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This was a birthday present (well, bought with birthday money, but it amounts to the same thing). I’m a huge fan of Lisa Gerrard, as I’ve mentioned before, so I was keen to get her new album with Patrick Cassidy. It’s a very spiritual album, with many of the tracks taking their lyrics or theme from religious works. There’s a version of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic (’Abwoon’), a prayer carved into the choir stalls of the Church of San Damiano in Assisi (’Psallit in Aure Dei’), and the feel of the whole album is reflective and reverential. For an atheist/agnostic, I’m strangely drawn to religious music of all denominations. I might not share the Faith, but I’m drawn to the passion (with a small ‘p’) and serenity embodied in religious music.

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Nobody writes like PG Wodehouse. I’m reading Piccadilly Jim at the moment (on my Treo–very convenient for those moments when you find yourself without a book), and this absolute gem made me laugh out loud. The eponymous man-about-town is recovering on the sofa after a night of rather ill-advised high jinks, and talking to his butler, Bayliss:

“You know, Bayliss,” said Jimmy thoughtfully, rolling over on the couch, “life is peculiar, not to say odd. You never know what is waiting for you around the corner. You start the day with the fairest prospects, and before nightfall everything is as rocky and ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon. Why is this, Bayliss?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

I have absolutely no idea what “ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon” might mean, but it’s a phrase to roll around your mouth like fine wine, and to employ when the occasion demands.

This is an embarrassing post to write, because if there’s one thing I find awkward, it’s blowing my own trumpet. However, I’m in need of work contacts, so I’ll prepare my embouchure…

About a month ago, in response to my rather anguished plea for career suggestions, several people suggested technical authoring. I thought it was a pretty good idea, so I did a bit of research. It was clear that having some kind of portfolio (in addition to this weblog) would help me a lot, so I decided to see if I could persuade a shareware developer to let me write a manual for free, in return for using the result as a portfolio piece.

As luck would have it, that very day I stumbled on a fantastic piece of software, which didn’t yet have any documentation–Quicksilver. The developer, Nicholas, accepted my offer, so I’ve been hard at work writing the thing for a few weeks. Quicksilver is proving to be very popular, and the clamor for documentation became so loud that we decided to release the manual in its somewhat unfinished form, alongside the new Beta version of the software. The past few days have therefore been very hectic, but fun.

So, I present the Quicksilver Manual: written by yours truly, edited by Nicholas. It’s not perfect, and it’s not finished, so be gentle with me. I’d love some constructive criticism, though–if anyone can be bothered to read it. And if by some slim chance you happen to be a developer looking to hire a technical author, then do get in touch.

Nicholas came up with a really cool job title for me: Lead Documentrix. I love it–apt, funny and ever-so-slightly saucy. I’m thinking of getting a T-shirt made. So, if you’re contacting me about technical authoring, the address to use is: documentrix [at] rousette [dot] org [dot] uk.

Oh, and it’s my birthday today (thanks to David for the very observant birthday wishes)…

…or in my case, shuffle forward. I hate the day that the clocks go forwards–I feel cheated out of an hour of sleep, even if I go to bed an hour early the night before, and I feel out of sorts all day. It didn’t help that I had a project to finish (for some value of ‘finish’) and consequently had a lot to get done today.

I much prefer Autumn, with the clocks going backwards. Still, you can’t do that at both ends of the year–it just wouldn’t work, would it? I’m too tired to think about it.

There was a ridiculous piece on the Today Programme this morning about the University of Oxford offering cycle training to its staff (which they have been doing for a while, actually). The spin was that Dons on bicycles were terrorizing pedestrians and riding dangerously. Edward Stourton asked in a rather jovial way if Oxford academics weren’t clever enough to work out how to ride a bike on their own.

Sometimes the quality of journalism really gets me down. The University introduced the courses as part of a very sensible initiative of try go get staff to abandon their cars and cycle to work instead. They even have some Brompton folding bikes to loan staff who need of travel on the train as part of their job. They knew that many people are put off cycling in Oxford because of the traffic, and worry about the safety of being on a bike in the centre of town. So they introduced the courses as a way of giving staff–whose cycle skills might be a bit rusty–the confidence to hold their own on the road, and to be aware of potential dangers and avoid them.

Later in the programme they reported a rather angry email from a listener (an Oxford Don) who was outraged about the slur on academics’ cycling skills. He pointed out that it’s usually the students who are hurtling the wrong way down a one-way street when they are late for lectures, rather than the academics as Edward Stourton suggested. In a rather wonderful turn of phrase, the listener said that the lecturer is usually in the lecture theatre “cooling his heels” (note the ‘his’) waiting for the students to turn up.

I heard a fantastic Afternoon Play on Radio 4 this afternoon–’The Bards of Bromley’, by Perry Pontac. The conceit was that a number of famous writers have turned up for a writer’s workshop in Bromley, to discuss their most popular literary works: George Eliot (“Middlemarch”), William Wordsworth (“Daffodils”), August Strindberg (Dance of Death), Goethe (Faust) and AA Milne (Piglet Meets a Heffalump). That’s a pretty good start for a comic drama right there.

Wordsworth makes friends with AA Milne and takes some ‘tincture’ given to him by Coleridge (a bad idea), Strindberg tries to seduce George Eliot, and Goethe just says “Nein!” a lot. Everyone rather hesitantly refers to George Eliot as ‘Mr. Eliot’, despite the evidence in front of their eyes. Strindberg is hugely critical of everyone’s work (his critique of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” is hysterically funny), and AA Milne is lovely to everyone. Milne even describes Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” as a ‘madcap romp’ and ‘fun for all the family’.

Do yourself a favour–if you’re a fan of classic literature, and you feel like having a laugh, listen to The Bards of Bromley now before it disappears from Listen Again.

It’s finally over! I’ve had my wisdom tooth out, and as with many things that you dread beforehand, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. There was a huge amount of pressure and really nasty grinding noises, but the tooth came out without too much of a struggle.

I feel a bit worn out now, and my mouth feels sore and bruised, but I’m really glad that it’s out. My dentist even gave me it the tooth in a little tooth fairy envelope. I think if I put it under my pillow tonight, I’m likely to find that the tooth fairy has left me a tooth exactly like the one I put under the pillow.

I had to go into the library book stacks today, in search of a journal article. If you’ve never seen stacks before, they are huge rolling shelving systems which can be stacked together or opened up to get at a particular shelf. They scare the life out of me, to the point where I’m reluctant to look up papers in journals with titles in the A-J range in the Psychology library. I always flip the pages in an unnecessarily noisy way so that no-one will accidentally crush me between the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Apparently, I’m not the only one who worries about this kind of thing.

I wonder how many people die in this way every year?

(This unusually morbid post was brought to you by the fear of an imminent dental appointment.)

Yesterday’s Meet the Ancestors programme was an interesting exploration of some recent gruesome discoveries just outside the old Oxford Gaol. The old prison (next to the old castle mound) is being redeveloped (surprise, surprise) into a luxury hotel and apartments. Three of the old cells will form each of the fancy new en-suite hotel rooms. However, after watching the programme, I don’t think that I would want to stay there, even if I had the money.

They got archaeologists in to check that there was nothing of interest in the area of the castle moat, only to find a number of human skeletons–I bet the developers loved that. Further investigations found a large number of bodies in mass graves in the old moat. Some of the bodies were dismembered or otherwise disrespectfully treated, and others were of children of about 12-16 years old.

This was odd because the moat was unconsecrated ground, and even the executed criminals were given a decent burial in consecrated ground within the prison walls. One of the bodies in the moat had the top of his skull sawn off, his face removed, and then the remains of his head forced inside the chest cavity–not what you might call respectful treatment of a human body. This seemed to be the work of medical students (dissection could only legally be performed on executed murderers), but it still didn’t explain why they weren’t reburied in the prison graveyard.

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There’s a great article in Thursday’s Guardian in Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column about the kind of pseudo-scientific jargon you see on beauty products. I quote:

Our noble bad science spotter Carl Brancher sends important news of PO2 Contour Cream from Laboratoires Herzog: it’s a “patented stabilisation of oxygen within a cream” that “puts oxygen back into the skin, reoxygenates skin cells, encourages natural rejuvenation”. It sounds like bollocks; but it smells like peroxide. Especially since Laboratoires Herzog point out, in the small print, that you will want to keep the stuff off your eyebrows. Now, I’m not sure that this is going to put any useful oxygen in my skin, because I’ve got a perfectly adequate circulatory system to handle that; but more importantly, I’m not sure that peroxide is quite what I’m looking for on my face. For £25.

To which I can only say–well said, that man. I’m always yelling at the screen when the latest face cream is advertised as having ‘advanced activated liposomes’ or some such thing. It’s just a fancy word for fat–you could get more or less the same effect by rubbing your face with cooking oil. Pah.

Regular readers will know that I’m learning Perl, and always on the lookout for good books, tutorials or tools to help me along. So I was quite excited to see it mentioned on TidBITS that Late Night Software have just brought out a Perl editor and debugger called Affrus. I know that many Perl aficionados maintain that you don’t need an IDE for Perl, but the fact that the question is a FAQ on Perldoc.com suggests that many people still want one.

It’s true that with use strict; and use warnings; you get a pretty good idea where your code is going wrong. There’s also perldebug which gives you all the debugging functions you are ever likely to want, albeit with a rather intimidating command line interface. BBEdit has excellent Perl support (including the ability to run a script and see the output, and to look up the documentation for functions in perldoc), as do vi or vim if you use the appropriate plugins. But I was curious to see what else it could offer, and downloaded the demo.

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You might have noticed that–in a fit of Spring zeal–I’ve restyled blockquotes (again). While I liked the previous style with graphical quote marks, it was a bit greedy on space and also didn’t scale well. If you have a short quote, the size of the quote graphics is out of proportion to the height of the text, and rather overpowers it.

I think that the new style is distinctive, but a little more subtle. Let me know what you think.

I went to the dentist yesterday, and found out that–as I had feared–I will have to have my rogue upper-left wisdom tooth removed. I’ve already had both lower wisdom teeth out as I don’t have enough room on my lower jaw for even the full adult set of teeth, but I was hoping that I might get away with the upper one. Being the kind of free-thinking, radical, out-there tooth that it is, this wisdom tooth seems to have decided that growing straight down is for squares, and that jutting out at a jaunty angle would be much more groovy. It’s now poking into my cheek in a somewhat uncomfortable way, and generally making a nuisance of itself when it comes to brushing the other teeth.

The dentist breezily said that she could ’slip the tooth out’ very quickly, but previous experience tells me nothing about the process is either easy or painless. What makes it all the more galling is the expense; I can afford it and still pay the rent, but if I’m going to spend £70 on anything, I would much rather blow it on something fun like a few nice meals out or some CDs–anything but a couple of days of intense pain and soup-eating.

I just thank my lucky stars that I don’t have an exotic but complicated dental condition like sarah.

John Gruber has produced another text-to-HTML filter, called Markdown. I use Textile extensively when writing this weblog, and find it very useful. I do know how to write HTML, and I don’t find it particularly hard, but using a filter like this just makes it a bit quicker to write–and perhaps more importantly–easier to read and edit. If there’s too much ‘code furniture’ on a page, it can be hard to pick up spelling or grammatical errors. Sometimes it’s hard to motivate yourself to write, and then any kind of barrier between you and the words on the screen becomes more significant.

Markdown has a smaller syntax set than Textile, but it seems that this is deliberate. It only allows you to encode the kind of HTML formatting that can be represented with plain text. As John Gruber explains:

Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.

This produces very clean markup, which is extremely readable. I particularly like the ability to form reference style links. To keep the main text as uncluttered as possible, you can refer to a URL as follows:

[Google][1]

and have all the referenced URLs listed anywhere else in the document like so:

[Google]: http://www.google.com "Optional title"

It works very neatly and makes it much easier to accumulate links at the bottom of the document as you are researching and writing, and then mark up the links in the text (the references at the bottom are converted to proper inline URLs).

I also like the fact that you can use Markdown to filter text files at the command line, or as a Unix filter in BBEdit, so that you can easily convert any piece of text intended for the web. I’m going to use the filter for a while and see if I get on with it–if I do, I’ll set up the preferences so that you can also use Markdown in the comments.

Update: For those of you not reading the comments, John Gruber pointed out an error in my examples. With the URL given in the text as:

[Google][1]

you need a reference like this:

[1]: http://www.google.com "Optional title"

We watched a really moving documentary yesterday about and archaeological expedition to try to uncover a German dug-out that had been occupied by the poet Wilfred Owen during the Battle of the Somme. Owen lead a platoon into No Man’s Land to try to occupy an abandoned German dug-out near the village of Serre. Life in the trenches was hazardous enough, but crossing No Man’s Land under bombardment was tantamount to suicide. Owen later recalled in his harrowing poem The Sentry how the Germans knew they were there, and kept them under constant attack:

We’d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew, And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.

Owen survived the hell of the dug-out and a bout of severe shell shock, only to die in action a week before Armistice Day.

Inevitably, the archaeologists discovered human remains during their excavations; two British soldiers and one German, distinguishable only by their metal buttons. It isn’t much to show for a life, is it? All that remains of your short but precious life are some buttons, a comb, a broken mirror, and the lid of a polish tin that reminds you of home.

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