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Along with all the usual Christmas stuff, we couldn’t help watching the Christmas Doctor Who special—-The Christmas Invasion. I loved Christopher Eccleston so much in the role (and the chemistry that he and Billie Piper generated), that I watched the programme with a mixture of hope and dread. (Warning: some spoilers ahead.)

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We left it a bit late to buy a tree this year, and the nearest outlet had sold out. So, while I was busy blowing air into rubber mannequins, Mr. Bsag got to do the caveman bit this year, and had to trek a bit further with it. He also got a real bargain because they were trying to get rid of their stock. We got an enormous and gloriously bushy tree (as you can more or less see from the blurry photograph) for the princely sum of £7—-bargain!

We’re going to take a couple of days off to eat, drink and scare ourselves deliciously with all the BBC4 ghost stories and Conan Doyle stuff we’ve been recording on the EyeTV. Happy Christmas, Festivus, Winter Solstice, or whatever else you feel like celebrating (or not celebrating) to you all. (Imagine that I just said that exactly like the Queen, complete with that funny, forced little grimace she makes at the end of her speech).

We had the assessment for our First Aid at Work course today, and I passed! So I’m now Licensed To Bandage. I even get to carry a little green card in my wallet to certify that I’m a First Aider. Nothing in the course is particularly hard if you know a little bit about the basic plumbing and wiring of the human body and apply common sense, but it is good to feel confident about the correct way to prioritise treatment and the techniques you need to help someone. I think it’s fair to say that in a real emergency, a certain amount of adrenalin and panic would set in, so having a memorised and drummed-in checklist of things to, well, check would be a good anchor to hang on to.

CPR is also an excellent skill to have. I think that everyone should really learn how to do it, because of the vital difference you could make in an emergency situation. Imagine how you’d feel if someone collapsed in front of you and stopped breathing, and you just stood there not knowing what to do? Still, I hope I never have to deal with anything that serious.

I’m on a four-day course this week to become a qualified First Aider for work. As a biologist, I’ve got a reasonable grasp of how the human body works and the kinds of things that can go wrong, and as my Mum was¹ a nurse, I’ve absorbed a lot of very sensible information from her about first aid, so I’m not finding anything too difficult so far. We’ve spent quite a lot of time today either pretending to be unconscious², or pretending to treat people who are pretending to be unconscious. Actually, it’s quite a lot of fun.

On the way back from the course, I was suddenly much more aware of all the people around me, and all the myriad ways in which they could have accidents or their bodies could suddenly pack up. It’s ridiculous, but I was thinking, “Please, no-one have a heart attack or a stroke today, because we don’t get to those kinds of things until Wednesday. Simple loss of consciousness, minor cuts, bruises or burns would be acceptable.”

¹ She’s officially retired, but nurses never really retire—-they just stop being paid for the care that they provide. ↑

² In other words, pretty much my normal Monday work state. ↑

I’ve had the new iMac G5 for a bit over a week now, and I’m still really happy with it. It’s a really beautifully designed computer, with all the usual Apple attention to detail. When I compare it to our old CRT-iMac (a Graphite model), you can see how they’ve continued to advance the all-in-one computer concept right to its logical conclusion. It’s so sleek and integrated. Two little touches that exemplify this are the power cable which has a plastic disc attached to the socket end so that the cable forms a smooth, continuous surface with the back of the machine, and the IR sensor (for the remote) which is hidden invisibly behind the grey Apple logo.

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Sometimes when I’m tired or ill, I can get into a state walking home where my legs are on ‘automatic’, and seem to be disconnected from my brain and the rest of me. I seem to be able to just put the gear stick into drive, and then sit back. It’s almost like traveling in a vehicle, or riding on your father’s shoulders when you were little, or even wearing a pair of Techno Trousers (ex-NASA!). You can look around, daydream or just generally relax while your legs mechanically eat up the kilometres. Weird.

When I got my new iMac G5, I also got an EyeTV for DTT. I saw these units being demonstrated at MacExpo, and was really impressed by the quality of the recordings, and by the tiny size of the box. We’re constantly having problems trying to record the Freeview-only channels on our VCR, so it seemed like a great idea.

As I mentioned, the hardware box itself is tiny—-about the size of a chunky box of matches—-and is bus powered via the USB2 cable. There’s a standard coaxial aerial socket on the back, and they provide you with a dinky little mobile indoor aerial. Since we don’t have access to the aerial cable upstairs (and the roof aerial is pretty dreadful anyway—-we have Telewest cable TV), we’ve been using this little aerial, and I’ve been amazed by the quality of the signal. The only problems we’ve had have been with the digital radio stations, which mostly seem fine, but then suddenly drop the signal altogether. Oddly, this doesn’t seem to happen with the TV channels. I’m sure that this would be much improved if we got an amplified indoor aerial.

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I’ve had a pretty busy weekend, as my parents came up to stay, and we met up with Mr. Bsag’s parents (plus our two brothers) for a pre-Christmas dinner on Saturday. On early Friday evening, we wandered around the Frankfurt Christmas Market in Birmingham, and managed to just about eat our own weight in free samples of stollen (fruity, spicy Christmas bread). The lights around the Bullring and the Christmas market looked quite striking, and I put a few photos up on flickr. Then on Saturday, we visited Lichfield for the big lunch, and took a bit of time wandering around the town and the Cathedral. It’s a very unusual style of architecture, and is a huge size for such a small town. There’s nothing quite as lovely as seeing the low winter sun slanting in through stained glass windows, and warming the stone.

I’ve just taken delivery of a shiny new iMac G5 20” to replace our creaky old iMac, and some other nice toys like an EyeTV (digital terrestrial version) and Aperture, all courtesy of the great Apple educational prices.

I’d write more, but I’ve got lovely new geek toys to set up and play with! I’m sure I’ll be going on about the experience at great length in due course. Brace yourselves…

There was an excellent article in TidBITS today about a music streaming and recommendation service called Pandora. It piqued my interest, as I’m always keen to explore new music, and was curious about how well it would actually do at finding music I’d like.

The idea is that you give it the name of an artist or a song you like, it classifies that music (by musical characteristics, rather than conventional genres), and it plays you a series of tracks that share some similarities with that music. You can indicate that you particularly like a track to hear more songs like that, or that you dislike it to exclude that song and those like it.

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Mr. Bsag and I went to the exhibition of wood engravings at the RBSA on Saturday—-sadly, it’s finished now, otherwise I’d recommend a visit if you’re in the area. I love woodcuts, linocuts and wood engravings. As far as I understand it, wood engravers use hard wood which enables them to make incredibly fine marks. Certainly, many of the prints on show where beautifully detailed and dense. Even the tiniest of the prints must represent hours of painstaking, delicate work.

I find it difficult to explain what I like so much about wood engravings. Usually, I’m a sucker for colour, and most engravings are just printed in black (though some may be hand tinted). It must be something about the magic of creating such a detailed, textured image out of a block of smooth wood that I find interesting. Wood engraving was a bit of a dying art, but it seems to have had a bit of a resurgence recently, which I think is great news.

With all the hullabaloo over the release of Firefox 1.5, I decided it was time to give it a proper go. I’ve had previous versions installed on my system for a while (along with Opera, Omniweb and Safari, of course), but I tend to just launch it occasionally when other browsers have problems, or to check the rendering of my site designs in another browser. Shallow though it may be, the main problem I’ve always had with Firefox is that it just doesn’t look very Mac-like.

After a little bit of digging, that particular problem was solved by the GrApple Eos Pro theme; very simple, stylish, and a bit like Safari without the brushed metal. Firefoxy makes form widgets a little smoother and more Mac-like, rather than the boxy Firefox-native widgets, which always seem too large to me.

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