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04 Jul 2004
A few weeks ago, we went to the wedding of a couple of friends of ours. I've just got the photographs that I took back from the developer, and I've put a few up on Wings Open Wide. It was a wonderfully unconventional wedding. The groom is in a band—Red Star Cycle—and they played a set at the reception. My Lomo camera loves occasions like this, so I tried to keep my hand as steady as possible and took some very long-exposure shots.
Whenever I take long exposure shots of people, it reminds me that humans are such ephemeral creatures. In the few seconds that the shutter is open, we become transparent ghosts leaving only trails of colour and light behind. Only the more long-lived objects—like buildings, trees and sketches by Burne-Jones—remain comparatively solid. If you held the shutter open for 100 years, only trees and some buildings would be solid—everything else would fade to transparency. Time is a funny thing.
27 Jun 2004
What is it about planning a barbecue in Britain? It seems to be an almost foolproof way to manipulate the weather. Let's say that you plan a barbecue to celebrate someone's birthday on Saturday night. Friday will inevitably be gloriously sunny, balmy and generally perfect weather for cooking and consuming food outdoors. Likewise, Sunday will also be warm and sunny, with a pleasant gentle breeze. On Saturday—more specifically Saturday evening—it will start to pour with rain just after you have set everything up, wrestled with the almost waterproof gazebo, and lit the barbecue.
There will be some 'stiff-upper-lip' types of debates about the possibility of wearing waterproof coats while eating ("It isn't raining that hard...") before the participants concede defeat. The chef cooks outside with the aid of a large umbrella, and everyone eats without their coats on indoors. Despite the best efforts of the British climate, a good time was had by all.
31 May 2004
In an effort to keep on top of our finances, I try to enter the details of all our receipts, bills and so on into a finance application (Moneydance), so that I can check the items off when the statement comes in and make sure that I'm not being swindled by the bank or anyone else. It doesn't actually mean we have any more money, but it does give an important illusion of control over the situation. Ideally, I would do this every week or so and it would take no more than five or ten minutes. So, do I do that? Do I heck. There are films to watch, books to read, not to mention sunny weather to bask in. In fact almost anything is more attractive that sitting down and entering receipts. This means that I sometimes go two or three months before tackling the task, when the pile of receipts beside the computer starts to resemble a bonsai Mount Kilimanjaro, with avalanches of white and yellow credit card slips threatening to rumble down the slopes at any moment. The longer you leave it, the harder the chore becomes, and the less you feel like doing it. Eventually, it takes up a whole morning, rather than being a five or ten minute task, but still I don't learn.
18 May 2004
Note to self: when you have just moved in to a new office, and haven't quite got used to the layout of the furniture, do not place your bag directly under low shelves which hang on the wall. Rummaging in the bag and sitting up suddenly can only end in the untimely death of several billion much-needed brain cells, and a lot of un-ladylike swearing.
17 May 2004
I've finally got round to posting some more pictures to my photoblog—the thumbnails aren't very interesting, but I'm quite pleased with the full-sized results, despite the annoying jagged edges on the diagonal lines. I think these are the result of compression, but if anyone has any suggestions for avoiding them in future, I'd be grateful.
15 May 2004
I'm sure that regular readers will have noticed that I've been worried and depressed about my work situation. I've tried not to rant about it too much, but if you aren't in a good state of mind it does show in your writing. So I'm really happy to announce that—after months of rejections, and lying to myself about what I really wanted to be doing in an attempt to convince myself that the situation wasn't as soul-destroying as it seemed—I've just been offered a great job in academia. I don't want to give too many details right now, but it's right up my street, and is a permanent job (w00t!) with great potential. It also means that we'll be moving from Oxford. On the downside, I'll miss the beauty of the city, but the trade-off is that we will be able to afford to live somewhere decent: you can't eat the scenery, after all.
The immense, Atlas-like burden I have been dragging around for months lifted from my shoulders the minute I got the news, and left me feeling light and dizzy. Mr. Bsag and I went out for an impromptu celebration (we plan to have many celebrations now that we have a legitimate excuse), and on the way back on the bus, I picked some music on the iPod to fit my mood. I can heartily recommend 'It's the Sun' from The Beginning Stages Of... by the Polyphonic Spree if you are feeling jubilant:
SUN
Hope has come, you are safe
And it makes me cry
Because I'm on my way
On my way
On my way
Hey, it's the sun and it makes me shine
Right on cue, the evening sun came slanting through the trees, turning everything a blazing gold, and I don't mind admitting I had a bit of a tear in my eye.
11 May 2004
We made the long-delayed office move today—though it hardly seems worthwhile for me. There's almost no chance now that I'll get another job in this department, so I'll be moving out in a couple of months. This is a bit of a shame1 as the view from the new office is really superb—dreaming spires prickle the horizon, and I can look down on the candelabra-like flowers of horse chestnut trees. Unlike our previous temporary office, which was a stuffy, dusty, noisy hell hole, this one is clean (so far—but give it a few weeks...), airy and light. I had better make the most of it while I can...
1Obviously I'm understating wildly here.
08 May 2004
Sometimes it would be really handy to have a search facility for finding the titles of films where you can't remember any of the words in the title, the director, or any of the actors. For example, this morning Mr. Bsag and I were trying to remember a great French film we saw a couple of years ago. Our search terms would have gone something like this:
What was that French film with the welder who runs away from his wife and family and becomes a painter in Venice?
We did eventually find the title—Lundi Matin, in case you are interested—via a rather verbose Google search.
05 May 2004
In this age of huge out-of-town superstores, it's comforting that you can still find an old-fashioned hardware shop when you need one. Gill and Co.1—tucked away down a very narrow alleyway in Oxford—is just such a shop. You can go in and ask for a single two inch nail, and know that they will happily sell you one and solemnly wrap it up for you.
We managed to break the plastic doohickeys that fix the toilet seat to the pan, which resulted in an unpleasantly insecure seat. Call me fussy, but I like my toilet seats firmly anchored. I had no idea what those plastic things are officially called, but a brief explanation and and a lot of hand-waving in Gills and they said, "Certainly. Would you like black or white toilet lid fixings?" All is well again in the Bsag bathroom.
1 As featured in Inspector Morse, where—if I remember rightly—one of Oxford's many murderers worked. The real employees are lovely, though.
01 May 2004
I had a very odd dream last night. I was on a boat, helping out on a whale-watching tour. I did this for real, and often dream about it, particularly when I'm a bit stressed. I was up on the observation deck, when I saw—to my utter joy—that we were surrounded by killer whales (orcas), leaping and breaching high into the air. The tourists on deck got very excited about this, and reached out their arms. I warned them not to put their hands into the orcas' mouths as their teeth were sharp, but one woman did just that. The orca wasn't being aggressive, but her hand got badly cut. At once, the orca took on the form of a man, and jumped on board to apologise to the woman (orcas are so polite). He was naked and his human skin still bore the striking black and white patterns of his orca form.
We all went down to the galley for some coffee, and while we were down there a storm blew up. A huge wave broke against the stern of the boat, and propelled us forward violently. "That was a huge wave", I said. The orca looked scornful; "Call that a big wave? Pah, that's nothing." Then he smiled his big, sharp smile.
29 Apr 2004
I must be cursed. The other day---after having randomly heard the theme tune on some TV programme and remembered how much he liked it---Mr. Bsag found the theme to Banana Splits on the web. As a 'surprise' for me, he played it to me very loudly at 6:30 am when I was barely functioning1. There can be few more tenacious soundworms than this song. Somebody make it stop! Then today, one of the builders at work was merrily whistling the tune just outside my office door (as a thoughtful counterpoint to the sound of drilling and hammering). Will I never be free of it?
All together now, "Tra la la, la la la la, Tra la la, la la la la." Now I've infected all of you too. If I'm suffering, everyone should be.
1 I'm sure that there must be legal precedent for this being legitimate grounds for divorce.
25 Apr 2004
I’ve finally finished messing about with my photoblog, and I’ve set up redirects from the old entries to the corresponding entries in the new blog. I say ‘finally finished’, but of course a true geek never finishes tinkering 
.
I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. I’ve mentioned before that I used an adaptation of the WordPress publishing platform called Pictorialis, which has been developed by Mark. It has loads of great features, like automatic uploading, re-sizing and thumbnailing of images, and it also sucks down the EXIF data provided by the camera, so that you can show the shutter speed, aperture and so on, which can be very useful.
However, the default thumbnails were rectangular, and used the full frame, whereas I had always used square thumbnails which only show a portion of the full image. After asking Mark’s permission, I hacked the source and added the ability to automatically copy a randomly selected square region of the image to use as a thumbnail. It wasn’t a complicated hack, but to my utter amazement (considering I have only been writing PHP for a few weeks), it actually worked. Better still, Mark is going to incorporate it into the next release of Pictorialis—yay!
06 Apr 2004
I'm going to do something very British here, and talk about the weather. But the reason I'm doing so is because of the very un-British weather we've been having today--with me so far?
The weather in Britain is generally defined by its moderation. It doesn't get very hot, it doesn't get very cold, and it often drizzles half-heartedly for days on end rather than having a jolly good downpour and getting it all over with. I don't know what has been going on for the past two days, but it seems as if the British weather has been trying on some tropical weather systems for size, just for kicks. I was off-sick today, and feeling very wan after only two hours of sleep last night (I'll spare you the details), so I watched the sudden changes in the weather with the words what the hell is going on forming on my lips.
First, it was very bright and sunny, with barely a breath of wind. Then--without so much as a by-your-leave--a huge wind blew up, a ground-shaking clap of thunder made me jump out of my chair, and hailstones the size of beans pummelled the earth for few minutes. Then everything abruptly stopped, the sun came out, and the wind completely stopped. This pattern cycled two or three times during the day. It's just not on.
01 Apr 2004
I’ve had two shocks today:
11 Mar 2004
I don’t know what I was doing in my sleep last night, but I woke up this morning with a really painful neck. I think I might have trapped a nerve. I’ve been walking around all day very gingerly–as if I’m wearing an invisible neck brace. Some kinds of relatively minor injuries seem to cause disproportionate amounts of pain and inconvenience, and you can’t do very much at all without moving your neck. Somebody feed me painkillers.