quite a nice kitchen. And far less money.

    Malta & Cyprus:

    Two Foreign holidays? I already mentioned my friend's magical destination wedding earlier, but by way of attending we got to spend almost a Week, without children, (thanks, Grandma!) in a pretty swanky hotel in Limassol. Cyprus is hot in the summer, and I say that as someone quite used to heat. So I ended up doing something I have never done before, and just hung out poolside, reading, and swimming and being waited on. And that was just great. And Despo came by to visit, which was a lovely coincidence. Then, a couple of months later we all went to hang out in another resort hotel, but this time in Qawra , in a Family oriented holiday complex. That's the first time we've done significant overseas travel as a family, also the first time I've been back in Malta in almost a decade. I enjoyed the opportunity to show the girls a little of the sense of what Malta is like, and I stole away for a poignant solo visit back to my old home town, my last opportunity to do it as a full EU citizen.

    Hal-Balzan 2019

    Softwares:

    I am feeling quite out of love with computers and software, and especially the flipping internet and the incessant noise bubble of the tech industry. At the moment, I'm afraid to say, outside of work (work is cool, as mentioned already) I’m not really indulging in very much computering. A brief spurt of activity on a secret, not yet abandoned, but not yet revisited project, at the start of the year, and then nothing really - a few isolated sessions of hacking on the software for this site which only really focused on infra things and build chains - I guess I have a useable flow for generating 32 bit ARM debs from Common Lisp applications, but that's more bureaucracy and housekeeping than hacking, and even I don’t find it that enthralling. And most of my infrastructure is still a mess after moving. Maybe 2020 I'll find a way to relight the spark. Maybe I'm done ? Seems unlikely, but I’m not inspired.

    I love my new shaver:

    On a more positive technology note, I did fall severely in love with a piece of consumer electronics. I finally lost patience with my Philips rotary head shaver, after years of dissatisfaction and overspending on replacement foils and cutting heads that never really helped much. Not really knowing where to turn to for advice, I tried the wire cutter, something I’m a little wary of trusting and I picked up a Braun series 7 during Black Friday month at amazon.co.uk, and no exaggeration, It has COMPLETELY CHANGED MY LIFE. I am competely astonished at the ease of use, enthralled by the consistency of the result, and enraptured by the sense of considered Germanic engineering that exudes from every aspect. I love this thing and it makes me happy while I am using it.

    No music:

    I am barely listening to anything. Some of it is because I've barely strung my music library infrastructure back together after relocating. Some of it’s because I'm too old and boring and middle aged. Some of it's because I still don't have a subscription to a streaming service, and some of it's just because I think I have just lost the habit of it. I have been playing guitar much more in the past 12 months than in previous years, and l am flirting with writing and recording a little bit more again. 2019 though, is a solid musical wash-out.

    iOS WTF:

    I know! I'm back on (an) iPhone after YEARS away. Actually, I jumped via an iPad first. I’ve been enjoying this fanciful idea of multiple, task-specific devices, and I wondered about splitting the non-coding, computer things away from my laptop and I thought I'd give an iPad mini a try-out as a general-purpose 'personal' computing device; Apps, email, browsing, etc. It was a mixed success- I use it for some things way more than I expected I would, it is basically the only way I do email now, I have used it to write the entirety of this blog post. (by hand, with a pencil!), and a bit less for others (I had a quixotic notion that I'd finally get everything organised into digital calendaring but I still remain a barely calendared human) Overall though, I likes it. It’s very reliable, I’d say it’s a slightly more useful thing than it appears to be on the surface, and a slightly less capable thing than it appears in the advertisements. I'm quite happily onboarded now though, to the point that I feel comfortable treating it as the primary device / silo for certain categories of things. So much so that when I hit a patch of phone trouble with my Sony Xperia 2 running /e/ (This year I have bounced between Lineage, /e/ and SailfishOS in my continuing adventures in alternative phone systems) I decided to dust off an almost dead iPhone 6S and give it a try. And, it's fine. Fine enough that I refurbished the battery myself, which cost fifteen pounds, and was surprisingly straightforward and kept going. Several months on, I'm still using it. Although not all that much. I think one of the side effects of moving more of my "app stuff" over to the iPad is that I'm not really using my phone for anything much these days beyond light social networking, messaging and podcasts. Oh yeah , and Apple Pay everywhere! I love Apple Pay almost as much as I love my electric Shaver. It is quite peaceful not having to care about whether my phone is working or not when I need to take a call.

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  19. 2009-02-02

    So much for my new year resolution to write more often.

    Just before I went away for Christmas, my trusty white MacBook had developed a bit of a problem with it's keyboard. Initially this manifested as the function keys intermittently losing the ability to switch between special Mac control keys, such as brightness, eject media and what-not and normal user-programmable f -keys. Initially I thought this may be a problem with the fn key that is the toggle, but eventually the keys f1 - f9 stopped working entirely. This was irritating, but didn't really render the machine unuseable. Most of the time I use it with an external keyboard, and luckily all the defunct keys functions were duplicated in software.

    The next key to go was the right Shift key. Although, of course there's a left Shift key, for a touch-typist, this was a little harder to ignore. Although I find much to admire about Apple's current laptop keyboard design, unfortunately user-repairability isn't one of its many blessings. There's no simple way to get into the top casing on a polycarbonate MacBook, it's an expensive specialist job for a service centre.

    Sensibly I'd followed my own advice when I purchased this laptop, and bought it from the always-wonderful John Lewis with their standard two-year full warranty on electrical goods. I was coming up very close to the two-year anniversary, which fell within the first week of January, itself another lucky stroke, as it meant that I'd be able to take it with me on my trip to North America , where hopefully it would hold up well enough to let me edit photos, communicate, and act as an additional entertainment for any idle moments. It managed the job fine, and as soon as I was back in the U.K. I packed it off to John Lewis for maintenance, which is something that they arranged with their usual attention to customer service. More thumbs up for John Lewis.

    Which left me Mac-less, save for my rather under-spec G4 mini, which can barely read mail and a web-page at the same time, under Leopard. And so no blogging.

    The two year mark was also my planned point for a new machine upgrade. Buying a machine for work, I was able to take advantage of the Apple Developer Program hardware discount. Sadly this means abandoning John Lewis to purchase direct, but now we've got a real Apple Store in Bristol , I think AppleCare is probably a good deal.

    I figured I'd be needing a machine with better graphics hardware, to better make advantage of the already signposted future directions in OS X technology. The new 'unibody' Macbooks didn't really suit, as I've probably got as many firewire devices as USB. Also, my recent work had been feeling the strains of my Macbook's 13" screen and modest integrated graphics chipset. And so I'm typing this update from my new 2.8GHz, 15.4" MacBook Pro .

    It's mostly a great upgrade. On the positive side, it's pretty and slim, and I'm remembering just how right the 15" widescreen form is for me. The screen is brighter than anything I've ever seen, and makes other LCD displays, including my expensive monitor look washed out and dull by comparison. The new glass front is dramatically easier to clean than any laptop screen I've owned. The extra-large button-free trackpad is brilliant, and even the gimmicky sounding gestures have proven to be almost practical enough for regular use. The unibody shell seems rigid and light, and bringing across the now-standard Apple keyboard hardware makes a brilliant switch from the old silver PowerBook G4 style, which I frankly hated. It's super-fast, of course; the new CPU, memory bandwidth, and fast hard drive all combining to ensure that as yet, I've not seen any performance stalls when many simultaneous processes grow busy.

    It's not perfect of course. Some of the positives are also negatives. The glass fronted screen is considerably more reflective than the previous gloss models, and while in practice I find that I mostly mind this far less than I'd have thought, it's undeniably worse than my gloss MacBook.

    Then there are more straightforwardly negative negatives. Like many people, I've found trouble with the Apple mini DisplayPort to DVI connector - the integrated NVidea 9400 graphics adaptor can't drive my 23" TFT without sparkly artefacts, I have to run it through the additional 9600 GT GPU to get a useful picture. It's too pretty, in as much as it makes me fret about the wear and tear that will inevitably mar its looks over time; surely computers should be tools not jewellery? It's slightly heavier than a MacBook, and the battery life is probably less, it's too hard to say, the calibration as yet seems to be a bit iffy with estimates. I miss the inbuilt LED charge gauges on the battery which allowed one to check the power without having to connect the battery up, so handy when travelling with two or more. I also miss the ports on the left hand side, and find the supplied ports a bit stingy; surely they could have squeezed a couple more USB slots and a firewire 400 in somewhere? I'm not sure I need a wired ethernet anymore.

    Not only that, but shortly after I'd ordered it, Apple saw fit to announce an update to the polycarbonate MacBook line, giving it a memory bus and GPU boost to inject some of the performance I was lacking, and keeping the essential firewire port in place. And then they announced iLife '09 would ship a mere handful of days after my new machine was dispatched. I think I'll still enjoy all the other Pro upgrades though, and they did offer recent purchasers like me the chance to upgrade the iLife suite for just a nominal cost.

    Overall I'm happy, and I'm sure all the wrinkles will be ironed out, as I adjust to life with it. It ought to keep me in the manner to which I'm accustomed for the next couple of years, at least. What was that they said about never buying the first iteration of a new Apple product line? Oh.

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  20. 2009-01-04


    • Less reading blogs

    • More writing blogs

    • Release more software

    • No more sugar, sweets, confectionary (free pass for tea, if I can't manage that plain)

    • No coffee

    • More politeness

    • Less judgement



    There's some lofty goals there. Let's see how well I fare. An important thing to remember about giving things up, which I learnt when quitting my oodles-of-fags-a-day smoking habit, is that a lapse shouldn't mean that you just abandon the effort. Some of them are obviously aspirational, and need to be viewed as a progression, not a destination.

    I have a few more, given that I'm such a fan of self-improvement, but I won't share everything.

    Last year my only public resolution was to stop drinking alcohol, and that lasted three months, until I got very bored of it. I don't think I have a drinking problem yet.
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  21. 2018-03-29

    I am typing this onto a phone, on a station platform, squinting at the early morning light. It is damp on the ground. Many birds, still excited enough by the recent dawn, and cheered on by the imminent Spring, are loudly singing in their particular competitions.I have been awake since stupid o' clock. I am a commuter, I have a headache, and I have a back-ache, and I am tired.

    I have been doing this routine, or a near variation of it for the last seven or eight years. It's been very useful. I have been privileged enough to afford to maintain a whacking great family home, in a comfortable part of Kent, and shuttle back and forth to the big smoke, and taken my parts, minor and significant, in various start-up and scale-up companies, some doomed, some successful, almost all of them great fun, inside London's burgeoning 'tech scene'.

    As of today, I am done. Today is my last commute.

    Now on the train, speeding toward Cannon Street. By some miracle of kindness, this train, frequently delayed, often truncated, usually rammed to the gunwales with the pissed-off, the late, the drooling snorers, the dextrous make-up applicators, the slightly terrifying morning Stella drinkers, arrived on time, and half-empty, and I have a seat, with a half-table. Airline seating, but nobody is pinning me in with an arse much larger than the mean spirited seating budget. Somebody up there likes me.

    "When a man is tired of London, he's tired of life", as the hoary old paraphrased proverb would have it. I'm not tired of life. I don't even think I'm tired of London. I haven't finished exploring it yet. I would like to do a bit more life, and a bit less dull routine. Recently, it's all been feeling a bit repetitive, and formulaic, and stale, and not really me. It feels like the right time to make some changes.

    I suppose 2018 seems to be my year for quitting things, from the outside. Over here I'm less sure of that. Change can be healthy, and constructive. A chaos wizard binds disorder and fluid energies into tools of power, after all. I don't believe in mid-life crises. I do believe in making the most you can from out of what you have. That's how the magic works.

    We're bang in the middle of selling the house. Planning to move further out, to the coast. I shall miss London, but only in the way I missed it when I left before, twenty-five years ago, perhaps more. That was opening a chapter onto great and marvellous things. This time will also. I'm sure I will be back. Meanwhile, I'm saying goodbye, at least for now.

    Now just pulling in to London Bridge. I like the Shard. It wasn't even a thing when we first moved here. Scenes change, always. Exciting.

    Cannon Street. One last day in the office. That's the end of my first, and probably last, ever live-blogged commute. A great run. That could not have gone better. I call that a perfect ending.

    Laters!

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  22. 2008-12-25

    Merry Christmas one and all! We decided to get away from it all this year, and are therefore in New York city. It is tremendously Christmassy.

    Heading to Toronto tomorrow to visit with the Lyles, back to New York for New Year's Eve (where we've a choice between two pre-booked parties to make - option a: Times Square, formal-ish dinner and comedy, option b: Tribeca, trendy club with cool bands playing). Back in the U.K. the day after.

    Here are some of the photos I've taken, so far.

    NYC Christmas

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  23. 2018-03-24

    I stumbled across a reference to the RMS Mülheim, and ended up in a wiki-hole. This German cargo ship was wrecked at Land's End in 2003, in apparently bizarre circumstances.

    On investigation, it was discovered that the chief officer—who had been on watch at the time—had caught his trousers in the lever of his chair when trying to get up, causing him to fall and rendering him unconscious."

    This brings to mind those periodic surveys about accidents in the home, wherein you learn that something inauspicious, like the toothbrush, is a significant factor in a majority of domestic fatalities. When I looked into it a little more, I did notice that trousers are involved in a surprising number of domestic incidents. In this article from 2001, they get the blame for 6000 accidents a year.

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  24. 2008-12-19

    How can I tell ? I've bought him his own duvet.

    I'm heroically committed to a program for keeping the dog off the majority of the household furniture. My strategy is thus; I have one (wipe clean!) sofa I don't actively discourage him from clambering on. The majority of the time, he sleeps on this overnight, even though to my eyes his basket seems as if it would more comfortable.

    When the wintertime arrives, and the nights get colder, he's not so keen on an unadorned sofa. I can tell this because he starts to seek out nesting opportunities in more upholstered regions. The way that I combat this is to pile up a few cheap throws or blankets on the permitted sofa, which gives him something to nest in. Of course, the actual, correct, dog-basket is padded, upholstered, lined with welcoming cushions and blankets, and positioned in front of a good radiator, but somehow none of that seems to matter. It's all about perceived status with dogs, and so far as he's concerned, sofas are extremely swanky real estate.

    To try and keep the winter sofa throws looking less manky after a couple of nights, I've tended to buy woollen ones. Light coloured rough wool doesn't show up the dog hairs so badly. In my heart, I think that I'll source them from local charity shops, but in practice they never seem to have anything suitable, so usually I end up buying them from shops, as cheaply as I can manage. Every once in a while, if they're looking particularly tired, I recycle the blankets in the rag box. The rough fibres are a too successful hair-trap; I wouldn't consider letting them near my washing-machine's expensive German filters, and I'm too lazy to clean them by hand. Then I buy some fresh ones, and restart the whole cycle.

    Which leads into the current ridiculous state. IKEA is a particularly useful source of very cheap and fairly durable blankets, and it's only a few minutes walk down the road. This time I was wondering about experimenting with something a bit more sustainable, a fabric I could more easily clean, using our wonderful new VAX , with it's miracle pet-hair removal tool (which is actually the stripped floorboard tool I think, the 'pet' edition of the same cleaner was more money for the same suction).

    I strode around a spookily empty IKEA (daytime, recession, Christmas panic shoppers busy elsewhere, wonderful!) trying to decide between a handful of different less-than-a-fiver options. I was suddenly flummoxed to encounter pile of somewhat rudimentary, lightweight double duvets selling for £2.78. A preposterous new plan quickly formed.

    And so I bought a duvet for my dog. We put a cover on it from our store of past-it's-best bed-linen, and arranged it on the sofa. He seems very happy with it, but I can't help feeling some sort of key principle of domestic husbandry has been roundly subverted.


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