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Although some of our potatoes are probably not quite ready for harvesting just yet (particularly the maincrop variety), we are impatient and decided to try digging up a couple of of the plants to see how they were doing. Other people on the allotment have been complaining that their yields have been very low this year, so we were pleasantly surprised to get quite a good haul. There are some very tiny ones, but also some that will make more than a couple of mouthfuls. We also — as is traditional when you grow your own — got a few amusingly shaped spuds.

The allotment is going pretty well at the moment, after a slow start. We’ve also got plenty of courgettes (you can see today’s haul in the photo, and we have more in the fridge from earlier in the week), and lots of nasturtium flowers for salads. The tomatoes are coming along slowly but surely, and the runner, Cherokee and dwarf beans are finally coming into flower after sulking for a couple of months.

Digging potatoes is brilliant - you never quite know what’s going to come up, but it feels like digging for treasure.

Reading web pages on the iPhone is a very different experience than reading them the desktop version of Safari. Some things (like entering text and so on) are inevitably slightly more awkward because of the onscreen keyboard. But there’s one thing in particular that I’d like to see in the full version of Safari: zooming in on page elements. For those who haven’t used Mobile Safari, each page is initially displayed full width, which for most pages results in tiny text, but means that you can see at a glance the layout of content on the page. The magic comes when you double tap a page element like a column of text: it expands to fill the entire width of the page, which for most pages I’ve tried makes it perfectly readable. It also — and this is why I want it in desktop Safari — removes any of the other distractions on the page. This is perfect when you’re reading typical sites with sidebars and other content at the side of the page, and is particularly good with online news sites where you have flashing adverts and other distracting elements to either side of the content.

It’s the web browser equivalent of ‘full screen mode’ on a text editor, and I’m rather addicted to it. So much so that I tried double clicking a column in desktop Safari earlier today to concentrate on what I was reading.

One of the dubious pleasures of being an academic is the annual graduation ceremony. On the one hand, it’s lovely to see the students you’ve taught graduating and celebrating their success. On the other, you have to sit through an awful lot of names being called out and hands being shaken. You also have to wear an academic gown and mortar board, which is downright weird when your usual attire consists of jeans and t-shirts. All Universities have different colours for their gowns, and the Oxford PhD gown is spectacularly lairy. It’s bright scarlet and electric blue, so you march solemnly into the hall looking exactly like a female eclectus parrot. In a hat.

The Birmingham ceremonies are quite nicely done, and we even get a brass fanfare as we process into and out of the Great Hall. I don’t know if it’s a long-standing tradition, but the music going in to the Hall is usually fairly solemn and a bit pompous. The music for processing out of the Hall, on the other hand, is often hilariously (and deliberately) inappropriate¹. One year we got the theme from the Dambusters, and this year — hilariously — it was the theme from Thunderbirds. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but it was all I could do not to imitate a Gerry Anderson puppet walk, or pretend to that I was flying Thunderbird 2. Imagine that: a female eclectus parrot, in a hat, flying Thunderbird 2. You can’t say that the Univseristy of Birmingham graduation ceremonies aren’t memorable.

¹ One thing that I love about Brummies and the ethos of the city of Birmingham as a whole is that they refuse to take themselves too seriously. There’s a constant level of dry wit and self-mockery that I like a lot. ↑

As you will have seen if you follow my Twitterings or see them on the sidebar here, I got an iPhone last week. When the original iPhone came out, I fell in love with it, but I couldn’t afford it at the original prices, and I also had a mobile contract to finish first. The timing for the 2.0 version was perfect, as was the reduction in price. With all the hoo-ha over the release (O2 got inundated with registrations of interest), I thought that my chances of actually getting hold of one would be low.

As it happened, I got lucky. I tried to order one online early on Monday morning when O2 started accepting pre-orders. The server went down almost immediately, and as I had work to do, I wasn’t able to try it again until lunch time. Amazingly, my order went through, and unlike many others who were unlucky, when it arrived on Friday by courier and I activated it through iTunes, the activation went straight through without a hitch. I know that others had a much less smooth experience, but for me it worked really well.

I’ve been living with the iPhone for several days now, and I really like it. I’ve been waiting a long time to get a small, mobile device that offers such a seamless experience with my Macs. 3G/Edge wireless works very well, and connecting to a WiFi network is seamless. The screen is beautifully bright and clear, so that reading web pages and emails or viewing photographs is a real pleasure. The touchscreen gestures are wonderfully intuitive and easy to use, and I even quite like the touchscreen keyboard. I’m a touch typist, so it’s never going to replicate the experience of a full sized, physical keyboard, but I think it’s a very effective and efficient compromise for a small, handheld unit. With one or two minor exceptions, everything is as beautifully designed and functional as you’d hope from an Apple product. In the past, I’ve had Psion PDAs (2 different models) and Palms/Treos (3 different models), as well as a clutch of smartphones (as well as some dumbphones). So I’ve had quite a bit of experience with using these kinds of devices, and I can honestly say that I’ve never used a phone/PDA/internet device which gets so much right. People argue that the latest Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Blackberry does everything an iPhone does, has a better camera, better battery life or whatever. But for me, the point is that the iPhone does pretty much everything you want in such a seamless and integrated way that you don’t have to think about it: you just use it.

Of course, it’s terrific when you are out and about and want a burst of information or entertainment in a handy package that you always have about your person. But I’m also finding that I use it at home a lot, where I have a laptop which replicates all ¹ of the functions of the iPhone — even portability. Somehow, if I’m browsing my email or reading RSS feeds or FriendFeed, it seems so much more comfortable to pick up the iPhone, curl up on the sofa and browse through the sites than it does to do the same at the laptop. In short, I find that it’s a device that really delights me, which is a fairly rare thing. I know that there will be someone who comments, “But it’s just a phone!” (Jonathan, I’m looking at you ), and that’s absolutely true. But it’s a beautifully designed, elegantly functional device that I thoroughly enjoy using, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t celebrate that in the same way that I enjoy looking at a Victorian suspension bridge, a beautifully turned ceramic bowl or a beam engine.

¹ Except GPS. ↑

As I blogged about a few years ago, I’m a first aider at work. We have quite a few qualified first aiders in our building, and there were practical reasons related to my job that made getting qualified a good idea for me, but I’ve always been aware of the importance of having some knowledge of first aid. My Mum (a nurse) taught us common-sense stuff about dealing with medical and other emergencies, and I did my First Aid badges in Brownies and Guides, but my qualification 3 years ago was the first time I had fairly formal training.

I went on an annual refresher course this week, and something the trainer said really shocked me. Apparently about one in three unconscious casualties die — not from their injuries, but because their airway wasn’t kept open at the scene before the ambulance arrived. That’s shocking because ‘keeping the airway open’ isn’t technical or difficult at all: all you need to do is place two fingers under the person’s chin, support their forehead and gently tilt their head up and back. That’s it. But a third of unconscious casualties die because no-one thought to do that simple thing.

I think we all have a responsibility to learn a bit of simple first aid. It’s mostly common sense, but if you know how to keep an airway open and stop bleeding (just put your hand over the wound and press hard, as long as there aren’t any foreign bodies in the wound), you’re half way there. If you can do CPR as well (which really isn’t a difficult technique), you stand a good chance of giving someone in a dire situation a much better chance of surviving. All you need to do is keep their brain supplied with oxygen: keep the airway open, keep the circulation going, and stop too much oxygenated blood from leaving their body — anything else can wait until the ambulance crew get there. We should really teach simple first aid to children in school. It’s a vital skill for life — and for preserving life.

We’re growing a lot of tomatoes at the moment. We both love tomatoes and can’t get enough of them, but last year our crop was a dismal failure (grand total of fruits: 1¹ ). So this year, we decided to hedge our bets. We grew half of our plants indoors in our unheated conservatory, and half outside on the allotment. Looking at them now, you’d find it hard to believe that they were the same varieties, let alone the same varieties planted at about the same time.

The indoor tomatoes are like supermodels. Incredibly tall (2 metres or more), leggy and skinny, they continually flop melodramatically all over the place despite being well supported with canes. Every day I come in to water them to find that another branch has buckled and is trailing on the ground having a crisis, or threatening to bring down another plant. They are healthy enough, but I think that the higher temperature and humidity in the conservatory has made the new growth very sappy and soft. They have flowers and a few tiny fruits, but I can’t imagine how they’ll stand up when they have a full crop of fruits weighing them down.

In contrast, the allotment tomatoes are like sturdy hill tribespeople: short with strong stems, tough, leathery leaves and very bushy. They’ve been exposed to the colder temperatures and the vicious winds that whip over our allotment site, and they almost look as if they’d be able to stand up on their own. They are a bit further behind, fruiting-wise, but I think they’ll probably produce a decent crop if we can keep the slugs and pigeons away from them.

¹ Which we cut in half and shared, determined to enjoy our one and only tomato. ↑

When I started using Tinderbox again for planning various work projects, I noticed that a lot of people were using it for a simple daybook or journal. I’ve tinkered with various ways of keeping a record of the various things I do, people I talk to or ideas I have throughout the day, including a simple little plugin I wrote for Textmate to keep a journal in a plain text file. That worked quite well, but it wasn’t as easy as it might have been to find things again when I needed them because it was one big flat file.

So I started playing around with keeping my journal in Tinderbox, and I’ve been using it for a couple of months now. It’s deliberately very simple: I have a container called Daybook, in which all my snippets of text are kept. That container has an OnAdd action which sets the prototype as daybook (setting the colour and a few other attributes), and also sets the title with a datetime stamp of the creation date. That means I can just hit return to create a new note, hit return again to dismiss the dialogue setting the title (because it will be set automatically), then start typing in the window which appears. These daybook entries are sorted in reverse chronological order, and automatically collected by ‘Today’ and ‘Past 7 days’ agents, which do just what you’d expect. I also have another container for completed tasks, where I have one note for each day (again, auto-titled on creation with the date and ‘tasks’) which contains all the completed tasks for that day.

One of the things I really like about Tinderbox is that the DIY ethos of it means that you can make something as simple or complex as you like, and — even more importantly — you don’t have to decide exactly how something should be set up from the start. Once I’d been using the setup I described above for a few days, I realised that it would be nice to collect my notes on articles I’d read in a separate place so that I could find them more easily. The infinitely flexible structure of notes meant that I didn’t have to create a different kind of note to do this, or even go back and edit my previous notes on reading. When I make notes on a paper I’ve read, I tend to first paste in the reference and the link to the entry from the Papers application, so that I can find the original article easily from my notes. So all I had to do was create another agent called ‘Reading’ which searched for notes with the string ‘papers://’ in them, which is the start of the Papers URI format. It would then assign ‘reading’ to the attribute ‘tags’ for that note. Also, by setting the tag manually to ‘reading’ I could get the Reading agent to find the note.

I set up something very similar for bookmarks, so that if I dragged a URL on to a note to remind myself of some online resource, it would be collected by the ‘Bookmarks’ agent. It’s important to note that these agents just store aliases of the original notes, so that all the originals are either in the Daybook container or the Completed tasks container. At any point, I could set up another agent or alter the existing ones, and view my notes in a different way.

Tinderbox has great text and HTML export capabilities, so I can export my journal for the day, week, month or whatever period I want, and it’s easy to view in other forms or reformat for other uses. And if I ever want to use something else, the file itself is XML, so I could still get my data out.