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I’m generally rabidly averse to any TV programme with a significant ‘celebrity’ element (Celebrity Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing, or whatever it is), but I’ve been really enjoying Who Do You Think You Are?. I suspect that’s because it’s not really about celebrities at all, but rather about the fascinating lives of the extraordinary, ordinary people who happen to be our ancestors. The celebrities seem to be there to draw in viewers who would normally have no interest in genealogy, and also to provide a presenter who is fairly comfortable and articulate in front of the camera.

The idea behind the series (for those who haven’t seen it) is that that they investigate the family tree of a celebrity, tracing back interesting stories as far as they can, and in the process revealing some very interesting things about social history. You tend to forget that the subject of the programme is famous after a while, and become fascinated by the lives of their ancestors.

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I’m a very late with this, but I thought it made interesting, funny, illuminating and mildly depressing reading. The Science Learning Centre in London surveyed adolescents on their opinion of science and scientists.

Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as ‘normal young and attractive men and women’ […] They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did ‘very important work’ and 70% thought they worked ‘creatively and imaginatively’. Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did ‘boring and repetitive work’.

Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: ‘Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family’, and ‘because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female’.

[Via Boing Boing]

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I want to vent a little spleen over a particular kind of vicious plastic packaging. I’m sure you’ve also seen the type I mean; they are rigid, flat-ish boxes made of clear plastic, designed to allow you to see the goodies within, but also to allow the package to be hung on a metal rail or stood on a shelf. Several years ago, similar packaging tended to be designed in two distinct halves like a clam shell, which were held together by plastic ‘blisters’. When you gently pulled the two halves apart, the ‘blisters’ would separate and you would get access to whatever was inside. Easy.

Easy is not a word I could ever bring myself to apply to the new kind of packaging. This breed requires some kind of bolt cutter (or other fearsomely sharp tool which can exert tremendous force), heavy leather gloves and a safety net or mattress. They look deceptively like the old kind, but are welded shut with a rigid plastic seam close to the edge. Because this narrow seam forms a right angle with the rest of the pack, it makes it fiendishly difficult to cut with even a stout pair of scissors. As you cut further, the thin strip of excess plastic gouges great gashes in your hand, unless you keep stopping to cut the excess strip off every time it gets long enough to damage your hands. That’s what the leather gloves are for, though they make a fiddly job even harder.

The really tedious thing is that you need to remove at least three seams from the pack before you can safely get the goods out. However, I suspect that I’m not the only person who howls with rage, frustration and pain on nearing the second corner, and—-maddened by blood loss—-attempts to tear the two halves apart with their bare hands, thus catapulting the delicate gadget within across the room to smash against the opposite wall. That’s when you need the safety net.

I’m tired of waiting for manufacturers to regain their sanity and just put the damn stuff in a cardboard box with a bit of sellotape sealing it shut, so if anyone has any great plastic-package-opening tips or tools, I’m all ears (and shredded hands).

In a comment on a previous article (I wish I could remember which one!), someone commented that they’d like to know a bit more about my setup in Tiger. I’m hoping to get to that in a little more depth in the future, but one feature of Tiger that I use extensively is Smart Folders. Specifically, I use Finder labels to mark files that I have to read or review (red), that are pending in some way (orange), and academic PDF articles that I’ve read (green). I can then use a Smart Folder to search for items that have, say, a red label, which gives me quick access to files I need to do something with, without having to file them in a special place, and then re-file them in their proper location when they’re finished with.

However, now that Path Finder 4 is out (and has a load of nice new features), I’ve gone back to using that instead of Finder. Unfortunately, Path Finder doesn’t yet have the ability to deal with Smart Folders because it’s written in Cocoa, and Smart Folders are Carbon-only objects. They are going to be supported in a future version, but they will have to be implemented from scratch. In the meantime, what was I to do without my beloved Smart Folders? Well, I knew that spotlight queries can be run quite easily from the command line using the mdfind command, so I figured that it ought to be possible to write a script in Ruby that could call the mdfind command, process the results and duct tape together calls to the shell and Applescript to construct a kind of home-brew Smart Folders GUI. By running the Ruby script itself using a Quicksilver trigger, I could get hotkey access to the results of my query.

It turns out that there’s a hard way to do it, and a much easier way. Unfortunately, I attempted the hard way first.

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I got the same, un-nameable feeling that I used to get when I was at primary school, and watched seagulls soaring around in the crisp blue sky over the playground. It was something like homesickness, and made me long to be somewhere else. This shouldn’t be taken as evidence that I’m chronically unhappy at work—-I’m fine. It’s just that it seems to have been a long, dark winter, and it’s the Friday after a very busy week, and I’ve had that, “For goodness sake, isn’t it the weekend yet?” feeling for a couple of days.

I don’t want to give the impression that I make a habit of eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, but there are a few people whose loud conversations in quiet places make me want to get out a red editorial pencil and make lots of those proof-reading deletion marks. I’m no Dorothy Parker, but I try to keep my mouth shut if I’ve got nothing interesting to say (obviously, my blog is exempt from this rule, and I blether on about all kinds of nonsense). However, I’ve noticed a tendency for some people to report very dull events in excruciating detail.

I had the dubious pleasure of overhearing a conversation like this on the train. The events in question could have been summed up as follows: “My washing machine broke down at the weekend, so I phoned my Mum and she offered to wash my laundry for me.” A fairly straightforward story, you might think. But no, in the mouth of a ‘conversation extender’ it can be made to last for at least 15 minutes¹ by relating every word of the conversation in real time. “So I said, ‘Really?’, and she said, ‘Yeah’, and I said, ‘OK then’…”. In other words, it was the three-hour Director’s Cut of the event.

As I got up to get off I couldn’t resist sneaking a look at her (suspiciously quiet) interlocutor, to see if she had literally died of boredom. She hadn’t, but she did have a distinctly glazed look about her.

¹ She was still going as I got off the train, so it could have been a lot longer for all I know. ↑

I’ve got used to putting up with the awful techno dreck that seems to get played in most gyms, so I thought I might be dreaming when I heard Pink Floyd as I started my workout this morning. I rowed to ‘Comfortably Numb’, which seemed utterly appropriate in the circumstances. Obviously someone with taste had broken in to the music system. I had the best workout I’d had for ages, lifting heavier weights and doing better in my aerobic workout. Coincidence? I think not.

I’ve been meaning to write about my experience with [Aperture][1] for a while, but other stuff got in the way. I also wanted a chance to really work with it for a while, especially in the light of various rather [negative reviews][2] that circulated after its release. I should also say at the outset that in three respects, I’m probably not a typical Aperture user, so my opinions should be weighted with these things in mind:

1. I didn’t pay full price for it—-a very generous academic licensing price meant that I paid about half of the UK retail price, making it financially equivalent to buying iView MediaPro 3.
2. I don’t own a camera which produces RAW files—-most of the negative remarks about Aperture seem to concern handling and rendering of RAW files (which to be fair, is a feature Apple promotes above all others).
3. I’m not a professional photographer, just a keen amateur.

[1]: http://www.apple.com/aperture/ “Apple’s Aperture page” [2]: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars “Ars Technica review”

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Yesterday we saw Elling again, courtesy of a special edition, exclusive to Lovefilm (of which more later). It was just as good as the last time we saw it, and I get the feeling that it’s one of those films like ‘The Big Liebowski’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ that I could happily watch many times, particularly when I’m feeling a bit cheesed off with life.

What I can’t understand is why this film—-which had a cinematic release in 2001, and which has won a clutch of awards—-hasn’t been released as a subtitled version in the rest of Europe yet. At amazon.co.uk, you can buy a US version, but it’s both a Region 1 disc (which isn’t too much of a problem for most people in the UK) and in NTSC format (which is).

I notice with a slightly sinking heart that a new version is being made in the US. Yet again, it seems, Hollywood has decided to try to remake a masterpiece unnecessarily, just to get English speaking actors in the roles. But the original actors were brilliant, and I thought that hearing the original Norwegian added enormously to the appeal. Part of the charm is hearing the way that the actors stress words and pronounce things, even if you don’t understand a word of Norwegian. If anyone knows where I can buy an English subtitled PAL format DVD of this film, do let me know.

I just had to get up and take a picture (trying not to look too conspicuous). It’s obviously a joke, but I’m wondering if it’s one of the spoof signs put up by Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton, and featured on the BBC’s website. Wherever it came from, it really cheered me up!

I was (and still am) a huge fan of the comedy series, Spaced, so I was really looking forward to the new comedy-sci-fi series Hyperdrive which stars Nick Frost—-also known as ‘Mike’ in Spaced and ‘Ed’ in Shaun of the Dead. It’s early days yet, but so far I really like it.

The premise (which, to me, is just funny on its own) is that the space ship ‘HMS Camden Lock’ is on a mission to promote Peterborough as an enterprise zone throughout the galaxy (“It’s got a Farmer’s Market!”). A somewhat thankless and futile task one might think, and one that really peeves the psychopathic and trigger-happy First Officer, York. However, the Commander Michael (Nick Frost) insists that it’s a “sideways move” within Space Force.

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Douglas Johnston has been developing a taxonomy of different archetypes of people who are constantly playing with their productivity systems: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers and Spies. It was immediately obvious to me which I was—like Douglas, I am a Tinker. To quote him:

• “The Tinker is the consumate tweaker for tweaking’s sake.” Oh, that’s me all right.
• “…modify existing setups (even if they already work fine)”. Check.
• “Tinkers are far less concerned about using the system than the idea of creating it…”. Check.
• “Fascinated by planners, bags and utensils with multiple uses, hidden compartments…”. Oh my, yes.
• “…the Tinker might also carry a Swiss Army Knife, Leatherman…” Check!

Hey, has he been going through the hidden compartments in my multi-purpose bag?

When I was a kid, I used to go swimming every week at our local swimming baths (as we called it then, rather than ‘swimming pool’). It was a lovely Victorian building¹, with the original tiles, a cast iron turnstile that could stop a charging rhino (handy for all those occasions on which a rhino is desperate to get in for a swim without paying), but rather short on modern conveniences like footbaths or a metric length. I loved swimming. I wasn’t fast or particularly stylish, but I could plod up and down for hours very happily. In fact, I spent most of the time swimming underwater, loving the feeling of exploring another world.

I’ve got quite long eyelashes, and the water on my lashes generated rainbows from the lights whenever I blinked. And I must be the only person in the world who actually likes the smell and taste of chlorine. This is a slightly shameful confession, but after I’d been swimming, I used to secretly lick my own arm, because I liked the faint residual taste of chlorine. I don’t do that now, of course…

I have started going swimming recently at the University, though, and I love my dawn swims before work, watching the rainbows burst from the lights.

¹ Unfortunately, the baths were demolished many years ago to make way for an office building. ↑

A colleague asked me if he could have a copy of my thesis as a PDF file a couple of days ago. It’s still sitting in a long-neglected corner of my hard drive as a series of Word files (in some antique version, circa 5.1), but as I’d been thinking for a while that I ought to convert them (before some future update to Word renders them unreadable), I decided to go for it.

My thesis is 10 years old this year, and I’d somehow totally forgotten that I’d actually hand-drawn a couple of the figures, literally cutting and pasting them into a space I’d left on the page, which I then photocopied. Obviously, this presented some problems for making a PDF file, but it also made me feel about 80 years old. Nevertheless, the hand-drawn figures do have a certain rustic charm. I also remembered that I had to construct the reference list by hand, painstakingly marking up each journal name in italics, and each volume number in bold. It nearly drove me crackers. In those days, I kept my references on index cards in an index box—-none of this inserting citations in the text with Endnote or BibTeX and getting them inserted and formatted automatically, oh no.

I can see that I’ve reached the stage when I’m going to start boring students with these kinds of recollections when they complain about how hard it is writing their theses, and from there ‘tis but a step to, “I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.”. It’s a slippery slope.

This made me laugh like a drain this morning. You really have to wonder if the makers of Trivial Pursuit do any actual research at all. However, given the question about feverfew, it’s entirely possible that they think we’re still living in the 18th Century, and that ‘handy’ actually refers to semaphore without the flags.