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I went to buy a birthday card for my cousin’s one year old daughter at lunchtime today. There were a few cheery looking cards, but a particularly bright design with a “1 Today!” banner along the bottom caught my eye. It had a little board picture book inserted into the top of the card, and I thought it would be a lot more exciting for her than just a card. Then I looked on the back and saw a little sticker which read:

Not suitable for children under 36 months

Really.

While following the links provided alongside a very interesting article on how to reduce household energy consumption in A-to-B magazine, I came across some information about highly efficient, power generating domestic boilers which contained Stirling engines, and I wondered again why we don’t see Stirling engines everywhere. Why did VHS (steam power and then the infernal internal combustion engine) win?

I first learnt about Stirling engines several years ago on a TV programme (who says TV isn’t educational?) and marvelled at their elegant design. Invented by Rev. Robert Stirling in 1816, the Stirling engine was intended as a safer, quieter and cleaner alternative to steam power. But modern Stirling engines using modern materials can even be more efficient than many petrol or diesel engines.

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We got the survey back on the house we’re hoping to buy, and it’s generally good news—-we think. The whole business of buying a house is fraught with panic anyway (particularly if you’re first time buyers as we are), but the survey is written in language designed to maximise back-covering rather than practical information, so it’s very easy to read far too much into it. They never use phrases like “the structure of the house is sound”, but say things like “as far as we were able to investigate it, the structure of the house seems to be acceptable”, which immediately makes you think that there’s something they’re not telling you. What does acceptable mean? What’s wrong with it?

“The internal staircase has 13 steps”. OK. Is that good? Or bad? Why do we need to know how many steps there are? “Some of the steps squeak.” It’s cursed! It’s a cursed house! Oh my Bod!¹

And breathe…

¹ A little tribute to Nebulous ↑

Google Calendar came out a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been having a bit of a play with it. I use Apple’s iCal as my main calendar, syncing it with my phone so that I’ve got access to my diary on the move. However, I’ve also been trying out some of the available online calendars that have been cropping up recently to see if I could use them alongside (or perhaps, instead of) iCal.

When you first think about what a calendar should be able to do, it seems as if it would be pretty trivial to create a really capable one. After all, it’s just displaying a list of events which have a date and and optional start and finish time, right? But when you think about it more deeply, you realise that there are things like recurring events (with all kinds of recurrence frequencies), reminders and notifications, different views of the data, sharing of events between individuals or different applications (in and out), invitations, scheduling and so on. And that’s before you sit down and tackle the all-important look and feel—-calendars have to be very easy and natural to add events to, and they have to make it easy to find things, either by event or period.

A lot of online calendars have sprung up recently, and I’ve personally tried out 30boxes and Kiko. Both have a lot of nice features. 30boxes has a lovely stripped-down and clean interface, with a dialog box that floats over the calendar then disappears when not needed. However, it doesn’t show blocked out sections of time in either the daily or weekly views, which I’ve come to depend on for judging how busy I’m likely to be on a given day. Kiko is a bit busier visually (though you can turn parts of the interface on or off), but shows blocks of time. Given the clout that Google has, both of these applications are going to have quite a fight on their hands.

Google Calendar itself is pretty nice, though missing a few features at this early stage. The interface is the clean, stripped-down affair you’d expect from Google, and the keyboard shortcuts—-like those of GMail—-make navigating around and creating new events very smooth. Like 30boxes and Kiko, there’s a form for creating new events in natural language: “Meeting with Anna 2pm next Friday”, for example. There’s a nice Agenda view that shows your events in list form, making it a good format to print out if you wish. At the moment, Safari isn’t supported which is a bit of a pain, and only a limited selection of mobile phone carriers are listed in the SMS notification settings, so non-US users are mostly out of luck. Importing iCal calendars works well, but I haven’t had much joy with the RSS feeds so far. I’m hoping that all of these things will be improved over time. It’s quite an exciting time for Calendar geeks.

Sorry about the formatting problems—-my Markdown plugin seems to have suddenly gone feral, and if I have it activated, the contents and comments are not displayed (thanks to Joe for pointing it out!). I’m working on it.

Sometimes I just despair of the Government ever making sensible policies to promote more sustainable use of our resources. For example, I was stunned to find out while watching It’s Not Easy Being Green (which is an excellent programme, by the way) that biodiesel—-made from used vegetable oil—-attracts duty. Though according to this HM Revenue and Customs page, biodiesel attracts a ‘discounted’ rate of duty: a whole 20p per litre less than standard sulphur-free diesel. That’s just crazy. If they were really serious about reducing reliance on fossil fuels and reducing net CO₂ production, there should be no duty on biodiesel. It’s not as if it’s a piece of cake to produce. On It’s Not Easy Being Green, Dick Strawbridge showed how you have to filter the oil (you don’t want bits of crispy batter sloshing around in your engine), then put it through a transesterification process which involves adding a catalyst, heating gently and leaving it for 24 hours. Coincidentally, there was an article in Wired this morning about a new process being developed which greatly simplifies producing biodiesel. Anyway, the point is that it’s a bit of a hassle compared to pulling up at a garage and inserting the nozzle, so people who are sufficiently green-minded (or miserly) to do it should be rewarded by not having to pay duty on it.

Mr. Bsag gave me this album for my birthday having heard a couple of tracks on Radio 3, and it turned out to be a terrific choice. Chris Wood is a fairly traditional folk singer in style, though he mixes traditional folk songs and—-for want of a better word—-modern folk songs he has written himself. However, the clarity of his delivery and instrumentation, and the passion with which he sings sets him apart. The title of the album is apt in many ways. Like Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, his music speaks in a subtle and unique way about England as a country and what it means to be British, without patriotism and xenophobia rearing their ugly, Union Jack-wearing heads. However, there’s a strong air of melancholy about this album, so it seems appropriate for the lark to be descending rather than ascending.

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Over the course of the time that we’ve been looking after M, my parents’ cat, one thing I’ve noticed is how whole-heartedly cats do physical things. They might spend 90% of their day sleeping, but when they stretch, they really go for it. They arch their backs (the inspiration for the cat pose in yoga, of course) and seem to stretch out every single muscle fibre in a shuddering, eye and ear scrunching movement. And that’s it, back to sleep—-job done. Likewise, cats don’t have any truck with the politely-smothered yawn. They crack their jaws open, bare their teeth, stick out their tongue and really yawn.

It does you good just watching it, but it also reminds me that doing anything with conviction and commitment is a good thing. Yoga practice teaches the same thing, and the idea that you should always be conscious of your breath and every part of your body encourages you to experience the moment fully, rather than being half there and half not. Of course, it applies equally to any endeavour. When we are children, we tend to be very focussed on and absorbed by whatever we’re doing at the time, even if that focus doesn’t linger very long on any one thing, but as adults, our minds seem to be perpetually somewhere else, skipping ahead to the next thing.

So my Spring Resolution (I dislike making resolutions at the New Year because it’s so hard to keep them then) is to be more child/cat-like in my attention. If I’m doing something, I should be doing it, not half doing it.

I’ve been trying to find a really comfortable office chair for ages. I used to use one of those kneeling chairs, but found that the pressure on my knees was too much after a short period, even though the chair kept my back in a comfortable and natural position. Since we moved, I’ve been using our landlord’s standard office chair, but I don’t find it comfortable and my shoulders and back are beginning to suffer.

I came across the Bambach Saddle Seat, and really liked the idea. I used to ride when I was younger (with an enjoyable return to the saddle in Brazil), and I always found sitting in a saddle very comfortable and natural. I seem to automatically sit up straight in a saddle, with my shoulders relaxed and pushed back rather than rounded forwards. Of course, it could just be a conditioned response to all those years of my slightly frightening riding teacher barking “Sit up straight! Shoulders back! Chest out!” at me like a Drill Sergeant. So the Saddle Seat looked ideal, but I really didn’t have £400-plus that it costs.

Then I saw the T2000 Saddle Stool at Natural Living: it seemed to be a very similar design, lacking some of the adjustability of the Bambach Seat, and perhaps slightly less high quality in finish, but only £99 including delivery and VAT. I got some money for my birthday, so I ordered one; we’ll need a new office seat when/if we move house anyway. I’ve been really pleased with it. I felt immediately at home on it, and I find working on the computer so much more comfortable and natural. My shoulders and lower back in particular don’t complain now, and because of the way that you sit astride the stool, it doesn’t restrict the circulation at the back of your knees the way that standard office chairs do. Because there’s no back on the chair, your upper body is much more mobile, and I find myself twisting around to reach things behind me, which must be a good thing for the mobility of my back. It even seems to have improved my typing accuracy!

Above all, it’s just fun to mount your saddle when you get down to work. When I’m reading from the screen without typing, I’ve taken to resting my hands on the ‘pommel’ of the saddle, as if I’m surveying the herd out on the plains. If no-one’s around, I might even ‘gallop’ my saddle stool across the laminate yelling “Giddyup!”. I just wish I could get one for work too.

I’ve been meaning to mention a great comedy Sci-Fi series that’s running at the moment on Radio 4. Nebulous concerns the doings of Professor Nebulous and K. E. N. T. (the Key Environmental Non-judgmental Taskforce) in the year 2099. ‘The Withering’ has wiped out Birmingham (boo!), Nebulous has accidentally destroyed the Isle of Wight, and K. E. N. T. is so strapped for cash that they have to take in laundry to make ends meet. When they’re not cleaning the lint filter on the Zanussi 3000, they investigate carnivorous cacti, mutant wasp/bee hybrids (the Bosp) and get trapped on “Wife-assic Park”; an island populated with robotic Deptford Wives running amok.

Mark Gatiss is brilliant as Nebulous, and there are some fantastic jokes, including some running ones. Nebulous has a secret clown phobia, having been raised by clown parents who were bitterly disappointed that he went into science rather than clowning. Most weeks, he has a flashback to his childhood. This week, we hear little Nebulous plaintively complaining when his parents force balloons on him:

But I don’t like balloons! They’re childish and overly buoyant.

There was also a fantastic new acronym in the latest episode that I intend to use frequently: FTFTBBW (Far Too Fiddly To Be Bothered With). The last series was great, but this one is turning out to be even better.

I’ve had Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) on my list at Lovefilm for quite a while, and have been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading its arrival. I’ve heard some people rave (in a good way) about it, and others hate it, so I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to make of it. I watched it this weekend¹ and you’ll know which camp I fall into when I say that I’m still thinking to myself, “…and another thing I hated about it was…”. I don’t think I’ve seen a film that I’ve disliked so much in a long time.

I am, of course, a huge fan of the original BBC radio series, the book, the BBC TV series and the new Tertiary Phase radio recordings (featuring most of the cast of the original radio series). I think that I’d have to say that I preferred the book and the radio series, but the TV adaptation was also pretty good, despite mostly dire special effects. So the film had a lot to live up to, but I’m not pathologically averse to Hollywood adaptations of books—-the Lord of the Rings trilogy being an excellent example of an adaptation made with skill and respect. I read the books (twice) before seeing the films, and of course there were bits that got left out or cut down that were regrettable, but on the whole, it kept very closely to the _spirit_ of the books, and provided a different but fully compatible experience of the story. So while I understand that some things must be cut for pacing and to fit within the different limitations of the feature film format, I don’t buy the argument that it’s impossible to render a book faithfully on film.

Warning: the rest contains spoilers

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I was speaking at a conference in Bristol for the first part of last week, and I was reminded once again what a wonderful city Bristol is. As long-time readers may remember, I was an undergraduate in Bristol, and I retain a great affection for the place. If you combined the excitement and urban grittiness of Birmingham, and the physical beauty and quirkiness of Oxford, and you’d get something rather like Bristol. Add one of Britain’s most spectacular bridges (Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge), and you’ve got a winning formula.

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Today had our under-the-asking-price offer accepted on a house we really want to buy, which was simultaneously exciting and terrifying. I don’t want to get too excited at this stage because there are about a gazillion things that could go wrong with the sale (though there’s no chain at all, which does simplify things a bit). But somehow I can’t help getting excited. Eep!

Saltation sent me a link to this classic site, a brilliantly done emulation of a Mac SE running System 7.1. Words cannot express how wonderful it is—-just go and visit it. It even has the Russian Tetris on it, on which I wasted many an hour while trying to write my PhD thesis on my PowerBook 100 running System 7. The ‘eep’ sound while the system extensions were loading almost brought nostalgic tears to my eyes.

This has to be one of the best character-driven films I’ve seen recently, due in large part to the intelligent but minimal script and the excellent performances from Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale. It’s quirky without being irritating and touching without being sentimental or mawkish.

Peter Dinklage plays a dwarf called Fin who inherits a disused train depot in New Jersey from fellow train enthusiast and business partner, Henry. Told that it’s in the middle of nowhere, he goes to live there, sick of being stared at and sniggered about. To his apparent horror, when he wakes the next morning, he finds a hot dog van close to the depot, staffed by the infernally chirpy and friendly Joe, who seems unable to see that Fin doesn’t want company. Later we meet artist Olivia, who has lost her son and is brittle with grief. Much of the film is about the complex relationship between the three of them while they try to reconcile the opposing forces of loneliness and a desire to be on their own.

Peter Dinklage’s performance is particularly good, particularly since his dialogue is almost monosyllabic for much of the film. He manages to convey a huge amount with a look or body language, and portrays enormous reserves of quiet, resigned dignity with great skill. We see things through his eyes, which is excruciating at times. There’s a toe-curling moment when he goes into a convenience store to get some supplies and is goggled at by the moronic owner. The woman gets his attention (in a similar way to the way you’d get a dog to look at you), then snaps a picture of him. When he later says (somewhat reluctantly) that he’s angry, you can see why.

It’s a fantastic, gentle and thoughtful film—-I recommend it highly.