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More.

I’m beginning to think that ‘more’ might be the most insidious word in the English language.

More beautiful. 50% more! Do more. Earn more. Buy more. Be more. More than ever before! More minutes, more texts. More speed. More channels. More bandwidth. More downloads. More time. More money. Get more. Get more. Get more.

What’s wrong with ‘enough’? Why do we have to be accelerating, accumulating? Why can’t we stand still, or even stop? Why can’t we enjoy and savour, rather than consume?

I’ve been an ardent Aardman fan since the first Wallace and Gromit short (A Grand Day Out), adored the short-lived Rex the Runt series, and—-while I thought ‘Chicken Run’ didn’t quite hit the spot—-I was itching to see this full length film film. It is, quite simply, brilliant. All the charm of the short W & G films is there, and the pace barely slackens over the entire 85 minutes. As usual, there are visual puns aplenty, as well as a lot of literary and film allusions, and you really need to watch it several times to pick everything up.

The plot concerns our heroes’ latest money-making venture: a pest control service called Anti-Pesto, which seems mostly to involve installing complex, hi-tech anti-theft devices in vegetable gardens and greenhouses to stop rabbits eating prize veg destined for the village Vegetable Show. Viewers unfamiliar with the world of giant leeks and prize marrows will think this is a joke, but it’s probably not too far from the truth. Wallace and Gromit, being gentle souls, can’t quite bring themselves to kill the rabbits they catch, so their home is overflowing with ultra-cute but ravenous bunnies.

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I haven’t been having a lot of luck with stuff recently. My car packed up (in a potentially expensive way¹), and yesterday I discovered that the battery in my PowerBook is one of the ones Apple is recalling. Brilliant.

I’ve filled in the form to get a replacement, so now I just have to wait 4-6 weeks for it to show up. In the meantime, I’m advised to remove the old battery and power the PowerBook from the mains. It’s weird though; I’ve had the laptop and battery for two years without incident (and it shows none of the telltale signs of overheating now), but now that I actually know that there’s a tiny chance it might burst into flames, I feel that I should take precautions. However, the probability of something happening hasn’t changed, just my knowledge of it.

So I’m going to compromise. I usually just put the PowerBook to sleep for the journey between work and home, but that’s obviously not possible with the battery removed. I’m using it without the battery at home and work, but reinserting the battery for the journey, and monitoring the Crumpler bag in which it lurks slightly nervously for signs of smoke or undue warmth.

¹ Though _expensive_ seems to be the only possible outcome when cars break down. ↑

In the centre of Birmingham, I overheard this exchange between a mother and her 5 or six year old daughter:

Mum: …and then we’ll go to the Library. Daughter (bouncing up and down with excitement): Yay! I love going to the library! Yippee!

Talk about the perfect kid.

On the subject of libraries, we now have a library literally four doors down from our house. It’s pretty tiny, and has somewhat eccentric opening hours, but… a library! Practically on our doorstep! Better still, you can reserve any book in the entire Birmingham library system online, and have it delivered to your local library.

Mmmm. Books.

Some films (and books, for that matter) are not especially promising in the first few minutes, and you have to be patient and give them a chance to draw you in. When we watched “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (“MAYAEWK” to save my typing fingers a bit) at the weekend, Mr. Bsag asked after ten minutes “Remind me why we decided to rent this again?”. However MAYAEWK is well worth a little patience.

The plot has a number of strands, following a group of inter-related characters. Christine (played by director Miranda July) is a video performance artist, giving a voice and narrative to people’s family snapshots, and trying to get her work exhibited by a local gallery. Her work reminded me of Laurie Anderson’s slightly, and there were other touches in the dialogue here and there that made me think of Anderson. I wonder if July is a fan? In her day job Christine runs a taxi service for elderly people, ferrying Michael to meet his new love, Ellen, who is very ill in a care home.

Christine meets and falls in love with shoe salesman Richard—-recently separated from his wife Pam, and trying to keep things together for his two sons, Peter and Robby—-when she takes Michael shopping. There are also two (underage) teenaged girls who flirt dangerously with Richard’s work colleague and friend, Andrew, and little Sylvie—-a serious young girl with a fetish for kitchenware to fill her trousseau.

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What with all the kerfuffle of moving and so on, I missed most of the buzz around Apple’s announcement of some of the features to be introduced in Leopard: the next version of MacOS X. I’ve had a little time to read the information now, and some of the features look pretty spiffy. Time Machine in particular looks interesting. The idea is that the system keeps an automatic, incremental backup of your entire system. If you want to retrieve something from an earlier system state (perhaps because you’ve mistakenly deleted a file), you can use the Time Machine interface to ‘go back in time’ and retrieve your deleted file.

It’s fair to say that Apple has received a bit of gentle (and not so gentle) ribbing about the interface. The perspective display of windows receding into the distance is very cool, but they chose to show an image of a star field behind the windows. I quite like it, but it is a tad literal. Still, it could be worse. They could have gone 80’s Sci-Fi-tastic and had some kind of swirly vortex together with calendar pages fluttering away into the void.

I’m interested in the technology behind this feature. Constant incremental backups could obviously consume even the biggest of hard drives in no time, so there must (we hope) be some kind of clever compression involved, or perhaps the system just stores the changes in files rather than the whole file after a complete initial backup has been made (something like Subversion). There has been a lot of speculation suggesting that Time Machine might be based on ZFS—-the file system all the geeks are raving about. However, it seems that’s not the case, and it’s probably just plain old journalled HFS+, which is a bit of a shame. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how it performs.

I’m also pleased to see that Apple has finally adopted virtual desktops (available in just about every Linux implementation) in the form of Spaces. I’ve used a number of virtual desktop applications on MacOS X, but currently use Codetek’s VirtualDesktop Pro. I must say that Apple’s implementation looks very slick, but if you can’t have more than four desktops (it’s not clear from the information available), I’ll probably stick with my 8 desktops on VirtualDesktop Pro. I’ve got so used to the layout of my desktops that it’s practically muscle memory now.

Some of the other features don’t excite me quite as much, but I think it will still be a pretty good OS upgrade, particularly the tantalising ‘secret features’ that Apple is keeping under wraps until later.

Our new house is on the same train line that I used to commute to work on, but on the other side of the University. This means that I arrive at (and leave) the University on the opposite platform to the one I’m used to. It’s going to feel quite weird until I’m used to it, and lends a kind of ‘Alice Through The Looking-Glass’ feel to my mornings, particularly when I’m not quite awake. Human auto-pilot is a surprisingly powerful thing.

We’ve got a whiteboard up in the office with a list on it of all the little jobs we have to do around the house. A day or so ago, one of the items was “Bodge shoe storage”. Now, I find that quite impressive: we’ve only been at this DIY game for a week, and already we’ve progressed to bodging.

Actually, it worked out quite well. We had some drawer units (from Ikea, naturally) that we used to use inside our wardrobes for clothes storage. They were a fairly simple construction, with a wooden frame and slots for plastic bins to use as drawers. We kept one of the drawers at the top for keys, wallets and other ephemera that you need close to the front door, then cut pieces of plywood as shelves to store our shoes. It looks pretty good, but has that crucial, slightly bodged, ‘we made this’, Blue Peter-ish vibe.

We are (OK, I am) quick to rant about companies when their service lets us down, but I think it’s also important to be just as quick to praise them when they get things right. When we moved, I had to decide which company to use for broadband provision. In our old house, we had Telewest for phone and broadband (only because our landlord already had it set up and it was too much hassle to change), but I didn’t really want to continue with them. I knew that the new house had a BT phone line, and that the nearest exchange was ADSL-enabled, so that left a pretty large choice of ADSL providers.

I did quite a bit of research, and also used the invaluable ADSLGuide to get the inside information from users about speed, reliability and customer service. That knocked out quite a few companies to start with. I was tempted for a while to go with TalkTalk, but their waiting times for connection are pretty horrendous, and for an internet junkie like me, being without broadband at home for a month or more would be like asking me to do without oxygen.

So after a lot of thought, I decided to go with Zen Internet. They aren’t the cheapest provider around, but they have good 8Mb plans, dedicated Mac support and rolling one-month contracts, so that you’re never stuck in a contract you want to get out of. I called them about a week before we moved house, and was amazed when I plugged my router in on the day we moved in and found that we were connected. I didn’t actually get enough time to do anything with the connection for several days, but I was really impressed by that. So if you’re thinking about getting a new broadband provider, I can heartily recommend them. My brother is also with Zen, and he has been very happy with them too. Needless to say, I’ve got no connection with the company, other than being a contented customer.

Well, we’re installed in our new house, and just beginning to emerge from the piles of boxes. We’ve put together more Ikea furniture than I care to think about, some of which went together nicely, and some which we had to battle with. Just don’t mention wardrobes to me for a while…

It’s been completely exhausting, stressful, and it seems to have gone on for quite a while. None of it was made any easier by my discovery (a few days before we were due to move) that I have a medical problem I didn’t know about. It’s fairly serious (though not life-threatening, as long as I do something about it promptly), but it might require surgery, and therefore has the potential to scupper various short and long-term plans. So, it’s been a fairly weird couple of weeks.

On the bright side, we have a lovely new house. It will take a little while before we get it exactly the way we like it, but it feels great to actually be able to make changes: something very new for us, because we’ve only rented before. In our old rented place, I had a tiny room for an office, which was very cramped with two computers in, faced a busy road and was rather gloomy. I now have a lovely large room (which doubles as a guest room with a sofa bed in it), and I’m looking out of the window now, while typing this, at little flocks of blue tits and sparrows foraging around in the trees that surround our garden. Better still, there’s enough room for two proper desks and chairs, so Mr. Bsag and I don’t have to fight for ownership of the only chair any more. We’ve also got a lovely little garden and conservatory, both of which are lovely to sit in in the evening and watch the sun go down with a cold beer or glass of wine. In fact, I might just have to go and do just that right now.

If any of you are waiting for an email reply, I’m gradually working through the backlog and will try to reply as soon as I can.