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Some of you may remember when I recounted how I tend to use other people I encounter on my cycle commute in as a kind of fuzzy human clock. Well, it seems that other people do this too. Recently, I’ve been passing another cyclist at about the same point in my journey every day. We often smile and say hello as we pass, but today, I encountered him quite a bit further on in my own journey than usual. As he cycled by, he said something, which was almost lost to the wind and the Doppler Shift. But as I mentally reconstructed it, I realised that he’d said, “Crikey! Is it that time already?”, and I laughed out loud.

I mentioned a little while back that I’m using Tinderbox as a kind of daybook to record thoughts, ideas, notes and activities throughout the day. I’m really enjoying using it, and the experience of gradually adapting the structure of my Tinderbox document has been interesting and fun. I also posted a request a while ago for suggestions for simple software that would allow me to log my time at work. People responded with some great suggestions, and I’ve since found a few more. For example, I love RedBook: it’s a commandline task logger written in Ruby, which has a simple method of storing the data (as YAML-format files) and can export and display the data in a number of formats.

However, in the end — good though they were — these applications felt like adding another layer of complexity on to something that I wanted to be transparent and effortless. Then it hit me that I was already jotting down what I was doing in Tinderbox, so if I could store start and stop times as attributes of those notes, I’d be half way to logging my time. What follows is probably only interesting for fellow Tinderbox nerds or serious geeks. You have been warned

So I created a new prototype called ‘timecard’ which has key attributes of startTime, stopTime, intDuration (calculated in seconds from the start and stop times) and duration (which is nicely formatted in text as hh:mm:ss). I create a note as usual, using the title of the note to describe the activity, then drag it to an adornment, which has some OnAdd rules to set the tag attribute to ‘timed’, and set startTime to the time now. When I’m finished with that activity, I drag the note to another adornment which sets the end time to now and calculates the duration in seconds by passing the start and end time to a little Ruby script I wrote, helped a lot by a thread on the Tinderbox forums. The notes can sit on that adornment until I’ve got time to take stock, or the end of the day, whichever comes sooner! Then I drag them to another adornment, which just shoots them back into a Timecards container. I’ve set the adornments up to be a kind of electronic version of one of those time card punch machines you see in factories, and that’s the way I think of it.

I’ve also set up a variety of ways to view the information that this system collects. In the first screenshot, you can see that I’ve set up a DisplayExpression for the agent which collects today’s timecards to show me the total amount of time I’ve worked so far today. In the second, I’ve used the spiffy new bargraph() function to set the Pattern attribute of an agent collecting the past week’s worth of timecards to show the total time for each day in a kind of sparkline graph. When I’ve accumulated enough data, I’ll probably do the same for the past few months as well. Finally, I’ve created an HTML export template for the timecards, which formats the task descriptions and times for an agent (usually today’s times) as a pretty HTML table, so I have a summary record for each day.

Since I don’t have to collect precise hours for invoicing or anything like that, the absolute values are not particularly important. I only time tasks when I’m properly focussed, not when I’m being interrupted by calls, conversations with colleagues and so on, so it’s quite a good relative measure of how much solid, productive work I’m able to accomplish. It has been really interesting to track it from day to day. I’m actually using it as a sort of game to motivate myself to devote uninterrupted time to important tasks, just so that I can watch the bars climb for each day!

Mr. Bsag managed to get one of his prints into a one-day art exhibition, sponsored by the Yorkshire Bank: FAB, or Future Art Birmingham. I went along with him for the evening, which was held on the 12th floor of the bank, with fabulous views over central Birmingham, as you can see in the photo.

There was some really good art on display, and an auction was held for a couple of pieces, with some of the proceeds going to help fund the new Children’s Hospital. It was fun chatting to all the artists there, as well as representatives of the bank and other city types. Many of the artists (or hangers-on like me) wanted to buy each others’ work, but we are all too poor to afford it! Everyone had name badges, with the artists being labelled as such, but it was hardly necessary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many sharp suits in one place at a time. The artists (and their hangers-on — particularly me) were completely scruffy by comparison.

Anyway, it was good fun, and we took full advantage of the fancy canapés and free wine on offer, as well as the wonderful views — you don’t often get a chance to see Birmingham at night from the 12th floor.

Like many other people, I was following the events surrounding the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN yesterday with great interest. The BBC has had some quite good coverage, particularly The Big Bang Machine, however I felt a bit frustrated with some of the explanations. On all of the coverage of the LHC we learned that:

• It is 27 km in circumference
• It is cooled close to absolute zero (about -271°C)
• Twin proton beams will be accelerated to speeds very near to the speed of light
• The protons will then be collided, resulting in them being “smashed apart”
• This will recreate conditions as they were very shortly after the start of the Big Bang
• Detectors will record incredibly short-lived products of the collisions, looking (among other things) for the theoretically postulated but never observed Higgs boson.

And that’s it. Everyone agrees that it’s revolutionary, exciting stuff that will answer huge questions which have puzzled physicists for decades, but we don’t get any more details other than the impressive statistics of the LHC.

Now, I know that the concepts invovled in particle physics aren’t exactly accessible for non-physicists. Every time I have to explain what I do for a living to non-biologists, I thank my lucky stars that I’m not a particle physicist. The ‘what’ of my research is pretty easy to explain to non-experts, though the ‘why’ (as in ‘why in the world would anybody be interested in that?’) is still sometimes problematic. But surely there’s some, non-patronising way to explain more details of the experiments involved? There are so many interesting questions to ask.

For example, they often showed the graphical representations of the tracks of the particles which would be recorded by ATLAS and the other experiments in LHC. They were very pretty, but I’m assuming that the physicists won’t be just gazing at the screens going, “Whoa! Look at all the pretty patterns… Far out, man…”, then going off to have their tea. They are data and they mean something important, but how are they interpreted? How will they recognise the Higgs boson if it appears, and how will they distinguish it from other particles? How will they know for sure if they don’t find it: in other words, how can they be sure that the absence of the Higgs boson is a real absence and not because their accelerator isn’t quite fast enough, for example?

And then there’s the whole ‘the LHC will create black holes which will destroy the Universe’ thing. Though the BBC and some other media organisations tried to imply that it was idiotic scare-mongering and all the physicists say it really can’t happen, they all managed to get the question in. If I was Stephen Hawking, I would add a loud claxon sound to my speech synthesiser (like the QI claxon in the General Ignorance round), and activate it (preferably with the words CREATE BLACK HOLES WHICH DESTROY UNIVERSE flashing in white text on a black background on a convenient huge screen) whenever a journalist asked me the question. Then I’d mentally deduct 30 points and just carry on.

We spent a few days last week on holiday in North Devon, staying at Lynmouth. When we actually stopped to think about it, we realised that it was the first holiday (as opposed to work travel) we’d had in 3 years, and I certainly felt like we needed it! In the last few years, we seem to have always been too busy, had too little money or to have been doing things like moving house to make even a short break practical. But getting a change of scenery every now and again is important to recharge the batteries, so I was quite excited about our little trip.

We suspected that we would have dreadful weather, but in the end we were incredibly lucky. It was very windy on the coast, and that seemed to keep most of the showers at bay, or at least move them along quickly once they had started, so we didn’t get prolonged periods of rain. This was just as well, because we wanted to spend most of the time walking some of the coastal and moorland paths. Lynton and Lynmouth are really one town divided by an almost vertical cliff. There’s a rather nice Victorian water-powered cliff railway to take you between the two, or you can walk up the zig-zag paths which connect the two towns.

All I can say is that people who live in Lynton and Lynmouth must be very fit, and have very supple knee and ankle joints. Even with the zig-zags, the paths had sections that seemed to have slopes of about 40°, and required a curious, flexed-foot shuffle to walk up or down. This also applied to the coast path and a lot of the other footpaths we used for our walks. The area isn’t known as ‘Little Switzerland’ for nothing. Mr. Bsag is like a mountain goat, and climbs hills while walking or cycling with no perceptible effort. I, on the other hand, am clearly not geared correctly for hills, and while I can walk for miles on flat or undulating terrain, I puff and pant like a steam train on inclines. Despite that, we had some wonderful walks (with Mr. Bsag gently pushing me up some of the hills).

One of my favourite walks was along the River Lyn to Watersmeet (where two rivers meet, obviously). The river flows in a deep gorge which is thickly wooded with wonderful, lush ancient woodland. One benefit of all the rain we have had this summer is that the vegetation was even greener and more lush than it might have otherwise been. Every possible shade of green — from almost black, through vivid emerald, to sharp lime — was represented. Rain drops shone and sparkled on every surface making the whole wood glitter. Every rock and tree trunk was thickly covered in many species of moss, liverwort, lichen and fern. I couldn’t resist plunging my hand into a plump pad of moss, and found that it sank finger-deep into the cool, soft fronds. Deciduous woodland is one of my favourite habitats, and with a fast-flowing river too, it was just about perfect. I could have stayed for days in that green-brown dappled light, just looking around me and sighing happily. The photo above is of a section of the woodland, high on the valley side, entirely composed of oaks. It might well be very ancient, but the soil is so thin there, with rocks close to the surface that the oaks can’t get to their full size, and grow like ancient saplings, close together and corkscrewing towards the available light. Magical.

One of the great treats of going to Brazil is a trip by boat to swim in the river. We find a nice spot with a sandy river beach, ignore the resident caiman, and pile in to the caramel coloured water. The water isn’t cold, exactly, but it feels cool after the roasting heat of the sun. I love the tropics, but don’t care for the heat very much, so I value any opportunity to get cool. The current is surprisingly strong, so you can use the river like a natural, water-treadmill. You thrash away as hard as you can, then find that you’ve made barely any progress relative to the bank, but when you’ve swum a little way, you can let yourself drift back, to start again.

The visibility under the water is very low, which is slightly unnerving. We know for sure that there are a lot of piranhas in the water, and every now and again you get a little, gentle nibble on a limb or your back, which keeps you on your toes. The reputation of piranhas is much more ferocious than they are (for a start, many species are not carnivorous), and it’s quite safe as long as you don’t have any open wounds. Similarly, the caiman just keep out of your way.

I know that it’s not an efficient stroke, but I think that breaststroke is wonderful for wild swimming. You can see where you are going and hear all the bird calls bouncing off the water. As you look ahead, your sweeping hands slice the calm, virgin water cleanly, making you feel as if you’re the first person ever to swim in the water. Even if you’re swimming with others, you can point yourself towards a bit of open water and it’s just you, your hands and the river. Bliss.

I travelled fairly light (for me, anyway) to Brazil, but one thing I was keen to take along was my iPhone. It turned out to be a very useful travel companion for entertainment (music, TV shows and books via Stanza) as well as a stopwatch, alarm¹, calculator, currency converter and various other useful widgets. We had no internet or mobile phone coverage at the site, but the connectivity was very useful during the interminable travelling. I found that with Airplane mode on, the battery life was great. I also took a Freeloader with me, which was brilliant for recharging on the go. The power supply at the place we stayed was not the most reliable, but there was certainly plenty of sun, so the solar panels of the Freeloader charged up its internal battery quickly. I could then recharge the iPhone (and my camera) up at my leisure. It works well in the UK too, though it takes longer to fully charge, but you can also charge it via USB from a laptop.

I lugged a paperback copy of War and Peace to Brazil (875g!), but if I had been a bit more alert, I would have noticed that it is available on Stanza, so I could have taken a weightless literary tome with me on my iPhone.

¹ I recommend ‘Piano Riff’ as an alarm tone. It brings a bluesy, dramatic start to the day, and you wake up composing “I woke up this morning [da-DA da-DUN]…” blues songs. It also goes well with howler monkeys. ↑