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We found very little worth watching over Christmas. This didn’t bother us much, as we were happy to chat or listen to music or read. However, we did watch two particularly good films, and both were fairly old.

I don’t know quite how this has happened, but I’ve never seen It’s a Wonderful Life (and I call myself a film buff—it’s shocking). I’ve seen enough parodies, clips and homages to the film that I feel as if I’ve watched it, but I thought it was time to see to real thing. We rented it from Lovefilm, and settled down to watch it on Christmas Eve; highly appropriate, given that the film is set on the same day. I thought that I might find it a bit sickly and sentimental, but I was utterly charmed by it. James Stewart is perfect as George Bailey—you really feel his frustration as he is torn between doing what he sees as his duty and what he really wants to do. When he turns on his wife and children in impotent rage at his impending bankruptcy, it’s quite frightening. It might be idealistic, but I’d really like to believe that the world really works like that, and that good people who do selfless things eventually get their reward.

The other enjoyable experiences (we watched several) were the ghost stories of M. R. James, which were televised in the 1970s. The stories, published around the 1900s, are unbelievably creepy. He never described the ghosts or monsters in stories very clearly, but let your imagination build them up. He also constructed an amazing level of psychological suspense from very simple stories. The filmed versions were quite faithful to this approach, and just let you glimpse the ghosts out of the corner of your eye, so to speak. We watched the programmes with candles lit and the lights out, and thoroughly enjoyed being scared.

My favourite was A Warning to the Curious. It confirmed my opinion that Norfolk is a deeply creepy place, and had some deeply shivery moments. At one point, the main character is digging up a cursed crown in some woodland at the dead of night. Quite why he’s doing it a night when he knows that the last person who tried it was found murdered with a billhook, and he’s already felt that he’s being followed is—of course—one of the great mysteries of the ghost story. He thinks he hears something and shines his torch beam around the trees. As this little beam of light moves over the tree, you briefly see a white face peering out from behind one of the trunks. Yaarghh! I gripped my cushion pretty tightly right then, I can tell you.

I had a wonderful extra and unexpected Christmas present this year. My Dad bought a new pair of speakers just after Christmas—some lovely Sonus Faber Cremona Auditors—and offered me his old Mission 753s at very low “mates rates” to replace my ageing B&W 601s. The B&W speakers are still pretty good, but they sound a little weedy in our new—much larger—living room.

After a bit of a struggle, we just managed to fit the speakers in the back of our tiny car, so I’ve had some fun setting them up and trying them out with familiar bits of music this afternoon. Of course, I’ve listened to them many times at my parents’ house, but all sorts of variables (like the model of CD player and amplifier used, the types of cables, the shape of the room) affect the sound you get out at the other end. I’m happy to say that—despite having a much less fancy amp and CD player than my Dad—the speakers still sound great. The solidity of the stereo image is amazing, and the overall sound is much tighter, better integrated, and more detailed. It also has more of what I like to call oomph; difficult to define, but very easy to recognise.

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I used to use MagpieRSS to pull my del.icio.us links into the sidebar on this site. It worked very well, but I’ve had problems in the past when the cache directory has become unwriteable because of permissions problems. The feed is then fetched every time someone loads the page, which is obviously very bad news for Joshua’s bandwidth, not to mention contravening the terms and conditions for the del.icio.us service.

It seems that when I transferred all my files to the new server, the permissions on the cache directory got changed so that MagpieRSS was no longer caching the feed. This meant that Joshua had to ban my IP address until the problem was sorted out, as the feed was being fetched a couple of times a second. Urk. I don’t want that to happen again. Since permissions can easily get messed up (and MagpieRSS doesn’t give you any visible indication that caching is failing on the page), I’ve decided to use another method.

RSSDigest allows you to enter an URL for a feed, and automatically build a bit of Javascript which will display that feed on your site. Unlike many similar services, it’s highly configurable so that you can get exactly the look you want. It also lets you set a caching interval (I set mine to 120 minutes), so that the server for the feed isn’t overburdened. Best of all, the caching is no longer my responsibility! It’s a very useful service, and could of course be used to display any kind of RSS feed—not just a del.icio.us feed.

We’re back from a few days spent with our respective families. I would have posted about something trivial or geeky (or both), as I usually do, but after the tsunami that would feel incredibly fatuous. All I will say is that I’ve never felt so lucky to be safe, warm and surrounded by my family. This evening, I’ll be thinking about the hundreds of thousands of people who have had their loved ones, homes and communities swept away from them.

Since the comment form automatically closes after 14 days, I thought it would be good to build a more permanent home for the GTD application, and any news, comments or download links connected to it. The new site is here, and there’s also a wiki where I’ve started to collect the tips for installation that people posted in comments on this site. Feel free to add your own! I’ve also added a GPL license, so that it’s clear to everyone what they are free to do with the application (almost anything, as it turns out).

The site itself is a bit basic at the moment, but I’ll spruce it up when I get time. One thing that definitely needs a spruce up is the name of the application itself—or rather, the lack of a proper name. Can anyone suggest a snappy new title for it? It can’t conflict with any existing application, and I’d like it to reflect the fact that it’s about GTD and also that it’s built with Rails.

Happy Christmas!

As regular readers will know, I’m something a rather fanatical user of an application called Quicksilver. I use it every day to access files, addresses and play MP3 files, launch applications, do quick calculations and look up the definition of words. However, there are things that even the mighty Quicksilver can’t do easily, and in my quest to automate all of the irritating repetitive tasks that we end up doing on our computers, I turned to QuicKeys. In fact, I’ve had various versions of QuicKeys around since version 1, but I stopped using it at some point. At the time, I was using it mainly to launch files and folders, but Quicksilver provided a much more flexible and elegant way to accomplish that.

With the latest versions, I’ve started to use it in earnest again for tasks like switching network locations, SMTP servers and even replacing or adding to keyboard shortcuts. I know that in Panther you can edit the keyboard shortcuts for any application via the System Preferences, but in my experience it is clunky and only works when it feels like it. Using QuicKeys is easier and more reliable, and you can even add shortcuts for actions which would usually be done using the mouse. For example, I’m currently trying out Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client. It’s excellent in many ways, but there are no keyboard shortcuts for selecting the inbox, sent mail box or the junk mail box, for example. Using mouse click recording, I was able to set up keyboard shortcuts to simulate clicking on a mailbox in the mailbox list. I’ve also got little macros to do things like exchange two adjacent characters. Cocoa applications have a shortcut for this (Control-T, I think), but now that I have a QuicKeys shortcut bound to Control-T, I can get the same behaviour in all applications.

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I’ve just got back from the annual ‘Black Country Beer Bash’ that some friends run every year. We all meet up at a nice pub in the Black Country and drink lots of real ale and eat mountains of food. Mr. Bsag and I haven’t made it for a couple of years because of the inconvenience of distance, so we hadn’t been to this particular pub before.

The Olde White Rose has more real ale pump handles than I’ve ever seen outside a beer festival—it’s wonderful. The hardier souls cycled up the the Black Country, while those of us who are wimps or have no balance on our recumbent bicycles after a couple of shandies took public transport.

I decided to stick to Belgian beers, as they had quite a good selection, and ended up with a Gouden Carolus Tripel. It wasn’t until after I ordered it that I discovered it was 9% ABV. Phew. Strength notwithstanding, it was a lovely drink, with an orangey, spicy taste, and a note of violets somewhere around. It’s worth seeking out if you have any Belgian beer outlets near you, but just don’t drink too many or even public transport will become a challenge.

I had a conversation with some friends at work the other day about real Christmas trees. We decided that the point at which you buy your first real tree for your own home (with lights and baubles and everything) is the point at which you feel truly grown up.

So—at the age of 34—I am finally an adult. In my previous homes, I was either not around for Christmas, so there didn’t seem much point in getting a tree, or I didn’t have enough space for one. Our last flat was so small that we could only fit in our ‘flat-pack’ tree. This was an outline of a tree, made from wire and woven with sparkly gold twigs. It was slightly more attractive than it sounds, but its main virtue was that we could store it under the bed for the rest of the year.

This year we have plenty of space and we’re at home for Christmas, so I went and chose my first proper tree. Homebase isn’t the most glamorous of settings for such a rite of passage, but it was close enough that I could walk there. Striding home with 1.4 m¹ of prime Nordmann fir on my shoulder made me feel rather prehistoric for some odd reason. Not that Palaeolithic people had much use for Christmas trees. I can just picture the conversation:

[Palaeolithic woman, returning to cave] See, husband, I bring a freshly slaughtered Nordmann fir to our cave. The chase was long and arduous.

[Palaeolithic man] Ah, we will feast for many moons on the tender green needles.

¹ I’m only 1.57 m tall myself.

I read about a clever anti-spam plugin on the WordPress Development Blog. Spam Karma assesses comments on multiple dimensions to determine their ‘spaminess’. It also tries to prevent any false positives at the same time as minimising the effort required to moderate comments manually.

I’ve installed the plugin now, as I’ve periodically had problems with comment spam (though nothing like the level of spamming I got when I was using MovableType). It should be exactly like commenting before. However, if your comment gets flagged up as being ‘borderline spammy’ (perhaps because it has more than three URLs in it), you may be asked to enter a code into a text box that you’ll be presented with as an image. This is to check that you are a real human and not an evil spambot. As usual, let me know if you hit any problems.

Well my DNS has propagated now, and it seems as if my move between hosts has been relatively uneventful. I think that I’ve put everything back more or less where it belongs, but if you spot anything that’s broken, missing, or not where you expect it to be do let me know.

My move wasn’t prompted by dissatisfaction with my previous host, Blogomania. They have been great hosts: reliable, great value and—apart from a small blip a few months ago which is now resolved—giving great support. I’ve recommended them to people in the past, and would do so again—they are a very safe bet. The problem was that I want to do some more Ruby and Rails development¹, and to produce live web applications rather than ones that just run on my local machine. Most good hosting companies (including Blogomania) provide great PHP support, but very few support Ruby.

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I’m moving hosts again—I’ll explain more when the transition has been made. So there may be some odd things happening, posts and comments appearing and then disappearing, 404s and so on until things have settled down. Do not adjust your sets!

I’m not a fan of horror films (even old classics like Frankenstein), so I watched this film for the human interest angle, and because it features Ian McKellen. He brings subtlety and depth to any role he plays, and this is no exception. The story is a fictionalised account of the last few days of the life of James Whale—the director of some classic horror films, as well as Showboat.

James sees himself as an outsider—partly because he is gay and partly because of the way that he has hidden his poor, working class background—and he is haunted by memories of his time in the trenches in the Great War. He strikes up a friendship with the handsome gardener Clay Boone (brilliantly portrayed by Brendan Fraser) with an ulterior motive—though it isn’t the one you probably first think of. Their growing intimacy is very touching. James opens up to Clay and tells him things he’s never revealed to anyone before, and Clay comes to terms with his homophobia as he is moved by James’s stories.

There’s a particularly harrowing scene where James remembers the first man he ever loved in the trenches, and who died on razor wire in no-man’s land. Even though his body was very close to the British trenches, they couldn’t expose themselves to enemy fire to go out and fetch it. So for months, they—including James—made black, gallows-humour jokes about the poor chap. Imagine that; you have to watch the corpse of your first love rotting before your eyes every day. If nothing else, this film certainly makes you think that there’s much more of a sub-text beneath those old Frankenstein films than you first thought.

It sounds like quite a bleak film the way I’ve described it, but it’s actually very funny in places. The housekeeper is a wonderful comic character, and McKellen has some great, catty lines.

A reader¹ emailed me to point out that part of my rambling entry about MacExpo (embarrassingly, the most rambling part) had been quoted in the ‘Voices from the Web’ column in the latest issue of MacUser. I subscribe to the magazine, but I’d been busy, and hadn’t had a chance to open the issue—it was quite a surprise.

¹ I feel an irresistible urge to add “…a Mrs. Trellis from North Wales” at this point, but that would baffle people who don’t listen to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

Here are a few photographic tips for you:

1. When you put your trousers in the wash, check the pockets for 35 mm film canisters that you meant to drop off at the photo processors on your way through town. Vigourous agitation in a detergent solution at 40°C does not suit colour film—who would have guessed?
2. When you forget about Tip 1 and you go to pick up the photographs after having experimentally submitted them for processing, do remember to run away when the assistant tells you that the film couldn’t be processed because it was wet for some reason, and also smelled of summer meadows. Under no circumstances should you hang around and try to explain why, because you’ll just end up sounding stupid or crazy or both.
3. When you realise too late that you should have followed Tip 2, do remember to pay for that sandwich you’re holding before you make a hasty exit, blushing deeply. Otherwise you’ll look like a stupid, crazy shoplifter.

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting article called Do It Now by Steve Pavlina:

When watching TV, read a computer magazine during commercials. If you’re a male, read while shaving. I use an electric shaver and read during the 2-3 minutes it takes me to shave each day. This allows me to get through about two extra articles a week — that’s 100 extra articles a year, enough to keep up on a few monthly subscriptions.

When I read the passage above, I was slightly horrified. I don’t mean any disrespect to the author; he is obviously a highly-organised, highly-motivated person who gets an enormous amount accomplished, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for that. My horror stemmed from the fact that I don’t want this to happen to me. All of my organisational drives are towards one aim: to get the same amount of work done in less time and with less stress.

I don’t want to do more work—I want more time to watch films, go for walks, spend time with my husband and friends, and more time to just daydream. If that sounds lazy, well, it probably is. However, I know from experience that when I have more of this ‘pottering time’, I’m more effective at work and more creative. Ideas seem to sidle up behind me and tap me on the shoulder when I’m doing something completely unrelated. If I sit down and actually try to think of new ideas, they elude me.

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