I caught a classic bit of the Today programme this morning. They had Falim Khoury (the head barman at the Savoy Hotel) shaking cocktails for everyone, and it was fairly evident from the general level of merriment that a certain amount of actual drinking was going on. Poor Charlotte Green had to try to read the news with sounds of shaking cocktails in the background, and she got a serious case of the giggles. The cocktail in question was a ‘Corpse Reviver’—she evidently needed an anti-corpse reviver to stop her corpsing. In the end, she had to wheeze, “Stop it, Jim!”. I assume that he was making faces at her and making it even worse.

Even if you didn’t start your celebrations quite that early, have a good time tonight, and I hope that you do a lot of giggling.

Since I’ve got a bit of spare time over the holidays, I’ve been trying to sort out my collection of digital photos and inspire myself to take some better images. I’ve had iView Media for a while now (I got a cheap upgrade from a version bundled with Toast), but I hadn’t got around to really investigating the new version.

It’s one of those bits of software which is simple to use without reading the manual, but has a lot of hidden power. Adding images to the catalogue is easy via drag and drop, or you can import images directly from a digital camera. There’s a lot of scope for batch processing files to rename them, resize or convert them, or to add metadata like the location, event, caption or category. Furthermore, you can add your own custom fields (I have ‘camera’ to distinguish shots taken with different cameras, and ‘quality’ to sort out the good shots from the duffers). Moving or copying files within the application is also very easy, so you can sort out the whole digital workflow without having to go to the Finder.

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I thought that I might do a quick round up of the past week or so. Mr. Bsag and I went to my parents’ place for Christmas, and we’re off to Mr. Bsag’s parents are next weekend. Such is the cost of marriage: two sets of parents to keep happy over the holidays. Anyway, we had a very cheery time, even though it was a bit of a brief visit.

We visited a local pub which Mr. Bsag had seen advertised in the CAMRA newsletter, and we thought was a Belgian beer bar. It turned out that—in a slightly hurried reading—we had mistaken ‘Belgian-style beer menu’ for ‘Belgian beer bar’. So it wasn’t quite what we were expecting, but with a wide range of Harvey’s ales on tap and in bottles, and with a very friendly publican (who gave us an unsolicted free diary when we left), we had a good time. A group at a table across from us were making good use of the jukebox, but the results weren’t always to our liking. Mr. Bsag decided that he would choose a few tracks to redress the balance, so we waited for his selections to come around. As soon as the first bars of that 1980’s hit “Down Under” by Men At Work came on, an extensively tattooed member of this group yelled out, “Who put this bollocks on? Wasn’t me!” We tried to arrange our faces into convincing ‘we didn’t put it on’ expressions, and slid down under the table slightly. Mr. Bsag claimed that he must have hit the wrong number. Likely story…

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It’s Christmas, so it must be time for another Lord of the Rings film! We’ve just got back from seeing Return of the King, and we are still stretching out our cramped legs. Overall, I think it was a fantastic film–indeed, the whole trilogy has been superb. Naturally, some bits have been left out, other bits aren’t as you imagined from the books (can anyone take Elrond seriously?), but it would have been impossible to make the films into everyone’s vision of the book. Peter Jackson did a wonderful job. Even the long battle scenes–which bored me rigid in the books (on both readings)–were exciting and spectacular. Some of the problems with the films are in fact problems with the book, most notably Tolkien’s almost complete lack of plausible female characters. There wasn’t much that Jackson could do about that.

While watching the battle scene at Minas Tirith, you suddenly think, “Flamin’ Nora! Look at all those CGI troops–they’re all doing something different!” But you don’t think that right away–it only occurs to you when you realise that there probably aren’t that many people in the whole of New Zealand, so most of those combatants must be pixels.

Despite the fact that I loved the film, there were still plenty of scenes to take the mickey out of. So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on a couple of the more ludicrous passages (some spoilers may be involved, though if you’ve read the book, it won’t come as much of a surprise).

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I’m going to take a short break from blogging over the holiday, so I hope you all have a relaxing break from work—however you choose to celebrate (or not celebrate) the season.

I watched a very good documentary yesterday, based on the book “Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. It was a very interesting glimpse at Galileo’s character (the word ‘arrogant’ springs to mind), and the rather touching relationship he shared with his illegitimate daughter, Maria Celeste who had been cloistered in a convent since the age of 13. It’s slightly frustrating, because while her letters to Galileo have been preserved, his to her haven’t survived—probably because the convent was a bit wary of keeping letters from a convicted heretic. Maria’s letters reveal a woman with a very lively mind, who was in as much of a prison as her father—perhaps a worse one, as the physical conditions were so harsh in the convent. She suffered a lot of ill health and died terribly young in her mid-thirties.

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This is just a quick entry for my CD of the week, as I’ve recently mentioned this particular piece of music before. It’s also unusual for me to cover singles, but this is a very honourable exception. When Caitlin mentioned that this single might just beat the legions of shoddy cover versions and excruciating pop pap to the Christmas number one slot, I immediately went out and searched for the single. After a bit of hunting, I found a copy, so I’d like to think that I’ve played some tiny part in its success. I’ve just heard that it has made it—’Mad World’ is number one for Christmas.

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Somebody (I’m afraid that I can’t remember who, and can’t seem to find the entry concerned) mentioned the O’Reilly Unix CD Bookshelf in the comments on an entry a little while ago. I couldn’t afford the full priced version, but I managed to find a used copy on Amazon. It was sold by Alibris, and only set me back £10 including postage from the States—bargain!

It arrived a couple of days ago, and I’m really impressed by how O’Reilly have implemented the CD bookshelf. You get 7 whole books in HTML format on a CD (I’ve copied the files to my hard drive for convenience), plus a book fashioned in genuine paper for good measure. In this collection, you get ‘Unix in a Nutshell, 3rd edition’ as your paper book, and all sorts of goodies in HTML format, including ‘Learning the vi Editor’, and ‘Mac OS X for Unix Geeks’—yay! The HTML versions are very well laid out, with lots of links to jump between chapters or books, and a very neat search page which will find stuff in any of the books. This is actually a huge advantage over paper books, as is the ability to copy and paste useful bits of code straight from the text. But you can’t read it in the bath, unless you are very, very careful (or you have more money than sense).

I have one slight niggle, though. In these days of on-demand publishing, I would have thought that it would be possible for customers to select which seven titles they would like in their CD Bookshelf from a small range of books on that topic. For example, in my CD Bookshelf, there’s a copy of ‘Learning the Korn Shell’, but I would have preferred Learning the bash Shell. Of course, for £10, I’m really being picky here, but if I had paid full price, a little more flexibility would be very welcome. Either way, I’ve got lots of lovely geeky reading in store over the holidays.

I wanted to mention the cinema where we saw ‘Être et Avoir’ yesterday—the Ulitmate Picture Palace. This cinema (know locally as the ‘UPP’) has had a number of previous incarnations, the most recent of which was the ‘Penultimate Picture Palace’, or PPP. I don’t know what they will name it if the current owners sell up—they haven’t really left a great deal of wiggle room with the ‘Ultimate’ tag.

The UPP is a funny cinema. It’s pretty old, and is in the pre-multiplex style, with a single, largish screen. There’s no foyer, and no popcorn, fizzy drinks or ice cream—it’s a case of ‘bring your own’. You buy your tickets from a tiny kiosk outside the cinema. The tickets themselves are the kind of numbered tickets you get at village fetes for the raffle, but I don’t suppose that they get hordes of people trying to get in without paying. The UPP always seems on the point of financial and structural collapse. Wise people keep their coats and gloves on in the winter months (there doesn’t seem to be any kind of heating), the paint is peeling, and the upholstery is rather torn. There’s a lingering smell of damp, and films are often accompanied by the sound of a tap dripping somewhere. I once saw the film ‘Salmonberries¹’ there, which was set in Alaska, and it was like having some kind of virtual reality system—I actually felt as if I was in Alaska.

So why do people go to the place? Well, they have an eclectic and adventurous programme of films, with all kinds of independent, foreign and just plain wacky films, as well as more mainstream offerings a few months after their first release. And it has character—it’s not some corporate chain which tries to extract the maximum amount of cash from its customers by flogging them snacks and inflicting endless adverts on them. You go to the UPP to watch films—end of story.

¹ An excellent film staring kd lang about a foundling in Alaska passing herself off as a man to work in the mines, and falls for an East German woman who befriends her.

p. We went to see a film called “Être et Avoir”:http://chipsquaw.free.fr/etreetavoir/index2uk.html last night. Directed (and filmed, I think) by Nicolas Philibert, it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary following half a year in the life of school teacher Georges Lopez. He looks after a dozen or so children—ranging from 3 to 11 years old—in a single class as the sole teacher (known as classe unique in France, where it is apparently quite common in rural areas). The film was refreshingly different from the average ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary for three reasons:

Even though it was a very intimate portrait of both the children and the teacher, it never felt voyeuristic.

It didn’t appear to have any kind of agenda or message—the events were presented very simply and the film maker was an observer, rather than a commentator.

The director really took his time with the shots. Not for him the currently popular nausea-inducing camera work and jumpy edits; every shot was unhurried and allowed you to just watch, in much more detail than you otherwise might. There was one long cut of fir trees being buffeted in a bitter blizzard which went on for minutes on end, which made me realise that I haven’t really looked at something like that in a long time, and that it was stunningly beautiful.

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I chickened out of cycling in today because of the frost, so I got the bus. The company that runs our route has finally splashed out on some new buses. When I got on, I commented to the driver that I liked the shiny new vehicle. She grimaced and said “I don’t - I’m scared of breaking it!”. When we passed another driver on the route, he gave a ‘Royal wave’ (index finger loosely extended, rotating the wrist) to say, “Ooo, get you with your posh Mercedes-Benz bus - you won’t be wanting to talk to us commoners in the canteen.”

I don’t know if anyone will find this interesting, but in the spirit of looking over someone’s shoulder and seeing what they’ve got in their Dock, I thought that I would list a few of my favourite Palm applications.

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In the interests of counting my blessings…

1. I’ve just finished two days of interviewing prospective undergraduates. This is surprisingly hard work. If you’re at all empathic, the fog of nervousness exuded by the students starts to seep into your pores. It took a session with my iPod playing Magnetic Fields at an unwisely high volume on the way home to expunge the feeling.
2. Our beloved iMac is back home with a shiny new keyboard¹, and a shiny new video card. I can’t believe how much we missed it, particularly for recording programmes off Radio 4 to listen to later.

Reasons to be slightly worried, 1…

1. I’ve got to get two grant applications submitted before Christmas.

¹ Mr. Bsag is under orders to not allow tea to come within 5m of the iMac, or there’ll be trouble…

p. You might want to read “Part 1(The first part of this story, obviously)”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000549.html before you start this entry. Or perhaps you don’t like linear narratives, in which case, read them in any order you like.

p. The other main activity on our field trip was small mammal trapping and radio-tracking. One of the best ways of estimating the population of animals that spend much of their time hiding, or being otherwise rather inaccessible, is a ‘mark-recapture’ scheme. The theory goes something like this:

• you set out your traps on a grid of known area and check them regularly for animals (all the traps are filled with warm bedding and food so that the trapped animal has a pleasant stay in the trap hotel)
• when you catch an animal, you mark it (in our case by carefully clipping an small patch of fur in a unique pattern)
• at the end of your trapping period, you put the total number of animals trapped, the number of animals you marked, and the number of recaptures into a “big, scary equation(see near the bottom of the page for the equations)”:http://srmwww.gov.bc.ca/risc/pubs/tebiodiv/hares/hacoml20-05.htm
• what you should end up with is some estimate for the population size in that area

p. This is all well and good, but our grid of traps was laid out on a 45° slope. All we could use to grapple our way up this slope were the wild garlic plants growing there. I can’t recommend wild garlic as a secure anchoring point, and if you add in the additional difficulty of holding on for dear life to the garlic with one hand, and holding a trap containing a small rodent with the other, it becomes very tricky indeed. We also had to go through this procedure very early in the morning, which meant that we went in for breakfast reeking of garlic. Then there was the ‘Rodent Roulette’…

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p. This is a great alternative rendering of the map of the [“London Underground(By Cory Doctorow at Craphound)”:http://craphound.com/images/tubemap.jpg]. Many years ago, I used to go out with a guy who lived in Ongar, so I have painful memories of the weeks it seemed to take to get from central London to deepest, darkest Essex on the Tube. Once—on a return trip—a drunk man fell asleep on my shoulder somewhere around [“Theydon Bois(Theydon Bois Village Web Site)”:http://www.theydon.org.uk/]. In typical British fashion, I was too embarrassed to move somewhere else and wake him up.

[via BoingBoing]