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It has been a tough week. In consideration for my poor, tired brain, I will just comment on a couple of more than usually inconsequential things that crossed my mind today.

1. Is there anything more frustrating than an unopened (or only very slightly open) roasted pistachio nut? I would add unopened mussels to that list, but when they don’t open after cooking, it usually means they’re dead and would give you no end of gastro-intestinal distress if you ate them. Pistachios just do it out of spite.
2. Young man! Yes, you on the 50cc moped styled to look almost, but not entirely unlike¹ a Harley. You’re fooling no-one with that riled wasp engine note. Get a Vespa and salvage some dignity and self-respect, for pity’s sake.

¹ Thank you, Douglas Adams, for that wonderful phrase. ↑

Generally speaking, I’m a Reality TV hater. If I happen to pass through a channel showing Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity Tank Driving, Life Laundry, How To Be Thin/Pretty/Young or any of their ilk, I hit the ‘next channel’ button with a little cry of distress. I’d rather watch paint dry.

But somehow I’ve got sucked into watching The Convent, and I’m finding it fascinating. I nearly got put off by the trailers in which the four women who were going to spend 40 days in the Convent of the Poor Clares in Arundel were portrayed as petulant, rebellious drama queens. I’m not sure that my opinion of them has changed greatly over the course of the series (though several of them seem to have quite serious psychological problems), but it’s well worth watching for nuns alone.

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If you’re an Apple fan, you might remember that a few months ago, Apple dropped the price of their Aperture photographic workflow software drastically after releasing the much-improved version 1.1. Now, this would have been a bit galling for those who had bought the original version at the much higher price (as I did), but Apple—-rather splendidly, in my view—-offered a rebate for the price difference (more or less) to registered users of Aperture 1.0.

So I filled in the rebate form as soon as it was posted and waited for the voucher to come in. I received it this week, so I now have a handsome £130 e-voucher to blow spend wisely on Apple’s online store. I’m like a kid in a sweet shop…

I heard a wonderful piece on Home Truths this morning about Anthea Hanscombe who is in her eighties and is passionately interested in steam engines of all kinds. Quite apart from anything else, she had the most wonderful, infectious laugh, and she had me chuckling along just because it was such a pleasure to hear her laugh.

It seems that Anthea has been interested in steam engines since she was a girl, and used to run out into the street when she heard a steam roller and breathe in the tarry fumes. Her interest developed during the war when she was a Land Girl, and she now has a very technical understanding of steam engines in all their forms, but is particularly fond of locomotives.

Anthea has obviously been doing the geekgirl thing for very long time, in times when it was even rarer for women to express an interest in machinery and other technical things. So, Sister, I salute you. May you ride the footplate with an oily rag in your hand for the rest of your days.

Several years ago, I saw a film called Ghost Dog, that I thought I would hate, but ended up watching twice because I found it so intriguing. The film is about the eponymous Ghost Dog, who is an assassin who works for a Mafioso, and follows the Way of the Samurai. To the Mafioso, he’s just a hired hitman, but the man saved Ghost Dog’s life when he was young, and Ghost Dog decided as a result to regard the man as his ‘lord’ in the terms of the Samurai code. In his own way, the Mafia man is also following a strict and outdated code of conduct. As someone who hates violence and guns, I thought I’d hate the film, but it was so thoughtful in the way that it explored the motivation and rationale of the two men that I found it fascinating. Ghost Dog also read extensively from a book called Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, and the readings piqued my interest sufficiently to buy it. For one reason or another, I’ve only just got around to reading it.

Tsunetomo was a Buddhist monk in the 18th Century who used to be a Samurai, but was prevented from committing suicide on the death of his lord by a the recent passing of a law. The book is a very eclectic collection of conversations that he had with a younger Samurai over a number of years and covers topics of Samurai code, local gossip and legend, etiquette, Buddhist practice and law, hygiene tips and—-as they say in the adverts—-much, much more. In fact, the copy I have is a translation of only a tiny fraction of the original manuscripts.

It has been a fascinating read. Some of the sections are bizarre or even repellent to modern sensibilities (I lost count of the number of people who had their heads cut off or committed seppuku. Or both.) Some are difficult to understand because they involve arcane and obscure details of Samurai lore, but others are startlingly relevant to modern life.

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I’m convinced that my IQ is about 50 in the first 15 minutes or so after I’ve woken up. I think that it’s partly to do with getting up before 6am (I’m less dopey if I get up an hour or more later), but whatever the reason, I’m a bit of a danger to myself and others until I’ve had time to give my brain a bit of choke and start up properly without spluttering and backfiring.

This morning’s piece of ‘Idiocy Upon Waking’ concerned an invisible plaster—-the type with a transparent sticky part, and a flesh coloured antiseptic pad. I’d put it on a huge blister the previous night (the result of a mosquito bite gone bad), but when I woke up, I could see blood where the blister was. Thinking that the blood had seeped through the antiseptic pad, I tried to peel the plaster off, poking the wound clumsily a couple of times. It took a good few minutes for the realisation to dawn (painfully slowly) that there wasn’t in fact an incredibly effective invisible plaster on my ankle, but no plaster at all. Not wanting Mr. Bsag to wake up and find a manky used plaster in the bed, I then had to rummage around under the bedclothes—-trying not to wake him—-to retrieve the invisible blighter.

I’ve had it with invisible plasters—-next time I’m going to get some of those blue catering plasters and avoid this kind of shenanigans.

About a week ago, I was geeking out over E17 on my newly installed Ubuntu installation. Then I found a window manager which was even more slick, though very light in the eye candy department: wmii, which apparently stands for ‘Window Manager Improved II’.

It’s an unusual in that it’s a dynamic window manager, which means that it arranges your windows for you, rather than making you drag and resize them to make the best use of the space. When you open a window, it fills the screen. If you open another, it is tiled below the existing window. You can also make a new column, which splits the screen vertically and places the second window next to the first. There is also a ‘stacking’ mode, where the unfocussed windows have just their title bar visible and you can flip through them with a keyboard shortcut, a ‘maximum’ mode where all windows are maximized, and a ‘floating’ layer for applications like music players which have non-standard windows.

Instead of the familiar Linux workspace metaphor, there are tags, which allow you to group your windows into views (so you can have browser windows in one view, terminals in another, etc.).

The best thing about wmii is that it is completely scriptable, and you can use any scripting language installed on your machine (including Ruby—-yay!), and it can be entirely keyboard driven. It’s rather like having screen for your X11 applications. It’s so light that it absolutely screams on my old Emperor, and everything feels really snappy.

Since we got our EyeTV unit, we’ve accumulated quite a collection of recordings that we’d like to burn to DVD. Some fit neatly on a disc, but others are just a tiny bit too long to fit on a single disc, and with a film it’s annoying to have to cut it in half and split it over two.

I wanted to make a disc for my Dad for Father’s Day, but I couldn’t fit the 15 episodes of a particular show on one disc (I can’t say which show in case he happens to read this before next Sunday), and I only had one blank DVD left. What to do…

Fortuitously, I came across VisualHub, which not only converts a huge range of video formats into a number of other formats (for iPod, TV, DVD, PSP etc.), but also claimed to be able to compress video so that 18 hours could be fitted on a single-sided DVD. So I tried it and found that it works really well. The automatic compression required to fit more than 5 hours of footage on to a DVD resulted in no noticeable decrease in quality, and it was really easy to use. I can see that I’m going to get a lot of use out of that.

If you don’t like football (and I really don’t), there’s a bit of a scarcity of decent stuff on the box at the moment. I’ve been doing more reading, pottering around in the garden and making a first pass at trimming down the pile of junk we seem to have accumulated in two years in our current house, so that we don’t export the junk to our new place. This is all good, constructive stuff, but there are times when you just want to plonk yourself down in front of the TV and watch something funny.

So I picked out one of my favourite episodes of Futurama from our DVD collection, which happens to feature Bender heavily¹, but also one of my favourite singers, Beck: ‘Bendin’ in the Wind’.

The plot, to summarise briefly, involves Bender being horribly mangled in an incident with a giant magnetic can opener, so that he can’t move his arms or legs. While bemoaning his lot in the hospital, he starts talking to the head of Beck in a jar (who is in the next bed, being attached to the body of a shop dummy). Beck gives Bender a tiny pair of robot arms to attach to his neck, with which he can play his ripped-up metal torso like a washboard. Beck persuades him to go on tour as part of his band, and they eventually start up a benefit concert (‘Bend-Aid’) in aid of mangled robots.

The whole thing is hilarious, with Beck making some very funny jokes against himself:

Beck: That song doesn’t usually last three hours, but we got into a serious thing… and then I forgot how it ended.

Anyway, the point that I’m trying to get to, while waylaying myself telling you what a great episode it was, is that there was an act in the benefit concert that made me giggle uncontrollably for hours afterwards, and still makes me laugh thinking about it now: Cylon and Garfunkel. The verbal pun and visual gags were funny enough in themselves, but then Garfunkel (a descendent of Art Garfunkel, and a sound-alike) starts singing “Scarborough Fair” is his trademark, gentle, plaintive voice. When we get to the “Parsely, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” bit, and Cylon steps in to sing the line in his monotonal Cylon voice, his red eye scanners flipping back and forth in time to the music.

I’m not going to be able to hear the original without hearing the Cylon part now. Funny and geeky.

¹ Actually most of my favourites revolve around Bender, including this one. ↑

A new version of Ubuntu (codename ‘Dapper Drake’) has been available for a little while, so I thought that it was about time to update Emperor to the latest and greatest. Unfortunately, I hadn’t kept on top of releases, so I was a couple of stable versions behind—-The Emperor was sporting ‘Hoary Hedgehog’, but had missed out on ‘Breezy Badger’. I tried following the instructions for upgrading from an older version, but managed to mess something up somehow. Since I didn’t have any important files on the laptop which weren’t also backed up somewhere else, I decided to cut my losses and do and a clean install of Ubuntu 6.06.

Now, The Emperor is getting on a bit, and compiling from source is glacial. So it took most of the evening to get Ubuntu installed and running. It was well worth it though—-the distribution is slicker than ever. However, the default Gnome desktop is a bit heavy going for my poor old laptop, so I decided to have a go at installing the cutting edge Enlightenment 1.7, otherwise known as E17 (not to be confused with the boy band). It was quite a task because there aren’t any packages for Debian or Ubuntu yet, but I eventually got it going. I’m a big fan of Enlightenment: it looks gorgeous, and yet is surprisingly light on resource usage. E17 has some lovely visual effects, including animated desktop backgrounds, which sound like a nightmare, but are actually extremely attractive and not distracting. Better still, E17 is much more snappy on my machine than Gnome Desktop. My next task is to get Ruby, Rails and Subversion back on again so that I can do Tracks development on it.

For about a week now, I’ve had a dodgy right foot for some unknown reason. My ankle is swollen and the ball of my heel is very sore when pressure is applied, which obviously happens very time I take a step.

Now that the sun has come out, I’ve moved to wearing my very well worn-in sandals (with no socks, naturally). Perhaps it’s because my gait has changed a bit because of my right foot, but I seem to have worn a huge patch of skin off the balls of both feet. The two mile walk home was pretty painful. Stupid feet—-I need an upgrade.

We’ve been really enjoying a French cop show/thriller currently being shown on BBC Four. Spiral (Engrenages) is a dark political thriller, with none of the flashiness and special effects of CSI:[Insert name of US city here]. It does, however, have a particularly French flavour, which in the context of a cop show feels quite different for some reason. At one point, the prosecutor greets his (male) friend by kissing him on both cheeks. This, of course is a perfectly normal French custom, but in the overly familiar context of cop shows which are usually made in the US, it really stands out.

The plot has a lot of good twists and turns and is quite gritty. That caused an unusual problem a couple of times: when you look away from the screen because you don’t want to see a close-up of a faceless corpse while you’re having your dinner (thank you very much), you have to strain your O-level French skills to the max in order to not miss some crucial plot point while you’re not reading the subtitles. I need some kind of remotely operated screen to lower over the top half of the TV so that I can still read the subtitles while protecting myself from yucky gore.

We’re a couple of episodes in to the series now, but it’s worth catching if you have access to BBC Four.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, our old Epson scanner died some time ago, without any possibility of resurrecting it. Mr. Bsag needs it for scanning his artwork, so it came to the point where we really couldn’t do without one any more. Our inkjet printer (a Canon i250) was a very cheap and cheerful affair, and having seen a great review for the Canon Pixma MP800 in MacUser magazine, I thought it would be a good buy.

I managed to find one at a very good price on Pixmania, which was delivered last week. I’ve now had a chance to try out most of the features, though not all (it practically makes coffee for you as well as printing and scanning), so I thought it would be a good moment for a review.

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If you’ve seen Amelie and were put off by Audrey Tautou’s slightly saccharine portrayal of a wide-eyed innocent, then you might also be put off watching this film. That would be a great shame, because it’s a very fine one. For a start, it’s really not a sentimental film, despite the title. It opens with a horrific scene of the trenches in World War One, and half a torso hanging off a blasted skeleton of a tree like a rag.

The story deals with Mathilde’s (Tautou) search for her fiancé, the skinny, childlike Manech. He, along with four other soldiers have been sentenced to death for cowardice at a Court Martial for maiming their hands to get sent home. All have their own reasons for doing so, though one shot his hand accidentally when he was trying to whack a rat running over his blanket with the butt of his pistol. Rather than being executed by firing squad, the five men are sent over the top into no-man’s land—-tantamount to the same thing, though slower and more painful.

There’s doubt about the fate of all of the soldiers, so Mathilde is following any clues she can find in the hope that her Manech is still alive. So the film is part war story, part love story and part detective fiction—-something for everyone. It’s a touching story, but also gripping and funny in places.

A small piece of ornithological geekery: albatrosses are significant to the plot, and at one point, Mathilde and Manech are at the top of a lighthouse and see a big white bird, referring to it as an ‘albatross’. It was actually a gannet (Sula bassana), not an albatross, so either no-one on the film knew the difference, or they did but couldn’t get any film of albatrosses. Alternatively, the translation for gannet might be confusing (my French vocab doesn’t quite run that far).