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Our landlord wants to sell the house we’re renting, so it looks like we’re going to be moving again before long. It’s not totally unexpected, but my heart still sinks at the prospect of going through the whole house-hunting thing again.

This time, we’re tentatively looking in to the prospect of buying a house, mostly because we desperately want to put down some semi-permanent roots. Initial enquiries about mortgages have not been encouraging. I’ve promised myself that I’m not going to become a crashing ‘house prices’ bore, so I’ll restrict myself to saying this: I find it a bit concerning that someone earning well over the national average salary can’t get anywhere close to getting a mortgage for a house selling at the national average house price. Is it just me, or does that not add up?

I watched a great documentary last week called ‘Art from the Arctic’ on BBC FOUR a week ago or so, which was about the Cape Farewell expeditions to the Arctic. This is a very laudable effort to bring together artists, scientists and educators to create work that will inform the public about the dangers of global warming. In the programme, they followed the latest voyage of the lovely Dutch schooner ‘The Noorderlicht’ to Svalbard.

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Sometimes I could really curse my natural, idiotic honesty. Today I bought a cup of coffee in a coffee shop and handed over a £5 note in payment. However, the barrista behind the counter gave me change for a £10 note. Before I could stop myself, I’d blurted out, “But I gave you five pounds—-you’ve given me change for ten.”

D’oh! Damn you, stupid Honest Brain—-why can’t you just keep your do-gooding trap shut? We could have been a fiver up.

There seems to have been a bumper crop of social bookmarking services recently. There’s the grandaddy of them all, de.icio.us; a brace of followers, Spurl and Furl; and then the newbies (or abecedarians) Diigo and ma.gnolia. As far as I know, the last two offer something not provided by the others—-private bookmarks. That might seem somewhat antithetical to the social aspect of bookmarking, but if you’re putting a lot of effort into filing links using one of these services, it would be really nice to store all your bookmarks there, and so have access to your bookmarks wherever you were.

I was lucky enough to get beta accounts at both Diigo and ma.gnolia, and have had some interesting exchanges with developers of both services. So I thought that I’d write about my impressions of them. I should point out that both services are being added to all the time, and some of the things I’d like to see appear seem to be possibilities for the future, or are planned features.

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We sometimes listen to ‘Private Passions’ a programme on Radio 3 in which generally erudite people talk to Michael Berkeley about their favourite pieces of music. It’s a bit like an upmarket version of Desert Island Discs, but without the restrictions on numbers of pieces, and they actually play the whole piece rather than snippets.

So when Mr. Bsag was looking at the Radio Times yesterday and said, “Anna Nicole Smith is on Private Passions tomorrow”, I did a bit of a mental double-take.

Me: Anna Nicole Smith? She of the surgical enhancement and the ancient, super-rich late husband? Mr. B. (rolling eyes and enunciating clearly): No. Alexander McCall Smith.

Ah, OK. The world makes sense again.

It’s almost impossible to describe what The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain do without making it seem weird and eccentric. This is very convenient, because what they do is weird and eccentric, but also a stroke of genius. They are (obviously, given their name) an orchestra of ukuleles who cover an amazing variety of songs in their own inimitable style. If you think of the songs you could least imagine being played on a ukulele, those are the ones they tackle.

Thus we have the hilarious cover of ‘Je T’aime’ by Serge Gainsbourg, and the surprisingly funky version of ‘Le Freak’. My absolute favourite, though, is ‘Miss Dy-na-mi-tee’ (by Ms Dynamite). They turn it into a wonderful, bouncy little number that sounds exactly like something Bertie Wooster would listen to with his chums from the Drones at ‘The Tipsy Oyster’ or some other smoky 1930s nightclub.

About a month ago, I mentioned that I’d made some customisations to TextMate to help me with the plain text journal file I keep to jot things down on a day-to-day basis, and a couple of people expressed an interest in me releasing a bundle with the modifications. It almost didn’t seem worth doing because what I’d mostly done was to add minor things to the Markdown bundle. However, I thought that people might be able to add to it and improve it, so I decided to bundle it up.

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I love discovering obscure words that are new to me. The following word arrived via an article about Proust that a reader of this blog sent me:

abecedarian: (adjective) 1 arranged alphabetically : in abecedarian sequence. 2 rudimentary; elementary : abecedarian technology. noun a person who is just learning; a novice. ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from late Latin abecedarius ‘alphabetical’ (from the names of the letters a, b, c, d).

It’s a great replacement for ‘newbie’, though somewhat harder to spell.

In homage to Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s excellent The Deeper Meaning of Liff:

dorking (verb trans.): the practice of expressing the curious and contradictory mixture of irritation, secret pride and frustration felt by a geek when a Google search for some vital piece of information leads to his/her own blog post on a superficially related topic. Tends to provoke thoughts similar to “if I already knew the answer, I wouldn’t be Googling for it, now would I?”

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film by Wong Kar Wai for ages, ever since I heard that he’d directed a kind of sequel to In the Mood for Love. Like its prequel, 2046 is a languid, sensual film that takes its time to unfold, and very little actually happens. If you like action films that are packed with explosions and plot twists, this probably isn’t for you. The film plays with time in many ways. In several places, captions intersperse snapshots of one of the characters frozen in some activity: ‘one hour later’, then ‘100 hours later’, then ‘1000 hours later’ and in between, a writer is poised with his fountain pen above the page, trying to finish a story. I think we’ve all been there in one way or another.

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I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.0 (always a somewhat nerve-wracking process). Things generally seem OK, with the exception that the commenting form has gone AWOL. Previous comments are being displayed, but there’s no form to add new ones.

So, yes—-I do know about it, and I’m currently trying to fix it. More later.

Update: OK, I think that’s go it. It was a rogue plugin. Let me know if there are any other screwy things.

I blame it on being very busy at both work and home recently, but lately I’ve been waking at 2 or 3 am most mornings, having just come out of a dream about getting an angry email from a colleague or from a reader of this blog, lambasting me for something or other. In a sleepy, confused state, I know very well that it was just a dream, but for some reason I can’t shake off the feeling that should go and check my email on the computer, as if I’ve got an IMAP connection on a secret dream port, and might have actually divined the content of a genuine email in my sleep. Ridiculous. But I lie awake for half an hour or so, telling myself that I’m being a complete muppet, and trying to resist the urge to lift the lid of my PowerBook.

Of course, in the morning, it’s instantly obvious to me that it was all ludicrous, and I was worrying about nothing. I think that it’s a good indication that I should never try to make an important decision at about 3 am, because my ability to distinguish reality from fiction is obviously seriously impaired at that hour. It’s lucky that I don’t have to do night shifts.

This book was quite a fun read, and unexpectedly uplifting and touching. Despite being a very popular pastime in the UK, birdwatching rather unfairly carries with it a slight whiff of anorak, partly because of the image of the avid ‘twitcher’, chasing rare birds all over the country just so that they can add that species to their list. That image is—-in itself—-unfair, because many twitchers also love watching common birds. Anyway, Simon Barnes’ argument is that you don’t really need to know much at all about birds to enjoy watching them, nor do you need expensive equipment, or to travel to exotic countries for it to enrich your life. In many ways, he was preaching to the converted as far as I was concerned. Despite birds being part of my job, I’m pretty hopeless at identifying them, but I could watch any bird for ages. I’m the kind of person who walks into lamp posts because my attention is suddenly caught by a bird in a tree. In fact, this passage from the book sounded terribly familiar to me:

I might be in the middle of a conversation of amazing importance about the Direction of Our Marriage, but my eye will flick out of the window at a hint of movement, caught in the tail of my eye, and I will register: bloody hell, sparrowhawk. I might say it out loud too—-not necessarily a wise decision.

He has some lovely passages about the glory of birds, but the book is also a rather touching portrait of his relationship with his father, who originally inspired his interest in birdwatching. They have (or had) a slightly awkward relationship, it seems, but their shared love of birds gave them something in common, something to talk about.

Just this morning I was standing at the bus stop in the gloomy pre-dawn light, and marvelling at the contributors to the dawn chorus gamely trying to make themselves heard over the roar of the traffic. At this time of year, they’re particularly welcome as heralds of the coming Spring. Now, I know that what they’re really doing is yelling at their male neighbours to get the hell off their territory (or else), and trying to impress the females, but what I hear is: “Welcome back, Persephone. How was the Underworld? Been a bit nippy while you’ve been away.”

There was an excellent quote on Hyperdrive last night, which might well become my favoured expression of mindless enthusiasm: “Set lasers to patriotic”. I like it despite the fact that I’m not in the least patriotic.

Perhaps it’s the current fashion for ‘geek chic’ (urgh), but there seems to have been a rash of comedies about or for geeks recently. Well, two—-there’s Hyperdrive, and now the new Channel 4 comedy, The IT Crowd. Roy and Moss are a couple of nerds who toil in the foetid basement IT department of a huge company, fielding stupid help desk calls from the other employees (“Is the button on the side glowing? No? Then you need to turn it on… push the button…you don’t know how to push a button? Are you from the past?”). Roy is prone to rage and wearing RTFM t-shirts (yay!), while Moss is dressed by his mother and has an aerosol can of water clipped to his belt with which to spray his ear when it gets hot.

It’s written by Graham Linehan and has many of the wacky and surreal hallmarks of Father Ted, laugh-out-loud moments (Moss emailing the fire brigade when his soldering iron starts a fire in the office), and some great physical comedy. However, it has one aspect that puts me into ‘Points of View’ mode¹: why did they have to make the new manager who knows absolutely nothing about computers female? And why does she have to be obsessed with shoes? Maybe they thought that if they were reinforcing the stereotype that all geeks are socially inept, they might as well also go for the one about women knowing nothing about computers and thinking of nothing except shoes. It’s a bit of a missed opportunity, though.

¹ “Why Oh Why do Channel Four persist in…Disgusted of Birmingham”. ↑