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As regular readers will know, my nom de keyboard of ‘bsag’ and the title of this blog both refer to the look which comes over someone’s face (usually male) when I exhibit signs of knowing something about technical matters (see my About page for more details).

I had a classic example of BSAG earlier this week when I had to contact some heating engineers about our boiler. We’ve dealt with these particular people before, and they are great: they are nice guys, do good work and charge a reasonable price. However, they really don’t seem able to handle the fact that — while neither Mr. Bsag and I are experts on heating systems — I know a bit more about it than my husband. I started to explain what I thought the problem was, but they asked if they could speak to Mr. Bsag. I could have put my foot down, but since I’d dealt with them before (an experience very similar to those experienced by Arabella Weir’s ‘Invisible Woman’ character on the Fast Show), I knew that it was a losing battle.

So I handed the phone over, and we had a farcical exchange where the heating engineers would ask Mr. Bsag some technical question on the phone, he would ask me, I would answer, and he would tell the engineers what I’d just said. It worked out OK in the end, because they came and fixed the problem (which was indeed a faulty control board, as I’d thought), but it would have been a bit easier if they’d actually believed that I knew what I was talking about. Sigh.

Yesterday, Mr. Bsag lost his wedding ring. He was working on the allotment and took the ring off because it was rubbing his finger when he was using the spade. Like the big idiot he is sometimes, he put the ring in the top pocket of his overalls which a) doesn’t fasten closed, and b) has a hole in the bottom, though to be fair, he didn’t know about b) until it was too late. The inevitable happened, and the ring must have dropped out of his pocket while he was spreading the huge load of horse manure we had delivered on to the beds. We went up to look for it, but it could be under several trailer loads of muck by now, so it was a fairly hopeless search.

I was surprised how upset I was by the loss of his ring. It’s only a piece of metal after all, and the fact that he doesn’t now have it in his possession or on his finger makes no difference to our relationship. But it still upset me. Our rings weren’t just picked off the trays of a jewellery shop, but were made to our own design by a lovely craftsman jeweller based in Birmingham. They weren’t expensive, but they were special and unique to us. At our wedding, I carried my grandmother’s wedding ring as my ‘something old’, and it had worn very thin over the years of her marriage. I wanted our rings to wear thin too, but now only mine will do so, and that makes me sad.

In folk tales and ballads, when this kind of thing happens, the years pass and the man catches a huge fish at sea, which he gets his servants to cook at a great feast. The woman then cuts open the belly of the fish, only to find the lost ring shining inside. Our allotment is a bit far from the sea for that, but my faith in the narrative imperative is such that I’m fairly confident that — some years from now — we’ll cut open a particularly prize specimen of a potato, which we have grown on our allotment, only to find the lost ring embedded in the flesh.

That, or we’ll have to make friends with someone who has a metal detector, but it doesn’t have quite the same ballady feel about it.

Mr. Bsag and I spent the weekend with my parents and my brother to celebrate my parents’ Ruby Wedding Anniversary on Sunday (40 years, for those not fluent in the gemstone to years-married conversion). It was a quiet family do, but great fun, despite the weather doing its best to scupper carefully laid plans with bitter winds and snow.

My brother and I hatched a plot to make them a photo book (using iPhoto) of photographs from their wedding day and a selection of other shots from the 40 years since. Unfortunately, we had to let Dad in on the secret because he is the keeper of the family slide collection, and had to do an enormous amount of scanning and sorting before we put it together. But we made sure that the final selection and layout was a surprise.

It was a roaring success, and both my parents thought it was a lovely idea. Since some of the wedding photos were on slides, they hadn’t seen them for years, so it was wonderful to look at them again, and I’m really impressed with the quality of the book. All the images came out really well, and it looks very classy.

I might even order a copy for myself, but I’m definitely going to get enlargements of a wonderful shot from their wedding. It’s a colour shot of Mum and Dad in the back of the wedding car, looking gloriously happy and covered in confetti. I suspect that they were also pretty glad to be out of the cold, because their wedding day was also bitterly cold and windy, just like this Sunday.

I’m one of those people who really enjoys (in a slightly masochistic way) watching Grand Designs. There’s no way that Mr. Bsag and I will ever have the money to buy a plot of land and build a house, but we enjoy watching other people go through the process. One benefit of house-building by proxy is that — while you don’t end up with a gorgeous designer home to live in — you don’t spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and go grey worrying about your house slipping down a hillside overnight and ending up in a pile of rubble by the side of the road.

We have, however, noticed something interesting about the programme which adds an interesting dimension to watching it. If you watch carefully, you’ll sometimes notice that some of the building firms or contractors involved in the build have their company logos pixellated out. In a surprising number of cases the be-pixellated ones end up being fired from the job, doing something disastrous, or getting into contractual or legal wrangles with the people commissioning the house build. It isn’t always the case, presumably because the production company hasn’t got permission to feature the logo, or something like that. But it does add a frisson of anticipation to the show when you see a blurred out logo: “That newly installed wall is going to collapse/leak/explode!”. Not that I indulge in schadenfreude, you understand…

Perhaps everyone involved should wear a pre-pixellated t-shirt to spoil our fun.

Well, that wasn’t the quiet, restful weekend we’d planned.

Mr. Bsag has been having terrible trouble with his teeth. Several teeth on one side hurt like hell, and were very sensitive to heat and cold. He made an emergency appointment with the dentist he was registered with in our old house, and — diagnosing a build-up of plaque — removed the plaque and said all would be well. But it continued to hurt badly, and on Friday, the whole of the lower half of his face had swollen up and he was having difficulty swallowing. In the meantime, I had managed to register him at our local dentist’s (after registering with them myself earlier in the week), and we got another emergency appointment for him. It’s not quite clear what the problem is, but it seems as if — in scraping the plaque away — the previous dentist might have introduced an infection into his gums. So he’s on antibiotics, but has been feeling pretty bad all weekend. Mr. Bsag likes his food, and a husband unable to eat solids is not a happy husband.

He’s feeling a bit better now, though still swollen, but it has been a weekend of sleepless nights and worry (for us both), and pain (for him).

To cap it all, someone bashed into my parked car in a supermarket car park, so I also spent some of the weekend on a wild goose chase to try and find a touch-up pen in the right colour, and trying to polish the scratches out. The damage is cosmetic, but it was a hassle I could have done without this weekend. Can I have another weekend instead of Monday morning, please?

We watched the film After Life at the weekend, and I really loved it. The film’s premise is that people who have recently died arrive at a slightly derelict institution, where they must — with the help of an advisor — decide on the one memory that they will take with them to the afterlife. Everything else will be forgotten, and they will live in that memory for ever. At the end of a week, the chosen memory is carefully recreated on video by technicians, and they go off to the afterlife to live in that moment.

Rather than trying to suggest that this is the way things actually are when you die, I felt that the director intended it to stimulate viewers to think about which memory they would take with them, if they were in the same situation. By coincidence, I’m re-reading ‘The Amber Spyglass’ at the moment (the final part of Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy), and there is a similar idea in that, posed in a different way. So this has been on my mind recently, and I went to bed after the film thinking about memories.

Think about it yourself — picking just one special memory is incredibly difficult. I’ve obviously got a number which are too personal for public broadcast on this blog (ahem), but I thought I’d share a few of the more — how shall I put it? — U Certificate ones with you.

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It’s funny how completing the little jobs that you’ve been putting off for ages, but aren’t really that difficult, can really make your day. If they involve something you didn’t know you could do until you tried, it adds about 100 bonus points.

Two things in our house have needed fixing since we moved in over a year ago. The first was the kitchen light. It was one of those ‘curved arm holding spotlights’ things, with tungsten spotlights, rather than halogen ones. Quite apart from being thoroughly blessed by the Ugly Fairy, two of the light fittings had a fault, and would sulkily blow bulbs as soon as you replaced them. Consequently, our kitchen had several very gloomy spots.

It’s one of those things that you look at many times a day and subconsciously think “I must get around to fixing that”, before you go on your way with a slight but gnawing feeling of things being unfinished. This week, we finally got around to going to a shop and buying a new light. Ridiculously, that was what was holding the whole thing back: once we’d got our shiny new halogen light, we were raring to put it up. We’d never attempted to replace a ceiling light fitting before, but it turned out to be very easy, once we’d worked out which of the many unlabelled fuses in the fuse box controlled the lighting ring. A few minutes work, some tutting at the messy nest of wiring stuffed into the ceiling space (just like real electricians!), and some work with a screwdriver, and it was done. When we replaced the fuse and switched on the light to find our kitchen bathed in lovely, clean, bright light, it felt like a genuine achievement, and a disproportionately large load lifted from our shoulders.

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Happy New Year, everyone! I know I’m a day late, but what’s a day between friends?

I’ve taken a couple of extra leave days, so I’m not back at work until next Monday, and I’m enjoying just pottering around, and trying to shake off a weird bug I seem to have picked up. I had one of those days today where you start off with the intention of fixing one small thing, and end up putting a whole host of things right by accident.

It started with my long-disconnected SliMP3 player. When we moved into our new house, I didn’t get around to connecting up the SliMP3 player, for a number of very dull reasons, but partly because I didn’t have a long enough Ethernet cable. (I know: it’s a classic GTD situation of not having the right next action written down…) It’s only taken a year, but I finally got around to finding a cable and fixing the other impediments and hooking that sucker up. They are beautifully simple devices, so the configuration was fairly straight-forward, except that I’d forgotten that in the interval between last using it and now, I’d converted most of my iTunes library to AAC format from MP3. My player can’t transcode AAC on the hardware (I believe some of the new players can do it), but the server software can convert AAC on the fly to MP3 and play that. Except that I needed LAME installed, so all I got was a ‘Can’t play file’ message. After a quick install of LAME all was well. Except that the horrible distortion I’ve noticed intermittently in my audio system downstairs was really ruining my enjoyment of listening to the SliMP3.

So I decided to see if I could track down the problem. We have a very noisy mains electrical system in our house, and the boiler controller is a particularly bad source of noise. I’d assumed when I heard the distortion before that it was the boiler switch, but today I was listening with the heating system off, and it was still distorted. I checked cable connections, tightened speaker terminals and swapped out power strips, all to no avail. Just when I was beginning to despair of being able to find the source of the problem, I noticed that when I listened with my ear to each speaker in turn, the left was producing all of the distortion. Checking the speaker cable to that speaker carefully, I found that the insulation had cracked, exposing the wire. Aha! Fifteen minutes of pottering in the garage looking for my wire strippers, and some cutting back of the cable, and the distortion had gone. Now I could sit back and listen to my SliMP3 player.

But now I noticed that there were huge numbers of mislabelled files cluttering up the artist listing, making it hard to chose the artists I wanted to listen to. I then felt compelled to go into iTunes and clear up the database, getting rid of some temporary files, and naming everything properly with the correct metadata.

By the time I came downstairs to finally listen to my distortion-free, nicely organised music, it was time for tea. Seriously, where did the day go?

We were on our own for Christmas and Boxing Day this year, so we had a couple of quiet days. After a hectic time at the tail end of this year, it was great to just stop and do very little. On Christmas Day itself, we cooked a crackingly good dinner (salmon en croute, in case you were wondering, with stir-fried carrots and sprouts and roast potatoes and parsnips), opened some presents and watched Doctor Who.

While we were eating dinner, and for a while afterwards, we listened to a World Routes which Mr. Bsag had recorded from Radio 3 earlier in the month, in which the presenter Lucy Duran travels to Georgia to listen to the traditional polyphonic choral music. I’ve been a fan of Georgian music for a long time, but the live recordings (if you’ll forgive the tautology) in the programme were incredibly good. While we were eating, we heard a couple of hymns by the St. Panteleimon Chanters (their name gloriously close to Lyra’s daemon, you notice) recorded at a funeral. That might sound an oddly depressing soundtrack to Christmas, but it was beautiful, ethereal, peaceful music, and far from depressing. In fact, it almost made me want to convert to Orthodox Christianity and move to Georgia, just to have the St. Panteleimon Chanters sing at my funeral. The only slight flaw in that cunning plan is, of course, that I wouldn’t get to hear the music at my own funeral.

They moved on to the traditional ‘table songs’ of the Tusheti region, which is my favourite Georgian style. This included some live recordings of the Tsinandali choir which blew me away. While I listened to their music with a huge lump in my throat, I tried to think what their music reminded me of. It was on the edge of my mind, but when it popped to the forefront, I was rather surprised: their music is like a wolf pack howling. That sounds like an insult, but actually I mean it as the highest praise. Like a wolf howl, there are shifting pitches, voices supporting and intertwining with one another. And like a wolf howl, it speaks to you of joy, longing, sorrow, exultation, fear, power and a wildness that immediately raises the hairs on your neck, and fills the night with electricity. It was a very special experience to hear the recording, so I can’t imagine how powerful it must have been like to be there and hear it live.

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This past week was very frosty, so I ended up getting the train to work. The compensatory benefit for putting up with packed, late-running trains and grumpy fellow commuters was the opportunity to see some truly stunning sunrises. The station platform faces east, and you see big, open skies over the nearby range of hills.

On Tuesday, I was treated to the display you see in the photo above as I waited for my train. The low level clouds were a deep, rich orange against the pellucid blue of the sky. Above, the clouds were a wispy pink, spread across the sky, with a wonderful rumpled texture. A tongue of golden flame — a herald, marking the point from which the sun would rise — pointed straight up into the blue. As I watched, it became brighter and more intense, turning into a pillar of fire. Within a matter of minutes, as I watched, this intense, glorious show faded back to normality.

If I hadn’t been waiting with nothing to do, if I’d been busy getting on with my day, I would never have seen this incredible spectacle. If I’d seen it start, then looked away with better things to do, and looked back, I would have missed it. And that moment would never happen again in quite that way. It would be lost forever.

By coincidence, I came across this Ezra Pound poem today, which seemed to articulate the slightly blue mood I’ve been in for a couple of months, and that this pillar of fire shook me out of.

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Ezra Pound

‘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 like the equinoxes. Winter and summer I can take or leave (though I’m fond of bright, cold, crisp winter days and cool but sunny summer days), but I love spring and autumn. After the literal washout of a summer that we experienced this year, the autumn is proving to be a real gem. The autumn foliage colours have been stunning, and have been shown off at their best by the bright, low sun. Riding to work has been a joy. In the morning, I’ve passed through veils of low-lying mist, just caressing the ground and the river, making even the football pitch look romantic — quite an achievement in my opinion. In the evening, the low sun has set fire to the leaves at the red end of the spectrum, turning them into glowing jewels on a backdrop of emerald green. One tree had dropped many of its leaves on the ground, and they were such a bright yellow that from a distance I thought there was a pool of sunlight under the tree. I was so impressed that I wrote a bad Twitter haiku about it.

Crowning the magical feel of the past few weeks, I saw the electric blue flash of a kingfisher on Friday — an amazing but improbable sight on an urban, rubbish strewn stream. I’m going to try to make the most of this amazing season while it lasts, and before the nights start closing in.

I suppose this is something of a LazyWeb request: for various reasons that I’ll explain below, I want an easy way to record, log and report on my activity at work. Before I write something myself, does anyone know of a good tool for doing this? I’d consider a standard Mac application, Unix command line utility, or even an online application at a pinch.

There are loads of invoicing or billing applications out there, but that’s not quite what I’m looking for. My time isn’t billable (unfortunately), nor do I have clients as such (unless I get all management-speaky about the students and other ‘stakeholders’, which I hope I’ll never do). What I’d like is a very simple and quick way to record a description of what I’m currently working on, and whether it’s admin, research or teaching related, then hit a ‘record time’ button to record how long I work on it. Ideally, I’d also like to record activities after the event, if I have a lecture or a meeting that I’m not able to record actively. I’d like to be able to view and export a simple report of my activity each week, showing total hours and the percentage of time spent on each of my 3 categories of activity. In needs to be very quick and easy to use, and unobtrusive when I want it to be, otherwise I’m never going to use it, and cheap or free because I’m a poor academic.

So, why am I interested in doing such a crazy thing? There are a couple of reasons:

1. I’m not required to log my time in detail at all, but funding bodies now use the concept of Full Economic Costing (FEC¹) when funding grants. As a consequence, we’re supposed to record the percentage of time each year that we spend on different categories of research, teaching, admin and so on. We just try to guesstimate it, but I’m a scientist and I’d like to have some actual data to base my guess on.
2. I’m curious. Juggling teaching and research (not to mention the administrative load of each) is very tricky, so it would be interesting to know just how much time I spend on each. I also feel that recording my time would help me focus without getting distracted, and also provide a bit of positive feedback at the end of the day. I’m feeling very swamped at the moment, so anything that might help seems worth trying. It’s very easy to have a madly busy day and feel at the end of it that you haven’t accomplished anything, when you’ve actually got quite a bit done. Alternatively, it could end up totally depressing me — frankly, it could go either way.

So, do any of you know of any great software that I’ve missed?

¹ See ‘Father Ted’ for pronunciation. ↑

I read an excellent article by Paul Graham a while ago about the perils of accumulating possessions, and the way that they can weigh you down as you subconsciously worry about them. It’s not a novel observation, of course, but he sets out the problem very clearly.

I also worry about how much ‘stuff’ I have, even though I’m not (by current standards) a particularly materialistic or acquisitive person. Even so, it’s horribly easy to acquire a mountain of possessions, which becomes startlingly (and expensively) apparent when you move house. I hate buying clothes, but because of that, I don’t throw away old clothes until they are literally falling apart. So even a very modest rate of acquisition of new clothes means that the storage starts to burst at the seams. You can imagine how bad the situation is for things that I enjoy buying, like music, books and electronics.

I’ve been trying to wean myself off the accumulation habit. My motivation is partly to do with reducing my spending, partly out of a wish to reduce my environmental impact, but also just to step off the consumer treadmill and have less stuff. Now that we have a library so conveniently close to our house, I don’t buy books unless it’s a reference book that will be useful for many years, or a particularly treasured novel that I’ll read again many times. We rent DVDs from LOVEFiLM for general viewing, and only buy DVDs when we know it’s something we’ll watch many times (like The Big Lebowski or Firefly). I’ve also instituted a kind of self-imposed ‘cooling-off period’ for other non-essential purposes. If what I’m thinking of buying isn’t replacing something broken, I make myself wait a month before buying it. I think about it, price up alternatives and so on, but I just don’t buy it for a month. If I still want it at the end of that time, I go ahead, but often I find that the urge has worn off as I find that my life has miraculously gone along unhindered, despite the lack of that thing I thought was so important to my happiness. Don’t get me wrong — I like a lot of my stuff, and I’m not about to sit cross-legged in an empty white cube any time soon. I just want to whittle things down a set of items that actually enhance my life.

I also read a piece by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian about the rise in popularity of services which allow rental of goods, rather than ownership. His point was that this was symptomatic of ‘commitment phobia’, but I actually think that renting rather than owning things is good thing (with the exception of the pet rental service mentioned - that’s an appalling idea). It’s an anti-materialistic feeling, and it’s probably better for the environment: why own a car or bike or expensive clothes that you’ll only use occasionally, when you can rent it and share the usage of one item with others?

I always laugh when I property shows on TV, where couples without children want a four or five bedroom house. Really, what are they going to do with all that space? Why do they need it? If they both work at home, they might need a couple of extra rooms to turn into offices, but after that, it’s hard to see why all that space is necessary. The problem is a circular one — as Paul Graham mentioned, the more stuff you have, the more space you need to house it all. But when you get a bigger place, you need more stuff to kit out the rooms as well (TVs, audio equipment, decorative items). Before you know it, you need a six bedroom house, even though there are only two of you. It’s craziness, and I want to get out of it.

Well, the bot larva removal isn’t going quite as smoothly as planned.

I had an appointment at the hospital this week, where the good people in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine got a gander at my little resident. It’s becoming something of a theme for this particular medical incident, but I got two medical students observing again. I don’t really mind, but I do see quite enough of students in my work life, without them appearing in my personal life too. Still, they have to learn somehow.

The experts agreed that it was almost certainly a bot larva — ‘almost certainly’ because it has obviously died, and is now a squishy mess that even the keenest entomologist wouldn’t be able to identify. They suggested that they make an incision into the lump to see if they could extract it, which would save me from an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon.

There followed quite a few painful minutes (why are local anaesthetic injections so painful?) of scalpel action, which I was quite glad not to be able to see, but the bot wasn’t budging easily. Rather than follow my example when I’m doing DIY — half-do a job, then whack a load of filler in to cover the bodges — they decided to leave it for an orthopaedic surgeon after all. Since the resulting cuts wouldn’t stop bleeding they also had a put a couple of stitches in, which means that I’ve got to go to my GP to get them removed (if I don’t sneakily whip them out myself with the kitchen scissors, and claim that they ‘just fell out’).

To sum up, I went in with an ugly looking but currently painless lump on my foot, and came out with stitches, pain and an upcoming appointment for day surgery. Sometimes you just wish you’d never started on something.