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Quantum mechanics blows my mind.

No matter how many times someone patiently explains (usually with the help of ping-pong balls) that it is possible for atom-sized objects to exist in two places at the same time, or to be both a particle and wave at the same time, I end up saying, “Wha… Bu…?” and looking gormless. Inside my head, my inner Scotty¹ yells into an intercom “The engines cannae take it, Cap’n! The dilithium crystals are gonnae blow!”, while being showered with sparks from an overloading console. I think of myself as a relatively intelligent person, and I do a fair bit of thinking about abstract things most days, but I can’t seem to get a mental hold on a theory that involves completely non-intuitive ideas that blow raspberries in the face of common sense. I do enjoy it though; it’s the intellectual equivalent of riding on a really intense rollercoaster — very scary, but rather exhilarating.

So I could sympathise completely with the look of terrified bewilderment on E’s face as various physics professors tried to help him understand quantum mechanics in the documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. E (Mark Everett of the band Eels) was trying to find out about his father Hugh Everett III, who was the originator of the idea of parallel worlds (the ‘many-worlds interpretation’). Hugh died when E was quite young, and it sounds like he didn’t communicate much with his children when he was alive. E lost all of his immediate family within a relatively short space of time, so it’s understandable that he has — until now — found it quite painful to think about. It was a wonderful documentary, both from the perspective of the science, and the personal journey E went on. After talking to friends and colleagues of his father, he ended up feeling like he knew Hugh a bit better, and seemed to be more at peace with his past.

One of the bits I enjoyed most was when E was listening to some dictaphone tapes his father recorded, which he had never heard before. He wasn’t even sure that he would recognise Hugh’s voice, because he died so many years ago, and spoke so seldom in the home. In the end, he did recognise his voice, and was amazed to hear him sounding so talkative and enthusiastic, while chatting with a colleague. E had already said that his father was quite tolerant of his adolescent drum practices, and sure enough, half way through the tape, a loud drum solo comes in the background, and we know exactly who is responsible.

¹ What? You mean you don’t have an irascible Scottish Starfleet engineer in your brain? Just me then… ↑

Back when I lived in Oxford, I used Mailbox as my broadband provider. They weren’t the cheapest around, but they were really reliable, and had the best customer support I’ve ever come across. It seems incredible (not to mention quaint) to say so now, but when you phoned them for support, a real human would answer the phone immediately. No pressing 4 divided by the number you first thought of to report a fault, or being robotically reassured ad infinitum that my business was very important to them. Shocking isn’t it? It got better though, because once your call was answered by a real human, they would quickly and efficiently solve your problem, without being patronising. I once had a problem with connecting to their broadband service (which turned out to be a BT-produced problem rather than Mailbox’s fault). I called them in the evening, and the guy on the other end explained very clearly what I needed to do to fix it. I followed the instructions, which worked perfectly, and settled down to surf and email. About half an hour later, the phone rang, and to my utter amazement, it was the engineer guy — wait for it — calling to check that the instructions worked correctly. It doesn’t get much better than that, in my opinion.

When we moved to Birmingham, the house we rented already had a Telewest broadband account, so we used that, shifting to Zen when we bought our house, because Mailbox had become rather un-competitive, price-wise, with other providers. In retrospect, I’m glad I made that decision.

In 2005, Mailbox was acquired by 186k.com. I know this because even though I had stopped my broadband account with them, I kept them as registrar for the two domains I had registered with them when I had an account. Gradually, all my interactions with them became inefficient and impersonal, not to mention more expensive. But inertia is a powerful force, and I stuck with them in the name of minimising hassle and disruption. I feel like an idiot for doing that now, because it has cost me a lot of money and more hassle than transferring my domain earlier would have done.

A couple of weeks ago, a Tracks user alerted me to the fact that the DNS for rousette.org.uk was pointing to de-comissioned DNS servers at TextDrive (thanks, Sean!). I’m fairly sure, thinking back, that I asked Mailbox to change the DNS entries a long time ago, but to be sure, I asked them again, only to be told that they were already pointing at the new servers. However, whois still showed the old records. Caching of DNS records can complicate matters so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I still suspect that they didn’t do the update properly, leaving the old server references along side the new ones.

That was the last straw, and after doing a search for reliable registrars, I settled on Gandi. They have been really efficient, and I now have a nice web control panel for administering my domains. The first thing I did, of course, was the set the DNS records straight, and wasn’t overly surprised to find that the whois record updated to reflect correct DNS information almost immediately. I realise that domain registrations are probably something of a loss-leader for companies like Mailbox, and that it doesn’t make financial sense for them to continue to act as the registrar for customers who no longer have a broadband account with them. But even so, I was paying for the nose for not very good service. They were charging more than seven times what I am paying with Gandi now, and they charged me an arm and a leg to allow me to transfer the domain too. Even Nominet charges half the price of Mailbox for domain transfers. I wish I’d done it sooner, but my domain renewals and management should be a lot easier and cheaper from now on.

I noticed yesterday that the rain coming down was a little more solid (and colder) than usual, but I didn’t really expect it to snow properly. We were going to do some work on the allotment, but chickened out because of the foul weather, and spent the day cosily inside, reading, listening to music, and in my case, writing installation and upgrade instructions for the next version of Tracks.

We closed all the curtains before it got properly dark, so it was a bit of a shock when I went into the kitchen at about 10.30, and saw an eerie glow outside. At first, I thought our security light had come on outside, but I gradually realised that the glow (I’ll you’ll forgive the rhyme) was coming from snow. It was at least 4 or 5 cm deep, and still falling, giving the sky a strange orange cast.

By this morning, it had mostly melted with remnants of greying mush, but the effect last night was quite magical because it was so unexpected.

I’m trying out Flock (a ‘social web browser’) following a recommendation from Martin Polley as a way of integrating ma.gnolia bookmarking into the browser. My timing was poor, because there’s a problem at the moment with posting bookmarks to ma.gnolia from Flock because of a temporary problem at ma.gnolia’s end. However, I tried it out with de.icio.us, and it was a pretty seamless process.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Flock. Martin said that it’s a kind of love it or hate it thing, and I can see what he means. If you use a lot of social software (flickr, social bookmark sites, facebook and so on), the integration features are pretty good. You can even blog direct from Flock, which is what I’m doing right now (all being well…). I also like the Web Clipboard, which lets you drag on links, text and images, then drag them on to other services or into a blog post. I can see that if you use Flock for everything, it’s really handy to collect everything in one place for easy posting.

But.

The interface isn’t bad, but it’s pretty cluttered after you’ve been used to the minimalism of Safari. It also seems slower to render pages, and seems to like popping up endless warnings about popups, available feeds and so on. I also wish that there was a way to view my Google Reader feeds in the Feed sidebar — you can use the button on the navigation bar to save feeds to Google Reader, but there’s no built-in way to view them.

I’m going to play around a bit more with it, but I suspect that I’ll probably go back to using Safari, Cocoalicious and MarsEdit for posting to my blog.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been using ma.gnolia for my online bookmarking for a little while now, and the non-private bookmarks appear automatically in the sidebar of this site. I like ma.gnolia a lot, but I’ve had a tendency to use it mostly for bookmarks that want to publish on this blog, and largely in a write-only way. Part of that is because it always seems like a bit of work to log in to ma.gnolia and search through bookmarks for one that I’m looking for. So for sites that I’m marking for my own use — ones that I know that I’ll want to refer to later — I tend to use Safari’s own bookmarking feature. But that means that I lose the tagging capability, and I have to look in two places if I can’t remember where I saved something.

There are plenty of desktop bookmarking applications which access your de.icio.us bookmarks, but not so many for ma.gnolia, being a relative newcomer. However, they publish an mirrord API which (as the name suggests) mirrors the de.icio.us API. This means that you can use many of the desktop clients intended for de.icio.us, as long as the software lets you specify the URL of the API. So I’ve started using Cocoalicious, which is a very nice Open Source de.icio.us client. The trick seems to be to enter the API as follows:

http://your_username:your_password@ma.gnolia.com/api/mirrord/v1

and then enter a single space for both your username and password when prompted. The rating star system in Cocoalicious doesn’t link up with the rating stars in ma.gnolia, but everything else works perfectly. It’s a very nice bit of software — it’s pleasingly simple to add links via a bookmarklet in your browser, but also very fast to find what you want by text in the URL, description or by the tag. Now I’m saving all my bookmarks (private and public) in ma.gnolia, and accessing them using Cocoalicious.

In my various ramblings about our cat, Cleo, I think I mentioned that she wasn’t at all interested in toys, and didn’t really play. That certainly used to be true: if you rolled a ball towards her, dangled string, or jiggled a toy mouse, she would look at it steadily, then look at you, then walk away. But in the past couple of months she’s started getting playful. I think part of the change is down to her being stronger and more energetic now that she’s put a bit of weight back on. When we first got her, she didn’t have the strength to jump up onto the window sills on her own, and we’d find her clinging on to the top of the radiator below the window with her front paws, vainly scrabbling to get on the sill. Now she can jump straight on to the sill unassisted, though she still feigns helplessness when she gets “trapped” behind the curtains, and there’s a good deal of chirruping and Eric Morecambe-style curtain waggling until we open them for her.

She’s always keen to play first thing in the morning (when we’re trying to get our breakfast) and in the early evening (when we’re trying to cook dinner). She loves a ping-pong ball toy which is covered in fake leopard fur, and has some beads rattling inside. She waits on the stairs, having previously engaged Pounce Mode; body pressed into the stair tread, ears horizontal, and a wild gleam in her eyes. We rattle the ball to grab her attention, then throw it over her head. She flings herself after it, often catching it rather gracefully in mid-air, or hurtling after it up or down the stairs. She does the ‘holding-the-ball-with-front-paws-while-biffing-it-with-back-feet’ thing, and sometimes gets distracted, then pounces back on the ball when its guard is lowered (like Cato and Clouseau). Eventually, the ball drops back down the stairs, and we throw it again, repeating until we get bored or our porridge goes cold. She seems to enjoy it, and it’s pretty entertaining for us, too.

As you’ve probably all noticed, when I review books, music or films on this blog, I link to the items at Amazon using an affiliate link. This means that if anyone uses the link to click through to Amazon and makes a purchase, I get a tiny cut of the sale. It’s not vastly profitable by any means: I choose to get ‘paid’ in Amazon gift vouchers because that has a lower minimum threshold for payout (£10), but even so, it takes a good year before I accumulate enough to get given a gift certificate. This isn’t a problem, of course, because it’s money for nothing as far as I’m concerned, so any sum is a delight. I see it as ‘fun money’ to spend on something completely frivolous.

This time when my gift voucher came in, I decided to go for something other than my usual choice of books or CDs. When I work in the office at home, I often like to listen to music, but that means hearing my iTunes library filtered through the speakers on my laptop. If I say that a couple of empty baked bean cans with a bit of taut string joining them would sound clean and crisp in comparison, it gives you some idea of their audio qualities. They are truly awful, and for me, it drains all enjoyment out of listening to my music. I could use headphones, but I like to move around, and risk dragging the laptop off the table. So when I spotted an ultra-cheap set of Logitech X-230 speakers on Amazon, I decided that I’d found something voucher-worthy.

Amazingly, the speakers (a pair of satellites with two drivers each and a sub-woofer) are only £23.99 on Amazon, so I was a bit skeptical that they would be any good. However, they got great reviews from customers, and since the area on the graph of audio quality to the left of the laptop speakers is almost microscopic, I felt that it was unlikely they’d be worse than what I’ve got now.

For such a cheap product, they have pretty good build quality. All the units are a smart black, and have some nice touches. There’s a very fine, almost invisible fabric mesh over the satellites to prevent inquisitive cats shoving their noses into delicate drivers, and the speakers come mostly pre-wired (admittedly, this might be a problem if you needed a longer run of cable than that provided). All you need to do is plonk the satellites on the table, plug a 9 pin D-sub cable into the sub-woofer, plug the mini-jack into the headphone port of the laptop, then plug the whole lot to the mains. The sub has a volume control on the back to set the relative volume of the sub-woofer (which you probably need to set only once), and the right-hand speaker has a master volume control, headphone socket and power button.

I checked all the connections, fired up iTunes and sat back to admire the sound, only to feel my face falling with disappointment as a horrible, distorted sound with blarty, flabby base came out of the speakers. Urk. Could it be that Amazon reviewers all have tin ears? Thankfully, I remembered just in time that — in a feeble attempt to improve the audio quality of the built-in speakers — I’d set a pre-set on the graphic equaliser in iTunes. Turning that off revealed a lovely, crisp, balanced sound, just as I’d hoped. The speakers really are impressive. The sub-woofer is a bit over the top, so unless you want to loosen a few fillings, it’s best to set the sub-woofer volume to a fairly low setting. The satellites are clear and reasonably detailed, and coped with a wide range of music from acoustic world music to grungy electronica. The sub-woofer provides a nice weight at the bottom end without being too flabby, and the satellites generate a remarkably wide and clean stereo image, considering how small they are.

Of course, they’re not Martin Logans, so the sound isn’t as detailed, integrated or spacious as you’d get with a pair of high end speakers. But then these cost a grand total of £24, not two orders of magnitude more. They’ll do very nicely, I think.

At about the same time that I was sorting out syncing my computers, I also changed the way I receive, send and archive email. I’d read an article on CatCubed which described how to route all your email through Gmail, while retaining the ability to send email using your own email address. It combined the benefits of being able to use IMAP in a desktop email client, while having access to Gmail’s excellent web email client on the road. As a bonus, with the enormous storage quotas you get at Gmail, you can leave all your email archived there for access from anywhere, and also make use of the brilliant spam filter on the server side. Since several of my email accounts have really miserly quotas, and I like to archive most of my email, I’ve often found that I’ve gone over quota in the past, which has caused a lot of hassle. Hopefully, that should never happen again. The rate at which Google is adding storage capacity to my account is currently outstripping how quickly I can fill it.

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Now that the clocks have gone back, my cycle home is in the dark. I have fairly decent hub dynamo lights, but even so, the way is unlit across parks and open spaces and on moon-less nights, I can really only see a patch of path about 3 m in front of my wheel. That makes for quite an interesting trip, particularly as most pedestrians seem to wear dark clothes at night. There seem to be a lot of ninja dog walkers. But I’ve found that as my visual panorama is restricted, the olfactory landscape unfolds.

In the past week, I’ve been acutely aware of all the smells that drift into my path on my route home. There are the natural smells, of course: the warm, sweet scent of wet grass, the cool, earthy tang of the river, and the distinctive smell of the canal, which is different from the river in a way I find hard to describe. There are also less natural smells: a particular whiff of sewer on one stretch of path, the dizzy smell of solvents as you pass a place where kids have been huffing, the sharp, metallic buzz of a metal pressing factory, chinese take away food, and the omnipresent fug of traffic fumes. I even pick up the smells of people as I drift past them: strong perfume, laundry detergent, cigarette smoke.

It all adds an interesting new dimension to my commute, as long as I can avoid crashing in to anyone or falling in to the canal.