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Part 2 of a series

(Read Part 1)

When I’m not fuming over the pathetic mess that we in the UK are forced to call a railway system, I really like train travel. So I was excited to be taking several train journeys while in Japan—-one of them on the bullet train or shinkansen.

As I mentioned before, PD had lived in Japan for a while. Without her, I think that GS and I would have been a bit baffled by the railway system. It isn’t that it’s particularly complicated (there’s a helpful guide here), but there are enough quirks in the system that novice travellers would be confused. For a start, buying the tickets at Osaka wasn’t straightforward as the ticket machines had few labels in English. PD did really well with resurrecting her Japanese, and we all ended up with tickets to the right places. What GS and I would also not have known is that there are different categories of train which correspond roughly to different speeds of service. Not surprisingly, the faster services come at a premium, and you have to pay a supplement to the fare. There are also supplemental fees for seat reservations, but we opted for unreserved seats on the medium speed of service.

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I’ve just entered the dreaded 35-45 age bracket on marketing surveys. Urg.

We decided to spend the day visiting the National Sealife Centre in Birmingham. They used to feature British marine life, and had an exhibit following the course of the River Severn from source to estuary, but evidently they decided that British fish are a bit—-well—-drab. It’s true that there are some very lovely fish, crustaceans and molluscs in British waters (we even have cuttlefish), but the overall tonal palette is somewhat on the brown side.

Anyway, they’ve just finished a big refit, and have a lot of tropical tanks, seahorse breeding facilities and one of those walk-through transparent tunnels through the biggest tank. Here and there you can still see the odd reminder of the old Severn exhibit. A diorama of the coast around the Severn estuary—-complete with stuffed gulls and oyster catchers—-has had a few coconut palms added for that tropical touch, but it doesn’t really fool anyone.

The tanks have been nicely done, though few contain real coral or plants. However, the fish look healthy enough, and most have plenty of space. I loved watching the rays flap lazily around their tank, gliding silently over the base and walls of the tank. I find them so relaxing that I could watch them all day. The crustaceans were brilliant too; along with some brilliantly coloured shrimps, there was a tank full of the most enormous spider crabs I’ve ever seen. They look like they should come from another planet.

I was disappointed that they didn’t have any octopi, cuttlefish or squid (I would have been happy just to see them walking on eight legs, rather than pretending to be coconuts), but they did have a mantis shrimp. Mantis shrimps are incredible. Not only do they have an incredibly fast strike with their specialised front appendages that is capable of breaking double-layered safety glass, but they are also beautifully coloured and have amazingly complex eyes. I’d love a mantis shrimp. In a very strong aquarium, of course.

I took some pictures at the Centre—-quite a challenge without a flash and in rather dark conditions. There’s a photoset on Flickr if you’re interested.

I watched the first episode of the new Doctor Who last night with some degree of trepidation. I loved the series as a kid (despite the fact that it scared me silly and resulted in lasting phobias), so I worried that they would wreck it by making it too serious and slick. I needn’t have worried. There may be spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t read on.

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Part 1 of a series

I went to Japan for a symposium, to meet up with some researchers there and look around their lab. I travelled with one of my graduate students (who I’ll call GS) and a post-doc (PD). GS and I were lucky with our journeys to the airport and got there in plenty of time, but PD got stuck in traffic coming in to Heathrow and consequently was very late checking in. The guy on the check-in desk decided it would be funny to pretend that her luggage was over the weight limit so that she would have to pay over £100 in weight penalties. Ha ha. Really, why do people do that? Anyway, the fact that she had to check in at the Business Class desk to skip the queues might be significant in this story.

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My return flight to the UK has been delayed by at least 4 hours. Delays are always a pain, but I always find that on the homeward journey I get in to a kind of ‘return mode’, and so I find delays on the return journey particularly painful. I’ve been wandering round Osaka airport for a couple of hours already, randomly spending money to try to pass the time. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I seem to have amassed quite a collection of pens—-I go into a shop, see some fancy, 4-colour gel pens that you can’t find in the UK, and buy some. At this rate, I’ll have a supply to last me about three years. I’d better start writing things in lots of different colours…

Anyway, I’ve just found a wireless hotspot, which conveniently extends to the inside of a coffee shop, and parked myself in a seat by a power outlet with a large cup of coffee. Surfing my [checks] 427 unread feeds should kill an hour or two.

I’ll write much more about it later when I’ve had time to collect my thoughts, but it has been a fantastic trip. Japan is a fascinating country, although we’ve only seen a tiny portion of it. I’ve utterly failed to learn much of the language. I know the words for ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘hello’ and ‘beer’ (you know, the Standard International Survival Set), and the Kanji for ‘big’, ‘little’, ‘open door’, ‘close door’ and ‘button’. This will come in handy when I next get stuck in a Japanese lift and have to choose between something big or something little.

I’m just about to leave for Japan (well, to leave to get nearer to the airport from which I’ll be going to Japan), leaving the house in the capable hands of Mr. Bsag. If I get time and an internet connection, I might update the site a little, but otherwise it will be at least a week (plus recovering from jet lag time) before I post again.

Play nicely in my absence.

Sometimes it’s nice when people in officialdom are brutally honest. I had to go to London yesterday, and caught a Virgin train from New Street to Euston. That service has now been more or less converted to using the fancy tilting ‘Pendolino’ trains, which can get to higher speeds (when they aren’t stuck behind another train, held up by points trouble etc.)

Anyway, the train I got was slightly late arriving, and was also not a Pendolino, but much older rolling stock. As we got underway, the conductor (or steward, or whatever they call themselves now) came on the intercom. He apologised for the late start, then paused and and gave a big sigh.

“There’s no way in the _world_ that we will be able to keep to the Pendolino timetable”

Tell it like it is, man. Tell it like it is.

After many years of not listening to them, I’ve become enthralled again by the magic of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It wasn’t that I wanted to stop listening to them, but I was introduced to them by my ex-boyfriend in the mid-90s, and when we parted, I was left Penguin Cafe-less as well as boyfriend-less. Having said that, I’m not sure why it took me so long to acquire their albums again, because theirs is a very joyful and life-affirming kind of music. Much of the music I listen to is very difficult to classify (which is part of the reason I like it, I suppose), but the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (PCO) really defies being pigeon-holed. It is somehow instantly recognisable, and wholly characteristic of PCO. Perhaps it’s best to let the founder and proprietor of the Penguin Cafe explain it himself. Sadly, he died of an inoperable brain tumour in 1997, but in his obituary here, I found a quote of his which sums up PCO for me:

“Ideally I suppose it is the sort of music you want to hear, music that will lift your spirit. It is the sort of music played by imagined wild, free mountain people creating sounds of a subtle dream-like quality. It is cafe music, but cafe in the sense of a place where people’s spirits communicate and mingle, a place where music is played but often touches the heart of the listener”.

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Just a ‘heads up’ for anyone here who is following Tracks development; I’ve released Tracks 1.02.

Since I released version 1.01 in January, it has been dowloaded 1,111 times (neat number!), and the previous version was downloaded 189 times. Of course, only a tiny minority of those people will be actually using Tracks, but I’m still chuffed—-and amazed—-that it is continuing to gather so much interest.

One thing I’ve noticed since living in Birmingham is the number of names of shops and businesses that feature puns. Of course there’s the usual hairdressers’ names—-like A Cut Above or Curl Up ‘N’ Dye—-but then you expect hairdressers to use puns (for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom).

No, what’s unusual here is the diversity of other businesses employing a finely-honed play on words in their name. Here’s a few of my favourites:

• Petshop Lads—-a pet shop, obviously, and it took me a few seconds to get that one
• Woodfellas—-a firm of carpenters
• Melon Cauli—-a greengrocer

I must also mention another wonderful shop name which isn’t a pun, but is just wonderfully, gloriously weird: Jeff’s Useful Shop. What do they sell? Why, Useful Things of course.

I had a couple of techie things to do this weekend: set up a D-Link DWL-122 USB Wireless adapter and install Skype.

1. D-Link WiFi adapter: Mr. Bsag wants to move the old G3 iMac into his studio so that he can use it to view the reference photographs he takes of an area when he’s out sketching. At the moment, he prints the shots out and uses them in conjunction with his sketchbook, but viewing them on screen is easier and less wasteful of ink. We’ve got an Airport network, but old-style Airport cards are expensive, and we’d need a long, messy ethernet cable to reach his studio. So I thought this would be a cheap way to get around the problem. How wrong I could I have been. I installed all the drivers, rebooted and plugged the adapter in. In the preference panel, it registered the Airport network and said it was connected, but also reported an Incorrect WEP key and so wasn’t actually connected at all. After a lot of faffing about and an email to D-Link support, it seemed that the D-Link was expecting a 26 character hex key for 128 bit WEP encryption. Fine. I used the Airport Base Station utility to change the WEP password to a 26 character hex string. Still no dice. It Just Doesn’t Work. Bsag 0, Technology 1
2. Skype: I’m going to a symposium in Japan in just over a week, and I thought that it might be fun to set up Skype to phone home while I’m away (assuming I manage to get a net connection at some point while I’m there). I downloaded and installed on both my laptop and the iMac (very easy) and set up accounts for me and Mr. Bsag. I was itching to test it, but Mr. Bsag was out. Feeling a little bit like Milly-No-Mates, I decided to rig up a system to test the audio quality by using a portable radio. I took the laptop downstairs and switched on the radio. Then I called Mr. Bsag’s account on the iMac and ran upstairs to answer the call. There was a bit more running up and down stairs as I realised that I hadn’t set the audio preferences correctly, but finally I got to have a lovely—-if one-sided—-conversation with Radio 4, for free! Bsag 1, Technology 0

Full time result: One-all.

My GTD application Tracks has a little red badge at the top left of each page displaying how many uncompleted actions are in the list, and over the past few weeks, I’ve been keeping an eye on that number. Of course, everyone is likely to differ in the number of things that they have on their list; not only because people are differently busy, but also because everyone has a different level of granularity for the tasks they enter.

It’s probably a failing on my part, but my granularity is quite chunky. This is partly because some of my tasks are difficult to break down into smaller pieces. For example, I’m putting together a poster for a scientific meeting at the moment. Now, I could divide it up further into chunks like ‘write text’ and ‘insert figures’, but that would be a bit artificial. I just have to get on and do it, but it’s going to take more than the mythical half a day.

Possibly because of this chunkiness (or because I’m a total lightweight—-who knows?), my magic red badge tends to vary between about 10 and 20 (this number doesn’t include emails I have to deal with). I strongly suspect that the upper limit isn’t down to my ninja-like efficiency in keeping the number of tasks low, but my reluctance—-when under a lot of pressure—-to add anything else to the list. The lower limit is more of a puzzle. Whatever I do, I can’t seem to get it down below 10. Once or twice the number has tantalizingly flipped down to 8 or 9, but then I instantly get some other task to deal with, and back up it goes.

It’s like some kind of physical GTD constant for me.

We’d had this film sitting next to the DVD player (via LOVEFiLM.com) for several weeks. We obviously thought we’d enjoy it when we put it in our rental queue, but somehow when it came time for us to put a disc in the player, we kept choosing other films. I put it down to a touch of Carey-phobia. Anyway, we finally watched it last weekend (only—-it has to be said—-because the copy of The Ladykillers we’d ordered was scratched to blazes and wouldn’t play in our machine), and really enjoyed it.

The first thing to say is that Jim Carey is thankfully quite low-key in this film, and actually rather good. So even if you have a bit of an aversion to his usual face-pulling routines, this is probably safe to watch. The plot concerns a man who finds out that his girlfriend has paid a company (called ‘Lacuna’, geddit?) to erase all memory of him from her mind after they’ve had a row. In grief and retaliation, he does the same for her, but then gets cold feet half way through the process.

The pseudo-science part of the premise is a bit silly (I don’t think we’ll ever be able to isolate the location of individual memories, and particularly those for complicated things like relationships), but it raises some interesting questions. If our memory of someone could be erased, would we keep on meeting them and falling in love with them again and again? What is memory anyway? Would erasing painful memories ease the pain, or would we still feel hurt and not know why?

The structure of the film takes a bit of concentration to get to grips with, but there are interesting effects to symbolise memories being erased. At several points, our hero and heroine have to run to escape the blankness that is consuming the landscape around them as the memory erasure is progressing. It’s also quite a sweet—-but not sickly—-love story. And it’s just won an Oscar, I believe, not that winning an Oscar is necessarily a recommendation in itself.