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I’m constantly amazed by how Quicksilver becomes an unconscious part of your interaction with a computer. Take today, for example. I had to send some information by internal mail to one of the administrators in our department. I had a one of those all-too-frequent mental blackouts, and could remember her first name but not her surname. Without even thinking, I turned to my keyboard, hit Cmd-space to activate Quicksilver, typed the first few letters of her name, looked at the result (her card in Address Book), and thought “Oh, yes, that’s it”. I hit escape to dismiss the result (since I didn’t actually need to open her card in Address Book) and turned back to the envelope to address it.

It was only while I was writing that I realised how easy it all was. Now if I could only activate the same sequence in my head when talking to people in person so that I could remember their names, I’d be a happy person.

When I moved from Oxford to Birmingham just over a year ago, I managed to sort out most of the administrative changes (like signing up with a new GP and informing people about the change of address) pretty quickly. However, for some reason, I never got around to registering with a new dentist. A few weeks ago, I realised with a shock that it must have been about 18 months since I had last seen a dentist, and signed up with one.

My old dental practice in Oxford was in quite a posh area, and despite the fact that they charged more or less the same as any other dentist, it was very nicely decorated, with polished wood floors, tasteful prints and classical music playing in the background. My new dental practice—-which I visited for the first time today—-looks somewhat more run down. The dentists and dental nurses are very nice and perfectly competent, but the decor looks like a typical NHS GP practice—-slightly tatty.

As I sat in the chair, having my teeth prodded and scraped, I noticed a couple of posters stuck to the ceiling, obviously placed there deliberately to give the victim patient something to look at. One was a nice black and white photograph of the Empire State Building—-a little bit mid-80s Athena, but quite nice. The other one made me look twice—-“World’s Greatest Modern Fighting Aircraft”, depicting about 18 jet fighters. Now, I admire the MiG 19 as much as the next person, but it still seems a bit of an odd choice of decoration. I would have thought that most dentists would opt for a peaceful seascape or a wild flower meadow or something. It had the desired effect though. I spent the whole consultation puzzling over their choice of posters, and so hardly noticed what they were doing.

I’m afraid that this is going to be something of a rant. I get increasingly annoyed by the way in which we seem to be imitating the US in designing our urban spaces around cars, with little regard for people who might prefer to (or have to) walk. I know that some cities in the US are quite pedestrian-friendly, but others just assume that you have a car and use it for even the shortest of trips. I’m used to walking around unfamiliar towns, and remember the bizarre looks I got in San Diego when I asked for directions for walking from one place to another.

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I’ll admit it: I have a Bag Problem. I’m not one of those women who drop thousands of pounds¹ on the latest tiny little chi-chi fashion handbag (“because beadwork is so hot right now, sweetie”), in fact I loathe and detest handbags and don’t own one. On the rare occasions when I go somewhere where even I would feel awkward carrying a rucksack, I colonise the pockets of my beloved. No, I’m talking about real bags. The kind you can carry all your geek kit around in, and which doubles as a mugger-felling projectile or an emergency seat. It must have pockets—-lots of pockets. My problem is that I want the perfect bag that will do it all, the One Bag to Rule Them All.

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Perhaps it’s because—-at current house prices—-we can’t begin to imagine ever being able to afford our own home that we find a particular kind of property programme so masochistically irresistible. In particular, I’m drawn to How to Rescue a House like a moth to a flame, because that shimmering mirage of the perfect wreck that you could buy for a song and ‘do up’ is so tempting. How To Rescue A House is a bit different to many of the shows because it doesn’t feature property developers who just want to make as much profit as possible before moving on to the next place. All the people looking for a property want a home to live in, and generally can’t afford to get one in their area for a price that they can afford. It’s also an excellent reminder of the scandalous waste of perfectly decent—-and often architecturally interesting—-homes that are just lying empty in our cities, while identical mock tudor shoeboxes spread like a rash over former green field sites.

However, my other reason for liking the programme is because of the glimpses of people’s lives that you get through their abandoned homes. It can be achingly sad and intimate, particularly when the former owner has lived there for many years and moulded the house into their shape like an old overcoat. One house belonged to a person who had gone into hospital suddenly, obviously expecting to return, but had ended up in a nursing home. An unwashed mug sat on a table, and there was a wooden chair in front of the gas fire, still with the imprint of the owner on the faded beige cushion. Tattered net curtains at the kitchen window seemed to have been repaired haphazardly by spiders’ webs, and a quiet layer of dust settled on every surface.

It made me itch to get in there with a camera and document it all, which made me feel slightly guilty. But how would you feel if you bought the house? Clearing away a life like that would feel like clearing away a person’s memories, and then erasing any vestiges of the person themselves.

I was struck while watching Sufi Soul last night (recorded some time ago, but we’ve only just got around to it) that one of the many ways in which you can classify religions is by their attitude towards facets of human nature. Some religions seem to put followers into the role of children, with the divine being as a strict parent and religious officials as enforcers and interpreters of his/her (let’s face it—-his) will. Many perfectly normal aspects of human nature are seen as wicked or sinful, and must be resisted by the children in order to gain the approval of the divine being.

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Friday night is White Russian night chez bsag. Yay! I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you have a DVD of The Big Liebowski to hand, so much the better, but if not, you can just imagine that you’re stoned and lying on your rug listening to a tape of bowling balls knocking down pins. Perhaps you are—-I don’t need to know what you do in the privacy of your own home.

Anyway, try it—-it’s an excellent antidote to five tediously consecutive week days.

I’ve usually found working on my 12” PowerBook very comfortable, but recently I’ve started to feel that my posture is beginning to deteriorate. I already use an external keyboard and mouse at work, so I felt that raising the screen up higher would help me to keep my shoulders back and my back in a more natural position. I could have gone the DIY route and propped my laptop up on a couple of phone directories, but I decided to do it properly and get a Griffin iCurve.

It’s a very low key design—-basically just a length of bent and curved polycarbonate. However, it’s much more solid and substantial than you might guess from looking at pictures of it, and seems to place the laptop in more or less the perfect position. The top ‘prongs’ tilt at an angle of about 5-10°, but non-slip rubber patches stop the laptop from slipping off. Another advantage is that the PowerBook is almost completely exposed to the air, and as a result the average CPU temperature (as measured by iPulse) has dropped by a few degrees, which can only be a good thing for the life of the processor.

I’m hoping that I might gain a few precious centimetres in height over the next few weeks, as my back learns to uncurl again—-I need all the height I can get.

Prizes, obviously¹.

But aside from that, I wrote nearly a month ago about David Seah’s Printable CEO; it’s a system for tracking your progress by assigning more points for completing things that progress your career the most. I’ve been using the sheets to keep track of the things I’ve done for about a month now, and I decided that it was about time to draw some graphs and have a look at the pattern. They’re a bit rough and ready and were knocked up quickly, but because I want to bore the pants off you, here’s the mean number of items per points category, plotted by day of the week:

The interesting thing from my point of view is that it reflects exactly the opposite pattern than I thought it would. Before I started this, I imagined that Mondays and Fridays were my most productive—-Mondays because I feel rested after the weekend, and Fridays because I’m trying to get things done in time for the weekend. What I can see from this graph is that I feel busier on those days because I’m doing a lot of fiddly little things rather than important things. Actually, in terms of important things, Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most productive, as you can also see from this graph (there’s also a lot of variability, as you can see from the whopping great standard error bars):

It’s been quite an interesting process, and has definitely changed my approach to work a bit.

¹ While I’m on the subject of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’, last night’s ‘One song to the tune of another’ was an all-time classic: the words of ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones to the tune of ‘Jerusalem’. ↑

Wow. Just wow.

Oh, you were expecting something a little more informative? Well, OK then—-here’s the whole story.

I’ve listened to Kate Bush for a long time, and her music has gradually worked itself into the warp and weft of my life like a sparkling gold thread. I remember walking around suburban Surrey in the rain doing my brother’s paper round, listening to ‘Breathing’ on a Walkman and feeling real fear—-what if everyone I loved died in a nuclear holocaust? ‘Never Be Mine’ drew out the pain of a relationship that was never to be, like putting a poultice on a wound. ‘Get Out of My House’: howling along with the refrain provided catharsis and helped me to reclaim my space after things had gone wrong. ‘Sensual World’: Mmmm. Yes. I could list many more, but you’ve probably got the picture¹.

So I’m an informed, but also somewhat biased reviewer. I’m not uncritical of her work though—-I felt that while some of the ‘The Red Shoes’ was fantastic, other parts were a bit lacklustre. Anyway, a new Kate Bush album is a big thing for me. It’s not only a new thing in my life, but it will probably become part of my life in quite a meaningful way. When I saw the CD lying on the doormat, I was excited, but also a little frightened—-what if it just wasn’t very good?

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I got the new issue of MacUser magazine through the post today, and was just flicking through it to see what was being featured when I spotted a report of the MacExpo which had some pictures of the show. Imagine my surprise to find that I was in one of the photographs! I don’t know what the chances are, but when you consider that the show was open for a total of about 24 hours, of which I was present for 4, that there were thousands of people and a huge number of stands, I find it incredible that I’m in one of the shots. Probability is a strange thing.

However, I don’t think that even my nearest and dearest would recognise me—-it’s a distant shot and I have my back to the camera (my best side for portraits, as it happens). It’s only because I know what I was wearing and carrying, and remember talking to the people in the photo that I know it’s me. It did briefly cross my mind that I could post the image here (if I could avoid getting sued for breach of copyright), and run a ‘Spot the Bsag’ competition. Visitors could enter their guess (as pixel coordinates of the image) in the comments, and the closest guess would win a fabulous prize¹. It would be like ‘Where’s Waldo/Wally’, with the added challenge of not knowing what Waldo/Wally looks like.

¹ Something in the style of a school fete tombola prize, perhaps, like a packet of Rich Tea biscuits or a bottle of HP Sauce. ↑

My brother came to visit at the weekend, partly to take delivery of a brand new Mac mini I’d ordered for him. He’s always been a Windows (and now *nix) user, but after a blown power supply on his old Windows machine, he decided that he wanted to get another small computer to run alongside it. All those years of steady but stealthy indoctrination from me must have had some effect, because he decided to get a Mac. If I’m honest, it probably had more to do with the fact that the mini is small, cheap, and he already had a monitor he could use with it.

When I held the handbag-sized box outstretched towards him with a flourish, the first thing he said (laughing) was, “Is that it?”. I don’t think that he’d realised quite how mini it would be. Anyway, we had a lot of fun setting it up, and I gave him a kind of whirlwind tour of Mac OS X, showing him the structure of the file system, the System Preferences and how to install applications.

I’ve used Macs for such a long time that many of its quirks and differences from Windows are invisible to me, so it was a very interesting experience to walk someone through the process. I think that he generally found it fairly intuitive, but certain things like clicking the close button and expecting the application to quit (which admittedly it sometimes does) might take a bit longer. At one point he asked me if the window widgets could be moved to the right hand sides of windows. “Err, no.” I resisted the urge to say that the left hand side is the One True Location for window widgets, but it is funny how the system you use leads to such a strong feeling of the absolute correctness of one pattern or the other. I think that the different keyboard shortcuts will probably take even longer to adjust to, as I’ve found to my cost in the opposite direction when using Unix applications.

One feature of Tiger that I hadn’t used at all, but which proved invaluable for a switcher was the Spotlight search box in System Preferences. I didn’t take much notice when Steve demoed it in his keynote, but they’ve cleverly put in keywords that Windows users will be likely to search for. So, for example, searching for ‘wallpaper’ brings up the Desktop and Screensaver pane—-it’s very handy.

Last week I found myself needing—-if you can believe this—-to buy some Lego® for work purposes. I know, sometimes I have an Interesting Job. Anyway, I wandered slightly fruitlessly around several toy shops and department stores, but couldn’t find a simple set of rectangular bricks of various sizes and a baseboard. There were Lego® dinosaurs, knights, Harry Potters and even Death Stars, but nothing as simple as a collection of bricks.

Just when I had resigned myself to going block-less (and had fretted about the future creativity of today’s children in a slightly pompous manner), I found the Lego® shop and its wall of pick and mix blocks. You pick up a cup (small or large) and fill it up with whatever blocks you like, then pay a flat rate. It’s a brilliant idea, and I had more fun than is seemly for a middle-aged woman collecting supplies for work. Of course, because I had the freedom to pick whatever I wanted, I decided that I had to have blocks of complementary colours. So all of my Lego® creations¹ will be tasteful combinations of grey and white, with accents of royal blue and orange.

¹ Entirely for legitimate work purposes, as I feel I should reiterate… ↑

The bezier pen: he’s a slippery little blighter, isn’t he?

Occasionally I have to use a vector drawing application to produce a diagram of some kind for work, and on those occasions I hope like blazes that the diagram in question doesn’t require any curves because I’ve never got to grips with the bezier pen. Of course, I can form perfectly nice paths with straight segments until the cows come home, but the moment I try to click and drag to form a curve, all hell breaks loose, and the resulting squiggle explosion looks like the outcome of an interaction between a sugar-crazed two-year-old and a crayon. Other people seem to be able to use it to create elegant, expressive lines and shapes, but all I get is a willful tangle.

This time, however, there was no way to get around it, and there had to be curves. So I decided to learn how to use that damn pen properly, once and for all. I did a search, and came up with a few online resources, of which this tutorial was probably the most helpful. I read, and practiced, and stabbed the undo button in a fury, but gradually, I began to see how to control this thing. My ‘eureka’ moment came when it dawned on me that if you want a smooth, symmetrical curve, the control handles need to be the same length as one another, and perpendicular to the curve. Those of you who are pen masters are probably thinking, “Well, duh!” right now, but it was quite an important bit of understanding for me. I think it also really helped me to have some kind of guide about where to put the points, like a circle or ellipse temporarily drawn underneath. Otherwise, it’s very hard to place points properly to achieve the shape you want. I still find it a very unintuitive way to draw, rather than sketching a line (which I’m also hopeless at without a graphics tablet), but it’s gradually beginning to seem less intimidating.

At the end of all this practice, I produced a diagram which had some very respectable—-and practically smooth—-curves in it. I feel quite proud of myself.