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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.

We have a rather impressive wasps’ nest in our loft space. It seems that the wasps (Vespa vulgaris) got into the loft via the ventilation holes in our wooden soffits¹, and built the nest on the inner surface of the roof, near the junction with the wall. The nest is just above the window of our office/spare room, so as I type this, I can see dozens of busy wasps hanging around the entrance or going in or out.

When we first discovered the nest a few months ago, we had a bit of a dilemma: should we call in a pest controller and get them to destroy it (or try to do it ourselves), or should we just leave it alone? As far as I can determine from reading about them, wasps don’t overwinter in their nests (unlike bees), so in theory, if we leave the nest until winter, all the workers will die, leaving only the queen to hibernate in the nest. It also seems that the queen leaves in the spring to found a new nest in a new location, so there isn’t much danger of her founding a new nest in the same place.

Wasps don’t have the good press of bees, but they are still beneficial for the ecosystem as a whole (and help to kill garden invertebrate pests like catepillars). I also dislike sloshing insecticide around unecessarily. So we decided to leave the nest alone, and clear it out once the colony has died. Apart from occasionally straying into the office when the window is open, they don’t bother us much.

However, we still have a problem with the loft. We don’t need to go up there much, but if we have to go and fetch something we’ve stored, it’s a bit scary. When you open the hatch and turn the light on, they start swarming around the light and moving towards you in a rather threatening way. I’ve got to go and get a suitcase down now for my upcoming trip to Brazil at the end of the month, so if you hear the sound of a small, British blogger falling down a loft ladder, closely followed by an empty suitcase and swarm of angry wasps, please summon help.

¹ ‘Soffit’ is one of my favourite words at the moment, for some reason. ↑

A snapshot from my cycle commute home on Friday:

An elderly gent is walking through the park with his portly, grizzled, leg-at-each-corner labrador. They are side by side, ambling along at the same, easy pace. It has just stopped raining, and the man furls his golfing umbrella, casually offering it to his dog. Without breaking stride, the dog takes the umbrella in his mouth and carries it. They stroll on, as they probably do every day, taking each others’ presence for granted in the best possible way.

Cleo is a very stealthy cat. I suppose that it’s something of a special cat skill, what with all that selection pressure on quiet stalking abilities. However, most of the cats I’ve known have had a very heavy tread, so you’ve usually been well aware of their location.

I opened the window in our bedroom the other day, then — as I left the room — I suddenly thought that I ought to check where Cleo was, and close the bedroom door so that she wouldn’t try to climb out of the window. Sure enough, as I turned back into the room a second later, there she was on the window sill, half out of the window. Gulp.

I didn’t want to frighten her, so I used my best ‘talking-a-cat-down-from-the-ledge’ soothing voice, and — to my relief — she came back in. I have no idea how she got past me so quickly and silently. She must have a tiny blue TARDIS or Star Trek transporter hidden somewhere. Since then, I’ve often found myself calling for her and looking in every corner, only to look down and find her sitting at my feet, looking up at me innocently with a “You called, Mithtreth?” expression on her face. She’d make an excellent Igor (if you’re familiar with Terry Pratchett’s books), minus the obviously sewn-on body parts, prominent lisp and surgical expertise, of course.

This weekend was quite a momentous one for us, because we finally did what we’d longed to do for ages and got a cat. We had cats throughout my childhood, but apart from looking after my parents’ current cat while they were away, I hadn’t felt that we could keep a cat because we were always renting and therefore in a bit of a precarious position. Now that we have our own house, and Mr. Bsag is often at home during the day, it seemed like the perfect time to give a cat a home.

The new member of our household — who we have named Cleo — is a rescue cat. Despite being a pedigree cat (a Somali), she was stray for an unknown length of time and is consequently very skinny and needs careful feeding up to get her back to a healthy weight. The person who found her said that she was sheltering under a car in the recent downpours, and when she tried to venture out and felt the rain on her face, she’d cry and run back under the car. So I think it’s safe to say that she’s not a hardened feral cat.

We had to transport her a fair distance in the car to get her back home, and we were worried that she’d be really stressed in the carrying box. Despite the fact that we had a bit of a nightmare journey because of a junction closure on the M40, she was really good. She complained a bit occasionally (rather quietly), particularly around roundabouts, but the rest of the time she just slept or looked at the world going past.

She is the most affectionate, sweetest-natured cat I’ve ever come across. She just loves being next to people, getting lots of cuddles and strokes and purring for England. She’s also gorgeous to look at, with very soft, thick fur around her neck and chest and hindquarters, and big, bushy fox tail. It always baffles me that anyone could mistreat or abandon an animal, but when it’s a cat as loveable as Cleo, it’s really bizarre.

Before anyone says, “But I thought you cared about wildlife!”, she’s going to be an indoor cat. She seems to be very content to be in a nice, warm, dry house (none of that nasty wet stuff, thanks very much), and because of her history, and the busy road out the front of our house, it seems like the best idea. So the birds in our garden are quite safe from her. Somali cats can often be trained to walk on a harness and lead, so if she takes to that we could stroll around the garden with her to give her some fresh air and exercise when it’s sunny.

Anyway, she’s settling in well, and I hope she’ll be really happy and secure with us. I have tried to take a few pictures (don’t worry — this blog won’t become wall-to-wall cat pictures), but they aren’t very good. This is partly because the moment you get the camera out, she wants to come over and see what’s up. Consequently, unless you have lightning reflexes on the shutter, you get endless shots of a blurry nose filling the frame. I’ll see if I can take her by surprise over the next few days and get a picture that does her justice.

As you’ll probably have guessed from the lack of posts around here, I’ve had a madly busy few weeks. Deadlines played their favourite game of hiding round a corner sniggering, and then all jumping out onto me at once, yelling, “Surprise!!” They haven’t quite gone away yet, but things have slowed down a notch from mad to merely busy.

Anyway, one of the things I had on was a short workshop, at which I was speaking. For one reason or another, it was pretty intense intellectually, and because I was talking about (for me) a relatively new area, my confidence was quite low. It was really interesting, and I caught up with some old friends as well as meeting new people, but a few days of stretching both my brain and my confidence to its limits took its toll. I was exhausted.

When I walked back in the door late at night and hugged Mr. Bsag hello, I felt incredibly relieved. One of the rarely acknowledged joys of a long-term stable relationship is the comfort and stability you get from knowing that there’s one person in the world with whom you can totally relax. Whatever else may be going on, you know that you can walk in the door into another world and leave everything else outside for a while.

Commuters tend to be creatures of habit, and I am no exception. My return journey timing is a bit more variable, but I tend to leave for work at about the same time everyday. The same is true of many other people I pass along the way, so they become a kind of fuzzy human clock.

You know where you normally tend to pass other commuters travelling on your route in the opposite direction, so if you see them earlier along your route, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re a bit late. Similarly, if you see them when you’re nearer to your destination, you might be a bit earlier than usual. I recently realised that I was subconsciously using these kinds of encounters to roughly gauge my timekeeping, and found it quite funny that — inconstant creatures though we are — much of our behaviour is predictable enough to set your watch by. Things do fall apart a bit if your ‘reference person’ happens to be running early or late too, though, but I have a watch to check.

There has a been a lot of talk today about the frequency of rubbish collection in the UK. Apparently, many Councils are moving to alternate week collections: recyclables one week, and ordinary household rubbish the next. There have been a lot of complaints about this, with people saying that their bins smell or that they are getting maggot infestations. Inevitably, the Daily Mail has weighed in with the “The Great Dustbin Revolt”.

Personally, I think it’s revolting that people throw so much away, particularly food waste, which is what must be generating most of the smell and maggots. I know that not everyone has the space to compost food waste, but buying only as much as you need would be a start. If more councils offered a food/green waste collection along with other recyclables (with firmly sealing containers), a twice weekly collection shouldn’t be a problem at all. Another approach might be to offer a weekly collection, but charge by weight for non-recyclable waste, offering a credit for recyclable waste. I suspect that would focus people’s minds on reducing their waste output rather effectively.

We get a weekly household waste collection, with a fortnightly recycling collection (paper, cans and glass), but we fill about half a dustbin sack a week now that we compost our food scraps and green waste. The vast majority of what we throw away is plastic-like stuff that we can’t recycle locally, and some of which is deposited on our front drive by passing littering kids (grr…).

Japan has a fantastic (though rather complicated) recycling system because they have very little land available for landfill. Just because we’ve got a bit more land, I don’t see why we should waste it all by burying our rubbish.

Now that summer seems to be a-coming in, midges and mosquitos are breeding like — well — flies. My morning ride is fine because it’s fairly early and the midges don’t seem to be swarming, but on the ride home, I have to wear sunglasses to avoid getting midges in my eyes every few minutes. I don’t mind getting a bug-splattered face, but flies in the eye hurt.

There’s one particular stretch by the river which is particularly infested. I was behind a little boy who was on a bike with training wheels in ‘Midge Alley’. He started flapping one arm around his head, while continuing to pedal at his top speed, and I knew exactly what he was doing. His arm-whirling got more and more frantic, until he hurled himself off his bike, thrashing the air around his head as if he was being assailed by invisible bees.

It was like watching some kind of pocket, low-budget action film. Like ‘Speed’ our hero has to keep his pedalling speed above 10 mph, or he will be devoured alive by midges! May contain scenes of Mild Peril.

I finally cleared the final boxes left by my parents yesterday, and came across a tiny leather-bound diary from 1935, probably owned by my grandmother. It’s a mine of interesting information. For example, in 1935 a dog licence (anyone remember those?) would have cost you 7s. 6d. (dogs under 6 months of age exempt). In case you’re ever in need of Apothecaries Measures converted to metric, 1 Fluid Scruple is 1,184 ml, and 1 Fluid Drachm is 3,552 ml.

There’s a helpful page of ‘Hints for Health and Comfort’:

Blowing the Nose. — The most effectual way for a person the clear the nasal passages is to use a long strong blow and not a short sharp one.

Flies and Midges. — Annoyance from these pests can be avoided by anointing the exposed parts of the body with a mixture made of one part cedar oil and eight parts almond ail. This remedy contains no disagreeable or obtrusive scent.

The best thing, however, is the short aphorism printed at the bottom each weekly page. For example, the motto for the week ending 30th March is, “A lie is too big a price to pay for anything.” I think I’m going to insert these every week into my Twitter timeline for a bit of fun.

My parents visited before Easter, and achieved their long-threatened goal of bringing me a load of boxes of my stuff that had been hitherto cluttering up their loft. “You’ve got your own loft now, so it can clutter up yours.” Fair enough. It’s an assortment of random stuff that I didn’t really want to throw out, but didn’t have room for at the time, including a lot of exercise books from my middle and senior school years.

The school books are hilarious, particularly the ones from middle school. It’s funny how you remember doing some pieces of work quite well, and others are a complete mystery. In my middle school creative writing class, I wrote a totally insane, psychedelic story about turning on the taps to run a bath, and seeing a stream of tiny pink crocodiles coming out, which I then had to hide from my mother under my bed. Quite where that came from, I don’t know — perhaps there was a serious LSD habit I’ve forgotten about along with the experience of writing the tiny pink crocodiles story.

My favourite subjects at senior school were Biology (obviously) and Latin, and I was an unbearably swotty geek in both. I loved translating ‘The Aeneid’, and can just about still quote little chunks of it from memory. Exercise books from both subjects show that I lavished a lot more care on them than on some other subjects. I had also forgotten that I was a fairly decent illustrator back then. There are some quite good drawings and illustrative figures, including a frighteningly meticulous, pull-out, fully-labelled diagram of the male reproductive system. I’m sure my 15 year old self found that interesting for purely scientific reasons… Unfortunately, while my drawing was reasonably good for a teenager, it never progressed to being good for an adult, so I rarely draw now.

French was one of those subjects I didn’t enjoy much at the time, but wish I had paid more attention to now. In one of my French books, I found a folded, handwritten (and illustrated) worksheet. There was a little domestic scene depicted in that lovely, blurry purple Banda ink, and a series of questions about the picture. But wait — what is that sous la table? Could it possibly be un singe? It is! I’d somehow decided that the prominent featuring of monkeys in French lessons was all a product of Eddie Izzard’s comedy genius, but there was the documentary evidence in blurry purple and white. As we all know, the French prize above all else the ability to locate one’s primate accurately in their native tongue.

It was my birthday last week, and I got some money from some very kind and generous friends and family members. I wrote a while ago about my lovely Rotring Newton fountain pen, and I’m afraid that I’ve enjoyed using it so much in the intervening time that the fountain pen bug has struck. I’ve been admiring the Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pens (or Pilot Capless or Namiki Vanishing Point — they go under a confusing array of names), and since I had some gift money to treat myself with, I decided to buy one.

I looked at them a while ago, and thought that they were probably a bit expensive, but then found an online retailer, Cult Pens which stocks them at a very good price, and also keeps all the nib sizes in stock. While I still love my Rotring, there are a couple of things that make it slightly less practical for note-taking use at work. This sounds trivial, but taking the cap on and off (to stop the nib drying out) while intermittently taking notes on a talk is a little inconvenient. I’m also prone to misplacing or dropping the cap when I do so, because it isn’t terribly secure when parked on the end of the pen. The second is probably a function of nib width, but the medium nib on the Rotring lays down quite a wet line. This looks nice, and makes for a smooth stroke, but I then tend to smudge it if writing quickly.

I think that the Pilot Capless will solve both of those problems. The retractable nib is a bit of an engineering marvel and works very well. It sounds like a gimmick, but having a fountain pen you can use with the convenience of a ball point is fantastic. I got the fine nib, which lays down a very fine line of around 0.5 mm or less with the Noodler’s Legal Lapiz ink I’m using. It’s almost like a Pilot V5 fineliner, but the line is very smooth and constant. At that width, the ink dries almost instantly, and I’ve even found that I can use it on newsprint to solve a crossword without the ink spreading. The pocket clip looks like it would get in the way of your fingers, but at least with my grip, I find that it stops my fingers slipping on the barrel, and helps to keep them in a good position for writing.

It’s a really lovely experience to write with, and quite a different feel to the Rotring. I keep finding excuses to write little notes or lists with it, because it’s such a sensual thing. I think it’s going to be a great notetaker at work, and I’ll use my Rotring for more leisurely writing at home.

I would also really recommend Cult Pens to anyone buying pens in the UK. It happened that the finish I originally chose (Black Carbonesque) was out of stock, and was on back order for a number of weeks when the delivery they were expecting didn’t materialise. They consequently offered me a discount on another finish, and sent the pen Special Delivery so it would arrive the next day — great service! I’m not affiliated with them, by the way, just a happy customer, and I think that good service deserves public praise.