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In an effort to keep on top of our finances, I try to enter the details of all our receipts, bills and so on into a finance application (Moneydance), so that I can check the items off when the statement comes in and make sure that I’m not being swindled by the bank or anyone else. It doesn’t actually mean we have any more money, but it does give an important illusion of control over the situation. Ideally, I would do this every week or so and it would take no more than five or ten minutes. So, do I do that? Do I heck. There are films to watch, books to read, not to mention sunny weather to bask in. In fact almost anything is more attractive that sitting down and entering receipts. This means that I sometimes go two or three months before tackling the task, when the pile of receipts beside the computer starts to resemble a bonsai Mount Kilimanjaro, with avalanches of white and yellow credit card slips threatening to rumble down the slopes at any moment. The longer you leave it, the harder the chore becomes, and the less you feel like doing it. Eventually, it takes up a whole morning, rather than being a five or ten minute task, but still I don’t learn.

I bunked off work early on Friday to watch a film. It’s the first time I’ve done that for ages, and it was a delightful treat. I saw Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring—a beautiful film about a young Buddhist monk, growing up in the care of an old Master. The two live in a tiny monastery floating in the middle of a lake in a deep valley. The cinematography is stunning, and while very few dramatic events happen in the film, the details and the gentle pace really kept me enthralled in a way that few action movies do.

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There has been a bit of a chorus of interest¹ in what I actually do for a living. Because I’m one of the handful of people (and the only woman) to work on my current study species, I can’t tell you exactly what I work on with without giving the game away. However, I can give you a broad overview of my research interests.

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It’s amazing the difference a new job makes. For the past few months—when I had no immediate prospect of a job, and it looked like I might have to leave academia—I was completely unenthusiastic about work, and I found it really hard to motivate myself. Now that I know I have a permanent job and I’m starting a new project, I’m fizzing with ideas and enthusiasm. Lately I’ve been waking up early—not with the feeling of dread and worry that I experienced before, but bubbling over with ideas for experiments¹, which forces me to get up and write them down.

It has made me realise what destructive things short-term contracts are (in any field, but particularly in academia). Projects require quite a lot of personal investment in terms of passion, motivation and drive, and often only really pay off in the longer term. If you know that you will probably be out of a job in two to three years, it’s really difficult to have the same level of commitment to a project. Let’s face it—no-one is in academia for the money (if you are, someone has seriously mislead you), so it’s vital to be excited about what you’re doing. Instead of worrying about what you can possibly get done in two years, you can think about the questions that you are burning to answer. You still have to have things that will produce results in two to three years to get grants to fund the research, but you can at least have a bigger, longer-term strategy running through the shorter projects. I’m really looking forward to it.

¹ For example, this morning I woke up wondering whether it would be possible to build my smaller bits of experimental apparatus out of Lego™.

Knowing that I’m a fan, David tipped me off to a documentary about Nick Drake on Radio 2 that aired on Saturday night. Everyone must be going Nick Drake-crazy at the moment, because this was immediately followed by another documentary on BBC4. Of the two, I preferred the TV version, if only because it didn’t have Brad Pitt telling us that he was Brad Pitt every five minutes, and mis-pronouncing ‘Stratford-upon-Avon’¹.

I didn’t know a lot about Nick’s life, so it was fascinating to hear interviews with his family and the musicians who worked with him. On the radio documentary, they featured Norah Jones singing one of his songs, ‘Day is Done’, and then we heard Nick’s own version. All I can say is that it totally vindicated the musicians’ opinion of him, and demonstrated just what a talented performer he was; Norah’s version sounded utterly bland and forgettable, whereas his was mesmerising and fresh.

I had no idea that his mother—Molly—was also a singer-songwriter. In the TV documentary, his sister Gabrielle played an old home recording of Molly singing one of her compositions. The family resemblance in musical style was spooky—you could hear future echoes of her son in her voice and delivery, like noticing the line of a jaw or similar eyes. It goes without saying that it’s a tragedy he didn’t live to see the popularity of his own music. His sister talked rather movingly about the many letters she gets from fans, who say that his music has helped them through extremely difficult periods of their life. She said that these would have meant more to Nick than anything else.

¹ stratford upon avon. Ugh.

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WordPress 1.2 final release is out, and I’ve installed it without problems. While I was at it, I also installed the updated statistics plugin, written originally by GamerZ and ported to plugin format by Ryan. You can get a whole page of interesting statistics here, or use the link right at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Among other fascinating facts, you can see who tops the league of frequent commenters (like the League of Gentlemen, only… not.). It all seems to be working fine, but let me know if you spot anything amiss.

I make no secret of the fact that I think Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields is a song-writing genius, and this new album hasn’t altered that opinion at all. He has a lugubrious baritone voice that renders his wonderful lyrics as wistful or deadpan hilarious as appropriate. He reminds me a lot of Noel Coward or Morrissey, with the same quicksilver turn of phrase or quirky rhyme.

‘I Thought You Were My Boyfriend’ is a sad, bitter little song about a breaking up:

The joke’s on me againI know you don’t love meYou know I don’t careKeep it hidden betterDid I say the world was fair?

My favourite so far (after a few listens) is ‘I Wish I Had an Evil Twin’:

My evil twin would lie and stealAnd he would stink of sex appealAll men would writheBeneath his scytheHe’d send the pretty ones to meAnd they would think that I was he

Put those great lyrics together with catchy, bouncy tunes and you’ve got an album that sticks in your mind tenaciously.

I’m really kicking myself because I’ve missed most of the series of documentary films organised by Martin Scorsese called The Blues. Each feature-length film is directed by a different person, and the one I saw last night—The Soul of a Man—was by Wim Wenders. He focused on three blues artists: Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J. B. Lenoir. It was fascinating learning about their lives, and a real treat to hear the old recordings made in the 1920s and 30s of Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James, and see the amateur film taken of J. B. Lenoir in the 1960s.

As with many blues artists, none of them really managed to break out of poverty, despite cutting commercially successful records. Skip James was offered a choice between a cash settlement and a percentage for his work, and went away with only $40 in his pocket, despite the fact that his work was—and still is—very successful. Those early blues artists got really exploited. It’s so tragic that neither they nor their families ever benefited from their talent. I think my favourite artist of the three is Skip James. I love his high, sweet, voice—slurring, blurring and smoothing the words into his soft and dreamy guitar playing, and concealing the harsh themes of the songs. They featured him singing ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues’, which is one of my favourite blues songs. It’s like running your fingers over the flat of a razor blade; it’s cool and smooth, but if you move your hand a little, it will draw blood.

It’s a fascinating series (which is available on DVD already it seems), with archival footage alongside modern interpretations of some of the songs by famous artists like Lou Reed, Beck and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

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I’m fed up to the back teeth with comment spammers, so I decided to do something about it. I do use the wpblacklist plugin, and that’s a great help, but you still miss one or two items when a new spammer appears and you haven’t updated your list. The majority of spam comments are made on old entries, so I decided to set up automatic closing of comments, as described here. I’ve set it to close comments after 14 days—that seems about right to me, but if anyone wants me to extend it a bit, just let me know. I’ve put a line in my cron file to run the script every day like this:

GET http://pathtoscript/auto-close.php > /dev/null 2<&1

It goes without saying that anybody (except spammers!) who wants to make a comment on a closed entry only has to email me, and I’ll put the comment in myself.

Note to self: when you have just moved in to a new office, and haven’t quite got used to the layout of the furniture, do not place your bag directly under low shelves which hang on the wall. Rummaging in the bag and sitting up suddenly can only end in the untimely death of several billion much-needed brain cells, and a lot of un-ladylike swearing.

As many of you will probably have seen, a new news reader called PulpFiction was released last week. I’ve been a long-time user of NetNewsWire Lite, and have dabbled with Shrook, so I decided the time had come to do a comparison of the two new kids on the scene. NetNewsWire 2 is in beta, and seems to have a lot of great new features slated for development, but since I don’t have access to it I won’t include it in my comparison.

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I’ve finally got round to posting some more pictures to my photoblog—the thumbnails aren’t very interesting, but I’m quite pleased with the full-sized results, despite the annoying jagged edges on the diagonal lines. I think these are the result of compression, but if anyone has any suggestions for avoiding them in future, I’d be grateful.

This is the kind of thing that always happens when I go away for a few days; this time I came back to find a storm of web traffic discussing the long-awaited release of Movable Type 3.0. As I switched to WordPress last month, I can sit back and read the war of words without worrying about whether I should upgrade or not. An article by Mena (one of the developers), has received—at the time of writing this—661 trackbacks. I scanned the list and I think it would be safe to say that the majority of respondents are not happy bunnies.

Indeed, the initial announcement produced so much bad press that they have now modified the pricing structure. My own opinion is that they have every right to make a living from all the hard work they have put in, but that it has been very clumsily done. Many people thought that previous announcements strongly suggested that MT 3.0 would be free. There is indeed a free version, but while it isn’t physically crippled in any way, the licence prevents you from having more than one author on the blog or more than 3 websites. My guess is that as MT has traditionally been software for ‘Power Bloggers’, this would prevent most users from benefiting from the free version. Add that to the fact that there don’t seem to be any significant new features in the new version, and—more seriously—that there are a number of fairly major bugs, and you can see why people are getting so exercised about it.

If you want a balanced view of the debate, Brad Choate offers a well-considered pro- viewpoint, while Mark Pilgrim gives an equally fair counterpoint.

I’m sure that regular readers will have noticed that I’ve been worried and depressed about my work situation. I’ve tried not to rant about it too much, but if you aren’t in a good state of mind it does show in your writing. So I’m really happy to announce that—after months of rejections, and lying to myself about what I really wanted to be doing in an attempt to convince myself that the situation wasn’t as soul-destroying as it seemed—I’ve just been offered a great job in academia. I don’t want to give too many details right now, but it’s right up my street, and is a permanent job (w00t!) with great potential. It also means that we’ll be moving from Oxford. On the downside, I’ll miss the beauty of the city, but the trade-off is that we will be able to afford to live somewhere decent: you can’t eat the scenery, after all.

The immense, Atlas-like burden I have been dragging around for months lifted from my shoulders the minute I got the news, and left me feeling light and dizzy. Mr. Bsag and I went out for an impromptu celebration (we plan to have many celebrations now that we have a legitimate excuse), and on the way back on the bus, I picked some music on the iPod to fit my mood. I can heartily recommend ‘It’s the Sun’ from The Beginning Stages Of… by the Polyphonic Spree if you are feeling jubilant:

SUN

Hope has come, you are safe

And it makes me cry

Because I’m on my way

On my way

On my way

Hey, it’s the sun and it makes me shine

Right on cue, the evening sun came slanting through the trees, turning everything a blazing gold, and I don’t mind admitting I had a bit of a tear in my eye.

We made the long-delayed office move today—though it hardly seems worthwhile for me. There’s almost no chance now that I’ll get another job in this department, so I’ll be moving out in a couple of months. This is a bit of a shame¹ as the view from the new office is really superb—dreaming spires prickle the horizon, and I can look down on the candelabra-like flowers of horse chestnut trees. Unlike our previous temporary office, which was a stuffy, dusty, noisy hell hole, this one is clean (so far—but give it a few weeks…), airy and light. I had better make the most of it while I can…

¹Obviously I’m understating wildly here.