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I’ve been meaning to link to this article by Maciej Ceglowski for ages, but forgetting to do it. I love Maciej’s writing: he doesn’t post very frequently, but when he does, it’s really worth waiting for. He’s really funny (I laughed out loud several times while reading this piece), but he also has a wonderful way of evoking the feeling of a place, and making you feel as if you know the characters he writes about.

My favourite part, however, is right at the end:

Each week I brute force my way through a dance with these gracious partners, and each week they are quick to assure me it wasn’t nearly as much of a Calvary for them as it had been the week before. As one of them said to me sweetly after what I thought was a rare successfully-executed figure, “Don’t worry. Someday you will know what you are doing.”

I feel like that all the time — someday I will know what I am doing.

I’ve started a tumblelog at Tumblr, called slipstream. I’m mostly intending to use it a as way of collecting together snippets of things posted in other places (like flickr, Twitter and ma.gnolia), but it’s also somewhere I can post things which are too short and inconsequential to post here. You might be wondering — given the general level of inconsequentiality of stuff on but she’s a girl — what would count as too inconsequential, but still… Eventually, I hope to find some way of incorporating slipstream here as a kind of side-blog, so removing the need for the separate listings of twitters and ma.gnolia postings, but I haven’t quite sorted out the best way to do it yet. Anyway, if you’re interested, enjoy!

‘Tis the season for boilers to break down, apparently. My parents were staying with us at the weekend, and returned on Sunday night to a freezing house as a consequence of a non-functioning boiler. It wasn’t a total surprise — they had a plumber over to look at it on Friday — but they had hoped it was fixed. As they couldn’t get anyone over to look at it again before today, they’ve had a few days of wearing all their clothes in the house, and shivering around a tiny fan heater. Reading John Kelly’s Voxford blog, I see that he has been having the same trouble. Boilers work hardest at this time of year, of course, so it’s not so surprising that they tend to fail in winter, but I also suspect the action of Sod’s Law.

John (an American currently living in Oxford) also puzzles over the curious British tradition of the glacial toilet or bathroom. As with many things you take for granted about your society until they are pointed out by someone from another country, it is an odd phenomenon when you think about it. I have two theories:

1. Within living memory, many people in this country used to have to walk down the garden path to an outside toilet, which would have been freezing and draughty in winter. The advent of the ‘inside toilet’ was treated with suspicion at first, and often regarded as unhygienic and liable to make people ‘soft’. Perhaps, as a concession to this view, indoor toilets were designed to be freezing, as a kind of compromise. It may be unhygienically indoors, but, by God, you’ll freeze your knees off using it, just as Nature intended.
2. The typical British boiler and radiator system is pretty pathetic. Once the water has circulated to the last radiator in line, it tends to be no more than tepid. Perhaps the toilet tends to be the last in line?

We don’t really suffer extremes of temperature in this country, but it still surprises me that we don’t have better heating for cold, damp winters. I knew a Finnish woman at University who said that she had never felt as bone-cold as she had in Britain, despite regularly experiencing temperatures much lower than those typical of the British winter. She said that there was something about the damp cold, coupled with the inadequate heating and insulation of British houses, that seeped into her bones.

When I was a child, we used to regularly visit an elderly relative in Norfolk. She lived in a bungalow, heated only by a coal fire in the living room, and she was very sparing with the coal. Even at the height of summer, it was colder inside the house than outside. In winter, it was bitter. I don’t think I’ve ever been colder, and I still shiver when I remember sitting in that living room. Don’t even get me started on the toilet… Still, Auntie Norfolk (yes, that’s actually what we called her) was as tough as old boots, and lived to well over 90 years old. Perhaps central heating does make you soft.

I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the Skitch beta (thanks to Matt Lyon and Alex Payne on Twitter!), and I’ve been having some fun trying it out. Skitch is a kind of image/snapshot/sketch creation application, which also makes it easy to share those snaps with others. That makes it sound complicated, but it really isn’t. In fact, Skitch is a blast to use, and I keep finding myself dragging photos in, making screenshots, and scribbling on my pictures, just for the hell of it.

It is designed in an unusual, highly visual and intuitive way. Almost all of the tools and functions can be discovered just by playing with the interface. You can drag images in to the frame (or select them from your iPhoto library), click on a pencil tool to draw a scribble, then move it around on top of the underlying image. Resizing the image is done by grabbing the frame and resizing it, which gives you a visual feel for the size, without having to guess how big 500 pixels wide is. You can take a screenshot of the entire screen, a selection (with some nifty crosshairs for accurate selection of an area), or a window. As a nice touch, when you are snapping a window, you can set a white or transparent background (with or without drop shadow), or you can set your desktop background as the window background. To clarify this, even if your selected window is sitting on top of a messy pile of other windows, the screenshot will show it sitting on a clean desktop background.

The sharing options are quite extensive and equally easy to use. You can use the provided space on the Skitch servers, Flickr, .Mac, or upload to FTP, SFTP or WebDav file space. When you’ve finished with your sketch, you select where you want it to go via the drop down at the bottom right of the window, then hit the ‘webpost’ button. This tells you that the image is uploading, and when it has finished, the button changes to allow you to click it to copy the URL (or a chunk of HTML) for inclusion in a blog or forum post.

Your ‘Skitches’ are automatically saved to a Skitch folder inside your Pictures folder, but you can also access all your saved or uploaded images via the history feature. It’s a simple thing, but having images automatically saved to a particular folder (but being able to find them again easily via the interface of the application) removes another barrier by giving you one less decision to make.

Skitch is one of those applications that you didn’t know you needed, but become indispensible very quickly. Many of the individual features are replicated in other applications — I have Snapz Pro for screenshots, various image editors for drawing and reszing images, and Transmit for getting images on to a server — but Skitch brings all of those features together into a single, very easy to use package. It has limitations and simplifications, but that’s part of the point: it exists to let you make and share screenshots and other annotated images as quickly possible, while being fun to use.

It seems that I have two invitations to give out for the beta, so if you’d like to try Skitch, let me know your email address.

Exciting news, everyone! Mr. Bsag’s Artfall has been submitted (not by me, amazingly) to a new digg.com-like site for promoting Birmingham and its many talented people: upyerBrum.com (great domain name).

Birmingham can be a tough place for artists (and those involved with the Arts in general). It’s chock full of very talented artists, but it can be incredibly hard to get your work in front of interested people, or even find a space where you can work. Mr. B. is a shy, modest and totally lovely person who tends towards extreme self-deprecation, which also doesn’t help. That’s why it’s great to have sites like upyerBrum and Birmingham: It’s Not Shit bigging up Brummies and all their wonderful works. Long may they continue.

If you like Mr. Bsag’s work and feel like expressing it, do visit upyerBrum and vote, which will push the entry on his site to the top of the front page! You don’t need to be registered to vote, only to submit stories.

I’m really ashamed that it has taken me so long — particularly since I do so much stuff on teh intarwebs — but I’ve finally got around to re-building Mr. Bsag’s art site, Artfall.

Part of the reason it took so long (apart from being incredibly busy) was that about 18 months ago, he started making prints (woodcuts, linocuts, aquatint, intaglio and so on) rather than paintings, so he needed to build up a portfolio of the new work to show. The other problem is that Mr. B is not what you might call a technophile, and is much more interested in making art than websites. If I have to maintain the site, it will just stagnate because I’ve got too many other things to keep on top of, so it needed to be something he could cope with using on his own, as part of his normal workflow. I’ve tried lots of things for his site over the years, but in the end I settled with RapidWeaver. There was a free copy with MacUser a few weeks ago, and when I tried it out, I was impressed with how easy it was to create and maintain a simple site in a WYSIWYG way, while producing quite clean, valid code. It also has very nice integration with iPhoto, so he can just create an album for the site in iPhoto with titles, select that album in RapidWeaver, hit Publish Site, and boom (as Steve Jobs is fond of saying) — there it is online.

RapidWeaver comes with some nice themes, so rather than toiling endlessly over a design of my own, which probably wouldn’t end up looking as professional as some of the available themes, I went with ‘Milky’ from Elixir Graphics, which is clean and simple, but rather nice. I tweaked a few colours and font sizes, but otherwise left well alone.

So, other than managing to finally pull my finger out and get the thing done, I deserve no credit at all for this site, but Mr. Bsag deserves a lot of kudos for producing such wonderful prints. Photographing them doesn’t do them justice, but do go and have a look, and tell all your friends — particularly your rich, art-loving friends with bare walls!

If I can’t provide him with shoes in a timely manner, I can at least pimp his work.

I’m rather tempted by this alarm clock which wakes you with the honeyed tones of Stephen Fry (as Jeeves). Who wouldn’t enjoy the illusion of their own personal Gentleman’s Gentleman rousing them gently and politely from sleep, bearing a tray of freshly brewed coffee in a silver pot, precision-cut toast, and — if necessary — an astonishingly effective hangover cure? Sadly, only the audio part of that illusion is included with the clock.

I did, however, notice a rather disturbing thing (disturbing to me, at least). If you go to the downloads page, you’ll see some samples of both the ‘Good morning, sir’ and ‘Good morning, madam’ greetings. The first thing you notice is that the ‘Good morning, madam’ samples are conspicuously more verbose than sir’s. Second, a good number of them deal in some way with issues of dieting, clothes, beauty or — gah! — horoscopes.

I feel that a female Bertie Wooster would give this kind of morning routine the short shrift it deserves¹: “Dash it all, Jeeves, if you’re going to trouble me early in the a.m. by blithering on about shoes and suchlike, you can jolly well biff off instanter and start perusing the Sits. Vac. for a new position!”

¹ With humble apologies to P.G. Wodehouse, who would have put it a lot better. ↑

Contrary to my usual practice of watching or listening to something on TV or radio and then blogging about how brilliant it was when it was all over, I’m actually going to talk about something fantastic in advance, so that you have a sporting chance to see what all the fuss is about.

The National Theatre of Brent are doing one of their unique theatrical productions on BBC Radio 4 at 9pm this Friday: The Messiah. I heard their Complete and Utter History of the Mona Lisa a couple of years ago, and I still laugh when I remember the conversation between Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli:

Leonardo da Vinci: So what you bin’ up to then, Botticelli?
Botticelli: Bin’ doin’ the paintins.
L: Oh yeah? Which ones you bin’ doin’ then?
B: Done the Venus.
L: What, on the sofa?
B: Nah, comin’ out the shell.
L: Any good?
B: Masterpiece, apparently.
L: How lovely.

For those of you not acquainted with NToB, they are Desmond ‘Olivier’ Dingle (played by Patrick Barlow), and Raymond Box (John Ramm): two of the most inept thespians (not to mention dodgy historians) you’ve ever come across. Oh, and they are hilarious. I can’t wait to hear how they mangle The Messiah.

I got tagged with the Trivia Tag meme by Matthieu Riou, and it must be getting near Christmas because I thought, ah, why not? Let’s think of it as the blogging equivalent of having a glass of wine too many at the office Christmas party and thinking it might be funny to photocopy some hitherto hidden part of your anatomy.

So, five little-known things about me:

1. I cry every time I watch the film ET. Every flipping time. Even though I tell myself that it’s just cynical emotional manipulation on the part of Spielberg, it still invariably makes me blub like a baby.
2. My favourite smell is that given off by the feathers at the back of a barn owl’s head.
3. My right leg twists outwards slightly, prompting my Tae Kwon-Do instructor (many years ago) to ask me if I’d ever fallen off a horse and fractured my pelvis. No, I’m naturally just rather badly put together. In those idle moments when you brood about such things, I’ve speculated that if I was unfortunate enough to ever face having a leg amputated, I’d be slightly less unhappy if it was my right leg that had to go.
4. I like the combination of peanut butter (wholemeal, crunchy) and Marmite.
5. My first and last appearance on the stage (at school) was as the speaking end of Arthur the Pantomime Horse in a production of Wind in the Willows. My portrayal of Arthur owed more than a little to Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I’m supposed to tag five more people to list their five bits of Trivia, but I’m feeling lazy and rebellious (an odd combination), so I’m just going to leave it open. If anyone feels like taking up the challenge, be my guest.

I had an eye test recently, and needed to get a new pair of glasses. Those of you who wear glasses will know how much of a shock it is to find out how much any of the high street chains of opticians want to charge you for even the most basic of frames. I have a very simple single vision prescription, and I find it incredible that a very non-descript pair of glasses would cost me more than £100, without even anti-scratch coating included in the price.

So it was time for this cheapskate to investigate the online options. After a bit of searching, I settled on GlassesDirect. They have quite a good range of frames, and prices start at an amazing £15 for the frame, lenses, anti-scratch coating and a hard case (I apologise for sounding like an advert¹). I went for a pair from the cheapest range in the end, and I’m really happy with the way they turned out. The quality seems every bit as good as the pairs I’ve had from high street opticians. The fit was also pretty good from the start, requiring only a slight tweaking of nose pads which I did myself.

I generally like to support local shops if I can (though the majority of opticians around here are chains rather than independent shops), but when there’s such a massive price differential between physical and online stores, it seems ridiculous. The opticians may claim that you get better after-sales service and fitting with them, but I’m sure it’s not more than £85-worth of difference. Really, at £15, it’s worth getting a pair just to try them, even if you decide you prefer buying glasses from chain opticians.

¹ No affiliation with the company, just a satisfied customer etc. etc…↑

A week or so ago, I had a email via flickr from Schmap Guides to tell me that my shortlisted photograph (of the inside of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford) had been selected for the Oxford Guide. Yay! The Schmap Guides are apparently free, downloadable guides with maps, photographs, reviews and so on for places in the UK and beyond. I say ‘apparently’ because at the moment the viewer is Windows only, so I can’t take a look. Anyway, if you have a Windows PC you can download the Oxford guide here if you’re interested. If you do, can you send me a screenshot of the page with my photograph on?

I’m ill and busy at the moment—-not a great combination. To anyone else in my position can I prescribe the perfect medication? Take one listening of Two Margarines by John Shuttleworth every 24 hours. It’s a dramatic reconstruction of the domestic disaster of having Two Margarines on the Go (i.e. opening a new tub without realising that there is one tub already open), and set to a samba rhythm.

Two margarines on the go It’s a Nightmare scenario Two margarines in my fridge It’s enough to end a Happy marriage

Side effects may include Lemsip shooting from your nose.

Saltation sent me a link to this classic site, a brilliantly done emulation of a Mac SE running System 7.1. Words cannot express how wonderful it is—-just go and visit it. It even has the Russian Tetris on it, on which I wasted many an hour while trying to write my PhD thesis on my PowerBook 100 running System 7. The ‘eep’ sound while the system extensions were loading almost brought nostalgic tears to my eyes.

Some time ago, I got an email from Nick Booth of the Grassroots Channel which is part of the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network (which aims to do exactly what it says on the tin). Nick wondered if I’d be interested in the Grassroots Channel [podcast][3]. To tell the truth, I haven’t really made huge use of podcasts—-I tend to get behind on my RSS reading, so podcasts are yet another thing to keep up with. I subscribe to the Nature podcast and to the TextMate screencasts, but that’s about it.

Anyway, I was intrigued, and I’m interested in local issues, so I gave it a listen. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Grassroots really shows off the benefit of podcasting for community organisations, and some of their features are so well done that national broadcasters would be proud to have produced them. In particular, The Worst Slum in Europe is a fascinating conversation between community activist Natalie Brade, and Birmingham City Councillor, Sir Albert Bore. Natalie was part of a group of residents of a seriously run-down estate, Lee Bank, trying to get improvements in their appalling living conditions from the Council.

The conversation is wonderful because it’s mostly just between the two of them, rather than having an interviewer trying to polarise the debate. They tease one another (Bore describes the demonstrations of Natalie’s group as “bloody embarrassing” at one point, with a smile in his voice), but they listen to what the other has to say, and they clearly respect one another. It’s a pity that politics can’t be like that more often, and the results that Natalie’s group achieved is quite an inspiration.

Even if you don’t live in Birmingham, you might find it an interesting listen.

[3]: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=82868503 “Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes”

Dan Hon has a cracking piece on children’s names inspired by fonts on his new blog. Some of them made me laugh out loud:

• Copperplate (boy’s name, ginger hair)
• Comic Sans MS (only if you’re an eccentric celebrity)
• Monaco (probably already being used by Victoria Beckham or Madonna)
• Rockwell (cowboy)
• Schoolhouse Cursive B (exception that quite irritatingly does something to the rule)
• SimSun (possibly something that would inadvertently either please or dishonour my parents)
• Snell Roundhand (old money again)
• Trebuchet (military family)
• Wide Latin (mean mother making a comment about how her daughter should lose some weight)
• Tahoma (surname probably Phoenix)
• Mistral (girl’s name)
• Marker Felt (never going to work as a teacher)
• Lucida Sans (quite posh girl)
• Wingdings (see earlier comment about my parents, or possibly suitable for a chicken farmer’s son)

It had me searching through the Fonts palette to find a few more. Plantagenet Cherokee (rugged yet sensitive) seems like quite a good name for the hero of a novel, and in honour of the rather dubious name for the new Intel Apple laptops, how about LiHei Pro?