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I don’t know why, but the Birmingham area seems to have become the Freak Weather Capital of the UK. First, there was the Dudley earthquake in 2002, and now we’ve had the Moseley tornado. What’s next—-typhoons on the lake in the local park?

I’m off to not-so-sunny (current temperature 13°C) Edinburgh for a week-long conference, so updates may be sparse unless I manage to blag some free WiFi¹. Does anyone know of any good, free WiFi hotspots in the city centre?

I’m giving two talks, and it’s a conference outside my discipline, so it should be… interesting.

¹ Mr. Bsag calls me ‘WiFi’ every now and again. I hope he means 802.11g, not 802.11b—-I’d hate to be nearly defunct.

I’ve said it many times before, but Radio 4 is really a national treasure. The dramas and comedies are great, but I also love the little factual programmes about obscure but interesting things. Just last week I was sitting on the train at New Street station, listening to the automated announcements and wondering about the poor soul who had to say “I’m sorry for the delay to your journey” a million times until he got the required firm but sympathetic tone. Thanks to ‘Cashier Number Six, Please’ (a ‘Sunday Best’ repeat), I now know that the poor soul is Phil Sayer.

Memorably describing himself as a “gob on a stick”, he also admitted that—-as the auditory scapegoat for Railtrack’s many failings—-he’s probably the most hated man in Britain. I’m sure that he got reasonably well paid to do it, but I’m still not sure that I would have the patience to read every single station name in Britain twice: once with a rising inflection (for the start or middle of a list), and once with a falling inflection (for the end of the list). It must also be weird when you’re waiting on a platform and furious about the delay to your train to hear yourself apologising sincerely to yourself.

They also featured the voices of BT directory enquiries, in-car navigation units and of course, the queuing machines. One woman who was a “Cashier number five, please” said that she’d become quite a celebrity at the local Post Office. I was surprised to hear that this didn’t involve her getting bludgeoned to death with parcels and pension books.

When I was bemoaning the state of my handwriting a while ago and asking for advice on how to go about improving it, several people suggested that a good pen—-particularly a fountain pen—-helps a lot. While my handwriting has improved a lot as a result of all the good advice I got, I felt that a good fountain pen would probably make it even better—-or at least more comfortable.

I’ve had a Lamy Safari fountain pen for a number of years, but I’ve found it to be a bit unreliable as far as ink flow goes. It also has a rather broad nib, and forms a rather wet, blobby line on the paper in my Moleskine. So I decided to splash out on a decent pen. After a lot of shopping around, and writing “The quick brown fox…” in a slightly embarrassed fashion on numerous pen shop testing pads, I settled on the Rotring Newton. In fact, this is the very pen that Lyle recommended in the comments of my post.

I love the sturdiness of this pen. It’s very solid metal, and looks as if you could run over it in a tank without ill effects (to the pen). I like to think that if I’m ever in a super-villain’s secret underground lair with some huge stone door about to crush me, I could probably save myself by wedging the door open with the Rotring. Happily, it also writes very well. It is—-as Lyle pointed out—-nicely weighty in the hand, and I find that this helps the stability and regularity of my writing a lot. The nib is very smooth, and the perfect ‘three bears’ happy medium between a smooth but wet broad nib and a dry but scratchy narrow one.

I don’t like cartridges (they always seem like a waste of money and hassle to get hold of) so I bought a convertor to use bottled ink. It took a couple of goes to fill the pen from dry, but the flow is now very even and reliable. To complete my conversion to fountain pen fanaticism, I’ve even ordered a couple of bottles of Noodler’s Ink on the recommendation of several people on the 43folders list.

I have a bit of a cheeky question for all you black belt Applescript coders out there; is there an easy way (or any way at all) to set the interval before the screensaver starts in an Applescript? I’ve tried searching the web and even browsing the relevant Applescript dictionaries, but I can’t seem to find anything relevant.

I’d like to know because I’ve started using Location X—-a very useful little application which allows you to construct a group of settings for things like network details, SMTP server, default printers, energy saver preferences and so on, and switch between them easily. I find it very convenient for moving between work and home with my laptop. Although it’s already easy to switch network locations, but changing the SMTP setting for certain email accounts when you do so is a bit of a chore. I’ve also set up a location called ‘Presentations’, in which the network is turned off, the screen is set never to go blank, the computer never sleeps and the screen is not locked when the computer wakes. The one missing piece is that I’d like to set the screensaver interval to ‘Never’ for presentations, and about 10 or 15 minutes for my other locations. You can trigger Applescripts or shell scripts when you change locations, so if I can find out how to set the interval programatically, my problems will be solved. Well, this particular problem, anyway.

Any ideas?

The conductor (or whatever they’re called now) made his way up the aisle of each carriage on the train this evening, asking people to identify each of the bags stashed on the overhead racks. Later, he reminded people to keep their bags with them at all times, and said that the ‘identifying bags on racks’ was a new directive.

Mr. Bsag phoned me before I left work and told me about the latest incidents in London (I’d been busy all day, and hadn’t heard). He’s got to go to London tomorrow, so we talked about that a bit. I blurted out “Well, you be careful” before I realised how silly that was. Being careful doesn’t really help—-we all just need to be lucky.

I suppose that this is the way things will be now.

Mr. Bsag and I were in the city centre on Saturday, doing a bit of shopping (a rare occurrence for us, as we hate shopping with a passion equal and opposite to the love most people seem to have for it). I must have walked past the outside of the Bullring shopping centre dozens of times, but this time I noticed some subtle poetry set into the bricks. It fascinated me, and although we were in a hurry, I dashed off a few shots for one of my flickr sets, with the intention of returning later to make a proper sequence.

The brick poem stretches on for 50 m or more, and for me, it’s a great example of Birmingham wit, light-heartedness, and the joy of creating something new—-even if it’s controversial. I love the cartoon-like ‘BRRrrr’ and ‘ZiiNNGG’, and the puffed-up civic pride in the scale and newness of the building (one set of bricks documents the number of steel discs on the Selfridges building). When I first saw the piece, it reminded me of the little weird or lewd figures that woodcarvers would work into monastic miserichords—-a hidden joke for those who knew where to look. Despite the fact that these bricks are on full display, I suspect that most people (including me until now) are too wrapped up in negotiating the crowds and traffic to notice them. Like many things in life, they are hidden in full view.

Last Thursday, we went to a concert at Lichfield Cathedral—-as part of the Lichfield Festival—-which celebrated Arvo Pärt’s 70th birthday. The majority of the concert was choral, with the Hilliard Ensemble and Ex Cathedra joining forces for the evening, but there was also an organ piece by Arvo Pärt called ‘Annum Per Annum’.

When the programme notes suggested that the work was “prefaced by a thunderous introduction”, they weren’t exaggerating; I think everyone jumped a little. That’s fine by me. I think that you’re probably failing somewhat as a composer for organ if you don’t use both the tiny, mouse’s whisper high notes, as well as the thunderous bass notes—-how else are you going to get the dust out of those big pipes? This piece did all of that, as well as making use of the organ stop marked ‘Armageddon with Knobs On¹’. I got the impression that it was a virtuoso piece to show off the capabilities of the organ, but it was great entertainment.

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There are many nice things about writing a blog. For one thing, people reading it regularly get to know something of your tastes and interests, and they are occasionally kind enough to pass on information about something that they think you might like. Usually that takes the form of a favourite album or website, but sometimes people tell you about their own work. I don’t think that I’ve ever had an artist contact me about their own album before, but there’s a first time for everything.

James Apollo sent me a very non-pushy little email suggesting that I might like a couple of the tracks on ‘Good Grief’. He sensibly has a stream of the whole album so that you can listen before you buy, so I gave it a go. 38.4 minutes later, I was visiting the iTunes Music store to buy the album.

Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on precisely why you like a piece of music—-you just do. The first thing that grabbed me about ‘Good Grief’ was that it has a lovely melancholy atmosphere, and an intimate, ‘live’ feel to the mix. There’s some fantastic acoustic guitar, banjo and—-I think¹—-steel guitar work, and Apollo has a great voice. I particularly like the anguished ‘Long Rope’, and the slyly sinister lope of ‘All The Pretty’. ‘Mercenary Tango’ conjures up an image of a smoky, seedy dive in a one-horse town, and ‘Three Birds’ is infernally catchy. All in all, this album was a lovely surprise, and something that I probably wouldn’t have come across on my own.

¹ I really miss sleeve notes when I buy albums from the iTunes Music Store.

I tried putting together a little Automator workflow to thumbnail some selected images in iPhoto and rename them. It worked well enough, but the thumbnailing component only allowed a suffix to be added to the file, whereas I wanted a prefix. I was able to work around it with another workflow to get selected files, trim the suffix off, then add it to the beginning of the filename. It worked, but it was hardly elegant.

Then I spotted a nice Perl script mentioned on a MacOSXHints thread about renaming files. Michael Forman’s ren-regexp is really useful. Rather than just renaming files you specify, you can give a pattern to match for searching and replacing. So renaming files like DSC01234_thumb.jpg to thumb_DCS01234.jpg can be done in one easy step:

ren-regexp 's/(.*)_thumb.jpg/thumb_$1.jpg/' *

It’s really neat and also has a spiffy -t switch, which shows you the result of your command without altering any files; a useful dry run when you are about to rename hundreds of files.

Since Automator workflows can include shell scripts, it becomes very easy to simplify the workflow. I know that there are quite a few such utilities around (both command-line and GUI), but this one just appealed to me. Like all the best *nix commands, it does one thing exceptionally well.

Those of you who cycle might be aware of the current debate about the merits of cycle helmets, and about whether they should be made compulsory. A couple of weeks ago, the BMA (British Medical Association) threw more mud in the water by voting—-against many of their members’ advice—-in favour of compulsory helmet wearing by cyclists.

I’m in favour of compulsion in safety matters where there is a clear benefit of the safety measure (seatbelts in cars and motorcycle helmets, for example), but the evidence in favour of cycle helmets saving lives seems very contradictory at best. A few studies have concluded that helmets can provide protection, but only if they are worn correctly (most people wear them too far back on the head), and only in certain kinds of accidents. Other studies report that helmets can increase neck injuries by causing the head to rotate on impact, and some argue that cyclists ride take more risks when wearing a helmet because of a false sense of security.

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I don’t really have anything worthwhile to add to the thousands of words written about the London bombings yesterday. I was working at home yesterday and listening to the radio when the news came in. My first thought was “Oh no, not again.” My Dad used to work in London, and throughout the 80s, I used to worry frantically whenever I heard about IRA bombs in London. It’s the same old brutality, just carried out more efficiently.

It’s a natural reaction when something like this happens for people to ask if your friends and family are OK. I’m glad to be able to say they are, but that’s not really the point. It doesn’t matter whose family or friends they are—-or, for that matter, what country the deaths or injuries occur in. They are all humans, and we are all affected.

Although we were away at the weekend, we caught some of the later parts of the Live8 concert. I wasn’t that keen on many of the bands featured—-I was much more excited by the concert featuring African musicians at the Eden Centre—-but I did want to see Pink Floyd. Actually, since it was 24 years since they had last played together, I was a bit concerned that they might be dreadfully, embarrassingly bad.

Obviously that was a foolish fear. Pink Floyd blew away all of the other bands—-even The Who. Their playing was tight and focussed, and the level of passion and feeling they got into the music was—-to use the original sense of the word—-awesome. I hope that the Scissor Sisters were suitably humbled after hearing ‘Comfortably Numb’ done the right way¹. Nick Mason may look like he should be handing out Werther’s Originals to adoring grandchildren rather than sitting behind a drum kit, and Roger Waters looks disturbingly like Smashy (or Nicey—-I can’t remember which was the blonde one), but they still rocked. They are also nice blokes, and have agreed to donate the profits of their increased album sales to charity.

¹ I love my husband dearly, but the closest I’ve ever got to wondering if I’d married the right person was when he said that he quite liked the Scissor Sisters version. You think you know someone… Thankfully, he has since recanted.

We had a family celebration at the weekend, and all converged on Bourton-on-the-Water to eat, drink, go for walks and spend some time together. We chose Bourton mainly because it was the nicest place to spend a weekend that was roughly equidistant between all of our home towns. And it is lovely—-if somewhat ‘chocolate-boxy’—-but the main street is fearsomely busy on sunny weekends.

If you walk away from the main street (and we did that as much as possible), you can find peace and quiet, but the centre of the village was packed with people strolling about, paddling in the river and eating ice cream. We were having a coffee on the terrace of our hotel and witnessed the surreal sight of at least 30 mini motorbikes roaring up to the green. They all seemed to be scale models of particular bikes, but were ridden by full-sized men (with their knees up under their chins), and were as noisy as ordinary bikes. After a number had parked up, a police woman came over to them and evidently asked them to move on. There wasn’t any argument, and they all rode off again like a tiny, well-behaved pack of bonsai Hell’s Angels.

I’m left wondering why anyone would buy a tiny motorbike. I’m sure that you can probably fit one in the back of a car to transport it, but it must be uncomfortable, and—-to be honest—-it makes you look like a bit of a wally.

I owe a huge debt to jb for pointing to this video of Billy Bragg and Bill Bailey singing Bill’s Billy Bragg song, Unisex Chip Shop at Glastonbury. I’m sure that I’ve said so before, but Bill Bailey is a genius. He can be more like Billy Bragg than Billy is, and lines like this are pure comedy gold:

[Previous line concerned him dreaming about Debbie from the chip shop running naked through the woods of Rainham…] If I had some tigers I’d train ‘em To protect her From the sexual fascism that was lurking ‘Round the gherkins

It’s made me smile every time I think of it.