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Recently, our cat Cleo has developed a couple of obsessions:

Obsession 1 - the airing cupboard: We have an airing cupboard on the upstairs landing, housing the hot water tank, clean towels and a variety of cat-trapping voids and spaces. She has never shown a lot of interest in the cupboard until now, but suddenly it seems to have become her aim in life to get in there against all odds. As soon as you open the door, she appears from nowhere, desperately trying to get into the cupboard. Unfortunately we have to open the door a few times a day, because the only way to turn off the hot water coming out of the shower is to use the stopcock in the airing cupboard (it’s a long story). Since we don’t want Cleo in the cupboard because of the aforementioned clean towels and cat-trapping voids, we regularly have a fun few minutes wrestling with a squirming cat while soaking wet from the shower and trying to preserve our dignity with a towel.

Obsession 2 - Springwatch: Yes, that Springwatch. Again, she’s never shown much interest in the TV before, but as soon as the birds turned up on Springwatch last night, she was stalking the TV, ending up sitting on the bench a few centimetres away from the screen, batting at the giant coal tit chicks on the webcam, and even — in one highly inappropriate moment — Bill Oddie’s crotch. We saw most of the programme obscured by a furry, feline outline, then when it ended she gave a brief chirrup and wandered off to sleep.

I’ve been getting a fair bit of spam slipping through Akismet’s fingers recently, so I’ve decided to turn comment moderation on and see how it goes. Please feel free to comment as usual, but remember that your comment won’t show up immediately. If you are a spammer, your comment won’t turn up at all!

I watched an interesting programme last night which found out what happened to people who had participated in some documentaries in the 1970s: “What Happened Next?” This episode caught up with a group of people who lived like Iron Age people for a whole year. They built their own roundhouse out of timber, thatch and wattle and daub, milked their own goats and ate gritty soaked wheat for breakfast. In contrast to modern reality shows, the focus of the original documentary seemed to be on exploring the processes involved rather than the personalities. It was more like a year-long experimental archeology experiment, rather than a reality show. There was a bit of conflict between one family and the rest of the participants, but other than that, they seemed to get on quietly with the required work without creating any fuss.

It was quite an impressive achievement, really. They did have some training from experts, but they turned their hands to house building, milking, blacksmithing, fishing, butchery and basket weaving, among other skills. They lived as comfortably as you can do as an Iron Age person, and they had enough to eat — if a rather boring diet. The participants went on to do a variety of things, from special needs teaching to software engineering, but all seemed to take away a certain confidence and competence from their experience. It must be quite comforting to know that — if the worse came to the worse — you have the skills to survive in quite a primitive environment. One of the participants said something to the effect that Iron Age people and modern people are the same: we all use our skills to the best of our abilities in the environment in which we live.

One thing that made me laugh was the obvious lack of Health and Safety involvement in the original documentary. People wobbled at the top of fragile looking ladders while handling huge logs, wood was trimmed with a billhook towards the person helping to hold the timber, and in a memorable scene which made me cringe every time I saw the trailer, a naked man used a chisel while propping one foot up on a bit of wood. I’m quite surprised that they still had all their bits attached at the end of the year.

Perhaps it’s because it is Bike to Work day today in San Francisco, but there seems to have been a lot of controversy stirred up on the web this week by the gentle art of cycling.

First, there was the ridiculous assertion that cycling is less efficient in terms of energy consumption than driving, as if we — in developed countries — need to consume any extra food to fuel our cycle rides or as if drivers fast to compensate for the energy not used when driving their cars. I could go on…

And then a post by jwz, offering his own advice for people wanting to start cycling in San Francisco, attracted an enormous pile of enraged comments, many from other cyclists upset by his recommendation to “Never take bike advice from anyone who owns bike shorts, clip shoes, a messenger bag, or a fixie.” I don’t necessarily agree with all his advice either (though he did make it clear that it was specific to the cycling situation in San Francisco), but I wouldn’t get upset about it. People cycle for all kinds of different reasons, and have their own preferences, requirements and constraints. There really is more than one way to do it.

I suppose that I don’t understand why cycling inspires such ire in people. If you’re not being harassed by drivers (or anyone else who seems to take it as a personal rebuke that you are using a eco-friendly mode of transportation), or or pedestrians, or being taunted by gangs of school children, or having your tyres shredded by the glassy remains of outdoor binge-drinking sessions that seem a permanent fixture next to every park bench in Birmingham, other cyclists also seem to want to join in.

Of course, some cyclists act like idiots, just like some drivers and some pedestrians, but does that have to mean that the rest of us who just want to potter quietly to work have to take the rap? In that context, watching this video of a school run in the Netherlands (via Velorution) made me want to cry — it’s like glimpsing Utopia. All those comfortable, sensible, load-bearing bikes! The broad, glass-free, well-maintained cycle paths! The people cycling calmly along in their ordinary clothes, and not wearing helmets! The hordes of children cycling with their parents! Sigh.

I’ve been trying to write another grant proposal recently (a seemingly Sisyphean task for academics), but I ended up a bit stuck. It was a collaborative idea that a colleague and I sketched out last year, but which — for one reason or another — ended up on the back-burner for a while. I was really struggling to pull it together. We had plenty of ideas, but I was having trouble rearranging and grouping them into a sensible structure and seeing gaps that needed to be filled. Finally, I decided to blow the dust of my copy of Tinderbox and try that.

I wish I’d done it earlier. I used to use Tinderbox a lot for writing notes and organising ideas¹, but newer, shinier applications have come along, and I’ve gradually turned to them. But Tinderbox is still a great tool, and it really excels at visual brainstorming. If you open a map view, you can just hammer out short notes containing all your ideas, then group them into similar themes later. With a linear outliner (a view which Tinderbox also has), you end up worrying more about where stuff should fit than what the important ideas are.

Once I’d got all the ideas down, I made some adornments (‘sticky notes’ on the page to visually group notes), and started moving notes around, first into similar ideas, then dividing them into aims, questions, hypotheses, techniques and random things to remember. Once that was done, I moved back to the linear outline view, and tidied things up, fleshing out the outline a bit as I went. It was really effective, and almost fun²! While Tinderbox can export notes quite easily as text (or HTML or XML), I probably won’t bother to do so in this case, because I was just using it as a tool for thinking rather than writing. I’ve started to write the final document with the Tinderbox outline view open to guide my writing, and it’s working really well.

¹ I even constructed, managed and wrote this weblog with it when I first started blogging. ↑

² Something which can make grant writing even almost fun is a miraculous tool, in my opinion. ↑

A couple of days ago, I came home to find that I had received a call from the security department of my credit card provider. I panicked a bit, of course, but called them straight away. They told me that they had flagged up a couple of transactions as suspicious, and gave me the details of the dodgy items. To my great relief, the transactions had actually been made by me, so there was no problem.

I have no idea why those particular transactions were seen as suspicious, but I’d certainly rather have a few false positives than for them to miss genuinely fraudulent transactions. I was also quite impressed that they phoned me to check. However, the whole experience did feel a little bit like my Mum reading my credit card statement and pointing out items in a slightly disapproving way: “Now, this one here — did you really need to buy that, it was rather pricey. And this one, what was that for?”

It must the technology breakdown season or something: after the amp blew a capacitor, both our ancient TV and the less ancient Freeview box started to go on the blink. The Freeview box was crashing and needed to be rebooted and retuned several times a week, always — as luck would have it — just as some programme we wanted to catch from the beginning was starting. When I was a kid, we used to have to turn our old black and white set on a few minutes early to let it ‘warm up’, so this didn’t feel like great progress. The TV was also having picture and sound problems, which pretty much covers all the critical elements necessary for a satisfying TV-watching experience.

So we bit the bullet and joined the 21st Century by buying a widescreen LCD TV which was in a sale. After living with a 20 inch 4:3 format CRT screen for so many years, the 32 inch 16:9 TV seems gigantic. No more do we have to squint at the narrow strip of slightly fuzzy picture when sitting more than a couple of metres away. It has made the whole TV, DVD or EyeTV recording-watching process much more enjoyable now that we can actually see the visual details properly and hear the dialogue and sound effects clearly.

The radical change in the quality of our viewing experience (and the earlier improvement in our listening setup with the new amp) prompted me to rearrange the living room. The room isn’t large, so rearranging the furniture is a bit like a slightly frustrating game of Tetris, but I think the new arrangement works better. We used to have the sofa at one side of the living room and quite close to the TV because of the size of the screen. This meant that we were at an awkward angle to it, and had the speakers on the other side of the room, at right angles to the TV. Now that we can sit a healthy distance from the screen and still see it, we could put the sofa across the end of the room, facing the TV. That also meant that I had space to move the speakers either side of the TV, so that we can supplement the TV’s speakers with the floorstanders — it’s poor-man’s surround sound, but it definitely adds to the experience. Also, since the speakers are firing down the long axis of the room instead of the short axis, it works better with the acoustics of the room.

The expression of Cleo (our cat) the first time she walked into the rearranged room was priceless. She looked at where the sofa used to be and did the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a double-take in a cat. Then she looked at me with a “What the hell’s going on? Where’s all my stuff?” look for a bit, before settling a bit grumpily on the sofa in its new position.